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nature, it becomes his property. The production and enjoyment of such property thus
becomes the central act of individuation. It both expresses the individual’s creative
freedom and marks out what is individual rather than common. The insecurity of such
property in the state of nature then becomes the incentive that motivates individuals to
establish the social contract that creates government. Justice thereby becomes defined as
those activities of government that respect the sovereign character of individuals by
protecting both personal and property rights (Locke 1980).
Thus we generally credit to liberalism the idea that justice is secured when the
person who does the work gets to keep the property he has created. But it is unclear how
much of this credit is deserved. Certainly, when Locke says “the ore I have digged in any
place…become my property” we have no problem with him. But when he claims
likewise for the “turfs my servant has cut”, we begin to see the half-heartedness of early
liberal producerism (Locke 1980, 19-20).
The real teeth in liberal producerism, ironically, come from Hegel and Marx, and
it is interesting to explore the extent to which their notions of justice were inspired by the
materialistic sense of justice as ethical consumption developed in ancient Greece. Judith
Shklar calls Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit an “elegy for Hellas”, a requiem for the
tragic heroic individualist project that began with Socrates and an overture for the
possibility of recasting the spirit of Pericles in the new constitutional state. Hegel, Shklar
argues, saw democratic Athens as a “paradise of the human spirit” because of its lack of
tension between individual and community, its “expression of a complete ‘character’ and
of an objective social situation…. [t]hat is far superior to the modern (Kantian) morality
which is merely a matter of abstract knowledge” (Shklar 1971, 86-87). Hegel interpreted
this “objective situation” mainly in terms of Athens’ political and civic life rather than its
aesthetics, its sense of beauty and freedom in ethical consumption (88). But Hegel’s
overall philosophy is one deeply consonant with a materialistic notion of justice. Human
beings as described in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1949), after all, are not individuals in
the liberal sense at all. Rather, human beings create themselves through the social and
material relations of the dialectic.
Relations of consumption, it is true, are relegated to the early and lower stages of
the historical dialectic outlined in the Phenomenology. Consumption, for Hegel, cannot
Convention