Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 26
The Family’s Resources
This middle moment is often passed over, although it is here that one can see what ethical life has over abstract right. There, property was the determinate being of a single will in a thing; here it becomes resources [Vermögen] — and this, for Hegel, does not mean wealth but, as the lecture puts it, “the continuing possibility of subsistence.” Possession and property are still something uncertain; property as the objectivity of freedom is meant to endure.[1]
With this, the ground on which something belongs to someone also changes. In abstract right, it is a matter of indifference from what impulse or inclination I have something. In morality, this becomes the duty to care for welfare — one’s own and that of others — but for an indeterminate welfare of indeterminate others. In the family, it is neither the one nor the other: here, care is directed at determinate others, at those with whom one forms this unity.[1:1] This is the place where the empty “welfare of all” from § 125 first acquires a content.
Hegel draws two conclusions from this, conclusions that remain brief yet reach far. Outwardly, the family appears as one person (§ 171); the laws must therefore make provisions against the possibility of squandering — the family’s resources do not belong to the individual for arbitrary disposal. And blood kinship recedes behind the bond through which the new family is founded: ethical love (§ 172). Under Roman law, the wife remained bound to her family of origin; the true relation, by contrast, is the community of goods.[2]
Here lies a point of connection for the later analysis. The family’s resources are a form of property that serves not valorization but the lasting security of life’s possibilities for determinate individuals. They thus stand crosswise to what property becomes in civil society. Whether, and to what extent, they can hold their own under the conditions of a developed market economy is a question this volume does not settle. [KF]
The Historical Variation of Family Forms
Here too, the double caution from I.8 must be applied. The family as an ethical unity that binds its members through love, forms an economic household, and brings forth the next generation is a general determination — it occurs in every known society. But the form in which these determinations are organized varies considerably. The tribal family embeds the nuclear family in a larger association, in which the individual family does not stand for itself but is a member of an extended kinship with its own ethical bonds. The ancient family, such as the Roman household, comprises not only biological relatives but also slaves, clients, and freedmen; the pater familias wields a comprehensive authority scarcely conceivable today. The medieval extended family or household economy includes several generations, often integrates servants and apprentices into the household, and closely joins familial and economic functions. The modern nuclear family — father, mother, children, living apart from the family of origin, economically self-sufficient — is a specific form that only took shape in this pure state in industrial modernity.
This variation is not arbitrary. What appears in Hegel’s architecture of ethical life as the family is modeled predominantly on the modern nuclear family — a fact he does not conceal, but also does not reflect on systematically. Anyone who wants to think the family conceptually today should carry this historical variation along, without dwelling extensively on every individual form. The structural determinations (ethical unity, economic household, generational reproduction) hold for all forms; the specific configuration differs in each case.
An Empirical Connection to the Conceptual Order
At this point a remark is needed on the relation between Hegel’s concept and modern empirical research. Hegel maintains — and this is one of the more delicate points of his theory of ethical life — that the form of the family is not arbitrary but co-shapes the later shape of the political order. This thesis long sounded like speculation; but it has found an empirical confirmation that Hegel himself could not have had.
The French population scientist Emmanuel Todd, who understands himself as an “empirical Hegelian,” has shown in a series of large-scale studies that a society’s basic family form — rules of inheritance, patterns of generational residence, the standing of men and women — stands in a non-accidental relation to its political structures. Where inheritance is distributed individually and unequally (the English absolute nuclear family), a different political mentality arises than where inheritance is divided equally (the French nuclear family), where one generation holds the whole farm and must provide for the others (the German stem family), or where property remains collective (the Russian or Chinese extended family).
These findings matter doubly for Hegel’s argument. First, they confirm that the family is not a private antechamber to the real political world but ethical life in the strict sense — a form that reaches into the whole structure of society. Second, they show that the form of the family is not the same everywhere, nor does it produce the same political institutions everywhere. What appears in the Hegelian architecture as the family is always already a determinate familial form, and the transition to civil society and to the state is itself shaped by this. This is said not against Hegel but for him: the conceptual order is a heuristic; its concrete content is empirical.