Herbert Marcuse frames how we intend to read Hegel's sociopolitical thought and the provoking controversies surrounding it. He writes:

While it is true that the entire significance of the qualifier ‘in our time’ has taken on a new meaning, since ‘our time’ is no longer Marcuse’s, the general upshot of his point of departure works for us. It is not an understatement to think that the vast changes in the ‘historical situation’ that separate our living present from Marcuse's era are arguably as significant as those that separated Marcuse from Hegel’s. Granting these upheavals, the change in ‘historical situation’ again makes it ripe for a reinterpretation of Hegel's philosophy. More specifically for our concerns, however, our objective in Part III will consist in a careful reading of a very precise aspect of Hegel's sociopolitical writings. While our primary objective will be to argue that problems concerning the issue of nature persist within the domain of objective spirit, we also believe that, in the spirit of Marcuse, our analysis will indicate some of the ways in which Hegel's thought and method not only remain decidedly allergic to totalitarian theory and practice, but continue to offer us the conceptual framework and tools with which to think problems that remain active within the contours of our living present – in this section, problems surrounding crime and the institution of punishment, and the ways in which these might also inform the question concerning nature in the final system.

Despite what we maintain is the continued purchase of Hegel's thought, Marcuse writes of the Rechtsphilosophie that there is ‘hardly another philosophical work that reveals more unsparingly the irreconcilable contradictions of modern society, or that seems more perversely to acquiesce in them’.