Hegel’s Theory of Value

Abstract

In situating Hegel’s understanding of economic relationships it is useful to outline three broad approaches to the subject. First of all there is naturalism: the assumption is that the science concerns relationships between Man and nature and, more particularly, imperatives flowing from the scarcity of resources relative to need. All the economic categories are mapped on to natural categories such as labour, land, machinery, productivity, fertility, location in space and time, and so forth. As Marx observed sarcastically, these people seem to think that rents grow out of the soil along with the crops. Second, there is the attempt to explain economic phenomena in terms of the interplay of subjective choices. The important thing about this is that what is presupposed is a monological subject; that is to say, whether it involves utility maximisation, preference schedules, cost-benefit analysis or whatever, it assumes the agency of a self treating its conditions of existence, including the presence of other agents, as given, and external to it.