Why did Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel think laws could protect freedom?

For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, laws and the state were essential to protecting freedom because he rejected the idea that liberty is merely the capacity to do as one likes, which he believed leads to anarchy and conflict. Instead, Hegel viewed freedom as the alignment of the individual will with a universal, rational will toward well-being.12

In his work The Philosophy of Right, Hegel argued that true freedom is realized when individuals act as moral agents within an organic community. Laws serve as the framework for this community, reconciling the antagonisms of bourgeois society and ensuring that individual actions accord with both personal conscience and rational principles. By subordinating themselves to a state organized around these rational laws, individuals move beyond the "natural" state of competitive self-interest and achieve a synthesis where their personal aims coincide with the common good. Thus, for Hegel, laws do not restrict freedom; rather, they provide the necessary structure for freedom to exist in fact rather than just in essence.2314