On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 491]

But the relation of this, which by its nature is another’s and does not have its spirit in itself, to absolutely independent individuality is able, according to its form, to be a twofold one, namely either a relation of the individuals of this estate as particulars to the individuals of the first as particulars, or of universal to universal. That relation of slavery disappeared of itself in the empirical appearance of the universality of the Roman Empire; in the loss of absolute ethical life and with the debasement of the noble estate the two previously particular estates became equal to one another, and with the ceasing of freedom slavery necessarily ceased. Since the principle of formal unity and of equality had to assert itself, it sublated in general the inner true difference of the estates and in the first place did not bring about the segregation of estates posited above, still less the form of their segregation conditioned by it, according to which, under the form of universality, they stand to one another only as a whole estate to a whole estate in the relation of dominion and dependence, so that in this relation too the two that are in the reference remain universal; whereas in the relation of slavery, on the contrary, the form of particularity is the determining one of it, and it is not estate against estate, but this unity of each part is dissolved in the real reference and the individuals are dependent on individuals. The principle of universality and equality had first to take possession of the whole in such a way that it put in the place of a segregation a mixing of the two estates; in this mixing under the law of formal unity the first estate is in truth wholly sublated and the second made into the sole people; of which change Gibbon8) gives in

8) Editors: Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1787; Bd. I, S. 74 f.

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  1. Cross-reference Avatar
    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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