Justice & Law Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Kaufmann slips a pointed corrective into what looks like a tidy historical aside. By flagging that Hegel "later became a man of influence", he’s not just timestamping a change in career status; he’s hinting at the way philosophy hardens into policy only when it has institutional backing. Ideas about universal rights can sit safely on the page until the thinker has enough authority to make them legible to the state. The line quietly flatters Hegel while also implying that influence, not merely argument, is what moves emancipation forward.

The sentence is built around a deliberately blunt universalism: rights attach to "man because he is a man". In postwar intellectual life - Kaufmann’s world - that phrasing reads like an antidote to ethnic nationalism and to the pseudo-philosophical racialism that had recently poisoned Europe. It’s also a rebuke to the habit of treating Jewish emancipation as a special favor granted to a troublesome minority. Kaufmann wants the reader to feel the moral downgrade involved in that framing: once rights are tethered to origin or creed, they become conditional, revocable, negotiable.

There’s subtext, too, in choosing Hegel as the exemplar. Hegel is often caricatured as the philosopher of the Prussian state, a theorist whose universal history can slide into justificatory politics. Kaufmann leverages that reputation: if even Hegel, the alleged high priest of the state, can ground equality in sheer personhood, then the liberal principle isn’t sentimental - it’s philosophically non-negotiable. The intent is less to canonize Hegel than to weaponize him against exclusion dressed up as tradition.