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Hegel's System of Needs: The Elementary Relations of Economic Justice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
Abstract
The Philosophy of Right is not usually taken to contain a prescriptive ethics. Yet to establish as much regarding the elementary relations of the economy is the task of this essay. The project is cast into three parts. It begins with Hegel's account in the ‘Introduction’ of the free self prior to the exposition of the modes of just conduct or philosophy of right proper. It is an account of freedom not yet realized — without any particular content. Yet, the point is established that the philosophy of justice will be based on a twofold notion of self-determination. Most of the ‘Introduction’ concerns the argument that freedom or valid conduct has to do with pure self-determination, the self determining itself. The claim is also made that philosophy establishes its own legitimacy through its conceptual self-determination. Part two deals with the question of how freedom can be realized in civil society where the individual's governing orientation is particularity. The characteristic features of civil society do not encourage the expectation that freedom can be realized there. One, particularity itself appears to be rooted in a natural necessity which seems to preclude any possibility of freedom. Two, the inherently social character of civil society seems to rule out the exercise of a freedom that is about the self's relation to itself in self-determination. Three, the pursuit of particularity characteristic of civil society seems inherently antisocial and thus not a suitable mode of conduct for ethics. However, the argument will be made that the theory can conceive of the relations of particularity in a way that makes the free self inherently social and particularity both social and free from natural determinations.
- Type
- Hegel and Ethics
- Information
- Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 19 , Issue 1-2: number 37/38 , 1998 , pp. 51 - 72
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1998
References
1 Hegel, G. W. F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hereafter cited as Philosophy of Right or PR. When this text is cited by paragraph (¶) Remark (R) or Addition (A), a comma used before “R” or “A” means “and”. Thus: “PR ¶ 10, A” means: “PR ¶ 10 and the addition to ¶ 10”; “PR ¶ 150, R, A” means: “PR ¶ 150 and the remark to ¶ 150 and the addition to ¶ 150”. The absence of a comma before R and A means that the reference is only to the Remark or Addition. Reference to the ‘Preface’ will be made by page number in the text.
2 Wood, Allen, Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 241 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Allen Wood returns to his arguments on the Philosophy of Right in ‘Reply’ in the issue, ‘Symposium on Allen W. Wood's Hegel's Ethical Thought’ of the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, no 25 (Spring/Summer 1992), 34-50.
3 Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought, 242-3.
4 Wood, Ibid., 242
5 Wood, Ibid., 8, 9.
6 Wood, Ibid., 12.
7 Wood, Ibid., 17, 18.
8 Wood claims this conclusion is supported by paragraph 481 of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. Miller, A. V., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)Google Scholar. See Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought, 32.
9 Wood, Ibid., 32-33.
10 Hegel's Logic, trans. Wallace, W. and Miller, A. V., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. Paragraph references given in the text.
11 Rosen, Michael, Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 179 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, mentioned in Wood, Ibid., 5.
12 The case for finding this argument in Hegel's philosophy is made in the following works: Dove, Kenley R., ‘Hegel's Phenomenological Method’, Review of Metaphysics, 23 (1970), 615–41Google Scholar; Winfield, Richard Dien, Reason and Justice, 117–157 Google Scholar; idem, Overcoming Foundations: Studies in Systematic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 13-75; idem, Freedom and Modernity (Albany: State University Press, 1991) 3-14, 33-50; Maker, William, Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 21–124 Google Scholar; Houlgate, Stephen, Freedom Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), 41–76 Google Scholar.
13 Steven B. Smith is one of many writers who takes the alternate approach, believing that the Philosophy of Right does not contain the development of the conceptual or rational account of freedom. “Hegel's concept of right takes the form of a phenomenology of the moral will”; see Smith, Steven B., Hegel's Critique of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 107 Google Scholar.
14 Wood, Ibid., 39.
15 Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Ellington, J. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 104 (80-81/436-437)Google Scholar.
16 Wood, Ibid., 44-45.
17 Wood, Ibid., 45-47.
18 Wood, Ibid., 46.
19 Wood, Ibid., 47.
20 “The science of right is a part of philosophy. It has therefore to develop the Idea, which is reason within an object, out of the concept; or what comes to the same thing, it must observe the proper immanent development of the thing itself (PR ¶ 2).
21 Wood, Ibid., 47-49.
22 Wood, Ibid., 48-49.
23 Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 45 (88/441)Google Scholar; Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Beck, L. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), 36 (35)Google Scholar.
24 The argument that follows regarding an ethical economics is similar and much indebted to the pioneering work of Richard Dien Winfield. See, in particular, his The Just Economy (London: Routledge, 1988), 87–119 Google Scholar.
