In an early essay by Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” we find both a concise critique of law and an introduction of the significance of both human relations of love and the power of forgiveness. While the essay is critical of the idea of making law the basis of political and moral life and reasoning, Hegel’s introduction of the significance of both forgiveness and affective relations in fact requires not a simple abandonment of law but its re-configuration or re-conceptualization—that is, the situating of law as a single element in a more complex conception of political and moral justice. What remains after Hegel’s critique of law in this early essay is not the privileging of forgiveness and affective relations over law but the identification of a constitutive tension between these three phenomena, all of which are essential to justice.`
