THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

CHAPTER ONE
THE ONTOLOGICAL BASIS OF HEGEL’S
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
1.1) Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Right
Interpretations of the Philosophy of Right often ignore the more esoteric side of
Hegel’s terminology, with its manifold relations to the obscure and allegedly obsolete
pronouncements of the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia. Such interpretations
focus directly on Hegel’s specific discussions of private property, contractual agreement,
punishment, Kantian morality, the family, civil society, and the state. Sometimes this
emphasis stems from expedience, from a desire to treat the more approachable and
allegedly relevant themes of Hegel’s philosophy without delving into the murkier
questions presented elsewhere in the Hegelian system. In other cases, this emphasis
stems from a more principled view about the development of Hegel’s corpus.
In Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Allen Wood aptly expresses a principled reason for
neglecting Hegel’s speculative logic in favor of concrete social and political issues. He
argues that we should not “suppose that Hegelian social thought is grounded in Hegelian
metaphysics, and conclude that speculative logic is a propaedeutic to Hegel’s theory of
modern society.” He goes on to say: “In fact, the relation may be very nearly the reverse
of this; often Hegel’s treatment of metaphysical issues is best viewed as an attempt to
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