ABSTRACT
Looking back over the previous discussions of Abstract Right and Morality, we can identify an agenda to be covered in this part of the Philosophy of Right. We insist that we are persons, the bearers of rights, but we do not yet know how this claim to elementary moral status is to be articulated so that it is properly recognized by others. We shall find that personhood is extended over the domain of the family unit as persons join themselves in marriage to constitute a spiritual (geistige) union. We shall see these ‘concrete persons’ (§§181-2) in the form of (male) heads of families pursuing the satisfaction of their distinctively modern needs in economic activity. This activity is governed by laws which transparently protect persons’ rights through a legal system which intelligibly promulgates and effectively enforces them. Personhood is threatened as well as protected in Civil Society; the economic sphere in which the particular ends of persons are pursued needs to be regulated by public agencies (die Polizei) and the evil of poverty, which threatens to eliminate this most basic moral status, must be remedied. Unfortunately, the rights of the person are still mainly ‘limited to the negative’ (§38). Thus, in the political sphere, the rights associated (often then; uniformly nowadays) with the active political participation of each person in the role of citizen, are strongly constrained. We shall emphasize this weakness, but at this stage we can look forward to a specification of what was missing in Abstract Right: an account of the interests which persons’ rights typically protect and a description of the regime of law, trial and punishment that is required to make that protection effective.
