Abstract
This article attempts to show, first, that for Hegel the role of property is to enable persons both to objectify their freedom and to properly express their recognition of each other as free, and second, that the Marx of 1844 uses fundamentally similar ideas in his exposition of communist society. For him the role of ‘true property’ is to enable individuals both to objectify their essential human powers and their individuality, and to express their recognition of each other as fellow human beings with needs, or their ‘human recognition’. Marx further uses these ideas to condemn the society of private property and market exchange as characterised by ‘estranged’ forms of property and recognition. He therefore uses a structure of ideas which Hegel had used to justify the institutions of private property and market exchange, in order to condemn those same institutions.
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Notes
Despite my differences, I am indebted in what follows to the discussion of the concept of recognition in Ikäheimo and Laitinen (2007).
Of course merely cognitive recognition can also lead to a disposition to act positively towards its object, depending on the recogniser’s prior motivations. If I have a love of cats then identifying an animal as a cat will motivate, and so dispose, me to act in a friendly way towards it. However in the case of recognition in the practical sense my motivation, and so disposition, to act follows directly from my belief that the status or characteristic in question objectively ‘calls for’ or ‘demands’ a certain way of acting towards its possessors, and such a belief is distinct from any general liking or love of things with that status or characteristic. This is the force of the word ‘thereby’ in the definition. I forego a discussion of the theory of motivation needed to account for recognition in this practical sense.
For a brief discussion of the idea of a practical attitude see Brudney (2010: 162).
Typically the act through which A expressly recognises B as X is simply that of treating B as X, as this is defined above. Express recognition needs to be distinguished from what could be called ‘performative recognition’, the performance of an overt act or utterance whereby an agent or organisation commits itself to treating B as X. For example: ‘The state of Utah recognised gold as legal tender in 2011’.
I have modified most translations of passages from Hegel and Marx.
Cf. Hegel’s separate attempt, in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right, to show from the bare concept of a free will that possessors of such a will must will the objectification of their own freedom (PR §§9–21, 28).
Hegel gives the term ‘abstract freedom’ a different sense at PR §§149, 336.
See for example ES §431A, quoted above, and PR §71, quoted below.
Nisbet translates Erkennbarkeit as ‘ability to be recognised’, but this translation is correct only if ‘recognised’ is understood in the merely cognitive sense which we set aside above.
For an alternative to the above reconstruction of Hegel’s concept of a person and his derivation of private property from it, see Schmidt am Busch (2008, 576–81).
As Hegel says, others must recognise as ‘mine’ the thing that I take possession of because in taking possession ‘My will is a rational will, it is valid, and this validity should be recognised [anerkannt] by the other’ (PR §217A).
Here and below I understand ‘property owner’ as involving the everyday sense of the word ‘property’.
The starkness of this conclusion is softened by Hegel’s assertion that persons can claim as ‘mine’ not only external things but also their own bodies and abilities (PR §§47–8, 57, 67). Hegel is clearly influenced by Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right in his derivation of property from mutual recognition as free. However Fichte’s own derivation is rather different. For him mutual recognition as free is bound up with a ‘summons’ to act freely which places the ground of each individual’s freedom at once in the other (as summoner) and in itself (as responding to the summons). To reconcile these the subjects must allot each other spheres of freedom, within which it is to be up to each subject to decide what to do, and must refrain from interfering with actions inside the other’s sphere (FNR 9/8, 39–42/41–4). When a subject then forms an intention to act on a part of the sensible world to realise its ends, every other subject must include within the first subject’s sphere of non-interference whatever actions the first subject envisages carrying out, and so must refrain from disturbing this part of the sensible world, which is thereby constituted as the first subject’s ‘original’ or natural property (FNR 103–6/113–17). Hegel’s claims that a person must will that things be ‘mine’ in order to objectify its freedom, and that others must conform to this willing in virtue of its rationality, play no part in Fichte’s derivation.