25 “Pay out money, and soon you will be in chains. The word finance is for slaves, it is unknown in a real state. In a truly free state, the citizens do everything with their own hands, and nothing with money …” ( Rousseau, Jean Jacques, The Social Contract, trans. Betts, C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 126)Google Scholar.
26 Wood raises the same question. In Hegel's Ethical Theory, 242, he states, “Without ethical goals, directing my activity to the needs of others and to a larger universal good, I likewise find myself in the condition Dürkheim called ‘egoism’”. Wood's conclusion is that it is only in corporations that conduct in civil society acquires a social character.
27 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 86–90 Google Scholar.
28 Of course, Hegel has already answered this general question in his treatment of the spheres of right preceding civil society. In this paper, this general question is answered in terms of the freedom specific to civil society.
29 This passage captures very well the special character of civil society. Ends not constituted by reason (the pursuit of particularity) are given free reign only because reason acting alone has been able to determine relations of freedom in which such ends find their legitimacy.
30 Michael Hardimon takes a contrary view. He believes that the logic of the elementary relations of the economy will entail individuals dealing with each other in merely an instrumental fashion. See his Hegel's Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 202–203 Google Scholar. Shlomo Avineri shares Hardimon's reading. See his Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 134 Google Scholar.
31 Because Wood believes that market relations are not in themselves just, he claims that social existence first arrives only with the estates and corporations.
32 Assuming, of course, that no other domain of right has been violated in the process.
33 Italics added.
34 It is worth pointing out again that the system of needs does not begin at the beginning of Hegel's treatment of civil society. It is preceded by the highly abstract discussion of particularity. It is because there is the prior treatment of particularity in all its abstractness, that the elements of the economy, i.e. need, the commodity and work, can through philosophical reconstruction be terms wholly based within the philosophical system.
35 See Winfield, The Just Economy, 97.
36 This move from particularity to need, commodity and work, for example, is not one theorists such as Wood, Hardimon and Avineri acknowledge. By overlooking such a step, they miss the opportunity to consider to the full the view that the Philosophy of Right sets out the systematic rationale of ethical economics.
37 Accordingly, it is not necessary, even if only this once, for Hegel to say “Here, at the level of needs, it is that concretum of representational thought which we call the human being; this is the first, and in fact the only occasion on which we shall refer to the human being in this sense” (PR¶ 190R).
38 It is worth pointing out the paradox that the very same process which Hegel refers to as an abstraction from empirical reality and necessity leads to theory's ever growing concreteness.
39 Again this point suggests that history contains the possibility for actual work to approximate the norms of work conceived as part of the ethical theory of right (PR ¶ 197A). But this very important conclusion is not one philosophy can address.
40 Italics added.
41 In the Philosophy of Right it is the section on “The Police’ which follows the elementary relations of the economy not the ‘Corporation’. It is the paper's claim that the reverse order is the better one. The argument for that position is not made here. The case for putting the corporation first is made in Merrill, David, ‘Building on Hegel for a New Theory of Social Justice: Getting Beyond Hayek and Dworkin’, Ph.D Diss, University of Southampton, 1997, 172–174 Google Scholar, and in Winfield, The Just Economy, 170, 182. In Freedom, Truth and History, 113-118, Houlgate argues for the order which Hegel follows.
42 Richard Winfield translates ‘Vermögen’ as ‘wealth’, while Nisbet uses ‘resource’ and T. M. Knox, ‘capital’, in his translation of Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967)Google Scholar. See Winfield, , The Just Economy, 140 Google Scholar. “Wealth” is preferable as it lacks the natural connotations that the term “resources” can suggest. Furthermore, wealth can take many forms other than that of capital in its strict economic sense. Wealth can include, for example, a society's public institutions, culture, non-capitalistic enterprises, all of which can help in an individual's participation in economic life.
43 Following this sentence comes: “By a dialectical movement, the particular is mediated by the universal so that each individual, in earning, producing, and enjoying on his own account, thereby earns and produces for the enjoyment of others”. These two sentences seem to contradict the passage quoted from PR ¶ 253R on page fifty-two above. Wood has not sought to reconcile the two, but rather has chosen to accept the quote from PR ¶ 253R over these sentences from PR ¶ 199.
44 For an account of how the public welfare authority secures the reality of economic justice, see Merrill, David, “Building on Hegel for a New Theory of Social Justice: Getting beyond Hayek and Dworkin’, Ph.D Diss., University of Southampton 1997, 182–201 Google Scholar; Winfield, Richard, The Just Economy, 183–232 Google Scholar.
45 See Maker, William, ‘The Critique of Marx and Marxist Thought’ in his Philosophy Without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel, 175 Google Scholar.