thing of which it is an integral part in order to enjoy and protect holdings allocated by the common welfare. The power is property-like because, while the exclusive rights to control, use, and alienate are integral to property understood as a person’s valid claim to mastery of a thing, they are only accidentally joined to an entitlement to a resource. My entitlement to a plot of land could be satisfied even if I were given it on condition that I leave it for the use of others every seven years. I could enjoy the x loaves of bread I receive from the common store even were I prohibited from trading any for a quantity of eggs. Likewise, an injunctive remedy against trespass is conceptually connected to a person’s exclusive mastery of a thing; it is not so joined to an entitlement to a resource from the common store, for that entitlement could be protected by a liability rule requiring takers to pay court-determined damages. So a property-like rule is one borrowed from its conceptual home in the direct relation between person and thing for employment in a public allocation to which it is only contingently connected.

Property-like rules are conditions of living autonomously. This is so partly because the secure (i.e. intellectual) possession of necessities liberates the moral subject for the pursuit of ends other than subsistence and partly because propertylike rules protect a sphere wherein the person’s autonomy may find expression through its exclusive use, management, and alienation of things according to its own will and its own goals. At this stage, therefore, it is appropriate to speak of a quasi-property (held from the common welfare) in resources as a condition of autonomy and so as a legally cognizable need of the human individual. In Abstract Right, the individual’s needs were juridically insignificant, since all need signified a natural ‘necessity’ from which the free will could detach itself, hence really an optional value having no normative force for other persons. At this stage, however, needs are freedom’s needs—agency goods, as we might call them. Understood as objective requirements for acting from self-authored ends, they now come within the purview of right.

4.2 Civil society as a bifurcated entity

Once the material conditions of self-determination are acknowledged as something to which subjects are entitled from rulers as a condition of their valid authority, the negative right against intrusions to property generated by Abstract Right cannot remain unaltered; for that right is now shaped by what citizens owe each other as members of a civic body ordered to the common welfare. I say ‘shaped’ because the rights paradigm ordered to the self-related person has been superseded by one ordered to the autonomous citizen, and no logic has yet come forward to redeem it as part of a whole. Recall that the market recognition relied upon by Abstract Right as validating exclusive possession took no account of disparities of buying power, for those disparities reflected peculiar features of the individual having no bearing on what persons owed each other as abstract ends. Yet disparities in buying power are obviously relevant to what citizens owe each other as members of a collective body ordered to the common welfare. Since Abstract Right (we can now say) erred in treating these inequalities as irrelevant to the justice of private spheres of

sovereignty over resources, it is superseded by a new, welfarist paradigm in whose entitlements the negative rights of Abstract Right are merged. As a consequence, there is now no property independent of the common welfare. Rather, a right against interferences with historically acquired holdings is now inwardly limited by the equal right of all moral subjects to the material conditions of self-determined action. Thus historically acquired holdings may be forcibly redistributed by the public authority without violating rights, provided that the redistribution is for the common welfare. No compensation is owed in any stringent sense, for there was no right to holdings that could not be justified by the collective welfare. Accordingly, whether compensation is paid depends solely on what conduces to the common welfare—on whether the benefits of compensation (e.g. alleviating anxiety, avoiding the frustration of expectations on which investments were based) outweigh its administrative costs, or as to how far compensation is fiscally consistent with achieving the positive ends of government. Previously inexplicable, the state power of eminent domain is now eminently intelligible; what is now mysterious is an absolute duty to compensate the ‘owner’.

Still, the human agent’s quest for validation cannot end there, for, far from being confirmed, its claimed end-status has come to naught. The elevation of autonomy to the fundamental end of civil union has generated a theoretical momentum whose end-point is the negation of autonomy. The systematic realization of the right to self-determination turns out to be the thoroughgoing submersion of a sphere of private sovereignty in the absolutism of the common welfare. Persons do not own what they possess and use; rather, they hold licences from the state that are revocable at will, perhaps with compensation, perhaps without. Property thus reflects the end-status, not of the individual agent, but of a collectivity in which the individual’s separate end-status is submerged.

Given the self-contradictoriness of this result, the common welfare cannot coherently be pursued to its logical end-point. Its logical momentum is curtailed by an equally logical recoil, leaving space for the self-related person of Abstract Right to reassert its priority and lordship over things. Civil society is just this restless oscillation between opposite poles—between the priority of welfare and the priority of the person—neither of which offers repose. On the one hand, the person’s claim of unconditioned worth finds no reality outside a common welfare inwardly constitutive of ownership; on the other, this realization of the person is its obliteration, requiring a return to the beginning—and so on endlessly. This is why Hegel calls the public sector of civil society an ‘external state’. In civil society, the state is one side of a split entity of which the other is the market. As such, it is one particularism juxtaposed to many others—a powerful sovereign pitted against a multitude of petty ones interacting through exchange. Neither sovereignty can abide the other, yet neither can conquer the other without subverting itself.

Now, the Fifth Amendment paradox might be understood as reflecting this basic tension in liberal civil society—as a kind of neurotic accommodation of mutually ambivalent opposites in a divided soul writ large. So, forcible takings for ordinary public goals (whether or not the taking is necessary for the goal) are permitted because the person is an end only within a civic body ordered to the common