The consideration of Hegel’s philosophy in this book returns to literal formulations and figures of his legal-political theory. It concentrates in particular on the relation of law and history and takes into account the constitutive role of violence for any institutionalization of the national, international or supranational reshaping and founding of law. The book shows the limit of any attempt to use law to found the entirety, the finality, and the transience of human needs. As a great thinker of victimhood, through precisely the figure of the victim, Hegel connects the historicity of spirit with tragedy, the limits of law, the possibility of politics, the dark side of history and philosophy itself.