ABSTRACT
"Right is concerned with freedom," Hegel notes in the remark to § 215 in his Philosophy of Right. According to Hegel, philosophy is not concerned with the mere concept of such freedom but with the concept and its "actuality" (Wirklichkeit). In his systematic language, this means that a philosophy of freedom is neither a rational analysis of the pure concept of freedom, nor some a priori formulation of an ideal, of what simply "ought to be." There is no doubt that Hegel does seem to invoke some version of this ontological notion of truth and that he counts modern institutions as rational because they "exist in the truth," as such a conception of truth would have it. There are several Hegelian criticisms of this model of institutional rationality. This chapter explains Hegel's attack on the abstractness of the notion of the individual in many modern theories and his claims about motivational and alienation problems.
