Elements of the Philosophy of Right Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

There were a number of issues that arose during the translation of the text. Most notably the phrase that is contained in the addition to §258, which was initially translated as "The state is the march of God through the world" as well as being translated thus: "The existence of the state is the presence of God upon the earth". From these early translations came the criticism that Hegel justifies authoritarian or even totalitarian forms of government: Giovanni Gentile, whose thought had a strong influence on Mussolini, bases his Hegelian revival on this point. However, Walter Kaufmann argues that the correct translation reads as follows: "It is the way of God in the world, that there should be a state".[2] This suggests that the state, rather than being godly, is part of the divine strategy, not a mere product of human endeavor. Kaufmann claims that Hegel's original meaning of the sentence is not a carte blanche for state dominance and brutality but merely a reference to the state's importance as part of the process of history.

The preface to the Philosophy of Right contains considerable criticism of the philosophy of Jakob Friedrich Fries, who had been a critic of Hegel's prior work. Included in this is a suggestion that it is justifiable for the state to censor the writings of philosophers like Fries and welcoming Fries' loss of his academic position following Fries' participation in the Wartburg Festival. The inclusion of this passage has led to scholarly debate as to the reason for Hegel's advocacy of the kind of censorship the Prussian state had introduced following the murder of August von Kotzebue in the form of the Carlsbad Decrees. Hegel scholars have suggested that the inclusion of these passages was done to satisfy the censors.[3] T.M. Knox argued that, while clearly designed to curry favour with the censors and written well after completion of the work proper, the Preface's condemnation of Fries was "nothing new", that there was no betrayal of his support for the Wartburg Festival principles, rather a mere denunciation of method, while condemnation of Karl Ludwig von Haller (whose work had been burned at Wartburg) remained undisturbed in the body of the work.[4] Stephen Houlgate wrote in The Hegel Reader, which he edited, that the work is now "recognized as one of the greatest works of social and political philosophy ever written."[5]