Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 16
The Person
The simplest, poorest determination of the free will is: to be a person. To be a person means to know oneself as a bearer of rights — abstracted from everything else one is (man or woman, young or old, educated or uneducated, poor or rich). The person is the formal recognition: this being is one to whom something can be due. Where this concept comes from is developed by Die drei Stufen (§ 417): whoever recognizes makes the other neither his purpose nor his means.
Here the double caution developed in I.8 becomes operative for the first time. There are two levels that must be cleanly distinguished. What is general is that human beings recognize one another as bearers of claims — this holds in every developed society, though in different forms: as a member of a tribe, as a citizen of the polis, as a link in a feudal bond, as a subject. What is modern is the specific form in which this recognition is uncoupled from all status determinations, so that the person appears as a pure legal person, equal to the person next to them. Before the historical establishment of this form, there were slaves (without rights), estates (with differing rights), guardianships over women — the person as such, equal to the person next to them, is an achievement of the bourgeois revolution. Hegel knows this and celebrates it. The genesis of this form is clear (centuries of struggle against feudal arbitrariness); its validity extends beyond its genesis, because the recognition of the human being as a thinking being requires a protected space of one’s own decision that cannot depend on birth or estate.
The person has, in Hegel’s conceptual framework, a definite teleological position: it is an end in itself, hence a bearer of inner purposiveness. What belongs constitutively to the person — the will, ethical life, personality as such — cannot become a means to other ends without the person ceasing to be a person. Slave contracts are therefore null and void, not because some particular law forbids them, but because they are conceptually impossible: whoever wished to alienate the person would thereby turn precisely the inner purposiveness that makes it a person into an external purposiveness. This is not a moral demand but a logical consequence of the teleological structure of the free will.
But abstraction has its price. The person is a person precisely by disregarding its concrete situation. Before the law, the day laborer is equal to the factory owner — which does not mean that they are actually equal. This is where Marx will step in: the equality of the person is not false, but it is abstract in a strong sense — it blinds itself to the relations that simultaneously make unequal what it posits as equal. Hegel is aware of this tension; but he resolves it not within abstract right, only within ethical life. For now, this holds: the person is the formal precondition for there being any legal relations at all.