Abstract

The role that money and all other economic categories play in Hegel’s philosophy can only be understood if account is taken of the fact that, in his eyes, the order of society must be represented and recognized as the progressive objectification of the Idea and of a divine Absolute in reality. In this way, the economic categories—which Hegel takes above all from the writings of English authors on political economy—acquire a speculative meaning, the general content of which is paradigmatically given by his Science of Logic. This chapter will therefore attempt, first, to uncover the respective logical-speculative meanings given to the concepts of labor, exchange, value, money, etc., in three of Hegel’s texts. It will turn out that Hegel assigns a positive speculative meaning to money in the Jena writings, which it loses in the later Philosophy of Right. On the other hand, using the example of the category of quantity as a determination of value, I consider the horizon of Marx and attempt to show that the treatment of all categories in the Science of Logic—which is supposedly prior to practical philosophy as “unfolding the thoughts of God before the creation of the world”—does not precede its application to the economic basis of society (as Hegel would have it) but results from it.