The substantial welfare of the state is its welfare as a particular state in its determinate interest and condition, together with its equally distinctive external circumstances and its particular treaty relations: government is thus a particular wisdom, not universal providence (cf. § 324 Remark) — just as, in its relation to other states, the purpose and the principle governing the justice of wars and treaties is not some universal (philanthropic) thought, but the actually injured or threatened welfare in its determinate particularity.

At one time, the opposition between morality and politics, and the demand that the latter should conform to the former, was much discussed. In this connection, it need only be remarked in general that the welfare of a state has a quite different warrant from the welfare of the individual, and that the ethical substance, the state, has its determinate being, that is, its right, immediately in a concrete existence rather than an abstract one, and that only this concrete existence — and not one of the many universal thoughts held to be moral commandments — can be the principle of its action and conduct. The view that politics is always supposedly guilty of wrong in this supposed opposition rests all the more on the shallowness of ideas about morality, about the nature of the state, and about its relation to the moral point of view.