Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 4
The Form of Reification and Its Substance
Here is the decisive point at which the teleology shows its dialectical reverse side — and where Hegel and Marx meet.
Hegel says: property is the existence of personality, hence a means through which the person as self-end 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 follows from the Hegelian concept itself, as soon as it is taken seriously: if property is supposed to be a means of realizing personality, then the question of whether it serves this end or has turned against it is not a side question. It is the question.
This is precisely where the teleological dialectic that Hegel himself developed in the Logic takes effect: the means has a law of its own, without which it would not be a means at all. But that same law of its own can turn against the end. In simple exchange, money serves as a medium between use values — property serves the person. In the developed capitalist form, money becomes an end in itself (M-C-M′), and property transforms into a form that serves its holders primarily as a means of capital accumulation — no longer as a means of realizing personality. What Marx describes as economic inversion is the teleological inversion that Hegel recognized as an immanent possibility of the means-end structure, but which he could not, in his time, work out economically.
What makes this confrontation more sharply graspable today is the distinction between two levels that were still fused in Marx’s theory of value. The form of reification — that social relations appear as properties of things, that essence shows itself only in its appearing — is Hegel’s logic of essence, transposed by Marx onto the economic object. The substance of reification — which social relations are here reified — is not thereby decided. Marx answers this with labor as the sole source of value; but as soon as, in the third volume, he takes into account the competition among many capitals, he must concede that prices do not conform to this substance, and the relation between the two remains unresolved. That it remained unresolved suggests that 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. The formal analysis carries without the substance; this is worked out in Kapitalismus — Eine Einführung (German edition, 2026), Ch. 6 and Kapitalismus — Eine Einführung (German edition, 2026), Ch. 16.
Before we turn to the institutional concretization in Pistor, an older episode in this debate should be mentioned, one in which the methodological line of the position argued here becomes visible. Friedrich Carl von Savigny, in his influential monograph Das Recht des Besitzes (The Law of Possession, 1803, in several editions), had defined possession as a mere fact, out of which the right of property arises through custom and judicial recognition — property is here ultimately congealed force, factum solidifying into jus.[^1] Eduard Gans, in his treatise Über die Grundlage des Besitzes (On the Foundation of Possession, 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 an existence in the thing.[^2] This debate 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, the Pandects with Savigny and criminal law with Gans. That Marx underwent, in this very semester, the methodological turn he describes in his letter to his father of November 10, 1837, as the turning point of his intellectual development — away from the “metaphysics of law” toward the demand to grasp “the reason of the thing itself” as “something inherently contradictory” — is therefore no coincidence.[^3] Gans’s critique of possession supplies the methodological prefiguration of what later becomes, in Marx, 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 deliberately coded privilege: certain forms of asset are systematically privileged over other forms of asset 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 foreign to Hegel; it shows how far the Hegelian method carries when it is not understood idealistically. Nor is it foreign to Marx: it continues his formal analysis without having to commit to the controversial substance-theory (labor as the sole source of value). What is 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 mere fact, and all of them show that the legal form itself is an object of critical analysis and political shaping.
Here we can see, applied to a concrete object, what was developed in the Prelude (II.2) as the doubling of abstraction. Modern property law is good abstraction insofar as it organizes the formal recognition of free persons — the achievement against the estate-order, the precondition for persons being able to encounter one another as legal subjects. 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 asset systematically undercuts the formal equality of all persons before the law, because certain persons command assets protected by different legal modules than the assets 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 need only be noted: the doubling of good and bad abstraction is not accidental but is inherent in the form of abstract right itself.
Kapitel 16: The Contract
Until now only a single will has been in play — I and my object. In the contract, two wills enter into relation: they recognize one another as persons and exchange property. What in the unilateral act of taking possession was only the relation of will to thing now becomes the relation of will to will, mediated by the thing.
The contract presupposes what it simultaneously actualizes: recognition. I can only exchange if I recognize the other as an equally entitled bearer of will. In this same act, abstract right confirms itself: persons are persons by treating each other as persons.
