The distinctive scholarly stake of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, with Marx’s Commentary: A Handbook for Students lies in its patient reconstruction of the inner articulation of Hegel’s political philosophy together with a running, text-bound staging of Marx’s youthful “transformative criticism.” The contribution is double: first, the book renders Hegel’s system of right as a living sequence of conceptual displacements—from immediate will to objective institutions—so that each level both preserves and reworks what preceded it; second, it situates Marx’s early critique directly within Hegel’s constitutional doctrine, thereby showing how Marx’s key political categories (proletariat, alienation, bureaucracy, abolition of the state) emerge from a close, internal encounter with Hegel’s own presentation. The result is a study designed for students that nonetheless advances a rigorous, source-driven argument about freedom, institution, and critique.
The outer frame of the handbook establishes the problem space by locating Hegel through shifting meanings of “category” from Aristotle’s objective predicates to Kant’s subjective forms and Hegel’s attempt at a unity of thought and being. This framing marks Hegel’s wager: the restitution of objectivity without a retreat to pre-critical realism, achieved through a logic that follows the oscillation between subjective and objective poles all the way into the ethical and political. In this sense the Philosophy of Right is introduced not as a treatise about rights narrowly considered, but as the point where legal, moral, and political determinations are shown in their systematic interconnection. The handbook emphasizes that Hegel’s book is simultaneously a jurisprudence, a moral philosophy, and a political science, and that its political part powerfully influenced diverse modern formations—from Marxism to authoritarian appropriations and democratic theory—precisely because it unfolds freedom as an institutional achievement.
From this vantage the study offers a compact map of Hegel’s Encyclopedia architecture—Logic, Nature, Spirit—and places the Philosophy of Right inside Objective Spirit: an analysis of the legal-moral-political nexus in which subjective willing is formed and tested by durable social forms. The point of entry is methodological. The handbook recovers Hegel’s dialectical movement not as a slogan but as the way a content discloses its insufficiency and passes over into its counter-term, producing a new unity that internalizes the path of conflict. Thus the treatment of “right” does not stack topics but follows a logic of emergence: from the bare person confronting external things, through the internally divided moral will, into the concrete institutions in which universality becomes effective. The aim, stated programmatically in the paraphrased Preface, is to understand the rational in the real—the union of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’—and to do so at the right time, when a form of life has reached the “grey dusk” that allows comprehension without romantic regression.
The Introduction, as Kainz presents it, anchors everything in the concept of right, understood not as an abstract definition but as a structure arising where will meets world. Because laws, property regimes, and institutions appear as objective norms and yet are precipitates of particular acts of willing, “right” is the name for a paradox: the universal that must be made by subjects and that, once made, obligates those same subjects. The text therefore begins from analysis of the will’s three simultaneous “moments”—indetermination, determination, and their paradoxical unity as absolute will—and tracks how each moment reappears, in transformed fashion, at higher levels of sociality. This is both method and content: the very notion of freedom is exhibited as the passage from negative withdrawal, through self-positing choice, to the voluntary self-limitation that binds itself to universality.
On this basis the first large movement—Abstract Right—takes the “absolute” will in its immediate relation to the finite and draws out the counterintuitive result that a turn inward yields a pressure outward toward possession. Personality, as Hegel is reconstructed here, is not a mere inner kernel but a power to relate to things such that they bear one’s stamp; thus property, contract, and wrong appear in sequence as the minimal schema in which a person encounters others. The strongest insight for students is that even the idea of person is quietly mediated by property relations: the proof that something is “mine” culminates paradoxically in the right to alienate it, a gesture that simultaneously declares the thing’s externality and reclaims self-possession in the very act of letting go. Wrong—first as honest mistake, then as fraud, finally as crime—becomes the negative pathway that incites the turn to morality by forcing reflection on what the universal ought to be when particular claims collide. This is the first major displacement: from the immediacy of external relations to the interiority of intention, responsibility, and conscience.
In Morality the study tracks a triad of oppositions that structure the moral standpoint. Purpose is bound to responsibility because knowledge of circumstances and foresight of consequences are limited; intention is bound to welfare because universal validity claims entangle themselves with the pursuit of happiness; Good is bound to conscience because the effort to stabilize an objective equilibrium between rights and duties must be authored by subjects who never fully coincide with the objectivity they bring into being. The crucial lesson drawn out for students is how the moral will’s self-determination generates alienation: the “ought” fulfills itself by becoming permanent dissatisfaction with what is, a stance that can never stop negating. The way forward, on Hegel’s own account as rehearsed here, is to bring Good down from abstraction into the “rational kernel” of existing practices and to let conscience accept determination by institutions it also helps to shape. The transition to ethical life thereby appears as the decisive repair of the split between subjectivity and objectivity.
