Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 17
The Form of Reification and Its Substance
Here is the decisive point at which teleology reveals its dialectical reverse side — and where Hegel and Marx meet.
Hegel says: property is the determinate being of personality, hence a means through which the person as end-in-itself realizes itself. Marx asks back: which property? The peasant’s property in his field is not the same as the shareholder’s property in the corporation. This question does not strike Hegel from outside — it arises from the Hegelian concept itself, as soon as it is taken seriously: if property is meant to be a means of realizing personality, then whether it serves this end or has turned against it is not a side question. It is the question.
Precisely here a dialectic is at work whose conceptual precondition Hegel develops in the Logic: the means has a law of its own, without which it would not be a means at all. But this same autonomous lawfulness can turn against the end. In simple exchange, money serves as a means between use values — property serves the person. In the developed capitalist form, money becomes an end in itself (M-C-M′), and property is transformed into a form that serves its owners primarily as a means of multiplying capital — no longer as a means of realizing personality. What Marx describes as economic inversion is the socially determined shape of a possibility already laid out in the means-end structure. Hegel supplies the conceptual tools for this: the double-sidedness of the means, which serves and yet retains its own right, and the proposition that the product of external purposiveness itself becomes a means again “and so on into infinity” (TWA 6, 451). M-C-M′ is precisely this series, made permanent in society: a movement whose result is nothing but the starting point of the next round. What Hegel does not develop is inversion as a social category — that a particular form of living together does not overcome the logical deficiency of the external teleological series but makes it into its principle. [KF]
What makes this confrontation sharper to grasp today is a distinction between two levels that in Marx’s theory of value were still fused together. The form of reification — that social relations appear as properties of things, that essence shows itself only in its appearance — is the Hegelian logic of essence, transposed by Marx onto the economic object. The substance of reification — which social relations are here being reified — is not thereby settled. Marx answers this with labor as the sole source of value; but once he brings in the competition of many capitals in the third volume, he has to concede that prices do not conform to this substance, and the relation between the two remains unresolved. That it remained unresolved suggests the question was wrongly posed: value is not a quantity contained in things but the legally constituted form in which productive contributions are translated into relations of appropriation. Form-analysis carries weight without the substance; this is worked out in detail in Kapitalismus – eine Einführung, Kapitel 6 and Kapitalismus – eine Einführung, 10a.
The methodological lineage of this position has an older station, one that must be named before Pistor’s institutional concretization. Friedrich Carl von Savigny, in his influential monograph Das Recht des Besitzes (1803, through several editions), had defined possession as a mere fact, out of which the right of property arises through custom and judicial recognition — property here is ultimately congealed force, factum hardening into jus.[1] Eduard Gans, in his tract Über die Grundlage des Besitzes (1839), rejected precisely this reduction: property cannot be grounded in the fact of taking possession, but only in the concept of the free will that gives itself a determinate being in the thing.[2] This dispute was no academic footnote but the methodological front line between the Historical School of Law and Hegelian philosophy of right — and it was, for the young Marx, immediate lecture-hall reality, since in the winter semester of 1836/37 he attended, simultaneously, Savigny’s lectures on the Pandects and Gans’s lectures on criminal law. That Marx, in this very semester, made the methodological turn he later describes in his letter to his father of November 10, 1837 as the turning point of his intellectual development — from the “metaphysics of law” to the demand to grasp “the reason of the thing itself” as internally conflicted — is therefore no coincidence.[3] Gans’s critique of possession supplies the methodological pre-form of what later, in Marx, becomes the critical analysis of economic forms of property, and it shows at the same time that the position argued here stands on a continuous, Hegelian-grounded line.
Katharina Pistor has shown, in The Code of Capital (2019), that the form of reification cannot be reduced to abstract human labor as its substance. What we call “private property” is, in the modern world, a consciously coded privilege: certain forms of wealth are systematically privileged over other forms of wealth through a small number of legal modules — priority, durability, universality, convertibility. A joint-stock company, a patent, a securitized loan have legal properties that the peasant’s field or the artisan’s tool do not have — not because they are naturally different, but because the law codes them differently. This coding is exactly the point at which the means can turn against the end, because it systematically determines to whom which sphere of existence accrues.
The Pistorian analysis is not alien to Hegel; it shows how far the Hegelian method carries when it is not understood idealistically. Nor is it alien to Marx: it continues his form-analysis without having to commit to the controversial substance-theory (labor as the sole source of value). What gets reified is not only labor but also law, coding, institutional power. The methodological line is continuous: Gans against Savigny in the dispute over possession, Marx against Hugo and the Historical School of Law, Pistor against the naturalization of the modern property regime — all of them dispute that the right of property can be grounded by naturalizing a fact, and all of them show that the legal form itself is an object of critical analysis and political design.
At this point what was developed in II.2 as the doubling of abstraction becomes visible in a concrete object. Modern property law is good abstraction insofar as it organizes the formal recognition of free persons — the achievement won against the estate-based order, the precondition for persons being able to encounter one another as subjects of right. It becomes bad abstraction as soon as this formal recognition is asserted against the concrete conditions under which it turns into factual inequality. The Pistorian analysis is the institutional concretization of this second meaning: it shows how the legal coding of certain forms of wealth systematically undercuts the formal equality of all persons before the law, because certain persons command wealth protected by legal modules different from those protecting the wealth of others. The detailed analysis of how this concretely operates within civil society — bargaining asymmetries, the wage contract, the three levels of appropriation — belongs not in abstract right but in ethical life, in the system of needs (V.4). Here, in abstract right, it is only to be noted: the doubling of good and bad abstraction is not accidental but is laid out in the very form of abstract right itself.
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. ↩︎
Eduard Gans, Über die Grundlage des Besitzes. Eine Duplik, Berlin 1839, pp. 7, 11. On the Savigny–Gans dispute, 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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