What matters here — and is often overlooked in the tradition — is Hegel’s insight that not everything is capable of being contracted. The state is not an object of contract (against Rousseau), for it does not belong to the individual wills that might conclude it. Marriage does begin with a moment of contract (the free consent of both parties), but it immediately sublates the contract: what unites here are no longer property-holders exchanging something, but persons belonging to a shared form of life. The contractual form has a precisely delimited domain of application: the mutual transfer of alienable things.
Historical Forms of Contract
Here too the double caution from I.8 must be applied. What is general is that human beings make agreements about letting others dispose over things — this holds in any society where more than one person has disposal over things at all. What is modern is the specific form of the abstract contract: two free wills agree, detached from estate, birth, or personal bond, on a clearly delimited object, with an enforceable consequence. This form — which today seems self-evident — is a historical achievement whose preconditions arose only through a long process. Four stages can be briefly named.
In tribal societies, exchange and reciprocal agreements exist, but they are mostly embedded in lasting networks of relationship. The most important form is gift exchange — what Marcel Mauss analyzed as don / contre-don [gift and counter-gift]: one gives, the other gives back, in a cycle that stabilizes the relationship. What we think of as a bare contract scarcely exists here; giving always contains a personal bond that is more than what was negotiated in the particular instance.
In the ancient world — and here above all in Roman law — the first systematic theory of contract arises. Hegel, in his History of Philosophy and at several points in the Philosophy of Right, accorded the Romans a special status: they are the creators of law, the first to work out law as an independent, systematic sphere. The category of person as a legal concept (persona), the differentiation among various types of contract (real contracts, verbal contracts, consensual contracts — sale, lease, partnership, mandate), the distinction between one’s own and another’s thing (meum and tuum), enforceability as the hallmark of a valid contract — all of this is Roman achievement. These determinations continue to operate into modern civil law.
Yet for all the sharpness of its contract theory, Roman law remains bound to specific presuppositions. Contracts are concluded between citizens (cives), whose legal standing is defined by status; slaves are things and cannot themselves be a party to a contract, only its object. Locatio conductio operarum — the contract for labor services — already exists, but it is treated as an exception: whoever must sell his labor counts as unfree; what marks the free citizen is precisely that he does not work for wages. The Roman contract is more refined than the medieval one, but it is bound to a status of citizenship that is not identical with the modern concept of the formally equal person. From today’s perspective, some Roman contractual forms that were then taken for granted — above all contracts for the sale of slaves — are incompatible with our understanding of the person as an end in itself; they violate what Hegel, in the preceding section, developed as the limit of alienability. This is a point where achievement (the refined doctrine of contract) and limitation (the bond to an exclusionary status of citizenship) appear together in the same material.
In medieval Europe, a different form comes to the fore: the feudal contract. Here the contract is not primarily the transfer of a thing, but the establishment of a lasting personal relationship — the vassal promises loyalty and service, the lord protection and provision. What in Roman law were clearly separated spheres (person, thing, contract) are, in the feudal contract, once again interwoven; the contract binds persons into their position within the estate, rather than releasing them from it. Alongside this there exist trade contracts, lease contracts, contracts for work — but all are embedded in the order of estates. The idea of a contract between formally equal parties, without regard to status, does not yet exist.
Only in modernity does the abstract contract arise in its pure form: two free persons agree on a determinate object, their agreement is enforceable, and their status is irrelevant to their capacity to contract. This presupposes what had first to be historically won — the recognition of every human being as a person (cf. III.1), the dissolution of the bonds of estate, the formation of a unified legal order with enforceable claims. Hegel’s theory of contract deals, at its core, with this modern contract, even though he does not systematically reflect on its historical conditionedness.
