5 - Person and Property in Hegel's Philosophy of Right (§§34–81)

Summary

Hegel treats the question of property in the first part of the Philosophy of Right, entitled “abstract right.” The “right” that forms the general context for this discussion of property is in the first instance Roman civil law insofar as the latter, defined expressly in terms of the utilitas singulorum, is concerned directly with the free individual, a “person,” that is, an individual capable of bearing rights, in contrast with the unfree individual. The capacity for bearing rights here signifies that the free individual is a “person” insofar as he or she possesses the right to dispose over “things” [Sachen] and thereby stands as such in a legal relationship of right with regard to other free individuals. This constitutes the point of departure for Hegel's analysis: the singular individual is to be regarded as a person insofar as he or she possesses the right to place his or her will in any thing whatsoever and thereby, precisely as the “owner” of “possessions qua property,” relates to other free individuals as persons (§§40 and 44). Hence the Philosophy of Right excludes everything that belongs to the subjectivity of any particular personality from the concept of “person” as such. This subjectivity, together with everything “connected with particularity,” is a matter of “indifference” (§37 Addition) in relation to the individual as person in the legal sense. Hegel is equally rigorous in restricting the theory of property to the relationship between persons on the basis of things as defined in civil law.