The claim I propose to defend is that Hegel’s ‘theory of recognition’ is intended as an answer to a specific question in his systematic philosophy. That question is the question of the nature and the very possibility of freedom.1 This will be controversial for several reasons. First I want to treat his mature theory of ethical life or the ethical community (Sittlichkeit) (the theory published as the account of ‘objective spirit’ in the Encyclopedias and most familiarly in the lectures on the Philosophy of Right) as an extension of the original, or Jena-period theory of recognition, not its abandonment.2 A widely accepted view has it that while Hegel was originally interested in accounting for the nature and authority of social institutions by appeal to a basic inter-subjective encounter and the ‘realisation’ of such inter-subjective links, he came later to abandon that view about inter-subjectivity, and believed instead that human social and political existence was best understood and legitimated as a manifestation of a grand metaphysical process, an Absolute Subject’s manifestation of itself, or a Divine Mind’s coming to self-consciousness.3 On this interpretation, what had been a competing modern theory about the nature of human sociality, a rival to Machiavellian and Hobbsean attempts to understand how and why persons forge the links of dependence and authority that they do and must, and so a rival account of an original dependence tied to the problem of recognition, status, esteem and solidarity, not fear, power and security, became instead a conservative, organic theory, with individuals mere accidents of ‘the truly real’ ethical substance manifesting itself in time and with no central role any more to inter-subjective experience. My claim will be that this interpretation is insufficiently attentive to the unusual foundations of the mature theory of ethical life, or to Hegel’s theory of spirit (Geist), and so to the very unusual account of freedom that position justifies. Once the latter is in view, I want to show, it is much easier to see how the ‘ethical life theory’ is an account of successful recognition, or a mutuality based on a kind of rational acknowledgement. Secondly the claim is controversial because defending that proposition will involve the claim that the theory of recognition is not primarily to be understood (as it often is in post-war Hegel scholarship) as a comprehensive transcendental theory about self-awareness, as if about the possibility of any self-relation (as if the contents of any such self-relation are and must be internalisations of ways of being-regarded by others), is not primarily a genetic theory about the formation