Abstract

Hegel is aware that it is only in the modern world, with the emergence of civil society, that ‘the freedom of property has been recognized here and there as a principle’. Nonetheless, he contends, property is made necessary by the very idea of freedom itself. The purpose of this essay is to explain why this is the case by tracing the logic that leads in Hegel's Philosophy of Right from freedom, through right, to property and its use. I conclude by briefly comparing Hegel and Marx on the topic of ‘value’.