this entails considerable difficulties in interpretation: one be ing the far-reaching intuitions Hegel attached to his concept of "objective spirit," the other the manifold reasons that led him to introduce his concept of "ethical life." The first concept neglecting its interconnection with the whole of the Hegelian system, seems to me to contain the thesis that all social real ity has a rational structure and any breach of that structure by using false or inadequate concepts to try to understand it will necessarily have negative effects on social life as soon as those concepts come to be applied in practice. In short, by his idea of society as "objective spirit," Hegel wishes to claim that an offence against those rational grounds with which our social practices are interlinked at any given moment will cause dam. age or injury in social reality. In contrast, the second central concept, that of "ethical life seems to me to contain the thesis that in social reality, at least in that of modernity, we come across some spheres of action in which inclinations and moral norms, interests, and values are already fused in the form of institutionalized interactions. To that extent Hegel is being consistent in asserting that those moral spheres of action them selves deserve the normative designation of "ethical life"; this is his philosophical alternative to the search for abstract moral principles as the conceptual means for orienting human su jects normatively. In what follows, these two theses, for all my vagueness in introducing them, will be regarded as belonging to the core of even an indirect reactualization of Hegel's losophy of Right; I maintain that those who dispense with the rational reconstruction of the concepts of "objective spirit" and "morality" have sacrificed the substantial content of the text to a superficial plausibility In particular, in my attempt at reactualization, I will first reproduce the basic intention of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in a form in which the text will appear as eminently meaningful even under the theoretical premises of the current debate i political philosophy; here I will be mainly concerned to pro vide a modern elucidation of the reflection behind Hegel's obscure formulation that the "idea" of the "general free wil termines the total extent of what we should call "right" I