Abstract

Much has been written over the years about the way in which Hegel’s Philosophy of Right has evolved from his series of lectures on the subject to the fully fledged volume published by Hegel in 1821 under the title Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. The latest and most useful contribution to this debate had been the publication in the 1970s of several volumes by Karl-Heinz Ilting, under the general title Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, in which the editor meticulously collated the different extant lecture notes taken by various students during several semesters at which Hegel gave lectures at the University of Berlin on the philosophy of right. Some of these notebooks had been utilized in the 1840s when Eduard Gans prepared his edition of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie for the first Gesammelte Werke: Gans used them, as well as his own notes from Hegel’s lectures in the “Additions” which he appended to the original Hegelian text. Ilting in his edition compared these notebooks to Hegel’s published texts, and due to his work the reader now possesses for the first time the textual variants of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of right from different years. One can also see what Hegel decided to include in his book and what he just left as oral remarks made in class.