In brief: Because the order of the Groundlines is not a ranking but an order from the poorest to the richest. Property stands at the beginning because it is the scantiest shape of freedom – the one that presupposes the least. Whoever reads an order of value out of the sequence is reading the book upside down.
The suspicion
It is an obvious one. The book begins with the person, property, taking possession, contract; human dignity, conscience, the family and the state come later. To a reader of the twentieth or twenty-first century this looks like a bourgeois lawyer’s list of priorities: things first, people afterwards.
Hegel’s answer: the sequence is to be read the other way round
He foresaw the misunderstanding and answered it in § 30. The more abstract a right is, the more restricted it is – and the lower it stands:
As against a more formal, i.e. more abstract and therefore more restricted right, the sphere and stage of spirit in which it has brought the further moments contained in its Idea to determinacy and actuality has, as the more concrete, the richer in itself and the more truly universal, thereby also a higher right.
Groundlines, § 30
Abstract right – that is, the right of property – is thereby expressly the lowest right in the book. What comes later takes precedence over it in a case of collision. The sequence is a construction, not a ranking; it ascends, it does not descend.
And still less a temporal sequence
A second misunderstanding lies beside the first: that historically there were owners before there were families. Hegel rules that out expressly as well:
It should be noted, however, that the moments whose result is a more determinate form precede that form – as determinations of the concept – in the scientific development of the Idea, but do not precede it, as shapes, in temporal development.
Groundlines, § 32 note
The family logically presupposes the concept of property; historically it was there first. Whoever takes the series of abstract right for a prehistory has made the same mistake as the one who takes it for an order of value.
Why property is nonetheless more than a preliminary stage
Hegel’s grounding of property is not an economic one. For him property is not a means of satisfying needs but the first place at which a will can show itself in the world at all:
Having property appears, when need is made the primary consideration, as a means; but the true position is that, from the standpoint of freedom, property, as the first existence of freedom, is an essential end in itself.
Groundlines, § 45 note
From this follows a consequence that is seldom quoted along with it: if property is the existence of freedom, there can be no person without the capacity to own. In § 66 note Hegel names the „incapacity to own property“ in the same breath as slavery and serfdom – as an example of the alienation of personality.
Where dignity stands in Hegel
It does not stand later; it stands across. § 66 determines what cannot be alienated at all and cannot lapse by prescription:
Inalienable, therefore, are those goods, or rather substantial determinations, and the right to them likewise imprescriptible, which constitute my own most personal being and the universal essence of my self-consciousness – such as my personality as such, my universal freedom of will, ethical life, and religion.
Groundlines, § 66
And the strongest formulation of the thought of equality does not stand in abstract right, but only there where civil society turns right into law:
The human being counts, thus, because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, and so on.
Groundlines, § 209 note
This sentence stands in § 209 and not in § 35, and that is no accident: for Hegel the equality of all before the law is not the starting point but an achievement – something that culture brings forth and that can be lost again.
Sources. Groundlines § 30 and note (stages and collision of rights), § 32 and note (conceptual vs. temporal sequence), § 41–§ 46 (property as the existence of freedom), § 66 and note (the inalienable), § 209 note (the human being counts because he is a human being). – On the relation of this passage to the human dignity of the German Basic Law: Hegel and German legal scholarship. – Literature. Ludwig Siep (ed.), Klassiker Auslegen, Berlin 1997, there the contributions on abstract right; Klaus Vieweg, Das Denken der Freiheit, Munich 2012.