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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 474]

|474| perfectly equal to one another and stand just as immediately opposite one another and bring about precisely the reduction of the forces as in the first representation; pure quantity does not let itself be deceived by such a mediacy, through which no difference or true infinity and form is brought into it at all, but it remains, as before, a wholly undivided, pure, shapeless might. In this way no coercion is possible against might, that it be adequate to the concept of universal freedom, for outside it no power is to be found and within it itself no separation is to be posited.

For that reason, then, recourse is had to a wholly formal distinction. The actual power is indeed posited as one and united in the government; but what is set over against it is the possible power, and this possibility is, as such, to be capable of coercing that actuality. To this second, powerless existence of the common will, namely, is to fall the judging whether the power has left the former, to which it is bound, whether the power no longer conforms to the concept of universal freedom; it is to supervise the supreme power in general and, when in it a private will steps into the place of the universal one, to wrest it from him, and the manner in which this is to happen is to be a public declaration, having absolute effect, of the complete nullity of all acts of the supreme power of the state from this moment on. That the power separate itself of its own accord by its own judgement, which would be insurrection, is not to, may not, happen; for this pure power consists of nothing but private wills, which therefore cannot constitute themselves as common will. But it is that second common will which is to declare this multitude as community, or the pure power, to be united also with the Idea of the universal will, since this is no longer present in the preceding holders of power. Whatever determinacy be posited through which something is to be extorted against the supreme power, then

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    Cross-reference

    Cross-reference:
    The following passages of this essay anticipate ideas that Hegel later developed at greater length in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Each link leads directly to the exact passage within this essay:

    p. 427 f. (part 2, 1802) – “The state of nature, and the majesty and divinity of the whole of the condition of right …” → § 258 (on the relation between the state of nature, contract theory, and the state’s ethical substantiality)
    p. 437 (part 2, 1802) – “If the determinacy of property in general is posited, then the tautological proposition …” → § 135 (on the critique of the empty formalism of the Kantian doctrine of duty (the example of property))
    p. 439 (part 2, 1802) – “A maxim that, on this principle, is immoral because it contradicts itself, is, precisely …” → § 135 (on the critique of the empty formalism of the Kantian doctrine of duty (the example of helping the poor))
    p. 449 (part 2, 1802) – “In this its determination, then, punishment is something in itself, truly infinite and …” → § 99 (on the theory of punishment: punishment as a work of freedom, against the mere idea of coercion or deterrence)
    p. 458 (part 2, 1802) – “They received laws and commanders from the will of their monarch, and the descendants of …” → § 357 (on the Roman Empire as the disintegration of ethical life into private personhood and abstract universality)
    p. 459 (part 2, 1802) – “It is this nothing other than the performance of tragedy within the ethical, which the …” → § 324 (on the ethical moment of sacrifice and the transience of the finite (compare the motif of war))
    p. 464 (part 2, 1802) – “But that which we have set on one side under the outer form of the first estate is the …” → § 325 (on the estate of valor of its own, and the free, violent death as the highest abstraction of freedom)
    p. 469 (part 3, 1803) – “There must also be a reflex of the same in his empirical consciousness, and such a reflex …” → § 204 (on the second estate (possession, property, bourgeois/formal ethical life))
    p. 469 f. (part 3, 1803) – “Those properties, however, that are truly ethical, in that in them the particular or …” → § 150 (on virtue as ethical energy become individual (the examples of Epaminondas, Hannibal, Caesar))
    p. 470 (part 3, 1803) – “It must also present itself in the form of universality and of cognition, as a system of …” → § 274 (on the relation between legislation and the living customs of a people)
    p. 471 (part 3, 1803) – “We remark in advance, in general, that philosophy, through the universality of the …” → § 3 (on the boundary between philosophical and positive (historical) legal science)

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