294

|302| The individual who is attached to an official vocation by the sovereign act (§ 292) is bound to the fulfilment of his duty — the substantial element of his relationship — as the condition of this attachment, in which, as a consequence of this substantial relationship, he finds the means and the secured satisfaction of his particularity (§ 264), together with the liberation of his external situation and official activity from any other subjective dependence and influence.

The state does not rely on arbitrary, discretionary services (the administration of justice, for example, as once exercised by knights-errant), precisely because such services are discretionary and arbitrary, and reserve to subjective opinion both the performance of the services and their discretionary non-performance, as well as the pursuit of subjective ends. The other extreme, opposed to the knight-errant with respect to service of the state, would be that of the state menial, who is bound to his service merely by need, without true duty and equally without right. — State service demands, rather, the sacrifice of the independent and discretionary satisfaction of subjective ends, and precisely by this it confers the right to find that satisfaction in dutiful performance, but only in it. Herein lies, from this side, the bond between the universal and particular interest that constitutes the concept and the inner stability of the state (§ 260). — The relation of office is likewise not a relation of contract (§ 75), although a twofold consent and a rendering of performance by both sides is present. The official is not called upon for a single, contingent service, like the mandatary, but places the chief interest of his spiritual and particular existence in this relationship. |303| Nor is what he has to perform an externally particular matter, of a kind merely entrusted to him; the value of such a matter is, as something inward, distinct from its externality, and is not yet infringed by the non-performance of what was stipulated (§ 77). What the servant of the state has to perform is, immediately as it is, a value in and for itself. The wrong done by non-performance or by positive infringement (an action contrary to duty, and both are such) is therefore an infringement of the universal content itself (cf. § 95, a negatively infinite judgment), and is for that reason a misdemeanour or even a crime. — Through the secured satisfaction of particular need, the external necessity is removed which might otherwise induce him to seek the means for it at the expense of his official activity and duty. In the universal power of the state, those entrusted with its business find protection against the other subjective side — against the private passions of the governed, whose private interest, and so forth, is offended by the assertion of the universal against it.