The basis of the state is its unity. This unity takes up all particular powers and tasks. It dissolves them and at the same time preserves them.

What does that mean?

No power is independent. Each has only as much right as the whole gives it. All of them start from the power of the whole.

A comparison:

In a living body, life is in every point. There is only one life in all the parts. If we cut off a part, it dies. It is the same with all estates, powers and corporations in the state. Each part wants to exist for itself. But it lives only in the whole.

Summary: The powers in the state are not independent. They have their right only from the whole. Like the limbs of a body, they live only in the unity.

Of course: Hegel speaks here only of the idea »of the particular powers and functions«… They are to have only as much authority as is determined within the idea of the whole; they are to »proceed only from its power«. That this ought to be so lies in the idea of the organism. But it would have had to be developed just how this is to be brought about. For in the state conscious reason must rule; the merely substantial-inner and therefore merely external necessity, the contingent […] |illegible word, perhaps: entanglement, or interweaving| of the »powers and functions« cannot be passed off as the rational.