By: Hegel (Simple)

Hegel (Simple) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:58:25 +0000

§ 255: The second root of the state

The state has two ethical roots. The first is the family. The second is the corporation.

What do they unite?

In the family, the particular and the universal are one from the start. In civil society, they are apart. On one side stand the need and enjoyment of the individual. On the other side stands abstract right. In the corporation, the two come together again, and they do so from within. Here particular welfare has recognition as a right, and it becomes real.

Two pivots:

The sanctity of marriage and the honor in the corporation. Everything turns on these two. If they fall, civil society falls apart.

Why did people abolish the corporations?

The idea was that everyone should take care of himself. But that stays true in the corporation too. And a human being needs more than his private purpose. He needs an activity for the universal. In the modern state, he has only a small share in the great affairs. In the corporation, he finds this universal.

A limit:

The state must supervise the corporation. Otherwise it grows stiff and sinks into a miserable guild system.

Summary: Next to the family, the corporation is the second ethical root of the state. In it, one’s own welfare and the universal come together again. Marriage and the honor of an estate hold society together.

By: Eduard Gans (Additions)

Eduard Gans (Additions) — Wed, 29 May 1833 14:07:45 +0000

If in more recent times the corporations have been abolished, this has the sense that the individual should provide for himself. But even if this may be granted, the obligation of the individual to create his own livelihood is not thereby altered by the corporation. In our modern states the citizens have only limited participation in the universal affairs of the state; but it is necessary to grant the ethical human being, besides his private purpose, a universal activity as well. This universal element, which the modern state does not always afford him, he finds in the corporation. We saw earlier that the individual, in providing for himself within civil society, also acts for others. But this unconscious necessity is not enough: it becomes a known and thinking ethical life only in the corporation. Of course, the higher oversight of the state must stand over it, for otherwise it would ossify, wall itself up within itself, and sink down into a wretched guild-system. But in and for itself the corporation is no closed guild: it is rather the ethical shaping of the isolated trade and its elevation into a circle in which it gains strength and honor.

Comments on: 255

By: Hegel (Simple)

By: Eduard Gans (Additions)