Irigaray has drawn on Hölderlin to develop the idea of self-dividing nature and so explain how patriarchal culture can be rooted in nature and yet open to change and improvement. The other German Idealist philosopher on whom she principally draws is Hegel, although she does so chiefly in the context of the political analyses and proposals which are increasingly important to her writing from the later 1980s on. She remarks that: ‘For a very long time, but more continuously since 1981, I have been looking at Hegel's work’ (ILTY, 12/31), and she particularly praises what she calls Hegel's ‘gigantic speculative project’, that is, his ‘global consideration of issues that relate to natural law, civil law, and divine law’ (SG, 128/142). Her own analyses of law and politics are, indeed, so deeply grounded in Hegel's thought that they cannot be understood unless they are first situated in relation to her readings of Hegel. This chapter aims to introduce these readings and show how they give rise to Irigaray's proposal that laws and political arrangements should express sexual difference – in particular, by allocating rights and obligations only to individuals qua members of a sex, and by organising all institutions along sexually differentiated lines. While the Hegelian background to these ideas does not in itself make them attractive, it does, I will suggest, provide conceptual resources with which to address some of the questions which Irigaray's political proposals provoke.