Will

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Not desire and not arbitrary choice, but the capacity to determine oneself. The free will is the one that has itself as its own object.

Cross-references: Person, Morality, Objective Spirit [^1]: Friedrich Carl von Savigny, *Das Recht des Besitzes. Eine civilistische Abhandlung*, Gießen 1803 (seventh edition, ed. A. F. Rudorff, Berlin 1865). On Savigny's methodological position, see Hermann Kantorowicz, "Savigny and the Historical School of Law, " in: *Law Quarterly Review* 53 (1937), pp. 326--343. [^2]: Eduard Gans, *Über die Grundlage des Besitzes. Eine Duplik*, Berlin 1839, pp. 7, 11. On the Savigny--Gans debate, see further Adolph Stoll, *Friedrich Carl von Savigny*, vol. 2, Berlin 1929, pp. 184--188; Hasso Jaeger, "Marx et Savigny, " in: *Archives de philosophie du droit* 12 (1967), pp. 65--89. [^3]: Karl Marx, letter to his father, November 10, 1837, in: MEW Ergänzungsband I, pp. 3--12 (quotations p. 6). On the significance of the legal studies for Marx's methodological turn, see Donald R. Kelley, "The Metaphysics of Law: An Essay on the Very Young Marx, " in: *American Historical Review* 83 (1978), pp. 350--367; Warren Breckman, "Eduard Gans and the Crisis of Hegelianism, " in: *Journal of the History of Ideas* 62 (2001), pp. 543--564. [^4]: On Gans's position within the Hegelian school and his tacit correction of Hegel on the questions of constitution, opposition, and the rabble, see Manfred Riedel, "Eduard Gans als Schüler Hegels. Zur politischen Auslegung der Rechtsphilosophie, " in idem (ed.), *Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie*, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main 1975, pp. 234--253. Riedel draws the comparison between Gans's natural law lectures and Hegel's *Grundlinien* on the basis of the lecture transcript by Immanuel Hegel, Hegel's youngest son, from the winter semester of 1832/33. [^5]: Eduard Gans, *Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte* (lecture, winter semester 1832/33), ed. Manfred Riedel, Stuttgart 1981, pp. 112f. Cf. Riedel, op. cit., pp. 249f. [^6]: Eduard Gans, "Paris im Jahre 1830, " in idem, *Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände*, Berlin 1836, pp. 99f. Cornu already highlighted the likely impression these sentences made on the student Marx in 1954; cf. August Cornu, *Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Leben und Werk*, vol. 1, Berlin 1954, p. 81. See further Norbert Waszek, "Eduard Gans und die Armut: Von Hegel und Saint-Simon zu frühgewerkschaftlichen Forderungen, " in *Hegel-Jahrbuch 1988*, Bochum 1988, pp. 355--363. [^7]: Marx is documented as having attended two lecture courses with Gans in Berlin: Criminal Law in the winter semester of 1836/37 and Prussian Common Law in the summer semester of 1838. Cf. Cornu, op. cit., p. 81; Hanns Günther Reissner, *Eduard Gans. Ein Leben im Vormärz*, Tübingen 1965, pp. 157f.; Waszek, op. cit., n. 10. [^8]: Cf. Gans, *Rückblicke*, op. cit., pp. 99--101; and Waszek, op. cit., p. 360. Gans's proposal of the "free corporation" as an "association" of wage laborers --- against the "despotism" of factory owners --- is explicitly directed against the Saint-Simonian abolition of property and inheritance rights, which Gans criticizes as a loss of the "moralizing" dimension of property (Gans, *Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte*, op. cit., p. 52). Marx will later go decisively beyond Gans here. [^9]: Eduard Gans, *Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände*, Berlin 1836, pp. 100f. Cf. Riedel, op. cit., pp. 250f.; Waszek, op. cit., pp. 359--361. [^10]: Cf. Gans, *Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte*, op. cit., pp. 117, 127; and Riedel, op. cit., pp. 243--248. Riedel emphasizes that Gans develops the doctrine of opposition as a necessary moment of the state: "Opposition is the true negation, which must contain the truly positive within itself" (Gans, ibid., p. 130; quoted after Riedel, op. cit., p. 247). If the state has no dealings with oppositions, "it falls into indolence" (Gans, ibid.).

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