Personal Freedom without Private Property? Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School

Abstract

Frankfurt School critical theory has always been concerned with revealing the various ways in which economic systems and social practices can dominate or oppress. It is therefore somewhat surprising that the tradition has had relatively little to say about private property rights. Indeed, this is all the more surprising because Hegel and Marx are crucial sources of inspiration for contemporary critical theory, and both gave an in-depth discussion of the structure and legitimacy of private property. This paper offers a new analysis of Hegel's justification of private property, Marx's critical response, and the relevance of such views for contemporary critical theory. This analysis builds upon Hegel's discussion of “Abstract Right” in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Marx's “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.”

Keywords:

• freedom
• property
• Hegel
• Marx
• Frankfurt School critical theory

Acknowledgements

I presented an earlier version of this paper at the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Marx & Philosophy Society. I would like to thank Andrew Chitty for inviting me to the conference and the participants for helpful feedback. Special thanks are due to Max Cherem and three anonymous referees for detailed comments on earlier versions of my manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank Gao Jingyu for encouragement.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch is professor of philosophy at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. He specializes in social, political and legal philosophy. His recent books include Hegel et le saint-simonisme (Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2012), ‘Anerkennung’ als Prinzip der Kritischen Theorie (de Gruyter, 2011) and The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (co-edited with C. F. Zurn, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). He is the editor of a special issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice on “Karl Marx and the philosophy of recognition” (2013, vol. 16, no. 4: 679–758).

Notes

¹This view has been articulated by Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Castel, Nancy Fraser, and Richard Sennett, among others.

²Interestingly, Habermas makes this move in the context of his reconstruction of historical materialism. See in particular the essay entitled “Überlegungen zum evolutionären Stellenwert des modernen Rechts” [Reflections on the evolutionary status of modern law] in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus [Towards a reconstruction of historical materialism] (Habermas 1979), which I discuss in Schmidt am Busch (2014). On Habermas's “mature” philosophy of law, see his major work Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Habermas 1996).

³Most recently, Christoph Menke has discussed the relations between law and violence from the standpoint of critical theory. See Menke (2012, 2013). Within this perspective he has also paid some attention to private property rights. See Menke (2013, 102–5).

⁴I deal with these issues at greater length in Schmidt am Busch (2011).

⁵Frederick Neuhouser (2000) and Axel Honneth (2014) use this term.

⁶Michael Hardimon has emphasized this aspect of Hegel's philosophy. See Hardimon (1994).

⁷See Quante (2011, 2014) for an analysis and discussion of anthropological aspects and presuppositions within Marx's theory of alienation.

⁸Daniel Brudney has offered an illuminating discussion of this model in his recent publications. See, for instance, Brudney (2010, 2013).

⁹For a fruitful analysis of Hegel's concept of the will, see Quante (2004).

¹⁰I use H. B. Nisbet's translation of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which I have occasionally altered for the sake of clarity and consistency. Changes to Nisbet's translation are not noted.

¹¹See Hegel (1991, 95): “It is possible for me to alienate my property, for it is mine only in so far as I embody my will in it.”

¹²While quite a number of authors have argued that, according to Hegel, property involves the “embodiment” of personhood in (external) objects (see, for instance, Munzer [1990, 67–70] or Waldron [2002, 360–70]), what “embodiment” exactly means in this regard remains controversial. Our analysis above can help to more precisely specify how Hegel may have believed that private property comes about through an embodiment of personhood in the external world.

¹³Jeremy Waldron presents Hegel's justification of private property differently. According to Waldron, Hegel believes that “property is something everyone needs in order to develop his freedom and individuality” (Waldron 2002, 351). More precisely,

[the] importance of property to individual wills is this: the actions that an individual performs on or with this object now may constrain or determine the actions that he can perform on or with it later. […] But this effect can be lost if others are also working on the object for purposes of their own in the meantime. That is why we need private property: a system which assigns enduring objects to the exclusive control of individuals. (373–74)

Waldron no doubt ascribes a very interesting view on private property to Hegel. However, he does not offer any textual evidence for his claim that Hegel views the importance of property in this way. Without such evidence, it is hard to see how Hegel could have justified the institution of private property in the way Waldron says he did. Amir Mohseni offers an interesting discussion of these issues in a recent publication; see Mohseni (2014).

¹⁴See section 2 above.

¹⁵See section 4 above.

¹⁶Some authors believe that Moses Hess advanced such a view in his 1845 essay “Über das Geldwesen” [On the essence of money]. See, for instance, Lange (1980, 96–105). For more on this issue, see my discussion in Schmidt am Busch (2013).

¹⁷The way in which both Habermas and Honneth talk about the “quasi-transcendental interests” of the human species lends plausibility to the assertion that critical theory might not strictly adhere to its own post-metaphysical self-understanding. See Habermas (1971) and Honneth (2003).