No. The impression arises from two sources: from a sentence that does not come from Hegel in that form, and from a word that means something other in him than in everyday use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201eThe state is the march of God through the world\u201c does not stand in the Groundlines<\/em>. It is the abbreviated circulating form of a sentence from the Addition<\/strong> to \u00a7 258<\/a> \u2013 that is, from the compilation that Eduard Gans put together from lecture transcripts after Hegel\u2019s death. And what stands there is: \u201eit is the march of God in the world that the state is<\/em>\u201c. What is said is that there are states at all is not merely a human arrangement \u2013 not that some particular state is divine. The circulating form turns a statement about there being a state into a statement about the state. More on this under Does this sentence come from Hegel at all?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Where Hegel calls the state \u201edivine\u201c, he means the same as with \u201erational\u201c. For him the rational is the divine \u2013 he says it bluntly in Homeyer\u2019s transcript: \u201eEverything that is divine is rational; and so conversely.\u201c Whoever makes a deification of the state out of this has read the sentence in the direction in which it is not meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u00a7 257<\/a> the state is called \u201ethe actuality of the ethical Idea\u201c. That is a determination of the concept, not a distinction conferred on any existing state. Since actual<\/a> means, in Hegel, corresponding to its concept, the sentence holds of no single state unexamined, but only to the degree to which it is what a state ought to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conversely, the thesis of deification runs aground at the point where Hegel treats religion. In the note to \u00a7 270<\/a> he expressly holds that religion, like cognition and science, has \u201eas its principle, a distinctive form of its own, different from that of the state\u201c. The state rests, in Hegel, on reason and not on articles of faith. A state that appeals to God instead of to grounds is for him not a higher one but a backward one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And finally: the state is not, in Hegel, the highest thing at all. Above objective spirit stand art<\/a>, religion<\/a> and philosophy<\/a> \u2013 three stages in which spirit knows itself and which the state does not overtake. Whoever takes Hegel for a deifier of the state has not read the last third of the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sources.<\/strong> Franz Gr\u00e9goire, \u201eLe mythe de l\u2019\u00c9tat divinis\u00e9\u201c, and the critique of Jacques Maritain, both reported in Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends<\/em>, 1996 \u00b7 Walter Kaufmann, \u201eThe Hegel Myth and Its Method\u201c, 1959. \u2013 In the edition: \u00a7 257<\/a>, \u00a7 258<\/a>, \u00a7 270<\/a>. \u2013 In the glossary: The State<\/a>, State and Religion<\/a>, Absolute Spirit<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe word<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What Hegel actually says \u2013 and what follows from it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n