It should be mentioned that in some passages Hegel also appears to suggest that contract is necessary as the means whereby individuals, by alienating the things they own while retaining their status as owners, can objectify their freedom in a way that is not tied to particular things (see PR §§72–3).
Patten (1999, 121–34) argues that for Hegel the practices of right in general are the means whereby each individual can demonstrate its freedom to others, and others can demonstrate that they recognise it as free. However Patten sees this double demonstration as a psychological precondition for each individual to think of itself as free, and so to be free at all, whereas on the present interpretation the latter demonstration, in the case of contract at least, is rather the means whereby each individual can objectify its freedom.
For a similar view see Quante (2011, 261–5).
In the above quote Marx also says that they are motivated to produce for others because they enjoy satisfying the needs of others, objectifying their individuality, and objectifying their essence as human beings, but these feelings of enjoyment can be seen as ultimately expressions of their practical attitudes of recognition towards each other. Brudney (2010, 159–63) also sees individuals as engaging in voluntary mutual production out of a practical attitude towards other human beings which underlies their occurrent feelings, although he characterises this attitude as one of ‘concern’ rather than recognition.
Cf. Brudney’s description of production/consumption as the ‘key social-recognition activity’ of Marx’s communist society (Brudney 2010, 173).
Two supplementary points: First, I have assumed that the objects of true property are normally physical things, and have ignored those passages in which Marx speaks of ‘labour’, ‘human life’ or ‘the human essence’ as objects of true property (e.g. CJM 228/463, EPM 297/537, 299/539). Second, the concept of ‘true property’ needs to be distinguished from a notion of ‘inner property’ which Marx describes in a single passage in the Comments on James Mill. Speaking of two individuals engaged in the exchange of private property, he says that ‘The desire for these two objects, i.e., the need for them, shows each of the property owners [that he is] a total being whose needs stand in the relationship of inner property to all productions, including those of another’s labour’ (CJM 218/452). To simplify, we could say that this ‘inner property’ stands to ‘true property’ in Marx in somewhat the same way as the primordial right a person has ‘to place his will in any thing’ (PR §44) stands to the property in things acquired by exercising that right in Hegel.
This view pervades the Comments on James Mill: see especially CJM 219–20/454, 225–7/459–61. It is discussed further below.
At least he does so if we understand an individual’s ‘existence [Dasein] for’ another in these two passages as the individual’s expressed recognition of the other.
For a helpful analysis of these passages, see Quante (2011, 251–61).
See also the contrasts between true property and private property at EPM 299–300/539–40.
Cf. Marx’s account of ‘estranged labour’ at EPM 270–82/510–22.
In addition, it has focused exclusively on the Marx of 1844 and has not addressed the question of how far the ideas of human recognition and true property survive in Marx’s later writings. In the German Ideology of 1845–46 Marx and Engels harshly repudiate the idea of ‘true property’ embraced at the time by other German socialists such as Moses Hess (GI 468–9/456–7), but the idea that communism will establish a new kind of property recurs in the Grundrisse and Capital (e.g. G 832/716, C 929/791; for a discussion see Arthur 2002, 114, 123–7). Meanwhile the idea of ‘human recognition’ arguably also survives in the later writings, most obviously in Marx’s description of communist society as inscribing on its banners ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ (CGP 87/21).
This combination makes it difficult to fit into any of Honneth’s three basic types of recognition: love, legal recognition and social esteem (Honneth 1995, 92–130).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for a Research Fellowship which made it possible to complete this article, and to Chris Arthur, Charlotte Baumann, Tim Carter, Jan Derry, Jan Kandiyali, Frederick Neuhouser, Michael Quante, Sean Sayers, Meade McCloughan, Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for comments on earlier drafts. All errors remain my own.
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Citations of works by Fichte, Hegel and Marx are given by the section number if the work is divided into sections, or otherwise by the English page number followed by a forward stroke and then the German page number.
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Chitty, A. Recognition and Property in Hegel and the Early Marx. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 685–697 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9408-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9408-5