Abstract

This paper discusses, in a comparative perspective, the two institutions in Hegel’s account civil society in the Philosophy of Right that aim at ‘taming’ the free market: the police and the corporations. It argues that although Hegel claims to have taken up the insights of the economists of his day, he has done so in a rather limited way, and he remains sceptical about many of the ‘laws’ formulated by economists. In order to derive such laws, economists reduce individual preferences to a few categories and take these to be constant. This methodology implies that in order to tame the market the framework of rules and incentives needs to be changed – this is also the model of the Hegelian police. With regard to the corporations, however, Hegel takes on a sociological perspective and asks how the individuals’ preferences are actually formed. His theory of the corporations can be read as a theory about the social spaces in which people’s ethos is formed, which not only influences their behaviour in the market, but also prepares the ground for the political ethos of the state. I argue that these two ways of looking at economic phenomena, and the ensuing suggestions for how to curb the negative effects of the free market, have parallels in contemporary discussions about economic ethics. In order to find solutions for the problems of today’s capitalism, it is worth focussing not only on the economic perspective of the police, but also on the sociological perspective of the corporations.