It was first presented in his work Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) to refer to "ethical behavior grounded in custom and tradition and developed through habit and imitation in accordance with the objective laws of the community"[1][2] and it was further developed in his work Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820).
[10] This sphere constitutes what Isaiah Berlin would call positive freedom, which is to say, moral autonomy.
He explains this deficiency through philosophical critique of pathologies such as loneliness, depression and agony.
The third sphere is an attempt at describing a limited conception of the person through an appeal to the greater institutional context of the community[17] and an attempt at bridging individual subjective feelings and the concept of general rights.
Later German thinkers developed the idea in various directions such as the liberal Carl Theodor Welcker, the conservative Friedrich Julius Stahl, and the socialist Wilhelm Weitling.