The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel Freedom, Right, and Recognition

"How is it possible that anything can be understood as mine or yours at all? Challenging the dominant frameworks of legalism and economism in our attempts to understand and justify property, Jacob Blumenfeld persuasively argues that turning to the underappreciated tradition of classical German Rechtsphilosophie provides invaluable resources for understanding the metaphysical, normative, social, and material conditions of property relations. What results from Blumenfeld's expert and clear reconstructions of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel is the following: property relations mediate the complicated, conflictual, and ethically charged relation between practical freedom and social necessity. The question of what makes something mine is ultimately the question of how needy, dependent beings can live together as a free community of equals, a possibility that is fundamentally connected with how we understand the property relation. An important and timely contribution, Blumenfeld shows that turning to classical German philosophy may well prove to be indispensable for resolving some of the most pressing problems of the twenty-first century."

Karen Ng, Vanderbilt University

"Jacob Blumenfeld's new work makes a vital contribution to contemporary political philosophy and not just its history. Blumenfeld's stringently argued, nuanced, and irreplaceable book is a critique of narrow economistic and legalist conceptions of property, and an emergent broad concept of property as the switching station through which Kant, Fichte, and Hegel each develop increasingly elaborate accounts of self-conscious freedom and agency as normatively constituted through the property relation as one necessarily involving mutual recognition within a self-determining civil condition. On this account, property relations spell out the conditions for need satisfaction and freedom generally, with the failure to secure the goods property rights protect leading to homelessness, unemployment, overwork, and poverty."

J.M. Bernstein, The New School for Social Research

"Jacob Blumenfeld's original, insightful, and thoroughly researched study of the concept of property in Kant, Fichte and Hegel challenges standard legal and economic justifications of property. Blumenfeld not only offers a penetrating historical reconstruction of the theories of property developed by Kant, Fichte and the early Hegel, he also creatively draws on key insights from each to defend a social-normative framework for addressing property rights, one that attends to the moral injuries of the propertyless: homelessness, unemployment, overwork, and poverty. In sum, Blumenfeld's timely and important study calls for us to radically re-consider the normative function of property in our lives along more social, if not socialist lines."

Gabe Gottlieb, Xavier University