Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 27
Preliminary Remark: Civil Society as a Modern Phenomenon
Before its individual determinations are unfolded, a clarification is needed that corresponds to the double caution developed in I.8. The sphere analyzed here as civil society — the mediation of needs through markets, formally equal private persons, economic mediation as the central structural level between family and state — is in this form a specifically modern production. Earlier societies had markets, had exchange, had economic mediation; but as a central structural level pervading the whole of life, civil society is modern. The genesis of this form lies in the dissolution of estate bonds, in the concentration of capital, in the separation of producers from their means of production, in the generalization of the wage contract — all those processes that constitute the transition to a capitalist economy. The validity of the form is to be judged dialectically: it brings with it a richer and more differentiated mediation of needs, a formal equality of all as the precondition for market participation, a liberation from estate bonds — but at the same time structural problems that did not appear, or did not appear with the same severity, in earlier forms: the inversion of need-satisfaction into accumulation as an end in itself, the structural production of the rabble, ecological externalization, the atomization of forms of life. This double assessment must be kept in mind throughout what follows; it guards against two symmetrical errors — glorifying what has been achieved and cynically abstaining from judgment altogether.
In older forms of society, what we grasp as civil society was organized differently. In tribal societies, economic reproduction is embedded in familial and kinship structures; an independent sphere of the market barely exists. In the ancient city-states, markets and trade exist, but they are integrated into the political life of the citizenry and are not the central structural level; the household economy (oikos) remains the foundation. In medieval Europe, the economy is organized through estate, guild, and feudal bond; markets exist, but they are embedded in the estate order. Only with the emergence of the capitalist economy does the economic sphere detach itself as an independent structural level shaping the whole of life — and this is the historical material from which Hegel develops civil society as an ethical sphere.
Civil society, as treated here, is thus not the general form of economic mediation, but a determinate historical shape. What is general in its determinations (for instance: every society needs forms in which people satisfy each other’s needs) will be marked as general in what follows; what is specifically modern (for instance: competition as the central form of mediation, wage labor as the central contractual form) will be marked as specific. The detailed analysis of the specifically capitalist form belongs to an investigation of capitalism and is to be carried out there; here it is developed only insofar as is necessary for the place of civil society within the architecture of ethical life.
Civil society is the sphere in which subjects encounter one another as private persons, each pursuing his own end. What binds them together is no longer the love of the family, but the mutual dependence of their needs.
The System of Needs — The Cunning of Reason and Its Underside
In civil society, the general structure of human metabolism developed in Part II (II.3) appears in a specific form: what people produce is, for the most part, not intended for their own use but for others — and it reaches the person in need not directly, but through the mediation of the market. In pursuing his own ends, each must simultaneously satisfy the ends of others — otherwise he cannot arrive at his own. This is Hegel’s uptake of classical political economy (Smith, Ricardo, Steuart). He sees that a peculiar reason rules here. No one wants the universal; everyone wants his particular — and yet a nexus arises that produces the universal. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is the economic form of what Hegel calls the “cunning of reason”: the end does not assert itself directly, but rather puts the self-interests of market participants into its service and lets emerge, from their interplay, what none of them individually intended.
The specific concepts in which this mediation can be described — use value and exchange value as the two determinations under which products appear as commodities; money as the universal medium of exchange; the capitalist movement M-C-M′, in which money becomes an end in itself — are to be developed in detail in an investigation of capitalism, where they belong as specifically capitalist determinations. Here only the structural point needs to be fixed, because it bears on the place of civil society within the architecture of ethical life: the mediation of needs through the market contains the possibility of the teleological inversion developed in II.2 as a general possibility of the means-end structure. Where money turns from a means between needs into an end in itself, to which the satisfaction of needs is subordinated, what is at work is not a moral defect of individual actors but a structural inversion built into the form of market mediation itself. Civil society is the historical shape in which this inversion becomes system-sustaining; why it becomes system-sustaining here can only be explained from the specific form of economic mediation, which is to be pursued in the volume on capitalism.
A specific contractual form, without which this inversion could not become system-sustaining, is wage labor — the agreement by which a person sells his labor power for a time in exchange for money, without further ties to the person of the buyer. It is a modern-specific form of contract that appears only marginally in earlier societies; its conceptual place belongs in the chapter on contract (III.3), where various historical contractual forms are to be set in relief against one another. Here it is enough to note that the specific character of civil society — and the sharpness of the passage on the rabble that follows shortly — cannot be separated from the generalization of wage labor. The detailed analysis of what wage labor accomplishes economically and what structural consequences it has belongs in the volume on capitalism.
