But in the nineteenth-century, Hegel took the whole idea of the individual in a new direction. In the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel developed his logic of individual growth to increasing levels of self-awareness. While the ultimate goal in his philosophy was to link the individual with a collective community of like spirits, his self begins that search toward self-actualization through an individual subjective encounter with the material world. While Locke linked ownership to work and survival, Hegel situated ownership in the individual desire for freedom and self-actualization. It is the desire for the freedom to be that fuels the individual's desires to own things.
Property is never an end in itself, only the means to the real objective of freedom.
Hegel's self is also an individual in process, never quite complete, always moving to new levels of self-actualization, growing and changing, an approach especially sympathetic to the quixotic nature of our contemporary consumer reality. In all fairness to Hegel, his ethic, Sittlichkeit, suggests a community of caring people. Ultimately Hegel's system is built on the belief that the collective culture is what guides and shapes individual ethical actions. Admittedly, this final stage of consciousness, guided by this ethics of social responsibility, is the ideal. It is from this tradition that Brown takes her central arguments.