Under _droit domestique_ he defends very warmly the right of the woman and the wife to treatment as a personality. He laments particularly the injustice which usually rules in marriage, where, under a cloak of legality, the married man denies to his wife a personal control of her own body and the freedom of self-determination in matters of sexual intercourse. So unjust and loathsome in its violation of the personality of woman is the modern view of marriage that Renouvier considers it little better than polygamy (which is often a better state for women than monogamy) or prostitution. It is less just than either, owing to its degradation of the personality of the wife. He remarked too in his _Nouvelle Monadologie_ that love (in the popular sense), being so largely an affair of passion and physical attraction, is usually unjust, and that friendship is a better basis for the relationship of marriage, which should be, while it lasts among mankind, one of justice.[24] Consequently, it should involve neither the idea of possession nor of obedience, but of mutual comradeship. [24] See particularly the notes in _La Nouvelle Monadologie_ appended to the fourth part, “Passion,” pp. 216-222. In the economic sphere Renouvier endeavours to uphold freedom, and for this reason he is an enemy of communism. Hostile to the communistic doctrine of property, he is a definite defender of property which he considers to be a necessity of personality. He considers each person in the community entitled to property as a guarantee of his own liberty and development. While disagreeing with communism, Renouvier is sympathetic to the socialist view that property might be, and should be, more justly distributed, and he advocates means to limit excessive possession by private persons and to “generalise” the distribution of the goods of the community among its members. Progressive taxation, a guarantee of the “right to work” and a complete system of insurance are among his suggestions. He is careful, however, to avoid giving to the state too much power. Renouvier was no lover of the state. While regarding it as necessary under present conditions, he agrees with the anarchist idealists, to whom government is an evil. He admits its use, however, as a guarantor of personal liberty, but is against any semblance of state- worship. The state is not a person, nor is it, as it exists at present, a moral institution. One of the needs of modern times is, he points out, the moralising of the conception of the state, and of the state itself. Although, therefore, he has no _a priori_ objection to state interference in the economic sphere, and would not advocate a mere _laissez-faire_ policy, with its vicious consequences, yet he does not look with approval upon such interference unless it be “the collective expression of the personalities forming the community.”