ABSTRACT
In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s main work of political theory, his Philosophy of right of 1821, the achievements of the political economists are mentioned with approval. This chapter deals with the role of political economy in his mature system, especially in the Philosophy of right. Hegel’s political philosophy presents an account of the necessary articulation of the system of right in its developed form. Hegel says that political economy ‘is one of the sciences which have arisen out of the conditions of the modern world’, because only in the modern world has ‘the system of needs and labour’ differentiated itself from family provision on the one hand, and political relationships and processes, on the other. In commenting on ‘the atomic theory’ in political science Karl Marx will later note that ‘the egoistic individual in civil society may inflate himself into an atom’, but nevertheless need directs these egoistic individuals into material intercourse with one another.
