the sovereignty of the people; and

the sovereignty of the people; and as this undemocratic fea- ture of the work is foregrounded it becomes obvious that it cannot productively be understood as a kind of metatheory of the democratic constitutional state. The second reservation that bars the road to any attempt at actualizing the Philosophy of Right today is of a mainly methodological kind and refers to the structure of the argument in the text as a whole. It is said that the steps in Hegel's reasoning can be correctly followed and judged only in relation to the appropriate parts of his Logic, but the Logic has become totally incomprehensible to us owing to its ontological conception of spirit. Therefore, it seems advis- able to treat the text as a quarry for brilliant individual ideas rather than making a futile attempt to reconstruct the theory as an integral whole. It was probably these two reservations, one political and the other methodological, that made the most significant contribu- tion to the decline in importance of the Philosophy of Right in the last few decades. All the arguments, epistemological as well as normative, that Hegel is able to marshal in support of his own conception of "ethical life" remain hidden behind the contested elements of his methodology and his concept of the state. If this crude characterization bears any resemblance to the reception of the work over years, then any attempt at reactualiza- tion is faced right at the outset with the choice between two alternatives: we must either criticize the two objections directly and show them up as mere misunderstandings through a new interpretation of the Philosophy of Right, or we must criticize them indirectly by demonstrating their irrelevance to any re ally productive reappropriation of the treatise. Thus, while the first, strategy would aim to actualize the Philosophy of Right according to its own methodological standards and at