Hegel's most mature statement of his legal, moral, social and political philosophy, it is an expansion upon concepts only briefly dealt with in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, published in 1817 (and again in 1827 and 1830).

The Philosophy of Right (as it is usually called) begins with a discussion of the concept of the free will and argues that the free will can realize itself only in the complicated social context of property rights and relations, contracts, moral commitments, family life, the economy, the legal system, and the polity.

The third sphere, ethical life (Sittlichkeit), is Hegel's integration of individual subjective feelings and universal notions of right.

The course of history is apparently toward the ever-increasing actualization of freedom; each successive historical epoch corrects certain failures of the earlier ones.

From these early translations came the criticism that Hegel justifies authoritarian or even totalitarian forms of government: Giovanni Gentile, whose thought had a strong influence on Mussolini, bases his Hegelian revival on this point.

The inclusion of this passage has led to scholarly debate as to the reason for Hegel's advocacy of the kind of censorship the Prussian state had introduced following the murder of August von Kotzebue in the form of the Carlsbad Decrees.