Third, he had not discarded the quasi-Aristotelian idea of his youth that the normative principles of communicative freedom in modern society must not be anchored in rules of external behavior or mere coercive laws but needed to be internalized by practical training in habitualized patterns of action and custom if they were to lose the last remnants of heteronomy. And fourth, he remained equally, or even more firmly, convinced that in such a culture of communicative freedom, called “ethical life,” a significant space must be provided for that social sphere of action in which all the subjects in their turn could pursue their selfish interests according to the conditions of the capitalist market. When Hegel was planning the publication of the Philosophy of Right in Berlin, he did not wish to part with any one of these four premises, all of which hailed back to the creative initial phase of his time in Jena, but his philosophical system had meanwhile developed in such an independent way that it was not easy to see how his original intuitions could be shown to their best advantage and without any damage in the new framework. The solution Hegel found for this task in his treatise not only clarifies the central intention of his practical philosophy; it explains both the extent of the underlying concept of right and the structure of the text as a whole, which seems confusing at first sight.