In brief: Everyone – but in different ways. Whereas in everyday life reason often works „behind the backs“ of those involved, for one particular group, the universal estate, it is an express duty of office.
Unconscious reason: civil society
In the sphere of the economy – the estate of trade and industry – the individual need not constantly have the whole in view. The baker may be self-interested and sell bread rolls in order to earn money. Reason sees to it, as it were behind the backs of those acting, that out of everyone’s self-interest there comes in the end the satisfaction of everyone’s needs – the construction of § 189–§ 208.
Conscious reason: the universal estate
From the universal estate, by contrast, Hegel demands reflected rationality. Since these people make the universal interests their business, they cannot afford mere arbitrary will; they must be rational by virtue of their office.
Who belongs to it today? Not only civil servants in ministries, but everyone who exercises a public function for the whole, for instance:
- Lawyers – judges, prosecutors, advocates: as organs of the administration of justice they preserve objective freedom.
- Teachers and scholars: they secure culture and cultivation, the presupposition of all rationality.
- Physicians: they preserve the physical substance without which no spirit can act.
- Journalists and representatives of non-governmental organisations: in so far as they pursue not private gain but public truth and universal goods.
The precondition: decoupling from self-interest
If this estate is to be rational, it must be decoupled from private need and greed – by private means, by a fixed salary, or by a professional ethos. Whoever works for the universal must be able to set his private cares aside in order to have a clear view of the matter. Hegel formulates this not as a demand for virtue but as an institutional condition:
The universal estate has, as its business, the universal interests of the social condition; it must therefore be exempted from direct labour for needs, either through private means, or through being indemnified by the state, which claims its activity, so that its private interest finds its satisfaction in its labour for the universal.
Groundlines, § 205
Sources. Groundlines § 202–§ 208 (the estates), in particular § 205 (the universal estate), § 207 (membership of an estate as one’s own decision), § 291–§ 294 (state service and its remuneration). – In the glossary: The Estates, Civil Society.