Hegel sees not only the cunning of reason but also its structural shadow — the famous passage on the rabble (§§ 243–246):
It becomes evident here that, despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not rich enough — i.e., its own resources are insufficient — to check excessive poverty and the creation of a rabble.
— Philosophy of Right, § 245 (TWA 7, 389)
This passage is among the most honest in the whole Philosophy of Right. In wealth, civil society simultaneously produces poverty that it cannot abolish. It produces a class of people who fall out of its logic. Hegel’s concept of the rabble, however, is more precise than the common equation with the poor might suggest: poverty alone does not make a rabble. In the 1824/25 lecture, Hegel says this explicitly: the rabble is distinct from poverty; usually it is also poor, “but there is also a rich rabble”; poverty in itself does not make one a rabble — this is “determined only by the disposition [Gesinnung] bound up with poverty.”[1] What must be added, then, is the disposition that arises from the loss of mutual recognition — Hegel in the printed text names the casting-off of shame and honor, the subjective foundations of society (§ 245). The rich rabble is no marginal figure here: wealth is a power, he says, and this power easily finds that it is also power over the law; the rich man can extricate himself from much that would go badly for others.[2] The rabble thus designates a decay of recognition at both poles — below, among those to whom society gives no place in which to realize their subjectivity; above, among those who can place themselves above the social nexus. From here it also becomes understandable why Hegel seeks the answer in the corporation. In the lecture of 1821/22 he defines it as “the ethical middle term between the family and the state,” and the honor it confers as “being recognized as what one is, such that one has this subjective standing in the representation of others.”[3] Since the rabble is defined precisely by the loss of shame and honor, the corporation is exactly the place where what is missing would institutionally exist. Both determinations stand separately in Hegel; bringing them together is a further step. [KF] But it makes visible that Hegel’s corporation-solution is no nostalgia for the estates but the systematically fitting answer to his own diagnosis — and it explains why Gans takes up precisely this point, not to reject the corporation but to demand its free form.
A clarification is needed here that is often missing in the reception of this passage: what exactly is meant by rabble [Pöbel]? Hegel primarily means the marginalized — those who fall out of the system of need-satisfaction because they have no place in it: the unemployed, the impoverished, vagrants who find no livelihood through any regular occupation. Structurally similar phenomena exist in other historical formations — the Roman plebs as the stratum standing below full citizenship and dependent on grain distributions is one example; the medieval wandering poor who appeared in the cities after the crises of the fourteenth century is another. But these comparisons must be drawn with caution: the conditions under which marginalization arises differ across societies, and the specifically modern form of the rabble is closely bound to the conditions of civil society — to the dissolution of the estate bonds that had still held the previously marginalized in some form, and to the separation of producers from the means of production, which makes a livelihood outside the wage contract structurally difficult.
Marx both extended and radicalized the question of the rabble. Extended, because for him the problem encompasses not only the unemployed but also the misery within wage labor itself — those who formally have work but labor under conditions that allow their subjectivity to be realized no more than the marginalized are allowed to realize theirs. Radicalized, because for him the unemployed are not the core of the problem but its necessary consequence: Marx’s industrial reserve army designates not a need the system announced, but a result: accumulation continually produces a relative surplus population, which in turn functions as a lever of accumulation and as pressure on wages. Unemployment, then, is not a regrettable side effect of an otherwise functioning order, but a moment of its reproduction. But the real problem is not unemployment as such — it is wage labor itself: the structural condition that forces people to sell their vital activity for money, and thereby places them in a position in which their subjectivity comes to realization not at all, or only under constant pressure. The question of the rabble in civil society is therefore, for Marx, a question of wage labor as a whole, not merely of the marginalized.
This extension shifts the weight of the rabble-passage. In Hegel it is the diagnosis of a residual stratum that the system cannot provide for. In Marx it becomes the diagnosis of a structural peculiarity of the whole of reproduction: wage labor itself — as the central contractual form of civil society — structurally produces the very problems Hegel observes among the marginalized, and these affect not only the marginalized but, with varying degrees of severity, all wage earners. The more precise analysis of this peculiarity belongs in the investigation of capitalism; what matters here is the clarification that the question of the rabble is not confined to the marginalized but points to the form of wage labor itself.
