Property and Its Fate: Hegel and Fichte on the Violence of Private Property Rights

This paper argues that the issues of right and private property are pivotal to grasp the transformations in the development of Hegel’s thought that push Hegel from his ontological theory of re-unification through love, developed in his Frankfurt fragments as an explicit remedy against the dominion of law and its form, to a more complex ontological conception of unification as the unity of unity and difference that marks Hegel’s Jena thought, most notably in his essay on natural right, where he attempts to think the absolute ethical life as inclusive of differences in the sense of an atomistic civil society, thereby rethinking the status of law anew. The problem of private property will also allow us to raise the question of Hegel’s complex relationship to Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre differently. It will be argued that despite Hegel’s harsh critique of Fichte’s theory of natural right and the state, both thinkers, nevertheless, agree that the crucial problem in thinking of right and the state is the inherent violence of civil society expressed in the notion of the contract, which, it will be furthermore argued, reveals a profoundly materialist thought. Finally, in relation to the problem of property, Hegel’s infamous conceptualization of sacrifice, a tragedy that the Absolute plays with itself, will be discussed. It will be suggested that war, for Hegel, pertains to the inherent violence of civil society as its self-relating negativity, which points to contingency at the very heart of his conception of the Absolute. Beginning with the Natural Law essay, Hegel already shows that neither the Absolute, nor the speculative unity he seeks to think, can remain a matter of indifference.