Hegel’s treatment of punishment also brings out the continuity of his way of conceiving of the structure and dynamics of the social world with that of Kant, as Kant too, in his Metaphysics of Morals had employed the idea of the state’s punitive action as a negating of the original criminal act. Kant’s idea, conceived on the model of the physical principle of action and reaction, was structured by the category of community or reciprocal interaction, and was conceived as involving what he called real opposition. Such an idea of opposed dynamic forces seems to form something of a model for Hegel’s idea of contradiction and the starting point for his conception of reciprocal recognition. Nevertheless, clearly Hegel articulates the structures of recognition in more complex ways than those derivable from Kant’s category of community.