System of Ethical Life

[p. 346]

|346| counsel with him and receives his revelations; all human and all other sanction ceases here.

It is neither the declaration that such a power is to be inviolable, nor its election by the whole people as its representative, that can give it its holiness; rather, such sanctioning takes it away from it; the election and the declaration are a deed, come from freedom and will, and can therefore just as well be overturned again; the force would belong to empirical conscious will and to insight, and every such singularity and deed of electing is in time, empirical, contingent, and may, and must be allowed to, be capable of being taken back. A people is not bound to its word, to its deed, to all its will; for all this is from its consciousness and from singularity; rather, absolute government is divine, sanctioned in itself, and not made, but absolutely the universal; every making of it, however, would come from freedom and will.

B. Universal government

Cross-reference: The system of needs, § 189 ff.; on wealth and poverty § 241 ff., on the police § 231 ff.

Absolute government is the resting substance of the universal movement, but universal government is its cause, or the universal insofar as it is opposed to the particular in the form of a particular, but according to its essence is at the same time the universal and, for the sake of its form, determining for the particular.

Now because universal government relates to movement, but this is in individuality, shape, relation, its object and content is a universal condition; for the absolutely abiding is the essence of absolute government; to universal government only something formally universal can belong, a universal accident; a determinacy of the people for this time; for this determinacy must not itself be an abstraction, something which in its reality belongs entirely to particularity and is no affection and particularity of the universal, as e.g. that everyone lives, is clothed etc.; such determinacies are only abstractions as universals, and needs of the singular; but what in them is a universal, a potency, and subsumes the whole under itself and makes it into a

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83