Between abstract law and ethicity: property and plebeians

Abstract

As my analysis shows, the Hegelian doctrine of property, of the right of necessity and of the plebs, rather than an Aufhebung integrating all the determinations at stake, reveals conceptual aporia and unresolved tensions. And perhaps it cannot be any other way if, as E. Gans rightly wrote in the reprint of the FD, it is a text that aims at the "definitive overcoming of the distinction made in the 17th and 18th centuries between state law and politics", so that Hegel "takes us back to the perspective of antiquity" in which "these divisions and differences were unknown, for then they were only with a great whole, with a universality, Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics are both natural law and politics, principles and life-giving realisation". And indeed, because it is a question of the life of men and peoples, Hegel himself has to recognise, more prudently than his philosophical rhetoric would allow, that "what the concept teaches" always comes "after the actual reality has completed and finished its process of formation" and, for that very reason, when "a figure of life has grown old and cannot be rejuvenated". But precisely because of this, the Hegelian attempt to understand social relations and elevate them to a form that overcomes the confrontation between enormous accumulation of wealth and miserable poverty, despite the problematicity of his proposal or precisely because of it, can continue to illuminate the cognitive effort to orient ourselves in the world of life that defines the philosophical task in each new generation, and which today, as Piketty exposes in his recent book, continues to confront us with the dialectic - real and not at all conceptual - of inequality on a planetary scale.