Ethical life is presented as the paradoxical surface where subjectivity and objectivity, immediacy and mediation, are at once opposed and at one. The handbook insists that this is not a moralization of politics but a political education of morality: the will realizes its freedom by participating in concrete wholes that neither absorb nor ignore individuality. The three spheres—family, civil society, state—are not coordinates laid side by side but stations in a single process in which each form both requires and overcomes the others.
The family is treated as the first explicit manifestation of spirit: a unity of natural polarity and personal sacrifice in which two self-relations give themselves to a higher self. The text emphasizes that marriage is not a contract about property but a mutual renunciation that establishes a new person—a unity signified by the stability of common capital. Children externalize the inward unity of love; education then orients them toward freedom, which paradoxically requires the dissolution of the original unity. The family’s truth thus points beyond itself, and the passage to the next sphere is already inscribed in its success: as children become free subjects the household’s ethical immediacy gives way to the mediated multiplicities of the market, work, and law.
Civil society appears as the theatre where particular interests proliferate, collide, and find imperfect forms of coordination. Kainz’s exposition highlights Hegel’s analysis of needs, labor, and capital: specialization mechanizes work and multiplies interdependence; education must become both theoretical flexibility and practical orientation to publicly recognized forms of activity; capital becomes the universal medium by which heterogeneous products and needs translate into one another. Out of these processes, not a simple unity but genera of interests congeal, yielding three essential classes: the agricultural class as the “immediate” relation to nature and family stability; the business class as the sphere of reflective formation—craft, manufacture, commerce; and the bureaucracy as the civil service oriented, in principle, to universal aims and therefore in need of insulation from venality. This typology is not sociology by enumeration; it is a conceptual map of how freedom, to be real, must coordinate dispersed particularities through institutions capable of making universality effective.
A decisive strand of the handbook’s pedagogy is its careful explication of the public authority—the “police” in Hegel’s broad sense—and the corporation. The former does not mean merely repressive force; it signifies the regulative powers that stabilize prices and standards, secure public health, mitigate poverty through a delicate balancing of relief and employment, fund education where family solidarity has been loosened, and even organize emigration as an external vent for internal fluctuations. The latter names not only commercial companies but also professional associations and labor federations—civil “families” that reconcile ability with security and lift private pursuit to the level of recognized right through standards, representation, and mutual aid. In this way civil society partially heals the very divisions it generates, even as its structural fragilities—rabble formation, inequity, dependency—demand a higher unity.
This higher unity is the state, for which the handbook supplies both Hegel’s argument and Marx’s counter-movement. Hegel’s constitutional theory is presented in two complementary lights. First, the state is “external necessity” because family and civil society depend upon its laws and institutions for their very functioning; second, it is also their immanent end because individual rights and duties interpenetrate in the Idea of the state—property, contract, and association make sense only within a public order that secures them. This doubleness is not a sleight of hand; it is the logical shape of an organism that is both the condition and the product of its members.
Here the handbook inserts Marx’s counter-thesis with precision. In Marx’s reading, Hegel “mystifies” the relation by hypostatizing the state as the true subject and demoting family, civil society, and individual choice to phenomena or mere determinations. Against this, Marx asserts that the real subjects are precisely those concrete spheres; the state is their derivative. The philosophical stakes are high: if one starts from the state as Absolute Subject one risks transforming empirical mediations into logical necessities and shielding existing hierarchies with speculative honor. Kainz’s editorial scaffolding makes this disagreement legible at the paragraph level, letting students see how a difference in what counts as subject ramifies into opposed assessments of sovereignty, administration, and representation.
The inner structure of Hegel’s state—crown, executive, legislature—is then unfolded with an eye to dialectical roles rather than rigid powers. The crown personifies decision as a moment of unity; it does not legislate universals but pronounces the singular “I will” that closes deliberation. The executive disperses into specialized branches and reconverges in concrete domains of life; civil service should be recruited on ability and insulated from private gain, disciplined both from above (hierarchy) and from below (corporate oversight), and habituated by ethical education and the breadth of a large state to a dispassionate demeanor. Hegel’s striking thought that this administrative stratum constitutes the greater part of a political “middle class,” neither oligarchy nor mass, places it as a hinge between sovereignty and social particularity. Kainz annotates these theses with Marx’s critique of bureaucracy as a self-serving formalism whose secrecy elevates its own reproduction to the end of the state; thus the same phenomenon can be read as rational mediation or as alienated power, depending on whether one begins from the organism’s Idea or from the social body’s lived antagonisms.
