Thimo Heisenberg

ABSTRACT The present special issue is devoted to diversifying the canon of economic thought. We believe that, faced with growing global material inequality and social instability, it is urgent to turn to neglected economic thinkers, as well as to authors who – while otherwise well-known – are not usually read for their economic proposals. This special issue thus assembles historical investigations that aim at widening the canon of economic thought and derive surprisingly important insights for current debates from the historical texts they are discussing. The nineteenth-century authors discussed in this volume are, thus, deliberately varied: some of the contributions bring the economic theories of Fichte, Hegel or Mill into focus and situate them vis-à-vis each other, bringing to the fore and discussing, in their otherwise well-known theories, a variety of unconventional and little-known economic ideals. Other contributions lift up voices that were influential in their time, but that are not as frequently heard today: focusing on thinkers such as Germaine de Staël, Johann Benjamin Erhard, Clara Zetkin, Georg Simmel and Richard Henry Tawney, these contributions, once again, bring unconventional economic ideals into the discussion. But they also illustrate the persistently complex interrelationships among feminism, anti-racism and the movement for economic justice.

Given Hegel’s well-known praise of private property, there is a surprising, and often under-emphasized, fact about his vision for rational social life: namely that most social members will own all their property in common with others – specifically with their family members. Indeed, by far the majority of social members in Hegel’s rational state will be embedded in familial property unions: acting not as sole proprietors, but rather as ‘representatives’ of an underlying property collective, for which they bear legal and ethical responsibility. My thesis in this paper is that, perhaps because of this seeming tension, the prevalence of collective property in Hegel’s Ethical Life has not been emphasized enough – but that it is, in fact, crucial to Hegel’s view and of philosophical relevance for us today. In particular, I argue that, on a closer look, the prevalence of collective ownership in rational Ethical Life is (i) consistent with Hegel's praise of private property, (ii) central to Hegel’s overall economic view (especially the ‘taming’ of the market), and (iii) relevant for our thinking about private property and its social place today.

Contemporary critics of capitalism often argue that prolonged exposure to the current economic order makes this order increasingly seem inevitable. Habituated to its structures, we come to perceive economic circumstances as ever more necessary and resistance as ever more futile. In this paper, I argue that Fichte’s 1800 Closed Commercial State, even though this has largely gone unnoticed, already anticipates an early version of this problem and even proposes a potential response. Writing that there is a »disease to regard the contingent as necessary« (GA I/7: 92) that can affect our perception of the economic world, Fichte proposes that immersion in history, esp. in economic history, can cure this disease and reignite our sense of economic possibility. By confronting how the politico-economic world has changed in the past and how human agency has shaped those changes, we can, Fichte thinks, regain the sense that economic change is possible even now.

The economic thought of politician and poet Adam Müller (1779–1829) has often been dismissed. Portrayed as heavily reactionary, philosophically unsubstantial, and internally inconsistent, Müller’s views have been rejected by thinkers across the political spectrum, from Karl Marx to Carl Schmitt. But in this paper, I argue that Müller’s economic thought deserves rediscovery. This is because Müller’s economic writings prove surprisingly prescient when it comes to one of their most prominent topics: the issue of money. Anticipating contemporary views long before they received wide-spread recognition, Müller argues that the essence of money is debt, and that the earliest human exchanges relied on credit, rather than, as many have claimed, on “truck and barter.” Indeed, defying many of his own contemporaries, Müller defends paper money and refutes calls for a return to precious metals as only medium of exchange. Müller, hence, despite many shortcomings, deserves to be recognized as an unlikely pioneer in the philosophy of money whose views still merit our attention today.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel's Value: Justice as the Living Good by Dean MoyarThimo HeisenbergDean Moyar. Hegel's Value: Justice as the Living Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 384. Hardback, $110.00.Hegel's Philosophy of Right is one of those texts that make it easy to miss the forest for the trees. On the argumentative journey from private property and punishment, via the "emptiness" of Kant's moral law to Hegel's vision of a rational social order, it is easy to lose sight of the overall arch of Hegel's argument. Indeed, this kind of problem is confounded by an ever-growing literature on individual ideas and sections of the text (from Hegel's conception of agency to his argument for the market economy), which, while interesting and rewarding on their own, direct our attention to parts of his argument, rather than to the Philosophy of Right as a whole.Dean Moyar's new book is devoted to making us see the forest again—albeit while never leaving the trees out of sight. Indeed, to stretch the metaphor of forest and trees a little bit further, Moyar builds his ambitious endeavor on two new interpretative theses, which enable him to show us completely new paths through and clearings in the forest, bringing to light previously underappreciated aspects of the argument and adding refreshing new takes on the parts of Hegel's view that are already well known.The first of Moyar's two central theses concerns Hegel's methodology in his Philosophy of Right. Moyar maintains that the structure of the Philosophy of Right can be understood as a "teleologically inferentialist" account: the content of the norms of right is developed through use, where at each stage of the argument the content of those norms is refined by sublating previous failures of application. But while this Hegelian process is dynamic, relying on conflicts and their resolution, the process is—in contrast to some pragmatist forms of inferentialism—not open-ended: instead, or so Moyar convincingly argues, it leads to a point of inferential equilibrium as telos of the text (Hegel's vision of Ethical Life), in which some dynamism persists but further development of right is no longer necessary.This kind of interpretation, Moyar argues, has several advantages: it renders the methodology of the Philosophy of Right consistent with the method of Hegel's Logic, but it also provides us with a general template (which Moyar calls the "basic argument" [30 and passim]) on which to understand all the different transitions in the Philosophy of Right as structurally analogous, thereby showing Hegel to be both intertextually and intratextually consistent. Even more, using this basic argument as a template, Moyar puts himself in a position to generate interesting understandings of all the major and minor transitions in Hegel's text, focusing not merely on the most well-known (the transition from Morality to Ethical Life), but also on those that have traditionally received much less attention (such as the minor transition that leads from the contradiction between right [Recht] and welfare [Wohl] to the Good).The second of Moyar's two central theses concerns the importance of the concept of value to Hegel's project. Indeed, Moyar argues that even though the word 'value' (Wert) may not appear frequently in the published version of Hegel's lectures, the concept of value is at work everywhere in the text. Moyar, consequently, traces the presence of this concept throughout the Philosophy of Right, using it to understand many of the forbiddingly [End Page 327] difficult passages, from the dense section on the "Alienation of Property" early on in the part on Abstract Right, to Hegel's later views on the relationship between right and duty, his precarious theory of the "circulation of value" on the market, and finally his view of history at the end of the Philosophy of Right.In this way, Moyar extracts a rich interpretative bounty: he defends a heterodox reading of Hegel as a legal positivist, reconstructs a Hegelian doctrine of public reason, and argues against an "amoral" reading of Hegel's account of history. Most important, perhaps, is his interpretation of the relationship...

