β) The particular functions and activities of the state, being essential moments of it, are proper to it, and are attached to the individuals by whom they are administered and exercised not in virtue of their immediate personality, but only in virtue of their universal and objective qualities; they are therefore connected with particular personality as such only in an external and contingent manner. The functions and powers of the state cannot therefore be private property.
The efficacy of the state is bound up with individuals; but they are entitled to conduct its business not by virtue of their natural manner, but rather according to their objective qualification. Capacity, skill, character belong to the particularity of the individual: he must be trained and formed for a particular business. An office can therefore be neither bought nor inherited. In France the parliamentary posts were formerly purchasable; in the English army the officers’ commissions still are, to a certain degree, even today, but this was, or still is, connected with the medieval constitution of certain states, which is now gradually disappearing.
It goes without saying that when particular functions and activities are designated as functions and activities of the state, as affairs of state and state power, they are not private property but state property. This is a tautology.
The functions and activities of the state are bound up with individuals (the state is efficacious only through individuals), but not with the individual as a physical being, rather as a state being, with the state-quality of the individual. It is therefore ridiculous when Hegel says that they are »connected with the particular personality as such in an external and contingent manner«. They are, rather, connected with it through a vinculum substantiale |an essential bond|, through an essential quality of the same. They are the natural action of its essential quality. This nonsense creeps in because Hegel grasps the affairs and activities of the state abstractly, for themselves, and, in opposition to them, particular individuality; but he forgets that particular individuality is a human one and that the affairs and activities of the state are human functions; he forgets that the essence of the »particular personality« is not its beard, its blood, its abstract physis, but its social quality, and that the affairs of state etc. are nothing but modes of existence and modes of operation of the social qualities of man. It goes without saying, then, that individuals, insofar as they are the bearers of the affairs and powers of the state, are to be regarded according to their social and not their private quality.
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