Hegel has accomplished the feat of deducing the hereditary peerage, landed estates etc. etc., these ‘supports of the throne and society’, from the absolute Idea.

The deeper truth is that Hegel experiences the separation of the state from civil society as a contradiction. The mistake he makes is to rest content with the semblance of a resolution which he declares to be the real thing. By contrast, he treats with contempt the ‘so-called theories’ which call for the ‘separation’ of the classes and Estates. These theories, however, are right in that they express a consequence of modern society, for here the Estates are nothing more than the factual expression of the real relationship between the state and civil society, namely one of separation.

Hegel does not give the problem its familiar name. It is in fact the dispute between the representative constitutions and the constitution based on Estates. The representative constitution is a great advance because it is the open, logical and undistorted expression of the situation of the modern state. It is an undisguised contradiction.

Before coming to the problem itself let us take another look at Hegel’s presentation of it.

‘In the Estates, as an element in the legislative power, the class of private citizens acquires its political significance.’

Earlier on (in the Remark to §301) he had said:

‘Hence the specific function which the concept assigns to the Estates is to be sought in the fact that… the private judgement and private will of the sphere called “civil society” in this book comes into existence integrally related to the state.’

Summarizing this definition we find that ‘civil society is the class of private citizens’, in other words the class of private citizens is the immediate, essential, concrete class of civil society. Only in the Estates as an element in the legislative power does it acquire ‘political significance and efficacy’. The new attribute thus acquired is a particular function; for its very character as a class of private citizens indicates its antithesis to political significance and efficacy, its absence of a political character: it expresses the idea that civil society is in and for itself without any political significance and efficacy. The class of private citizens is the class of civil society, or, civil society is the class of private citizens. Consistently with this Hegel excludes the ‘universal class’ from the ‘Estates as an element in the legislative power’.

‘The universal class, or, more precisely, the class of civil servants, must, purely in virtue of its character as universal, have the universal as the end of its essential activity.’

The universal forms no part of the character of civil society or the class of private citizens; its essential activity does not have the universal as its end, alternatively, its essential activity is not determined by the universal, it is not a universal determination. The class of private citizens is the class of civil society against the state. The class of civil society is not a political class.

By defining civil society as a private class, Hegel has arrived at a position in which he must declare that the class distinctions of civil society are non-political and that civil and political life are heterogeneous and even antithetical. How does he continue?

‘[The class of private citizens]²⁸ appears, therefore, in the Estates neither as a mere indiscriminate multitude nor as an aggregate dispersed into its atoms, but as what it already is, namely a class subdivided into two, one sub-class [the agricultural class]²⁹ being based on a tie of substance between its members, and the other [the business class]29 on particular needs and the work whereby they are met (see §201 ff.). It is only in this way that there is a genuine link between the particular which is effective in the state and the universal.’

[§303.]

It is true enough that civil society (the class of private citizens) cannot appear in the Estates as ‘a mere indiscriminate multitude’, and this is because the ‘mere indiscriminate multitude’ exists only in the ‘imagination’, in ‘fantasy’, and not in reality. In reality there are only multitudes of varying sizes, according to chance (cities, market towns, etc.). This multitude or multitudes not only appear but are in reality ‘an aggregate dispersed into its atoms’ and they must enter upon their political functions in the Estates in this atomized state. The class of private citizens, civil society, cannot appear there as ‘what it already is’. For what is it? A private class, i.e. the antithesis of the state and in separation from it. In order to ‘acquire political significance and efficacy’ it must rather abandon what it is, viz. its private status. Only by this sacrifice can it acquire its ‘political significance and efficacy’. This political act entails a thoroughgoing transubstantiation. Civil society must completely renounce itself as civil society, as a private class, and must instead assert the validity of a part of its being which not only has nothing in common with, but is directly opposed to, its real civil existence.

