»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.