Abstract

One of the main difficulties facing the scholarly exegetist in regard to Hegel is that Hegel was in the habit, so appropriate to the philosopher and so frustrating to the exegetist, of continually and more or less subtly revising his thought and writings. In most cases, the scholarly damage inflicted upon his work by this philosophical "bad habit" is easily contained within academic groves, as only academicians in the main are concerned with explicating such topics as his logic or his aesthetic theory. But the case is different when Hegel's social and political philosophy, his Rechtsphilosophie, is brought onto the scene, for there can be little question but that his work in this area shares, along with Hobbes's Leviathan and Rousseau's Du Contrat Social, a constant and pervasive influence upon the actual course and conduct of political praxis and moral history. In this case, the exact presentation of Hegel's theory in the face of his own philosophical development becomes a more pressing and practical matter.