It is the fate of texts concerned with legal and political philosophy that they tend, much more than other philosophical writings, to be read emphatically in the light of subsequent events and later experience. This is particularly clear in the case of the controversy that has surrounded Hegel's Philosophy of Right from the Young Hegelians through Marx and Haym up to the Anglophone critiques of Hegel's thought in the middle of the last century (Russell, Popper, Hook, etc.). The question of whether Hegel's political philosophy properly belongs in the “liberal,” the “Prussian-restorationist,” or even the “totalitarian” tradition is one that has been constantly and repeatedly encouraged by the specific experiences of modern German history. Nor indeed is it an illegitimate question, as long as one is capable of distinguishing between Hegel's work in this field and the story of its influence, or its “effective history,” capable of distinguishing between Hegel's general systematic conception and certain of his own historically conditioned views and remarks.

During the last few decades there has been a concerted effort to answer the question decisively above all by reference to previously unpublished student transcripts of Hegel's lectures. Yet the attempt to descry in these manuscripts a hitherto unknown “liberal” and “democratic” Hegel, who with the Philosophy of Right of 1820 effectively joined with the Prussian Restoration or accommodated himself to the spirit of the Karlsbad Decrees, is quite implausible.