These two determinations — that the particular functions and powers of the state are neither self-sufficient and fixed in themselves nor in the particular will of individuals, but have their ultimate root in the unity of the state as their simple self — constitute the sovereignty of the state.

This is sovereignty internally; it has yet another side, sovereignty externally (see below). — In the former feudal monarchy, the state was indeed sovereign externally, but internally it was not only the monarch who lacked sovereignty — the state itself was not sovereign. In part (cf. Remark to § 273), the particular functions and powers of the state and of civil society were constituted as independent corporations and communities, so that the whole was more an aggregate than an organism; in part they were the private property of individuals, so that what these individuals were to do with regard to the whole was left to their opinion and pleasure. — The idealism that constitutes sovereignty is the same determination as that whereby, in the animal organism, its so-called parts are not parts but members, organic moments, whose isolation and separate subsistence for themselves constitute disease (see Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, § 293) — the same principle that occurred in the abstract concept of the will (see the Remark to the following paragraph) as negativity relating itself to itself, and thus as universality determining itself into individuality (§ 7), in which all particularity and determinacy is superseded — the absolute, self-determining ground; to grasp it, one must in general possess the concept of what constitutes the substance and the true subjectivity of the concept. — Because sovereignty is the ideality of every particular authorization, the misunderstanding lies close at hand — and it is indeed a very common one — of taking it for mere power and empty arbitrariness, and of equating sovereignty with despotism. But despotism denotes in general the condition of lawlessness, in which the particular will as such — whether that of a monarch or of a people (ochlocracy) — counts as law, or rather takes the place of law, whereas sovereignty, precisely in the lawful, constitutional condition, constitutes the moment of ideality of the particular spheres and functions, namely that such a sphere is not something independent, self-sufficient in its purposes and modes of activity and merely absorbed in itself, but is in these purposes and modes of activity determined by, and dependent on, the purpose of the whole (which is generally designated by the indeterminate expression the welfare of the state). This ideality comes to appearance in a twofold manner. — In the peaceable condition, the particular spheres and functions proceed along the course of satisfying their particular concerns and purposes, and it is in part merely the mode of the unconscious necessity of the matter, whereby their self-seeking turns into a contribution to mutual preservation and to the preservation of the whole (see § 183); and in part it is direct intervention from above, whereby they are continually led back to the purpose of the whole and restricted accordingly (see governmental power, § 289), and are also required to render direct services for this preservation. — But in the condition of necessity, whether internal or external, it is sovereignty in whose simple concept the organism — which there subsists in its particular parts — converges, and to which is entrusted the salvation of the state through the sacrifice of these otherwise legitimate rights; and it is here that this idealism attains its distinctive actuality (see below, § 321).