The Concept of Wrong in Hegel’s Political Philosophy

Despite the vast literature on rights, duties, responsibility, and punishment, the normative notion of wrong is often dealt with, if at all, as an afterthought. This project aims to challenge the casual attitude towards wrong, wrongs, wronging, wrongfulness, and the like, by looking at the concept through the lens of GWF Hegel’s mature philosophy, which takes wrong (Unrecht) to be an integral feature of intersubjective, institutional, and political make-up (“objective spirit”) of the modern world.
The second motivation relates to Hegel’s legacy. Both the understanding of crime as the “infringement of right as right” (PR § 97) and the thought that punishment would “annul the crime, which otherwise would be held valid, and […] restore right” (PR § 99) have proven extremely influential, especially in criminal law theory, providing a foil against which to label one’s position as “Hegelian” or “anti-Hegelian.” A closer look at wrong has the potential to correct some clichés about Hegel’s philosophy, not least his image as a one-dimensional retributivist.
The third motivation is intrinsic to Hegel scholarship. Thus far, there is no monograph or edited volume that is explicitly dedicated to the treatment of wrong in Hegel’s philosophy. Yet, the notion of wrong, making more than fifty appearances in the original text of the Philosophy of Right alone, is significant enough to warrant focused scholarly attention.
The outcome of the project will be a conference and an attendant publication, both of which will contribute to ongoing debates in criminal law theory, metaethics, and political philosophy.