[p. 337]
|337| posited. The value and the price of labour and of the product are determined according to the universal system of all needs, and the arbitrary will in value, which was grounded on the particular want of others, as well as the uncertainty whether the surplus is necessary for others, is completely sublated. – The universality of labour, or the indifference of all as their middle, against which they compare themselves and into which each singular thing could immediately transform itself, posited as something real, is money; just as the active universal exchanging, the doing which mediates particular need and particular surplus, is the merchant estate, the highest point of universality in the exchange of acquisition; what it produces is that it takes up the surplus present in the particular and thereby makes it a universal, just as what it exchanges for is likewise money, or the universal.
Where exchange, or the transfer of property to another in general, becomes ideal, partly through the universally known possession of the one, which universal being-known hinders the transfer, since property and its certainty rest in part upon it, – partly through the empirical falling-apart of the simultaneity of exchange, – that ideality is posited as real through the whole power of the state attaching itself to it, as if what is supposed to happen had actually happened, and the empirical appearance of the exchange becomes indifferent. Just as the empirical appearance of possession or non-possession also becomes indifferent, and what matters is the nearer or more remote inner absolute relation of the individual to the thing, whether it is his property or not. Both together constitute justice concerning property in things.
Personal injury, which in the natural potency became infinite, a matter of honour and of the whole person, becomes in the real system this determinate abstraction of injury; for since the indifference of the individual is here the absolute indifference, the people, but this cannot be injured, nothing remains but precisely the determinacy and particularity of the injury. In a citizen in general, therefore, the universal is so little injured, and this is so little to be avenged or in danger, that only the particularity remains to be set free, through its being sublated, namely through the one who injures being placed under the very same.
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