What Hegel diagnoses here has a conceptual depth that can be grasped precisely through Hegel’s own logic of the Idea of Life. A living system reproduces itself by articulating itself internally (self-differentiation), by maintaining itself against its environment (self-preservation), and by reproducing itself beyond itself (self-sublation into the next generation). But these formal structures, taken by themselves, allow no distinction between successful and parasitic self-preservation. One can conceive of processes that formally satisfy all the criteria of living self-reproduction while destroying the overarching nexus on which they themselves depend. Civil society, as Hegel describes it, has exactly this structure: it reproduces itself formally in full, while at the same time destroying the very preconditions on which it depends — people who find no place in it in which to realize their subjectivity.
In Hegel, the rabble appears as a crisis-phenomenon structurally produced by civil society, which civil society cannot sublate by its own means. What the logic of mere life cannot resolve from within itself remains, in its architecture, an unresolved problem — a residual problem in the sense of what ethical life does not simply reconcile. In Marx, this insight is radicalized: what appears in Hegel as an unresolved crisis-phenomenon proves to be a necessary moment of capitalist reproduction. The specific legal constitution of civil society — private property in the means of production on the one side, the wage-labor contract as the generalized form of labor’s valorization on the other — structurally, not accidentally, produces people who fall out of its logic. The rabble is not an exception to the reproduction of civil society but one of its conditions.
The rabble-passage thus stands as a hinge of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel sees the problem with full conceptual sharpness. He provided the conceptual means for it in the Logic — the double-sidedness of the means and the infinite progress of the external series of ends (cf. II.2) — without developing the inversion itself as a social category. What he cannot deliver from his own means is the economic analysis that would show why this contradiction is not a residual problem but a structural condition of civil society.
At this point Eduard Gans is the important intermediate figure, without whom the transition from Hegel to Marx could not be read as a continuous movement within the same method. Gans was Hegel’s student and close collaborator — he co-founded the Society for Scientific Criticism, organized the Yearbooks for Scientific Criticism, and, after Hegel’s death, edited the second edition of the Grundlinien (1833). From 1826 he was professor at the Berlin law faculty, where he regularly lectured on natural law and philosophy of right following Hegel’s compendium; he was the most charismatic philosopher of right at the university, and most of Hegel’s students learned the Philosophy of Right not from Hegel but from him. In his lectures on natural law in the winter semester of 1832/33 — three years after Hegel’s death, three years before Marx’s student years in Berlin — Gans takes up the exact point where Hegel’s treatment of the rabble had remained open, and carries out the step that Hegel himself had not taken.[4] Where Hegel had treated the existence of the rabble with a curiously ambivalent determination as a residual problem, one that could be alleviated but not sublated through alms, public assistance, and, in the end, world trade and colonization, Gans states it in so many words: “Must the rabble remain? Is it a necessary existence? […] Among us such a rabble is not yet organized, but it is in London. The police must therefore be able to act so that no rabble exists. It is a fact, but not a right. One must be able to get at the grounds of the fact and sublate them.”[5] This is the methodological turn: the rabble is no longer accepted as a residual problem but treated as a fact whose grounds are themselves subject to sublation — the Hegelian method turned upon what Hegel himself had not sublated.
A clarification is important here that bears on the whole relationship between Hegel and Marx. In later Marxist reception, the charge became established that Hegel’s philosophy reconciles only in the concept — that it sublates contradictions merely in thought while leaving actuality standing as unreasonable. This charge misses what the Hegelian Logic actually accomplishes. The Idea, as the unity of concept and objectivity, is not a silent contemplation but a movement of realization: cognition and volition, the theoretical and the practical Idea, whose truth comes together only in the speculative Idea that sinks cognition into volition and volition into cognition. Hegel does have reservations — but they concern not the changing of reality but the subjectivity of morality, in which each person constructs his own private conception of the good and thinks the world must conform to it. Ethical life, by contrast, is the sphere in which people give themselves rational organizations and rules — family, civil society, state are not given facts to which the individual would have to submit, but shapes that the free will works out, criticizes, and rebuilds for itself, because only in them does it find itself as truly free. What Gans does at the rabble-passage is not to go beyond Hegel but to take Hegel at his word: if ethical life is the realization of the free will, then a fact that falls out of it while being structurally produced by it is a scandal within ethical life, one whose sublation ethical life is obliged to work toward. The task of the state as mediating instance is precisely this: to sublate the contradictions of civil society in practice, by critically examining and reconstituting the institutions and rules that produce them. Read along this line, Hegel loses the sting of the reconciliation-charge: reconciliation in the Hegelian sense does not mean that the unreasonable is accepted as reasonable, but that the reasonable is made practical. Gans states this more openly than Hegel, and Marx radicalizes it further — but all three stand within the same practical-philosophical line.
