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February 1, 2007
In the Philosophy of Right Hegel tackles the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Lock, Rousseau and Kant. I'm following Strauss and Macpherson, among others, who argue for Hobbes and the 17th century, as the begining of the tradition of subjective, individualized natural rights. In this tradition the social or political order is held to derive its legitimacy from its ability to uphold and protect the rights of autonomous, sovereign individuals, and the social is the outcome of a contract between autonomous individuals to respect each other’s rights. I understand that the tradition of rights talk was one of escaping from the objective norms of natural law, (ie.,moral/juridical natural law, embodying universal norms of right and wrong and accessible to natural human reason) to become identified with a modern version of moral conventionalism.
Rights are important, for as Strauss had argued, Strauss suggests that the superiority of liberal democracy to its twentieth century alternatives, fascism and communism, is intelligible only as a reflection of the superiority of the political thought underlying liberal democracy, the natural rights doctrine. What makes the American regime, for instance, is the doctrine of natural rights.This is its constituting thought; one that appears to be grounded in natural law.
Hegel argues that the subject of abstract right (Recht) is the person as the bearer or holder of individual rights, and he claims that this focus on the personality is significant in distinguishing persons from mere things.The personality, or the subject, is what underlies this tradition and Hegel characterizes it in terms of freedom and the natural being of the individual in the form of natural drives, needs and desires. The individual it implies is a universal individual without particular traits and without reference to social or cultural environment.
A person must translate his or her freedom into the external world and thus abstract right manifests itself in the absolute right of appropriation over all things. Property is the category through which one becomes an object to oneself in that one actualizes the will through possession of something external. Property is the embodiment of personality and of freedom. The basis of individual rights lies in property.
The system of private property establishes individuality and personality through contract and exchange. Contract establishes ownership through institutionalized norms of mutual respect of individual rights and obligations. Economic life governed by free exchange of commodities is based on an institutionalized notion of the individual as having some claim to recognition as a right-bearing person. If an exchange market is to function efficiently, economic actors must recognize universal standards by which a person can claim to own property. Established norms of reciprocal recognition in the modern economic sphere (civil society) are internalized in economic actors and represent a “common will.”
The system of mutual recognition and abstract right is the basis of what Hegel calls morality.
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As to Strauss claims for the superiority of one "regime" over another, though I think it's right that political regimes and their subtending/supporting social organizations be analyzed in terms of the distinctive "principles" and rules that they embody, and those latter can be evaluated in the abstract as to their desirablity and "justification", I don't think that whole societies can be judged as morally superior or inferior, as opposed to historically fortunate or unfortunate.
That's the sort of thinking that gives rise to "red-baiting" denunciations of relativistically reducing things to unjustified "moral equivalence" directed at anyone who would seek to open up political communication or accomodation between antagonistic regimes or objectively assess historical possibilities and motivations.
As to the Hegel paraphrase, it bears traces of idealism in that property is the external embodiment of the free will and the only way in which it can know itself as embodied. It might be reasonable to claim that the possession of property provides for a "place" for agency which stabilizes it. Equally, an object can be an "objectification" of agency, if the agent produced it in the manner of a craftsman. But to say that property is based on sheer appropriation ignores that property is a claim to exclusive use of or disposition over an object, which is not the projection of a mind, but depends on the recognition of that claim by others. Property then is itself based on "right", which is to say that recognition between embodied agents/selves must already precede the existence of property.
Hegel, of course, does want to say that the "system of needs", that is, the market system of the production, exchange and consumption of objects/property, emerges and derives from a prior historical development in which the recognitions of "abstract right" that it depends upon and "embodies" are embedded, such that there are antecedent forms of the organization and anchoring of social recognitions. That's very reason is why "abstract right" based on the "system of needs" "dialectically" transcends itself into a more "universal" and collective form of public recognition as citizens forming a polity, a state, which, in turn, modifies and relativizes "abstract right". But individualistic morality does not simply derive from property rights, but rather must be sustained by differentiations within the public recognitions of the state.
More generally, Hegel's critique of "natural right" begins at the beginning with the so-called "master-slave dialectic", in which self-consciousness exists only through the recognition of an other self-consciousness, which is first achieved through a struggle unto death as a relation of domination and submission. The point that Hegel is making with this "primal scene" against contract theories of "natural right" is that the latter must presuppose a mythic state-of-nature, in which already constituted self-conscious individuals enter into a mutual understanding/agreement, the "contract", based on perceived mutual advantages, such that those maintaining the contract must be essentially the same as those who made the contract.
Hegel's counter-argument is that in entering into a socio-cultural form of life, the "individuals" take on a different "nature" than they could have had before, indeed, for the first time become potentially "individuals", in the relavent sense, and that the "individuals" develop in the course of the development of that socio-cultural form of life, such that the "individuals" at the "end" are not the same as at the beginning.
Hence the only basis for any "social contract" is what is actualized in social recognitions and struggles for recognition in a given polity/society. The "end" of that process would be when the "master-slave" relation is fully "internalized" such that each and every "individual" is equally and reciprocally recognized by each and every "individual", which is the state of "abstract right" and private, self-determining morality. But because such a "social contract" is derived from antecedent and underlying struggles for recognition between agents/selves, because of the problems of coordinating and balancing the pursuit of individual interests and moral aims, because the "subjects" of such a system must be formed and educated to sustain its "contract", and because such a system must be sustained and steered in a broader world including other societies, the level of "abstract right" must be dialectically transcended in the more "universal" public form of a politiy, a state, through which, in turn, its citizens attain a "higher", fuller form of realization through participation in a common public world.
The interest nowadays of Hegel's extended theory of the state, as the state + civil society, in this day and age of corporate-led globalization, in which the steering capacities of nation-states are constricted and diminished, is that it seems to anticipate the rationale of the social democratic "welfare" state, not just as a means of subsistence or of muting social conflict, but as a locus for realizing public "power". But Hegel, because of his idealism and because of his traditional cognitivist/theoretical standpoint, stops at considering the state as the embodiment of idealistically conceived "freedom", and does not address how the "freedom" of social agents inevitably leads on to the collective generation of power, which constrains and imposes itself on those agents. That is what I was trying to get at in my first comment to the Strauss/Locke post below: the way in which rights and conflicts over rights must be seen not merely as a protection of "freedom" against abuses of power, but as a means of engendering, distributing, balancing and enabling participation in public power.
And how any realistic, effective political/constitutional system of "checks and balances" should be evaluated not as an automatic means of protecting "freedom", agency, inevitably and constitutively constrained by the imposition of power relations, from any undue interference, but as a regulated means of transmitting and dividing power so as to put in check and counterbalance any undue concentration of power.