Second Section. Civil Society
The concrete person, who is, to himself, a particular purpose, as a whole of needs and a mixture of natural necessity and arbitrary will, is the one principle of civil society; but the particular person, as essentially in relation to other such particularity, is such that each makes itself count and is satisfied only as mediated through the other, and, at the same time, absolutely only through the form of universality, the other principle.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1827), § 523:
§ 523. The substance, as spirit, particularizing itself abstractly into persons (families or individuals) that exist in independent freedom and at the same time as particulars for themselves, at first loses its ethical determination, in that these persons as such do not have the absolute unity but their own particularity and their being-for-self in their consciousness and as their purpose. In this way the substance becomes merely a universal, mediating connection of independent extremes and of their particular interests; – the totality of this connection, developed within itself, is the state as civil society, or as the external state.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1830), § 523:
§ 523. The substance, as spirit particularizing itself abstractly into many persons (the family is only one person), into families or individuals, that exist in independent freedom and as particulars for themselves, at first loses its ethical determination, in that these persons as such do not have the absolute unity but their own particularity and their being-for-self in their consciousness and as their purpose – the system of atomism. In this way the substance becomes merely a universal, mediating connection of independent extremes and of their particular interests; the totality of this connection, developed within itself, is the state as civil society or as the external state.
Civil society is the difference that intervenes between the family and the state, even though its formation occurs later than that of the state; for as the difference, it presupposes the state, which it must have before it as something independent in order to subsist. The creation of civil society, moreover, belongs to the modern world, which is the first to let all the determinations of the Idea come into their right. When the state is represented as a unity of different persons, as a unity that is merely a commonality, what is meant thereby is only the determination of civil society. Many of the more recent teachers of constitutional law have not been able to arrive at any other view of the state. In civil society each person is his own end, everything else is nothing to him. But without relating to others he cannot attain the full range of his ends; these others are therefore means to the end of the particular individual. Yet the particular end gives itself, through its relation to others, the form of universality, and satisfies itself by satisfying at the same time the welfare of the other. Since particularity is bound to the condition of universality, the whole is the ground of mediation, where all singularities, all aptitudes, all contingencies of birth and fortune set themselves free, where the waves of all passions surge forth, governed only by the reason shining into them. Particularity, limited by universality, is alone the measure by which every particularity furthers its welfare.
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