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274

Since spirit is actual only as that which it knows itself to be, and the state, as the spirit of a people, is at the same time the law permeating all its relations, as well as the customs and the consciousness of its individuals, the constitution of a specific people depends in general on the manner and the culture of its self-consciousness; therein lies its subjective freedom, and with it the actuality of the constitution.

To wish to give a people a constitution a priori — even one more or less rational in its content — is a fancy that overlooks precisely the moment through which a constitution becomes more than a mere thing of thought. Every people accordingly has the constitution that is appropriate to it and that belongs to it.

DE

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2 responses to “274”

  1. Eduard Gans (Additions) Avatar
    Eduard Gans (Additions)

    The state must pervade all relations within its constitution. Napoleon, for example, wanted to give the Spaniards a constitution a priori, but this went badly enough. For a constitution is not something merely made: it is the work of centuries, the idea and the consciousness of the rational, to the extent that this has been developed within a people. No constitution is therefore created merely by subjects. What Napoleon gave the Spaniards was more rational than what they had had before, and yet they rejected it as something foreign to them, since they were not yet educated up to that level. A people must have, toward its constitution, the feeling of its right and of its condition, otherwise the constitution may indeed be externally present, but it has no meaning and no value. It is true that in individuals there can often be found the need and the longing for a better constitution, but that the whole mass should be pervaded by such a representation is something quite different and follows only later. The principle of morality, of the inwardness of Socrates, was necessarily generated in his own days, but it took time before it became universal self-consciousness.

  2. Karl Marx Avatar
    Karl Marx

    From Hegel’s reasoning it follows only that the state in which the »mode and formation of self-consciousness« and the »constitution« contradict one another is no true state. That a constitution which was the product of a past consciousness can become an oppressive fetter for one more advanced, etc. etc., is surely a truism. What would follow from this, rather, is only the demand for a constitution which has within itself the determination and the principle of advancing together with consciousness; of advancing together with the actual human being — which first becomes possible once »man« has become the principle of the constitution. Hegel a sophist here.

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