Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 6
Why Not Begin with the Individual
The liberal tradition (Hobbes, Locke) begins with the isolated individual who raises himself out of the state of nature into society by contract. Hegel considers this a fiction. No one comes into the world as a finished individual. What appears as a natural individual is always already the product of a culture, a language, a family, a legal order. Ethical life is not something that individuals construct after the fact — it is the condition for there being individuals at all who could construct anything.
Marx will share this starting point and sharpen it: if individuals are historically and socially constituted, then the specific form of their constitution — the mode of production, the class relations, material reproduction — is the actual ground on which everything else stands. This is not opposed to Hegel but is its concretization: Hegel had already grasped the historical-social constitution of the subject; Marx shows in which economic relations this constitution actually takes place under the conditions of civil society.