From Preface:
"In his preface, Hegel's editor, Professor Eduard Gans, makes some interesting remarks upon the "Philosophy of Right," and informs us as to the way in which the matter of the book had been put together. He dates his preface May 29th, 1833, thirteen years, lacking one month, later than Hegel's date for the completion of his own preface, and eighteen months after the philosopher's death. Hegel had, it would appear, lived to see the outbreak of unusual opposition to his political conceptions, and so Dr. Gans begins: "The wide-spread misunderstanding, which prevents the recognition of the real value of the present work, and stands in the way of its general acceptance, urges me, now that an enlarged edition of it has been prepared, to touch upon some things, which I would rather have left simply to increasing philosophic insight." He goes on to give three reasons for placing great value upon this work of Hegel's. 1. He thinks that the highest praise is due to the author for the way in which he does justice to every side of the subject, even investigating questions which have only a slight bearing upon the matter in hand, and thus erecting a marvellously complete structure. This fact is more striking, thinks Dr. Gans, than the foundation of the work, which had been already in a measure laid by Kant and Rousseau. 2. A second achievement of the "Philosophy of Right" is the abolitionof the distinction, so prominent in the seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, between law and politics. Even in our own time, remarks the editor, many think of law as the skeleton, as it were, of the different forms of the state, as an abstract thing devoid of life and movement. Politics, again, they conceive to be more mobile and a function of a living thing. Law is thus said to stand to politics as anatomy to physiology.

This divergence, which was unknown to Plato and Aristotle, had its origin in the separatist character of the Middle Ages, and was brought to completion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hegel, gathering up the experience of centuries, returns to the form of the ancient state, and counts law and politics as organic phases of one single whole. 3. The "Philosophy of Right" suggests a two-fold place for the principleof natural right. In its scientific treatment this principle precedes the philosophy of right, and it also comes at the close. That part of the "Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences," which precedes the discussion there given of right, morality, and the ethical system, is designated the subjective mind or spirit, and from that ground natural right proceeds. Skipping over the region occupied by the "Philosophy of Right," dealing with the objective spirit, natural right reappears in worldhistory. Dr. Grans means that the right of the world-spirit, transcending, as it does, the individual and the nation, is a return at a higher level to natural right. Nations are, as he says, so many streams discharging themselves into the world-ocean of history."