What we see here in the individual case is in fact the general rule. Civil society is separated from the state. It follows, therefore, that the citizen of the state is separated from the citizen as a member of civil society. He must therefore divide up his own essence. As a real citizen he finds himself in a double organization. On the one hand, he is part of the bureaucratic order; this is an outward, formal determination of the state, the executive in its remoteness, and does not affect him and his independent reality. On the other hand, he is part of the social order, the order of civil society. But here he exists as a private citizen outside the state; the political state as such remains unaffected by the social order. The first [the bureaucratic] is an organization of the state for which he furnishes the material. The second [the social] is a civil organization whose material is not the state. In the first case, the state stands in formal opposition to him, in the second case he stands in material opposition to the state. If he is to become effective as a real citizen of the state, if he is to acquire true political significance and efficacy, he must abandon his civil reality, abstract from it and withdraw from the whole organization into his individuality. The only form in which he can exist as a citizen is the form of pure, unadorned individuality. For the existence of the state is complete without him and his existence in civil society is complete without the state. He can advance to the status of citizen of the state only as an individual, i.e. in contradiction with the only available forms of community. His existence as a citizen of the state is one which lies beyond the scope of his existence in any community, i.e. it is entirely individual. Only by becoming part of the ‘legislature’, as a ‘power’, is he supposed to become part of an organization, a communal body. Prior to joining the ‘legislature’ civil society, the class of private citizens, does not exist as an organization of the state and in order to acquire such an existence its real organization, real civil life, must be assumed to be non-existent, because the assumption of its non-existence is a part of the definition of the Estates as an element in the legislative power. The separation of civil and political society appears necessarily as the separation of the political citizen, the citizen of the state, from civil society and from his own real empirical reality; for as an ideal political entity [Staatsidealist] he is a quite different being, wholly distinct from and opposed to his actual reality. Civil society thus manufactures within itself the same relation between state and civil society that we have already found in the bureaucracy. In the Estates the universal really becomes explicitly [für sich] what it is implicitly [an sich], namely the antithesis of particular interests. If the citizen is to acquire political significance and efficacy, he must discard his class, civil society, the class of private citizens; for it is precisely this class that stands between the individual and the political state.

Now if Hegel counterposes the whole of civil society as a private class to the political state, it inevitably follows that all distinctions within the private class, i.e. the various classes of citizens, have only a private significance in respect to the state and no political status at all. For the various classes of citizens are merely the realized existence of the principle of the private class as the principle of civil society. If, however, this principle is to be abandoned, it follows inevitably that the divisions within the principle will not exist for the political state.

‘It is only in this way,’ Hegel concludes, ‘that there is a genuine link between the particular which is effective in the state and the universal.’

Hegel here confuses the state as the existence of a people as a whole with the political state. The particular he refers to is not the ‘particular in the state’ but the particular ‘outside it’, i.e. outside the political state. Not only is it not ‘the particular which is effective [wirkliche] in the state’, it is in fact the ‘unreality [Unwirklichkeit] of the state’. Hegel wishes to demonstrate that the classes of civil society are the political Estates and to achieve this he suggests that the classes of civil society are the ‘particular moments of the political state’, i.e. that civil society is identical with political society. The expression ‘the particular in the state’ can only have the meaning of ‘the particular moments of the state’. Hegel’s bad conscience leads him to give preference to the vague expression. He himself has not only argued the opposite case, he even confirms it in this paragraph by referring to civil society as ‘the class of private citizens’. No less cautious is his statement that there is a ‘link’ between the particular and the universal. It is possible to ‘link’ the most heterogeneous objects. But here we are confronted not with a gradual transition but with a transubstantiation and it is of no use to pretend that the gulf does not exist when we prove the contrary by the very act of leaping over it.

In the Remark [to §303] Hegel says:

‘This runs counter to another prevalent idea’ etc. We have already shown that this prevalent idea is logically and necessarily ‘a necessary idea at the present stage of the development of the people’ and that Hegel’s idea is mistaken notwithstanding its prevalence in certain circles. Returning to this prevalent idea, Hegel observes:

‘This atomistic and abstract point of view vanishes at the stage of the family’ etc ‘The state, however, is’ etc. etc. This point of view is certainly abstract, but the ‘abstraction’ is that of the political state as Hegel has presented it. It is also atomistic, but its atomism is that of society itself. The ‘point of view’ cannot be concrete when its object is ‘abstract’. The atomism into which civil society is plunged by its political actions is a necessary consequence of the fact that the community, the communistic entity [das Gemeinwesen, das kommunistische Wesen] in which the individual exists, civil society, is separated from the state, or in other words: the political state is an abstraction from civil society.

Even though this atomistic point of view vanishes in the family and perhaps (??) also in civil society, it returns in the political state just because the latter is an abstraction from the family and civil society. The converse is equally true. However, the mere fact that Hegel draws attention to the strangeness of this situation does not imply that he has eliminated the estrangement it entails.

‘The circles of association in civil society,’ he continues, ‘are already communities. To picture these communities as once more breaking up into a mere conglomeration of individuals as soon as they enter the field of politics, i.e. the field of the highest concrete universality, is eo ipso to hold civil and political life apart from one another and as it were to hang the latter in the air, because its basis could then only be the abstract individuality of caprice and opinion, and hence it would be grounded on chance and not on what is absolutely stable and justified.’ [§303, Remark]

This idea [of these communities breaking up] does not hold political and civil life apart; it is just the idea of a separation that actually exists.

