恩格斯《论住宅问题》中的住宅权理论解析

Theoretical Interpretation on Engels’ The Housing Question

住宅权在适当生活水准权等人权问题讨论中占据着极其重要的地位,马克思主义经典著作中的权利规范批判对现今仍有着很强的解释力。一个半世纪前,恩格斯站在唯物主义立场上,对改良资本主义的经济理论和法权思想进行了批判,揭露了蒲鲁东主义的理论幻想、逻辑缺陷和根本问题,并以此为基础,提出了解决住宅问题的方案,即变革生产方式、消灭城乡差别,还进一步就法律起源问题提出了设想。这些理论构想、逻辑分析和具体措施至今对保障住宅权利仍有着极强的指导意义。

The right to housing is an important right to an adequate standard of living. In the era of accelerated capitalist industrialization and urbanization in Western Europe, Engels’ The Housing Question, using the theory of historical materialism, provided an in-depth analysis of the economic relations, legal relations, and institutional issues underlying the housing problems in England, Germany, and France, which also had a profound impact on the study of spatial and institutional issues after World War II. The critique and study of rights norms therein still have a strong power to interpret today’s study. The Housing Question was written by Engels in order to engage in a sharp debate with the Proudhonists, represented by Milberg, on housing and related problems in Western European societies. Analyzed from the perspective of human rights, this debate deals with the following topics: the housing problem in the right to life, the economic reasons why the people’ rights in continental European countries were not guaranteed, the paradox of the coexistence of the demands of bourgeois development and a large number of small farmers in Germany after the European Revolution of 1848, and the social problems caused by the massive influx of bankrupt small farmers into the cities during the urbanization process in Western Europe. In that essay, Engels critiques the economic theory of reformed capitalism and the idea of juridical rights from three dimensions. First, it criticizes the Proudhonists’ attempts to conceal the fact of economic inequality and the fallacy of the Proudhonists’ resort to the path of juridical rights by means of metaphysics, which further proves the hypocrisy of the Proudhonist theory of juridical rights. Second, it criticizes the four types of petty-bourgeois reformist housing solutions and elaborates the paradox of means and goals in them. Third, it analyzes the fundamental fact that bourgeois relations of production and legal power by which jointly worsen the housing conflicts. Engels’ profound analysis of the housing problem is in fact the demystification of the bourgeois concept of legal power, and the basic logic of this narrow class-concept of legal power has been revealed: the economic relations of capitalism are shaped as "eternal ideas", and the essence of these economic relations is under the veil, and from the "eternal ideas", an abstract system of concepts is created, from which legal relations are evolved with self-consistency, thus sanctifies the bourgeois ruling will. On the basis of the critique, Engels further pointed out, applying historical materialist theory, that the root of the housing problem lies in the fundamental contradiction between the capitalist mode of production and the solution of the housing problem, as well as the urban-rural dichotomy;and the fundamental path to the ultimate solution of the housing problem rests precisely in the elimination of the above-mentioned contradiction and dichotomy. Engels’ critique of the capitalist idea of legal rights has played an important constructive role in the development of housing rights theory. Among them, the analysis of the legal right to housing, a basic need, laid the foundation for the formation and development of the right to an adequate standard of living and provided a very vital theoretical basis for understanding today’s housing property rights system, financial system, and welfare system.