The tasks of the state belong to the state. Individual people carry them out. But they do so not because of who they are as persons. They do so because of their abilities.

What follows from this?

An office is not private property. No one can sell it or leave it to heirs. Whoever holds an office needs skill and character. He must have the training for it.

A look back:

In France, people used to be able to buy posts as judges. In the English army, people can still buy some officers’ posts today. This comes from the constitution of the Middle Ages. It is slowly disappearing.

Summary: The offices of the state depend on abilities, not on persons. So they are not private property. No one can buy or inherit them.

The functions and activities of the state are bound up with individuals (the state is efficacious only through individuals), but not with the individual as a physical being, rather as a state being, with the state-quality of the individual. It is therefore ridiculous when Hegel says that they are »connected with the particular personality as such in an external and contingent manner«. They are, rather, connected with it through a vinculum substantiale |an essential bond|, through an essential quality of the same. They are the natural action of its essential quality. This nonsense creeps in because Hegel grasps the affairs and activities of the state abstractly, for themselves, and, in opposition to them, particular individuality; but he forgets that particular individuality is a human one and that the affairs and activities of the state are human functions; he forgets that the essence of the »particular personality« is not its beard, its blood, its abstract physis, but its social quality, and that the affairs of state etc. are nothing but modes of existence and modes of operation of the social qualities of man. It goes without saying, then, that individuals, insofar as they are the bearers of the affairs and powers of the state, are to be regarded according to their social and not their private quality.