Hegel is widely regarded as difficult to read and teach within political science. Yet many of the central questions addressed in Hegel’s philosophy of right, concerning freedom, law, institutions, social inequality, and the modern state, remain foundational to our discipline. Alan Brudner’s translation, published by the University of Toronto Press, allows English-speaking audiences to encounter for the first time Hegel’s third course on the philosophy of right (1819–1820), delivered at the University of Berlin. This course is of particular importance because it concluded only seven months before the publication of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. As a result, the lectures offer a unique perspective on Hegel’s elaboration of his political theory for students while he was simultaneously completing his definitive published statement on the subject. The Elements are difficult to read and follow not only because of Hegel’s technical vocabulary, but also because the text was designed to function in conjunction with oral lectures on its various sections. This pedagogical context helps explain why it later became standard to incorporate students’ “additions” (Zusätze) into the text itself.

With Brudner’s translation, students can now read Hegel’s political philosophy while supplementing their study with the closest available lecture course from the same period. More than this, however, the structure of the lecture notes allows the text to function as a presentation that also, in agreement with Brudner, “stands on its own” (Hegel 2023, p. x), in the sense that it is “the only version that reads like a book” (Hegel 2023, p. x). This is particularly significant because both in the Heidelberg lectures and in the Elements, Hegel’s exposition is organized around relatively brief sections connected conceptually and thematically. By contrast, in the 1819–1820 lectures we encounter a reconstructed text that reads as a continuous narrative rather than as a series of “additions” to the printed Elements.

The lectures are based primarily on the notes of Johann Rudolf Ringier, a Swiss student enrolled in the course. These notes were discovered in 1997, edited by Emil Angehrn, Martin Bondeli, and Hoo Nam Seelmann, and published in 2000 as volume 14 of G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte (Felix Meiner). Brudner’s edition, however, offers more than a translation of Ringier’s manuscript alone. A second set of lecture notes from the same course, authored by an anonymous student and discovered in 1969 at the Lilly Library of Indiana University, was edited by Dieter Henrich and published in 1983 as Philosophie des Rechts: Die Vorlesung von 1819/1820 in einer Nachschrift (Suhrkamp). Brudner uses Ringier’s notes as the base text while supplementing them with material from the anonymous manuscript to clarify arguments, expand discussions, and fill gaps in the record. These interventions appear in the main text, footnotes, and appended materials (Hegel 2023, pp. 251–267). The result is a highly readable and pedagogically distinctive presentation of Hegel’s philosophy of right. Political theorists and political science instructors who struggle to introduce Hegel within the constraints of a few weeks will benefit from assigning selections from these lectures to supplement the Elements, or, depending on course needs, even to replace it. Brudner’s introduction situates the manuscript in its historical and intellectual context and advances a persuasive reading of Hegel that resists the view that he became merely conservative or reactionary in the aftermath of the Carlsbad Decrees (Hegel, 2023, pp. ix–lvi).

Although Hegel famously maintains that philosophy aims to grasp its own time in thought, without predictive or prescriptive ambitions, there are nonetheless substantive themes in his philosophy of right that remain strikingly timely. Readers unconvinced by Hegelian “transitions” and speculative “movements” will profit less from the introductory remarks on freedom (Hegel 2023, pp. 3–15) than from Hegel’s substantive theorizing about modern institutions. In particular, his analyses of “abstract right” (Hegel 2023, pp. 17–60) and “morality” (Hegel 2023, pp. 61–100) provide useful conceptual vocabularies for thinking about freedom and agency in terms of legal personhood and moral subjectivity, categories central to political science debates about law, responsibility, and citizenship. But it is in his account of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), however, that Hegel most clearly emerges as a seminal social and political theorist. Here he develops a systematic account of how modern institutions generate and sustain freedom: the family (Hegel 2023, pp. 111–132), structured by love and consent; civil society (Hegel 2023, pp. 133–184), organized through a socially interdependent division of labour into estates and corporations driven by self-interest; and the state (Hegel 2023, pp. 185–250), which mediates tensions between market self-regulation and political intervention for the sake of citizen’s freedom. This institutional analysis speaks directly to enduring political science concerns with states, markets, the rule of law, inequality, exclusion and power.

Although Hegel is committed to reconstructing what he takes to be the immanent institutional rationality of modernity, it is crucial to note that, for all the reconciliation and actuality he discerns, the structural production of the “rabble” (Pöbel) remains for him a phenomenon that fundamentally escapes this rationality. The “rabble” refers not only to material poverty or exclusion from participation in civil society or the state, but also to a form of moral corruption in which respect for right itself is eroded. What these lectures make especially clear is that such disregard for the rule of law is not limited to the poor. Hegel also identifies the existence of a “rich rabble” (Hegel 2023, pp. 257–259): economic elites who come to see the norms and institutions of modern freedom as constraints that do not apply to them. This framework is particularly useful for political science analyses of contemporary inequality, elite power, and the erosion of democratic accountability, illuminating how extreme wealth can translate into disproportionate political influence and the instrumentalization of legal institutions.

For political science, Brudner’s translation thus offers more than historical insight. It provides a conceptually rich and pedagogically effective resource for thinking about institutions, inequality, and the conditions of modern freedom, topics that remain at the core of the discipline. In making Hegel’s political thought more accessible without sacrificing its complexity, this volume stands to become a valuable reference for both teaching and research in political theory and beyond.