The state, as the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness raised to its universality, is that which is rational in and for itself. This substantial unity is an absolute, unmoved end in itself, in which freedom attains its supreme right — just as this ultimate end has the supreme right over individuals, whose highest duty it is to be members of the state.

If the state is confused with civil society, and its determination is placed in the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then the interest of individuals as such becomes the ultimate end for which they are united, and it follows equally from this that being a member of the state is something optional. But the state’s relation to the individual is of a wholly different kind: since it is objective spirit, the individual itself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life only insofar as it is a member of the state. Union as such is itself the true content and end, and the destiny of individuals is to lead a universal life; their further particular satisfaction, activity, and mode of conduct have this substantial and universally valid element as their starting point and their result. Rationality, considered abstractly, consists in general in the interpenetrating unity of universality and individuality; and here, concretely, as regards content, it consists in the unity of objective freedom — that is, of the universal substantial will — and subjective freedom, as individual knowledge and the will’s pursuit of its particular ends; and, accordingly, as regards form, it consists in action determined by thought-out, i.e. universal, laws and principles. This Idea is the eternal and necessary being of spirit, in and for itself. But whatever the historical origin of the state in general — or rather of each particular state, its rights and determinations — may be or may have been; whether it first arose out of patriarchal relations, out of fear or trust, out of the corporation, and so forth; and however that on which such rights are conceived and made fast in consciousness — as divine, positive right, or contract, custom, and so on — may have come about: none of this concerns the Idea of the state itself, but is, with respect to the scientific cognition with which alone we are here concerned, merely a historical matter belonging to appearance; and with respect to the authority of an actual state, insofar as it enters into giving reasons at all, these reasons are taken from the forms of the right valid within it. Philosophical consideration has to do only with the inward aspect of all this, with the thought concept. As regards the search for this concept, Rousseau has the merit of having advanced a principle which is thought not merely in its form (as, say, the social drive, or divine authority, are), but in its content as well — indeed which is thinking itself — namely, of having posited the will as the principle of the state. But since he conceived the will only in the determinate form of the individual will (as Fichte likewise later did), and the general will not as the rational element in and for itself of the will, but only as the communal element that emerges from this individual will as conscious, the union of individuals within the state becomes a contract, and thus has as its basis their arbitrary will, opinion, and consent given at pleasure and explicitly; and there follow the further, merely intellectual consequences that destroy the divine, which is in and for itself, along with its absolute authority and majesty. Having grown into a [political] force, these abstractions accordingly produced, on the one hand, the first tremendous spectacle since we have known of the human race: that of overturning everything existing and given, and undertaking to begin the constitution of a great actual state entirely afresh, from thought alone, and to will to give it as its basis only what was merely supposed to be rational; while on the other hand, because they were nothing but abstractions devoid of [any] Idea, they turned the attempt into the most terrible and violent of events. Against the principle of the individual will, one must recall the fundamental concept that the objective will is what is rational in itself, in its concept, whether or not it is recognized by individuals and willed by their pleasure — and that the opposite, the subjectivity of freedom, the knowing and willing that is held fast alone in that principle, contains only the one, and therefore one-sided, moment of the Idea of the rational will, which is such only by being in itself just as much as it is for itself. The other opposite of the thought of grasping the state, in cognition, as rational for itself is to take the externality of appearance — the contingency of need, of the need for protection, of strength, of wealth, and so on — not as moments of historical development, but as the very substance of the state. Here too it is the individuality of individuals that constitutes the principle of cognition — yet not even the thought of this individuality, but on the contrary the empirical individualities in their contingent properties: strength and weakness, wealth and poverty, and so on. Such a notion — of overlooking what is infinite and rational in and for itself within the state, and of banishing thought from the