[p. 596]
|596| it is necessarily done by war. The Jülich-Berg succession matter […]
6.
The arrangement of justice is therefore such that, when judgement is given in relations of public law, it cannot be executed, except when the interests concern an impotent estate; but if this is not the case, and usually it does not come to any judgement of right, it is decided according to power and the political relations.
That public power be present is the demand, and indeed it is not to be a mere thing of thought but is to have execution and reality; and that this execution be an actual execution, legal procedure is prescribed against him who refuses submission; but the realization of this legal procedure is a thing of thought.
Chap.
Legality, that the exercise of the laws of the state does not come about
It was set out in the preceding chapter that the state remains a state of thought by the fact that legal procedure has no execution; the force of legal procedure is hindered by power, and one would first have to judge that this hindrance is something unlawful, and indeed, because it concerns the existence of the state itself and public power, the greatest crime, high treason and crime of injured majesty. Yet one would be mistaken if one wished to judge merely according to the concept; for resistance to the resolutions of public power has itself been raised into the form of legal right; action is taken lawfully when the state is prevented from being a state, inasmuch as the power that can resist it is legitimate.
That the state is only a thing of thought lies in this, that as state it has no power, but that power is in the hands of individuals, and to recognise power mutually through electoral capitulation and treaties of peace, and thus to make it legal, this has been, since the relation of the state to individuals became an object of treaties, the general tendency of the
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