ABSTRACT
Although Hegel’s argument makes comprehensible how commodity exchange is a legitimate structure of civil freedom, whose authority cannot be challenged by any labor theory of value, the significance of capital for the just economy is still undecided. Hegel’s analysis of exchange has already established that the earning of profit constitutive of capital can proceed within the boundaries of commodity relations. The question remains as to whether capital’s role within the market economy has legitimacy as a consonant expression of the freedom of interest or illegitimacy as a fatal impediment to economic autonomy. Does capital’s quest for ever more wealth infect the market with an uncontrollable force fostering economic disadvantage and shackling the freedom of interest to the blind wheel of capital accumulation? And if so, can capital be excised from commodity relations as a tumorous perversion, or is it a necessary, irremovable organ of the market, undermining its legitimacy and condemning civil association to the ignominy of a bourgeois society?
