Hegel's System of Needs: The Elementary Relations of Economic Justice

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.