| To date, there has been no comprehensive attempt to systematically reconstruct the development of law and right in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit . My work undertakes this project of reconstruction in order to facilitate a better understanding of the text and to demonstrate the particularly contemporary relevance of Hegel's theory of law. I begin by tracing Hegel's development of law and right throughout the first half of the text, constructing an account of its general principles and demonstrating the continuity between his critique of natural law and that of social laws and law-based societies. Next, I consider these law-based societies, challenging feminist interpretations of Hegel's Antigone and showing the contemporary resonance of "legal status" or "state of right" (Rechtzustand). Hegel, however, provides no legal resolution of the problems facing the law-based societies he treats; law is continuously shown to be incapable of integrating into a mobile and self-differentiating unity both poles of the relation between one and many, identical and different, universal' and particular.;The text, however, does contain a different form of resolution to the difficulties facing law, right, and the social life based upon them, and that is found in forgiveness, which grants law and right a circumscribed role in spirit and integrates the previously opposed poles of universal and individual into a fluid identity. I demonstrate how the Phenomenology's legal articulation of the relationship between individual and society is supplemented and situated by forgiveness, which modernises the law-based society of ethical life and resolves the tendency of state of right toward alienation. If law is reconceived to meet the requirements represented by Hegel's account of forgiveness, it can be transformed into a more faithful expression of the identification between universal and individual. I conclude by arguing that, with the help of Hegel's concept of forgiveness, the Phenomenology's theory of law presents an alternative to the extremes of liberal legalism and the post-structuralist critique of law. |
