The laws affect individuals in two ways. What do they receive from the state? And what must they give it?

What they receive:

Private right, the rights of local communities and corporations, general institutions. And indirectly the whole constitution.

What they give:

Almost only money. Why? The state needs talents, abilities and work. But it does not demand them directly. It demands money, the universal value of all things. Only in this way can it share out the burdens justly and equally. Otherwise the gifted would have to bear more than the ungifted.

Freedom through money:

It used to be different. In Plato’s state, the rulers gave each person his task. In the Middle Ages, vassals owed certain services. In Egypt, people had to work on huge buildings. There the freedom of the individual was missing. Today the state buys what it needs. That may seem cold. But it respects freedom. Each person decides for himself how he uses his work.

The only great exception is service for defense.

Summary: The state gives individuals right and institutions. From them it demands above all money. In this way it can share out the burdens justly and respect the freedom of each individual.

»What is to be the object of universal legislation and what is to be left to the determination of the administrative authorities and the regulation of government in general can, in general, be distinguished thus: that into the former falls only what, in respect of content, is wholly universal, the legal determinations, while into the latter falls the particular and the manner of execution. But this distinction is not made fully determinate even by this, that the law, in order to be a law and not a mere command in general (such as: »thou shalt not kill« […]), must be determinate in itself; but the more determinate it is, the more its content approaches the capacity of being carried out. At the same time, however, a determination going this far would give the laws an empirical side which would have to be subject to alteration in actual execution, which would do damage to the character of laws. It lies in the organic unity of the powers of the state itself that it is one spirit which establishes the universal and which brings it to its determinate actuality and carries it out.«

But it is precisely this organic unity that Hegel has not constructed. The various powers have a different principle. They are, at the same time, fixed actuality. To flee from their actual conflict into the imaginary »organic unity«, instead of having developed them as moments of an organic unity, is therefore an empty, mystical evasion.

The first unresolved collision was that between the whole constitution and the legislative power. The second is that between the legislative and the governmental power, between the law and its execution.

The second determination of the paragraph is that the only service the state demands of individuals is money.

The grounds Hegel adduces for this are:

1. money is the existing universal value of things and of services;
2. what is to be rendered can be determined in a just manner only through this reduction;
|262| 3. only in this way can the service be determined in such a manner that the particular labors and services which the individual can render are mediated through his own arbitrary choice.

Hegel remarks in the Remark:

ad 1. »It may at first seem striking, in the state, that of the many skills, possessions, activities, talents, and the infinitely manifold living capacities bound up with them — which are at the same time bound up with disposition — the state demands no direct service, but claims only the one capacity that appears as money. — Services relating to the defense of the state against enemies belong first to the duty of the following division« (not the following division, but for other reasons we shall come only later to the personal duty of military service).

»In fact, however, money is not a particular capacity alongside the others, but is the universal of them, insofar as they produce themselves into the externality of existence in which they can be grasped as a thing.« »Among us«, it says further in the Addition, »the state buys what it needs.«

ad. 2. »Only at this most external point« (namely, where capacities produce themselves into the externality of existence in which they can be grasped as a thing) »is quantitative determinacy, and hence the justice and equality of services, possible.« The Addition says: »But through money the justice of equality can be far better carried through.« »Otherwise the talented person would be taxed more heavily than the untalented, if it depended on concrete capacity.«

ad. 3. »Plato, in his state, has the individuals allotted to the particular estates by the rulers and has their particular services imposed on them […]; in the feudal monarchy, vassals likewise had to render indeterminate services, but also in their particularity, e.g. the office of judge etc.; the services in the Orient, in Egypt, for the immense architectural works etc., are likewise of a particular quality etc. In these relations the principle of subjective freedom is lacking, namely that the substantial activity of the individual — which in such services is in any case, as regards its content, something particular — should be mediated through his particular will; a right which is possible only through the requiring of services in the form of universal value, and which is the ground that has brought about this transformation.« The Addition says: »Among us the state buys what it needs, and this may at first seem abstract, dead, and unfeeling, and it may also look as though the state had thereby sunk down to satisfying itself with abstract services. But it lies in the principle« of the modern state »that everything the individual does should be mediated through his will.« … »But now precisely through this, respect for subjective freedom is displayed, in that one lays hold of someone only at the point at which he can be laid hold of.«

Do what you will. Pay what you owe.

The opening of the Addition reads:

»The two sides of the constitution relate to the rights and the services of individuals. As for services, they now nearly all reduce themselves to money. Military duty is now nearly the only personal service left.«