[p. 474]
|474| from each other: what is necessary for a multitude to be a state and a common power, and what is only a particular modification of this power and belongs not to the sphere of the necessary but, for the concept, to the sphere of the more or less better, and for actuality to the sphere of chance and arbitrary will.
This distinction has a very important side for the tranquillity of states, the security of governments and the freedom of peoples. For if the universal public power demands of the individual only what is necessary for it, and restricts the arrangements for this necessary to be rendered to it to that, then in other respects it can grant the living freedom and the own will of the citizens and leave it a great latitude, just as the public power, which is concentrated in the government as a necessary centre, is the less looked at askance by the individuals who are on the periphery on account of what it demands as necessary and whose indispensability for the whole each can see, and does not run the danger that, if the necessary and the more arbitrary [are] subjected to the centre of the public power with the same strictness with which it is demanded by the government, the citizens likewise confuse the two with each other and, when they grow equally impatient with the one as with the other, bring the state into danger from the side of its necessity.
To that part of the actuality of a state which belongs to chance must be reckoned the manner in which the entire public power exists in a supreme point of union. Whether the holder of power is one or several, whether this one or the several are born to this majesty or elected, is a matter of indifference to the one thing necessary, that a multitude constitute a state; just as indifferent as, among the individuals subject to the universal public power, uniformity or
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