System of Ethical Life

[p. 360]

C. Third system of government

Cross-reference: On education § 174 and § 239, on the police § 231 ff., on colonization § 248.

In this the universal is the absolute, and, purely as such, the determining; – in the first it is the crude, merely quantitative, wisdomless universal; in the second the universality of the concept, the formal, the recognising. For the absolutely universal, therefore, the difference which it sublates in its movement is also a superficial, formal one, and the essence of the different is absolute universality; just as in the first the essence of the different is feeling, need and enjoyment; in the second, to be a singular, formally absolute; the universal, the cause, is determined according to its essence as the particular is.

I. Education. II. Culture, and discipline; the former talents, inventions, science formally, really it is the whole, the absolutely universal, the self-moving within itself of the people, the absolutely cultivating, true absolute reality of science; inventions concern only the singular, as do the singular sciences, and where these, as philosophy, are absolute, they are nevertheless wholly ideal; culture in truth, with annihilation of all semblance, is the self-cultivating and self-discussing and conscious people; – the other is police, as discipline in the singular; the great discipline is the universal customs, and order, and the cultivation for war, and the testing of the truthfulness of the singular individual in it.

III. Procreation of children; the becoming objective to itself as this people; that the government, the people, brings forth another people. Colonisation.

Possible forms of a free government. I. Democracy. II. Aristocracy. III. Monarchy; each is capable of being unfree; I. Ochlocracy. II. Oligarchy; III. Despotism; the external mechanical element is the same; the difference is made by the relation of the government to the governed; whether the essence is the same, and the form of opposition only superficial.

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