The totality of the Rechtsphilosophie attempts to systematically develop the mutually interpenetrating institutions that human freedom necessitates when considered in its complex socio-economic- political activity. In this sense, as one commentator notes, the Rechtsphilosophie is the study which ‘reveals what it is to be free, and, more particularly, what objective structures and institutions (such as civil society and the states) are made necessary by the nature of freedom’. Whereas Hegel's first systematic consideration of the concept of spirit begins with the self-determining, self-referential structure in its inchoate emergence from the natural register at the individual (subjective) level, as we saw in the anthropological writings, the Rechtsphilosophie, by way of contrast, takes up the concept of spirit in its concretisation within the matrices of its objective field, that is, the relationships constituting its socio-ethical communal substance, therefore its political world. Hegel's writings on subjective spirit take up the various systems constituting individual subjectivity, systematically tracing the necessary interconnections between sensation, imagination, language, thought, drive, and, lastly, free will. The writings on objective spirit, therefore, take up the results of the analysis of subjective spirit, that is, the freedom of the will, but as an immediate given, in order to investigate not only the forms and shapes that freedom must take in light of the new social territory it seeks to generate and inhabit, but also the institutions that must be in place for its realisation therein.

It is in the sense of going out into the social substance and its institutions that Hegel can speak of spirit being ‘at home’ in its difference, its other. Such an identity is critical to spirit's freedom at the objective level. Concerning the most rudimentary features of spirit's objective world, Hegel tells us that: ‘An existent of any sort embodying the free will, this is what right is.’ In this precise sense, Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie has to do with the embodiment of free will, the domain that Hegel demarcates by way of the category of right [Das Recht]. Hegel states that: ‘the system of right is the realm of freedom made actual, the world of mind brought forth out of itself like a second nature’.