Three years later, in Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände (1836), Gans draws from his 1830 stay in Paris a line toward a Saint-Simonian class analysis: “[…] the class relation, unchanged through all the vicissitudes of history hitherto, between lord and slave, patrician and plebeian, feudal lord and vassal, factory owner and worker.”[6] The formulation is not accidental: it is the class-formula that reappears in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 — and Marx, at the time when Gans published these sentences, had just attended his lectures.[7] Gans nonetheless holds fast to the Hegelian concept of property — he explicitly criticizes the Saint-Simonian abolition of inheritance law as a loss of the moralizing dimension of property — but he translates the question of the rabble into the language of modern class relations and proposes as a solution the free corporation, or “socialization” [Vergesellschaftung]: an ethical form in which wage laborers can organize themselves against the despotism of factory owners.[8]
What Hegel methodically prepared, and what Gans, working within the Hegelian method, carried forward into class analysis, becomes in Marx the economic necessity of the form itself — the radicalization already stated in the previous paragraph. The line is continuous, but it has real breaking-points, which should be marked here in advance (a fuller treatment follows in the conclusion). In Hegel, three layers must be distinguished. The logical core — the state as the place where the universal becomes conscious, ethical life as the sphere in which the rational is meant to become practical — is load-bearing and untouched by the critique. Hegel’s linguistic expression, by contrast, is at certain points too far-reaching, because it makes reconciliation sound as if it had already been accomplished. And the time-bound assumption that the unity of cognition and volition was already actual in the state of his own time (the Prussia of the reform era and its restoration) is historically unredeemed and is asserted by Hegel himself more strongly than the matter can bear. Marx criticizes chiefly the second and third layers; his objection allows the logical core to be brought out as what it is, without taking on board the problematic layers. In Gans the difference lies elsewhere: he thinks in a Hegelian spirit — recognizing reality, recognizing the circumstances, acting and willing rightly — and applies this consistently to the rabble. His statement that the rabble must disappear means, in substance: the circumstances that produce the rabble must disappear. What Gans does not provide is the detailed economic analysis of these circumstances. Marx thus differs from Hegel and Gans chiefly in this analysis — he shows in detail which circumstances produce the rabble and what form of confrontation with them would be necessary. Pistor later supplements this analysis at the level of legal form, but does not replace it.
Three Levels of Appropriation and Bargaining Asymmetry — Reference to the Volume on Capitalism
Hegel’s rabble-passage and the wage-labor section in III.3 both point toward a structural deep-analysis that can only be sketched briefly here, because it belongs, by its nature, in the volume on capitalism.
Three levels are to be distinguished analytically within civil society, without being developed in full here. The production of the useful — what comes into being as useful — is the sociological-anthropological fact of every complex society; humans, nature, animals, and machines all contribute to it, and it is always more than what the immediate producers themselves need. Legal appropriation decides to whom what is produced falls; it operates exclusively through legal forms (property, contract) and follows a logic of its own that does not coincide with production as such. Enterprise cost accounting is the bookkeeping inside-view of the second level. The conflation of these three levels is the root of several classic controversies — for instance, the question of whether labor or capital creates value. The Hegelian rabble-passage becomes legible in its structural depth as soon as one distinguishes: the surplus product arises at the first level and is not the problem; that it falls to a particular class of owners is a fact of the second level, bound to the specifically capitalist structure of appropriation. The detailed analysis of these structures — including the question of who counts at all as a fully participating legal subject, and how historical and present-day forms of semi-free labor (slavery, debt bondage, precarious supply-chain labor) are integrated into capitalist appropriation — belongs in the volume on capitalism.