apprehension of its inner nature — has perhaps never appeared in so unmixed a form as in Herr von Haller’s Restoration of Political Science¹ — unmixed, because in all attempts to grasp the essence of the state, however one-sided or superficial the principles may be, the very intention of comprehending the state carries thoughts, universal determinations, along with it; here, however, not only is the rational content that the state is, and the form of thought, consciously renounced, but both are stormed against with passionate heat. This Restoration owes part of the widespread effect of its principles — an effect which, as Herr von Haller assures us, it has had — no doubt to the circumstance that he has known how to dispense with all thoughts in his exposition, and thus to keep the whole thoughtless and of a single piece; for in this way the confusion and disturbance that weaken the impression of an exposition falls away — the disturbance that arises where, mixed in with the contingent, there is still some reminder of the substantial, and mixed in with the merely empirical and external, some recollection of the universal and rational, so that within the sphere of the meager and contentless one is still reminded of something higher, something infinite. This exposition is, for this very reason, likewise consistent; for since the sphere of the contingent is taken as the essence of the state in place of the substantial, consistency, given such content, consists precisely in the utter inconsistency of a thoughtlessness that lets itself run on without regard, and feels equally at home in the very opposite of what it has just endorsed.²

¹ Carl Ludwig von Haller, Restoration of Political Science, or Theory of the Natural-Social Condition Contrasted with the Chimera of the Artificial-Civil Condition, 6 vols., Winterthur, 1816–34

² The book in question is, on account of the character just described, of an original kind. The author’s indignation might in itself have something noble about it, since it was kindled by the false theories mentioned above, proceeding chiefly from Rousseau, and above all by the attempt to realize them. But in order to save himself, Herr von Haller has thrown himself into an opposite extreme which is a complete lack of thought, and of which, accordingly, there can be no question of any content — namely, into the bitterest hatred of all laws, of legislation, of everything formally and legally determined as right. Hatred of law, of right determined legally, is the shibboleth by which fanaticism, feeble-mindedness, and the hypocrisy of good intentions reveal themselves and unfailingly betray what they are, whatever other garb they may otherwise choose to put on. An originality such as Herr von Haller’s is always a remarkable phenomenon, and for those of my readers who do not yet know the book, I will cite a few samples. After Herr von Haller (vol. 1, p. 342 ff.) has set up his principal thesis — ‘that just as, in the inanimate [world], the greater displaces the smaller, the powerful the weak, and so forth, so too among animals, and then among human beings, this same law recurs, [only] in nobler forms (though often, no doubt, also in ignoble ones)’ — and ‘that this is accordingly the eternal, unalterable order of God, that the more powerful rules, must rule, and will always rule’ — one can already see from this, and equally from what follows, in what sense power is meant here: not the power of what is just and ethical, but contingent natural force — he then goes on to support this, among other grounds, by the further claim (p. 365 f.) that nature has, with admirable wisdom, so ordered things that it is precisely the feeling of one’s own superiority that irresistibly ennobles character and favors the development of precisely those virtues that are most necessary for subordinates. He asks, with a good deal of school-rhetorical elaboration, ‘whether, in the realm of the sciences, it is the strong or the weak who more often abuse authority and trust for base, self-interested ends and to the ruin of trusting people; whether, among jurists, it is the masters of the science who are the pettifoggers and quibblers who betray the hopes of trusting clients, who turn white into black and black into white, who abuse the laws as a vehicle of injustice, who lead those in need of their protection to the beggar’s staff, and who, like hungry vultures, tear apart the innocent lamb,’ and so forth. Here Herr von Haller forgets that he adduces such rhetoric precisely in support of the thesis that the rule of the more powerful is the eternal order of God — the order according to which the vulture tears apart the innocent lamb — so that those who are more powerful through their knowledge of the law are entirely right to plunder the trusting and those in need of protection, as being the weak. But it would be asking too much to expect two thoughts to be brought together where not even one is to be found. That Herr von Haller is an enemy of codes of law goes without saying; civil laws are, according to him, on the one hand generally ‘unnecessary, since they are self-evident from the natural law’ — a great deal of trouble would have been spared, ever since there have been states, trouble that has been spent on legislation and codes of law and that is still being spent on them and on the study of legal right, if people had from the outset contented themselves with the profound thought that all of this is self-evident — while ‘on the other hand, laws are properly not given to private persons at all, but as instructions for the subordinate judges, in order to make known to them the will of the lord of the court.’ Jurisdiction is in any case (vol. 1, p. 297 f., and passim), according to him, not a duty of the state but a benefaction — namely, an act of assistance rendered by the more powerful, and merely supplementary; among the means of securing right it is not the most perfect, but rather unsafe and uncertain — the [one] means that our more recent jurists leave to us alone, while robbing us of the three other means, precisely those which lead most quickly and most surely to the goal, and which, besides that [one means], kindly nature has given to man for securing his legal freedom’ — and these three are (what might one guess?) ‘1. one’s own observance and enforcement of natural law, 2. resistance to injustice, 3. flight, where no help is any longer to be found.’ (How unkind, indeed, are jurists compared with kindly nature!) ‘But the natural, divine law which (vol. 1, p. 292) all-good nature has given to everyone is: honor in every one your equal (according to the author’s own principle this ought rather to read: honor [him] who is not your equal, but the more powerful), offend no one who does not offend you; demand nothing that he does not owe you (but what does he owe?) — indeed, more than that: love your neighbor and be of use to him where you can.’ It is the implanting of this law, [Haller holds,] that is supposed to make legislation and constitution superfluous. It would be remarkable to see how Herr von Haller makes it comprehensible to himself that, notwithstanding this implanting, legislation and constitutions have nonetheless come into the world! In vol. 3, p. 362 f., the author comes to the ‘so-called national freedoms’ — that is, the legal and constitutional laws of nations; every legally determined right was, in this grand sense, called a freedom. He says of these laws, among other things, ‘that their content is usually quite insignificant, even though one may in books set great store by such documented freedoms.’ When one then sees that it is the national freedoms of the German imperial estates, of the English nation — the Magna Carta, ‘which, however, is little read, and, on account of its outdated expressions, understood even less’ — the Bill of Rights, and so on — and of the Hungarian nation, and so on, of which the author is speaking, one is astonished to learn that these possessions, otherwise held to be so important, are something insignificant, and that among these nations value is set on their laws — laws which have had a part in every piece of clothing that individuals wear, in every piece of bread that they eat, and which daily and hourly have a part in everything — merely in books. Regarding the Prussian General Code, to cite one more instance, Herr von Haller is particularly ill-disposed (vol. 1, p. 185 ff.), because the unphilosophical [in Haller’s own word: ‘neo-philosophical’] errors (not yet, at least, the Kantian philosophy, against which Herr von Haller is most embittered of all) have there proved their incredible influence — among other things, chiefly because it speaks of the state, of state property, of the purpose of the state, of the head of the state, of the duties of the head of state, of servants of the state, and so on. Worst of all, in Herr von Haller’s eyes, is ‘the right, for meeting the needs of the state, to impose levies on the private property of persons, their trade, products, or consumption; because thereby, since state property is qualified not as the private property of the prince but as state property, the king himself — and likewise the Prussian citizens — no longer have anything of their own, neither their body nor their goods, and all subjects are legally serfs, for they are not permitted to withdraw themselves from the service of the state.’ Amid all this incredible crudity, one might find most comical the emotion with which Herr von Haller describes the inexpressible pleasure he takes in his discoveries (vol. 1, preface [p. XXIII f.]) — ‘a joy such as only the friend of truth can feel, when, after honest inquiry, he attains the certainty that . . . he has, as it were (yes indeed, as it were!), hit upon the utterance of nature, the word of God himself’ (the word of God, on the contrary, distinguishes its revelations from the utterances of nature and of the natural human being quite explicitly) — ‘how he could have sunk down for sheer admiration, how a stream of joyful tears poured from his eyes, and how living religiosity was born in him from that moment on.’ Out of true religiosity, Herr von Haller ought rather to have wept over it as the harshest judgment of God — for it is the harshest thing that can befall a human being — to have strayed so far from thinking and rationality, from reverence for the laws, and from the recognition of how infinitely important, how divine it is that the duties of the state and the rights of citizens, as well as the rights of the state and the duties of citizens, be determined by law — so far, indeed, that the absurd substitutes itself for him as the word of God.