Alfredo Bergés brings us to the very heart of Hegel's theory of punishment and offers us a sense of its controversial implications when he writes:

Bergés's succinct phrasing invites us to consider two points. First, what it would mean to suggest that punishment is supposed to operate as the annulment (in strict Hegelian terms, the ‘determinate negation’) of crime; second, how punishment (coercion) can produce freedom (‘freedom can be forced’). If crime is a negation of right, punishment is the coercion (negation) of crime's primary negation and therefore it attempts to forge an internal relationship between crime, punishment, and the ‘productive logic of freedom’ in the form of right. At least, this is supposed to constitute the justification of punishment in Hegel's late system. It is our objective here to systematically think through what such a conception of punishment must mean in terms of Hegel's speculative analysis, and how it might relate to our overarching concern to track the problematic status of nature and the natural in the final system.

Punishment's ‘double negation’ is well documented in the literature, and yet, despite its recognition, its overall meaning has been widely debated. Debate continues in attempts to situate Hegel's position in terms of different theories of punishment (retributivist, consequentialist, etc.). It is not our purpose to enter into all the details of debates revolving around classification, as this would take us too far afield from our primary objective of tracking the problem of nature in Hegel's political philosophy and the protean ways in which it continuously reappears throughout the final system. Instead, our perhaps counter-intuitive thesis will insist that while nature constitutes a fundamental component of Hegel's conceptual rendering of the constitution of crime, the most problematic dimension of this phenomenon only becomes explicit by way of the category of punishment. It highlights the problem of spirit's reactivity to the question of the natural.