Individuality, as exclusive being-for-itself, appears as a relation to other states, each of which is independent in relation to the others. Since it is in this independence that the being-for-itself of actual spirit has its existence, independence is the first freedom and the highest honor of a people.

Those who speak of the wishes of a totality which constitutes a more or less independent state and has its own center — of wishes to lose this center and its independence in order to form a whole with another — know little of the nature of a totality and of the sense of self which a people has in its independence. — The first power in which states appear historically is therefore this independence as such, even where it is wholly abstract and has as yet no further inner development; it belongs to this original appearance, accordingly, that an individual stands at its head — patriarch, tribal chief, and so forth.