A corresponding analysis concerns the exchange-side: the bargaining asymmetries through which the formal equality of contracting parties is systematically undermined within the mediating relations of civil society. Urgency (situational bargaining power) and lack of alternatives (structural bargaining power — whether as a legally secured monopoly or as a lock-in effect) operate in every exchange and can produce stable asymmetries in favor of one side. In the wage contract they operate systematically to the disadvantage of wage earners; the historical answer to this — unions, collective bargaining agreements, statutory protections — is the form in which the asymmetry is addressed as an asymmetry and partially corrected. Gans anticipated this in his concept of the free corporation; the detailed analysis of how bargaining asymmetries operate in modern capitalism, and what they mean for tenants, small suppliers, data producers, and other structurally weaker parties, belongs in the volume on capitalism.
The point at this juncture of the Philosophy of Right is methodological: the formal recognition of equals as equals (abstract right) does not carry its own realization within itself, but depends on ethical institutions that address the structural asymmetries. Where this does not happen, the good abstraction of formal equality tips over into the bad abstraction of substantive command over another’s lifetime (cf. II.2). The wage contract is the central case in which this tipping-point becomes visible — and the Hegelian concept of the corporation, like the Hegelian concept of the police, are the ethical answers that abstract right cannot provide from within itself.
The Nature of Labor
Before civil society is legally mediated, it is mediated by labor. Hegel devotes a section of his own to this (§§ 196–198), and his determinations, though brief, are consequential.
Labor is first of all formation: it specifies the material supplied by nature for manifold purposes. From this Hegel draws a consequence that prepares the later concept of value — this formation gives the means “its value and its suitability for its purpose,” such that in consumption a person relates himself “primarily to human products,” and it is these efforts that he consumes (§ 196). The addition puts it more bluntly: only water can be drunk as one finds it; everything else, human beings acquire through labor.
Second, labor is formation of the self [Bildung] (§ 197). Practical formation through labor consists, according to Hegel, in the habit of occupation and in the restriction of one’s own activity — partly according to the nature of the material, partly, and this is the sharper determination, “according to the arbitrariness of others.” Labor is thus from the outset not merely an engagement with the object but a subjection to another’s purposes.
Third, and here Hegel reaches furthest ahead, the universal element of labor lies in abstraction (§ 198). It brings about the specification of means and hence the division of labor: the individual’s labor becomes simpler, his skill in abstract labor greater, the quantity of products higher. At the same time, this abstraction turns the mutual dependence of human beings into “complete necessity.” And Hegel draws the conclusion himself: the abstraction of production makes labor “ever more mechanical, and thereby in the end capable of allowing the human being to step away from it and let the machine take his place.”
Thus, in Hegel, what later analysis will separate stands already together: abstract labor, division of labor, growing dependence, machinery. How far these determinations carry, and where they fall short of what the development of industrial production has since made visible, is to be developed in the volume on capitalism; here it suffices to note that this line of questioning is not imported from outside into Hegel.
The Administration of Justice
Here law has its proper place — in the sense of the distinction developed in V.2a: in the family it first emerges only at its dissolution; in the state it turns against the state itself; in civil society, by contrast, it is the very form of interaction.
The system of needs is not raw but legally mediated. Property and contract — the determinations of abstract right — return here, but now as consciously posited and judicially enforced.
Hegel determines this step more precisely than it first appears. Right becomes law: what is right in itself is “determined for consciousness through thought” and thereby made known as what is valid (§ 211). Positive law is thus not right plus state power, but right that has taken on the form of universality. Hegel calls this explicitly an act of thought: to posit something as universal means to bring it to consciousness as universal (§ 211, Remark).
The form, however, does not come from the state. It is not the state that gives right its determinate being, but — as § 209 puts it — the sphere of needs itself, “as culture/formation [Bildung].” Only where people have learned to take themselves as universal persons can right exist as “universally recognized, known, and willed.” Right rests on an achievement of formation [Bildung] by society, not on a command.
The judiciary enforces it. Here too Hegel makes a point easily overlooked: the member of civil society has “the right to appear in court, as well as the duty to submit to it” (§ 221). Both belong together, and the addition names the condition for this — whoever may appear in court must be able to know the laws, otherwise the entitlement is of no use to him. What this is directed against, Hegel says at once: under feudal conditions, the powerful often did not submit to appear, and treated it as an injustice on the court’s part to summon them.