The legislature completes the circle by bringing organized social voices into institutional speech. The two houses of the Estates, as reconstructed here, are less a feudal leftover than a functional duplication designed to mediate between the free subjectivity of the crown and the dispersed freedoms of civil society. An upper house of landed gentry, self-subsistent and hereditary, counterbalances mass volatility and sometimes shields popular bodies from royal reproach; a lower house of deputies summoned from corporations embodies representative reason only when its members unite professional competence with public-spirited judgment. Hegel’s acute reflections on public opinion—its composite of valid concerns and private caprice—and on the difficult boundary of censorship in a free state are given special pedagogical weight: the great statesman ignores the noise without suppressing the sense, and curbs speech only when speech negates the very conditions of its freedom.
Beyond domestic constitution the handbook follows Hegel into international law and world history, where the organism confronts others and where Spirit’s long itinerary through Oriental immediacy, Greek aesthetic unity, Roman abstraction, and Germanic reconciliation sets the horizon for modern constitutional monarchy. Here the textual point is not providential triumphalism but the insistence that a state’s rationality appears only against a historical series of failed or partial unities; each world-form both conserves and cancels its predecessors. This gives teeth to the Preface’s “grey on grey”: philosophy comes late because it thinks the labor already done, not because it dictates it.
Kainz’s most consequential service to students may be the way he nests Marx’s early critique within this Hegelian architecture rather than treating it as an external polemic. The appendix-based materials show Marx determining the lever of change in Germany as the fusion of philosophical criticism with material force, the critique of religion as precondition for political critique, and the emergence of a class that is the “dissolution of all classes”—not a particular estate but the social residue of universal wrong. In this light, the proletariat is not merely a demographic fact; it is the standpoint from which the inversion of Hegel’s subject is thinkable and practicable. The inversion consists in relocating universality from the Idea of the state to the lived negation of property, so that emancipation becomes the overcoming of the state as a form that subordinates practical life to idealized order. By positioning these claims directly opposite Hegel’s paragraphs on constitution, crown, executive, and legislature, the handbook lets readers see the hinge on which “idealism” becomes “materialism” without caricature.
Because the book never abandons its didactic vocation, it also offers a compact lexicon of Hegel’s contested terms—abstract as isolated from context, concrete as unified with it; understanding as faculty of fixed distinctions, reason as the capacity to comprehend the unity of opposites; absolute as complete union of subjectivity and objectivity; concept as the effective unity of consciousness and world rather than a mere idea. This terminological clarity is never ornamental: each definition returns in the exposition where, for example, the concrete state must be in active rapport with its citizens if it is to be more than an organization, and the absolute will must be seen as the achieved unity of self-determination with self-limitation if freedom is to be more than license.
The sequence across the whole is best read as an ever thicker bonding of will to universality. The person in property learns the meaning of universality in the right to alienate; the moral subject learns its insufficiency as long as its universality remains an “ought” that floats above the world; the ethical agent learns to will universality by inhabiting forms that make universality real—household, market, administration, representation—knowing that each form is a site of conflict and education. Kainz’s diagrammatic aids and sample prompts do not distract from this thesis; they reinforce the insight that the book depicts a movement in which each level both stands on its own and points beyond itself, so that the state is neither the annihilation of individuality nor a mere instrument, but the space in which individuality finds itself as a participant in institutions that it also modifies.
From this perspective, the friction with Marx is not a simple clash of “idealism” and “materialism” but a contest over how universality is embodied. Hegel sees universality realized in an organism that integrates partialities by constitutional design and ongoing political education; Marx sees that same claim as the self-presentation of a machine whose form conceals the rule of particular interests—foremost the bureaucracy’s “formalism” and the property relation’s abstraction—behind a rhetoric of the common good. The handbook gives students resources to feel the pull of both positions. When Hegel describes civil servants as a middle stratum preventing aristocratic isolation, one may read a rational mediation; when Marx replies that bureaucracy is the “corporation” of the state that defends its own reproduction under the sign of universality, one may hear the nascent theory of alienation and ideology.
In closing, the argumentative reasoning of the handbook can be stated with precision. It begins by fixing the scholarly stakes: to show, with textual economy and conceptual patience, how Hegel’s system of right trains the will to universality through ever denser social forms, and how Marx’s commentary does not merely oppose this system but turns it by reversing the bearer of universality. It then develops a source-grounded narrative in which each part of Hegel’s construction is reconstructed as a necessary, problem-ridden station: property yields wrong and so calls for morality; morality yields alienation and so calls for ethical institutions; ethical institutions compose an organism whose inner articulation is both the condition and the product of free agency. Finally, it clarifies why these materials matter: because they equip readers to think freedom neither as pure inwardness nor as mere compliance, but as the sustained labor of making universality effective in the very mediums that tempt us to forget our authorship—law, work, administration, representation—and to test that labor against a critique that insists the true subject must be those who suffer under those mediums. The handbook for students thus earns its title by fusing conceptual exposition with adversarial warrant, enabling a study of Hegel that thinks through Marx and a study of Marx that takes Hegel seriously as the adversary that had to be overcome.
Simon Gros 
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