grundlinien.de

289

The maintenance of the universal interest of the state, and of legality, within these particular rights, and the reduction of the latter to conformity with the former, require oversight and care on the part of delegates of governmental power — the executive state officials — and of the higher deliberative bodies, which are constituted on a collegiate basis and converge in the supreme offices that are in contact with the monarch.

Just as civil society is the battleground of the individual private interest of all against all, so here is the seat of the conflict of this private interest against the communal particular concerns, and of this conflict, together with the former, against the higher points of view and ordinances of the state. The corporate spirit, which is generated in the entitlement of the particular spheres, at the same time turns of itself into the spirit of the state, since it has in the state the means of preserving its particular ends. This is the secret of the patriotism of citizens on this side, that they know the state as their substance, because it preserves their particular spheres together with the entitlement and authority, as well as the welfare, of these spheres. In the corporate spirit, since it contains immediately the rootedness of the particular in the universal, lies accordingly the depth and strength which the state possesses in disposition.

The administration of corporate affairs by their own presiding officers will often be clumsy, since, although they know and have before them their own particular interests and concerns, they know and have before them less fully the connection with more remote conditions and the more general points of view — quite apart from further circumstances that contribute to this, such as the close personal contact and other kinds of equality between the presiding officers and those who are supposed to be subordinate to them, their more manifold dependence, and so on. This particular sphere may, however, be regarded as left to the moment of formal freedom, in which private knowing, deciding, and executing, as well as petty passions and conceits, have a field in which to disport themselves — and this all the more, the less the substance of the business (which is thereby spoiled, attended to less well, more laboriously, and so forth) is of importance for the more universal concerns of the state, and the more the laborious or foolish handling of such a minor matter stands in direct relation to the satisfaction and the opinion of themselves that is derived from it.

DE

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One response to “289”

  1. Karl Marx Avatar
    Karl Marx

    Hegel has not developed governmental power. But even granting this, he has not proven that it is more than a function, a determination of the citizen of the state in general; he has deduced it as a particular, separate power only by regarding the »particular interests of civil society« as such as lying »outside the universal that is in and for itself of the state«.

    »As civil society is the battlefield of the individual private interest of all against all, so here the conflict of this interest against the common particular affairs has its seat, and this conflict together with that against the higher points of view and arrangements of the state. The corporate spirit which is generated in the entitlement of the particular spheres turns at the same time, within itself, into the spirit of the state, since it has in the state the means of preserving its particular ends. This is the secret of the patriotism of the citizens on this side, that they know the state as their substance, because it preserves their particular spheres, together with their entitlement and authority, as well as their welfare. In the corporate spirit, since it directly contains the rootedness of the particular in the universal, lies, to that extent, the depth and the strength which the state has in sentiment.«

    Remarkable

    1. because of the definition of civil society as the bellum omnium contra omnes |the war of all against all|;

    2. because private egoism is betrayed as the »secret of the patriotism of the citizens« and as the »depth and strength of the state in sentiment«;

    3. because the »citizen«, the man of particular interest as against the universal, has the member of civil society regarded as a »fixed individual«, just as the state, correspondingly, confronts the »citizens« in »fixed individuals«.

    Hegel, one would think, would have had to determine »civil society«, like the »family«, as a determination of every individual of the state, hence also the later »state-qualities« likewise as a determination of the individual of the state in general. But it is not the same individual that develops a new determination of its social essence. It is the essence of the will which allegedly develops its determinations out of itself. The existing various and separate empirical existences of the state are regarded as immediate embodiments of one of these determinations.

    Just as the universal as such is made self-subsistent, it is immediately confounded with empirical existence, and the limited is, uncritically, at once taken for the expression of the idea.

    Hegel here comes into contradiction with himself only insofar as he does not, in like manner to the citizen, regard the »family human being« as a fixed race excluded from the other qualities.

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