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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 492]

|492| these features the picture: The long peace and the uniform dominion of the Romans introduced a slow and secret poison into the vital forces of the empire. The dispositions of men were gradually brought to one level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. Personal courage remained, but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger and the habit of command; they received laws and commanders from the will of their monarch, and the descendants of the boldest chiefs were content with the rank of citizens and subjects. The more aspiring minds gathered to the standard of the emperors, and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or unity, sank imperceptibly into the dull indifference of private life. – With this universal private life, and for the condition in which the people consists only of a second estate, the formal relation of right, which fixes individual being and posits it as absolute, is immediately present, and the most complete formation of the legislation relating to it also formed and developed out of such a corruption and universal debasement. This system of property and right, which for the sake of that fixity of individuality is in nothing absolute and eternal but wholly in the finite and the formal, must, really segregated and separated from the noble estate, constitute itself in an estate of its own and then be able to extend itself here in its whole length and breadth. To it belong partly the questions, subordinate for themselves and remaining in the formal, concerning the legal ground of possession, contract and so on, but partly also the whole endless expansion of legislation over – as Plato enumerates the rubrics of these things – “these judicial matters of the contracts of individuals against individuals concerning things or manual works, as also of insults and blows, regulations

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One response to “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right”

  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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