Wage Labor as a Specifically Modern Form of Contract
In modernity, a form of contract comes to the fore that is new both structurally and in the extent of its generalization: the wage contract, in which a person sells his labor power for a period of time in exchange for money. It must be developed here because it is a matter of the law of contract, not merely, as is often thought, a matter belonging first to civil society.
Structurally, this is a specific application of the abstract concept of contract: two free wills agree on an object. But the object is of a peculiar kind. It is not a thing that the seller hands over and is thereby rid of, but the vital activity of a person for a determinate period of time. The wage contract thus borders on the limit of alienability that Hegel developed in the section on the person and in the section on property. The person as such is inalienable; her will, her ethical life, her personality cannot be sold without her ceasing to be a person. The Roman slave contract violates this limit openly — it turns the human being into a thing. The modern wage contract does not violate it openly, but shifts it: not the whole person is sold, but only her labor power, and only for a period of time. But labor power cannot be separated from the person to whom it belongs; whoever sells her labor power sells a part of her vital activity, and for the duration of the contract the buyer disposes, in a strong sense, over the person of the seller.
The genesis of wage labor can be clearly marked. It generalizes to the extent that the separation of producers from the means of production is carried through — through enclosures, through the breaking of guild bonds, through the concentration of capital in the early industrial phase. Whoever has no means of production with which to produce independently must sell his labor power to others in order to live. The “freedom” of the wage laborer is a double one: free from the bonds of estate, but also free of any means of production of his own. This doubling is the historical condition of wage labor as a central form of contract.
The validity of the form is conceptually problematic. Its formal structure corresponds to the general concept of contract: two free wills agree. But under the real conditions in which the contract is concluded, the equality of the wills is often only formal. Whoever has no alternative, because he lacks the means for independence, concludes the contract under a structural asymmetry that hollows out formal equality. Marx formulated the point more sharply than any other tradition: the wage contract appears formally as an exchange between equals, but in content it is a relation in which one contracting party disposes over the lifetime of the other. This is the teleological inversion in its sharpest form: what is supposed to serve as a means (labor power as a means to satisfy the worker’s needs) becomes a means to alien ends (the valorization of capital), while the person who sells the means factually becomes the means of the means. Hegel’s distinction between alienable and inalienable spheres, between external and internal purposiveness, supplied the standard; Marx shows that actual conditions violate it.
The detailed economic analysis — how wage labor functions within the capitalist movement M-C-M′, what surplus value is, how the dynamic of accumulation results from it — belongs in the volume on capitalism and is to be pursued there. Here, in the philosophy of right, what must be clarified is the contract-law standing of wage labor: it is a contractual form that formally satisfies the schema of the abstract contract, but in content runs up against the limit of alienability — and, under the actual conditions of its generalization, systematically violates the mutual recognition in which the contract has its meaning. This tension is what the later account of ethical life has to take up and work through — in the corporation, in the police [system of public administration and welfare], in the state as contested terrain.
Kapitel 17: Wrong and Its Sublation
Abstract right contains within itself no guarantee of its own validity. If I assert my property but the other steals it, or if we conclude a contract and one party breaks it — then it becomes evident that right, as mere ought, does not bind the arbitrary will. Wrong is the test of right: it forces right to assert itself.
Hegel distinguishes three stages: unwitting wrong (both sides believe themselves to be in the right — a dispute over interpretation), fraud (the semblance of right is preserved, but its content is violated), and crime (the will openly negates right).
Punishment is the negation of the negation. It sublates the crime not through retribution, but by taking the criminal seriously as a rational being, and thus as capable of right: through his deed he has posited a law for himself, and this law is now applied to him. Punishment honors the criminal — a formula that at first sounds paradoxical, but that states precisely this: he is not treated as an animal to be trained, but as someone whose act has a meaning.
With this, however, abstract right has reached its limit. Within abstract right, punishment turns into revenge: the injured party strikes back, and the one now struck strikes in turn — a spiral that right cannot end from within itself. What is needed is a higher instance, one that is not merely external power but inner insight. Abstract right thus presses beyond itself toward morality.