 Others have speculated about an effect in the opposite direction—not so much the incorporation of the self into the object as the incorporation of the thing into the self (Radin 1982). This was a theme in Hegel’s work, where there was a suggestion that owning property helped the individual to ‘supersede the mere subjectivity of personality’ (Hegel [1821] 1991, 73); in plain English, it gave them the opportunity to make concrete the plans and schemes that would otherwise just buzz around inside their heads, and to take responsibility for their intentions as the material they were working on—a home or an sculptor’s block of marble—registered the impact of the decisions they had made (see Waldron 1988, pp. 343–89). Even the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham toyed with a version this idea. Though property, he said, depended on positive law, the law of property had an effect on the self that makes redistribution particularly objectionable. Law provided security for our expectations, and when that security came to be focused on a particular object, that object formed part of the structure of one’s agency: ‘It is hence that we have the power of forming a general plan of conduct; it is hence that the successive instants which compose the duration of life are not like isolated and independent points, but become continuous parts of a whole’ (Bentham 1931 [1802], p. 111).