Thus the person, who in abstract right was so far only a concept, here becomes practical. Everyone is known and treated as a legal person. This is a tremendous achievement — and its limit. For this person remains abstract: it abstracts from the economic position in which legal subjects actually stand. Hegel knows this; this is precisely the point of the rabble-analysis. What Pistor shows today about the coding of capital is the institutional concretization of exactly this point: law is not the neutral form in which economic substance would remain untouched; it is itself part of the shape in which certain economic relations endure — and hence part of the means that can turn against the end.
Hegel himself marks the limit of the administration of justice at the end of the section. It does lead civil society back to its concept, but only “in the individual case” and only “in the sense of abstract right” (§ 229). The court decides the dispute brought before it; it cannot ensure that the conditions exist under which people are in a position at all to exercise their right. It is precisely for this that police and corporation follow — and precisely there Hegel runs up against the rabble.
Police and Corporation
Police has, for Hegel, the older, broader meaning: it encompasses all public arrangements for security, welfare, and well-being — oversight of markets, public health, poor relief, education. The police is society’s insight that private purposes alone do not suffice; an external instance is needed to guard the universal.
This insight has a conceptual depth that must here be separated into two layers. The general form, effective in every complex society: there are tasks that exceed what individual actors (persons, families, smaller communities) can accomplish — defense against external threats, protection and care of common resources, large infrastructures for transport and water management, the securing of peaceful coexistence, education across generations. Such tasks demand an overarching instance that takes them on for society as a whole; without it, society either disintegrates into uncoordinated individual actions, or the task simply remains unsolved. Which of these tasks appear in which form, and how they are handled, depends on the respective form of society.
Four brief historical cross-references make the variation in solutions visible, without lapsing into a miniature world history. In tribal societies, universality is organized through direct assembly, through elders, or through ritualized instances; what concerns everyone is deliberated jointly or decided through customary procedures. In the river-valley civilizations — Mesopotamia, Egypt, ancient China — a central bureaucracy emerges that administers irrigation systems, stockpiling, flood control, and census-taking; what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine” is the highly coordinated bureaucracy that makes such large infrastructures possible in the first place. In medieval Europe, many of these tasks are taken on by guilds, corporations, brotherhoods, and communal orders; the town regulates its own markets, the guild controls the quality of work, the brotherhood provides for its members in sickness and death. In modern state administration, finally, most of these tasks are centralized in a web of ministries, agencies, and municipal services; the form that seems self-evident to us today is a specifically modern one — it arose together with the modern territorial state, uniform citizenship, and the dissolution of estate structures.
These cross-references show the structural generality (in every developed society, overarching tasks must be assumed by some instance) and its historical variation (the concrete forms differ in each case); but they do not narrate the transition from one form to another. How the medieval guilds transformed into modern state administration belongs to world history, not here.
In civil society, a particular difficulty is added to this general form — one that is specific and that Hegel has chiefly in view at this point. Because here the mediation of needs runs through markets and producers stand against one another as competitors, prisoner’s-dilemma constellations arise: tasks that everyone recognizes as necessary cannot be taken up by individuals, because attempting to solve them puts them at a disadvantage in competition. Three examples from the developed capitalist economy make the constellation visible. First, the training of qualified labor: whoever, as an individual entrepreneur, invests in training his employees pays the costs alone and shares the benefit with all his competitors, who can later poach the fully trained workers. The rational individual calculation is to refrain — with the collective result that no one does it, and the labor force as a whole is undertrained. Second, the preservation of common resources, such as the environment: whoever, as an individual, internalizes environmental costs produces at higher cost than one who externalizes them; if everyone externalizes, the system tips over, and everyone suffers — including those who would have shown restraint. Third, the limiting of self-exploitation: whoever, as an individual employer, offers shorter working hours or higher wages than the competition is undercut; but if everyone works the labor force to the maximum, an exhausted working population results, and everyone suffers.
These three constellations are not mere historical concretions of a general structure but have their own specific form: the competition-dilemma. In societies where economic reproduction does not run through competition, these problems either do not arise at all or arise in an entirely different shape. The education of the next generation in a tribal society is a matter for the tribe, not for a competing individual; common resources are protected in many pre-capitalist societies through commons institutions, religious taboos, or direct communal administration; the question of self-exploitation does not arise in the same form where labor is not organized through wage contracts. That these problems take on, in civil society, the specific form of the competition-dilemma is a consequence of the specifically capitalist form of social mediation. The detailed analysis of how capitalist competition structures these problems, and what forms of response the state has developed for them (education systems, environmental law, labor law), belongs in an investigation of the capitalist state. Here only the methodological point needs to be fixed: Hegel’s determination of police-and-corporation carries a general form (every society needs overarching instances for tasks that exceed individuals) and a particular form (in civil society, as the competition-dilemma); both must be distinguished, or else what is specifically capitalist will be passed off as a general condition of the social as such.
