The German Constitution

[p. 451]

Manuscripts from Hegel’s Frankfurt and Jena years (1800–1802), not published in his lifetime; the title is the editors’. The edition prints four pieces: A the early drafts of an introduction, B the executed essay on the constitution, C parallel passages and D fragments. Translated from the German text of the Werke (vol. 1, “Frühe Schriften”). Headings in square brackets are the editors’.

Print version (PDF): for printing and taking along – each page of the PDF holds exactly one page of the printed edition, with a wide margin for one’s own notes.

The figures between vertical bars, e.g. |93|, mark the beginning of a page of the printed edition, so that a passage can be found again in one’s own copy.

In the notes, “Editors:” introduces a note by the editors of the German edition and “Hegel’s footnote.” one of Hegel’s own.

Cross-reference: Hegel’s first great text on the state, twenty years before the Groundlines: the Empire is no longer a state, because it lacks a common power. The concept of the state he wins here returns in § 257 ff.; on sovereignty § 278, on the estates element § 301 ff., on the relation of states § 321 ff. and § 330 ff. At each section the corresponding place is noted as a cross-reference. The German text is on the German side of this edition.

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Contents

• A
• 1.
• 2.
• B
• [Introduction]
• I. The Concept of the State
• [II. History and Critique of the Constitution of the German Empire]
•     [1. Military Power]
•     [2. Finances]
•     [3. The Territory of the Empire]
•     [4. Jurisdiction]
•     [5. Religion]
•     [6. The Power of the Estates]
•     [7. The Independence of the Estates]
•     [8. The Formation of National States]
•     [9. The Policy of the Two German Great Powers]
•     [10. Civic Freedom and the Freedom of the Estates]
• [III. Proposals for the Reform of the Constitution]
• C
• 1.
• 2.
•     [Finances]
• 3.
•     II.
• 4.
• 5.
• 6.
•     Chap.: Legality, that the exercise of the laws of the state does not come about
• 7.
•     Religion
• 8.
• D
• 1.
• 2.
• 3.
• 4.
• 5.

(1800-1802)

A

[First Drafts of an Introduction to the Essay on the Constitution]

1.

[Preface]¹⁾

1) Editors: This first draft for the essay on the constitution (Schüler no. 88) originated in early 1799 in Frankfurt (text in Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, ed. Hoffmeister, pp. 282-88) and was heavily revised in Jena in spring 1801 (Ms. vol. 13, leaves 7-10 – Kimmerle no. 3 – Lasson pp. 137 f. and 3-13). The revised text is reproduced here – in places a compromise between the readings of Lasson and Hoffmeister.

(1799/1801)

Was the political result of the ruinous war which the German Empire had to wage with France to be no other for Germany than that some of its fairest lands, some millions of its children, should be torn from it, that, as compensation for the princes thereby losing out, their ecclesiastical fellow-estates should be annihilated, and that a heavy burden of debt should prolong the misery of the war even into the peace?

So many German patriots asked themselves at the time of the Congress of Rastatt. It did indeed follow from the whole course of that assembly that alterations in the condition and constitution of Germany were, or were to become, its subject; why the condition is so closely connected with the constitution that [Germany] was bound to be subjected to a thoroughgoing political relegation will become clearer afterwards. Since then the misery of those German lands that are at war with France has become so great that exhaustion demands nothing but rest at any price for the moment, without

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