Much attention has been paid to the role that Hegel, in his mature ethical theory, attributes to what he calls the social or political body i.e. to the institutions of the social order. Ironically, by comparison, much less attention has been paid to the role the physical body plays in the same theory. This paper attempts to level the scale, by reconstructing Hegel’s ethical theory of the physical body from the Philosophy of Right and the Encyclopedia. Hegel’s leading thesis here, I argue, is that developing and maintaining a good relationship with one’s physical body is not only rather demanding, but also requires the right kind of social institutions – and that absent these institutions, individuals will (for the most part) be unable to see and to treat their body in the right kind of way. Achieving a good relationship to their body, hence, is something that individuals cannot just do on their own, on Hegel’s view, but something that requires them to collaborate with others, creating and sustaining social institutions that help them be at home in their bodies.

Philosophers today do not think of Goethe’s Faust as an important contribution to the philosophy of money. But to discount the work in this way is a mistake, I argue. Underneath Faust’s lyrical form, Goethe develops a comprehensive view of money that came to be an important influence on left-wing (Karl Marx) and right-wing (Oswald Spengler) discussions of money. Centrally, Goethe argues that modern economic practices have transformed money obsession (long conceived of primarily as an individual vice) into a structural problem: social structures are now set up to systematically require individuals to engage in quasi-obsessive behaviors towards money (e.g. persistently talking about/sacrificing for money) independently, to a significant degree, from their individual choices. This structural power, Goethe proposes, requires a rethinking of how behavior towards money should be morally evaluated – and, importantly, a critique of moral attitudes that individualize what is, in truth, a social problem.

In this paper, I argue that Kant’s philosophy of history underwent a significant change be- tween his 1784 Idea for a Universal History and his 1790 Third Critique. My proposal is that in between these two texts Kant decisively revised his conception of the sources of historical, i. e. cultural and political, progress: In 1784, he conceived of historical progress as primarily accomplished through social antagonism among human beings, whereas beginning in 1790, he elevates ethical cooperation into a second, significant source of progress. Between 1784 and the 1790s, in other words, Kant re-conceived the collaboration between moral agents as a driving force of history and of the progressing cultivation of humankind. In this paper I offer evidence for this change and suggest reasons why it might have occurred.

To us today, it seems intuitive that an ideal society would secure for its citizens some time for leisure that is, some time to do “whatever they want” after having attended to their various responsibilities and natural needs. But, in this essay, I argue that—in 19th century social philosophy—the status of leisure (Muße) in an ideal society was actually surprisingly controversial: whereas J.G. Fichte makes a strong case for leisure as part of an ideal society (going even so far as considering it its central good), G.W.F. Hegel implicitly argues against this idea. For him, leisure is a crook that we only need as long as the social conditions are not sufficiently ideal—whereas a truly rational society would create a new type of work that subsumes the benefits of leisure into work itself. In this essay, I reconstruct this largely forgotten disagreement and argue that although both positions contain an important overstatement, each includes an important lesson for the contemporary debate on leisure and society.

It is widely known that Hegel's Philosophy of Right recognizes poverty as one of the central problems of modern civil society. What is much less well known, however, is that Hegel sees yet another structural problem at the opposite side of the economic spectrum: a problem of affluence. Indeed, as I show in this essay, Hegel's text contains a detailed—yet sometimes overlooked—discussion of the detrimental psychological and sociological effects of great wealth and how to counter them. By bringing this discussion to the fore, we get a more complete picture of Hegel's theory of civil society and shed light on an aspect of Hegel's social philosophy that speaks to problems we face today.

It is widely known that Hegel is a proponent and defender of the market economy. But why exactly does Hegel think that the market economy is superior to other economic systems? In this paper, I argue that Hegel's answer to this question has not been sufficiently understood. Commentators, or so I want to claim, have only identified one part of Hegel's argument—but have left out the most original and surprising dimension of his view: namely, Hegel's conviction that we should embrace the market economy for its educational impact. Indeed, Hegel thinks that the market, by creating a sphere of life apart from traditional norms and expectations, teaches us something about ourselves, about others, and about the world we inhabit together—something that we could not learn anywhere else, but that we inevitably need to live well as individuals.