The corporation is the other side of the answer: it is the self-organization of professional estates, in which individuals no longer know themselves merely as isolated private persons but as members of a concrete universal. Here too the historical variation must be seen: what Hegel calls corporation has its historical precursors in the medieval guilds, corporations, and brotherhoods; in the ancient world there were comparable collegia; in the modern world the professional association, the trade union, the vocational society are the most important forms. In it, the subject finds, for the first time in civil society, an ethical home — a second family, as Hegel says. Gans takes up this concept in a direction Hegel had left open: where Hegel thinks the corporation primarily from the professional estates of the bourgeois class, Gans widens it into the “free corporation,” or “socialization,” of wage laborers — as an ethical form in which the labor freed within industry does not fall back into despotism but finds an organizational shape of its own.[9] This is an anticipation of the idea of the trade union out of the Hegelian concept of the corporation, one that has been underestimated in the further history of its reception.
In police and corporation, civil society presses beyond itself toward the state. It recognizes that it cannot generate its own reason out of private purposes alone; it needs an instance that represents the universal as universal.
Lectures on the Philosophy of Right, Griesheim transcript, lecture course 1824/25, on § 244: GW 26.3, pp. 1390f. ↩︎
Transcript by Anonymus (Kiel), lecture course 1821/22, on § 244: GW 26.2, pp. 754f. On the subject, see Frank Ruda, Hegels Pöbel, Konstanz 2011. ↩︎
Transcript by Anonymus (Kiel), lecture course 1821/22, on §§ 251 and 253: GW 26.2, pp. 759f. ↩︎
On Gans’s position within the Hegelian school and his tacit correction of Hegel on the questions of the constitution, opposition, and the rabble, cf. Manfred Riedel, “Eduard Gans als Schüler Hegels. Zur politischen Auslegung der Rechtsphilosophie,” in: idem (ed.), Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main 1975, pp. 234–253. Riedel draws the comparison between Gans’s lectures on natural law and Hegel’s Grundlinien on the basis of the lecture transcript by Immanuel Hegel, Hegel’s youngest son, from the winter semester 1832/33. ↩︎
Eduard Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte (lecture, winter semester 1832/33), ed. Manfred Riedel, Stuttgart 1981, pp. 112f. Cf. Riedel, op. cit., pp. 249f. ↩︎
Eduard Gans, “Paris im Jahre 1830,” in idem, Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände, Berlin 1836, pp. 99f. Cornu already pointed out, in 1954, the likely impression these sentences made on the student Marx; cf. August Cornu, Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Leben und Werk, vol. 1, Berlin 1954, p. 81. See further Norbert Waszek, “Eduard Gans und die Armut: Von Hegel und Saint-Simon zu frühgewerkschaftlichen Forderungen,” in: Hegel-Jahrbuch 1988, Bochum 1988, pp. 355–363. ↩︎
Marx is documented to have attended two lecture courses under Gans in Berlin: criminal law in the winter semester of 1836/37 and Prussian common law in the summer semester of 1838. Cf. Cornu, op. cit., p. 81; Hanns Günther Reissner, Eduard Gans. Ein Leben im Vormärz, Tübingen 1965, pp. 157f.; Waszek, op. cit., n. 10. ↩︎
Cf. Gans, Rückblicke, op. cit., pp. 99–101; and Waszek, op. cit., p. 360. Gans’s proposal of the “free corporation” as “socialization” of wage laborers — against the despotism of factory owners — is explicitly directed against the Saint-Simonian abolition of property and inheritance, which Gans criticizes as a loss of the moralizing dimension of property (Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte, op. cit., p. 52). Marx will later decisively go beyond Gans on this point. ↩︎
Eduard Gans, Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände, Berlin 1836, pp. 100f. Cf. Riedel, op. cit., pp. 250f.; Waszek, op. cit., pp. 359–361. ↩︎