Nor does this idea hang political life in the air; it is rather that political life is the airy life, the aethereal region of civil society.

Let us now consider the Estate and representative systems.

It was a definite advance in history when the Estates were transformed into social classes so that, just as the Christians are equal in heaven though unequal on earth, the individual members of the people became equal in the heaven of their political world, though unequal in their earthly existence in society. The actual transformation of the Estates into classes took place under the absolute monarchy. Thanks to the bureaucracy the idea of unity was made to prevail over the various states within the state. Nevertheless, alongside the bureaucracy of the absolutist government, the social distinctions between the classes remained political and this political difference persisted within and alongside the bureaucracy of the absolute government. Not until the French Revolution was the process completed in which the Estates were transformed into social classes, i.e. the class distinctions in civil society became merely social differences in private life of no significance in political life. This accomplished the separation of political life and civil society.

This was accompanied by a comparable transformation of the classes of civil society: with its separation from the political state, civil society also changed. The medieval ‘Estate’ survived only in the bureaucracy, in which civil and political position are immediately identical. In contrast to this, civil society exists as the class of private citizens. Class distinction here is no longer a distinction between autonomous groups distinguished by their needs and their work. The only universal distinction to survive is the superficial and formal one of the difference between town and country. Within society itself, however, distinctions are variable and fluid and their principle is that of arbitrariness. The chief criteria are those of money and education. However, this is a matter to be dealt with in our critique of Hegel’s analysis of civil society. Enough. The principle underlying civil society is neither need, a natural moment, nor politics. It is a fluid division of masses whose various formations are arbitrary and without organization.

The only noteworthy feature is that the absence of property and the class of immediate labour, of concrete labour, do not so much constitute a class of civil society as provide the ground on which the circles of civil society move and have their being.³⁰ The only class in which civil and political positions coincide is that of the members of the executive. The present state of society is distinguished from that which preceded it by the fact that civil society does not sustain the individual as a member of a community, as a communal being [Gemeinwesen]. On the contrary, whether an individual remains in a class or not depends partly on his work, partly on chance. The class itself is now no more than a superficial determination of the individual, for it is neither implicit in his work, nor does it present itself to him as an objective community, organized according to established laws and standing in a fixed relationship to him. It is rather the case that he has no real relation to his substantive activity, to his real class. The doctors do not constitute a special class in civil society. One businessman belongs to a different class from another and has a different social position. Just as civil society has split off from the political state, so too civil society has divided within itself into class and social position, even though the two are linked by numerous relations. The principle of the civil class or civil society is enjoyment and the capacity to enjoy. In his political role, the member of civil society breaks away from his class, his real private position; only then does he come into his own as a human being, only then does his determination as the member of a state, as a social being, appear as his human determination. For all of his other determinations in civil society appear as inessential to the man, to the individual, as external determinations, necessary to his existence within the whole, i.e. forming a bond with the whole, but a bond which he can just as easily cast away. (The civil society of the present is the principle of individualism carried to its logical conclusion. Individual existence is the ultimate goal; activity, work, content, etc., are only means.)

The constitution based on the Estates, when not a tradition of the Middle Ages, is the attempt, partly within the political sphere itself, to plunge man back into the limitations of his private sphere, to make his particular concerns into his substantive consciousness and to use the existence of political class distinctions to re-introduce corresponding distinctions of social class.

The real human being is the private human being of the present political constitution.

In general, Estate means that distinction and separation constitute the existence of the individual. Instead of his mode of life, his activity etc., making him a member, a function of society, they turn him into an exception, they are his privilege. This distinguishing characteristic is not merely individual, but establishes itself as a community, Estate or corporation, a fact which, far from eliminating its exclusive nature, is in reality its expression. Instead of the individual function being the function of society, the individual function is made into a society for itself.

Estate is based on the supreme law of the division of society, but, in addition, it separates man from his universal essence, it transforms him into an animal that is identical with its own immediate determinate nature. The Middle Ages is the animal history of mankind, its zoology.

The modern age, civilization, commits the opposite mistake. It isolates the objective essence of man, treating it as something purely external and material. It does not treat the content of man as his true reality.

This is a matter to be dealt with more thoroughly in the section on ‘Civil Society’. We come, therefore, to

§304. ‘The Estates, as an element in political life, still retain in their own function the class distinctions already present in the lower spheres of civil life.’

We have already shown that ‘the class distinctions already present in the lower spheres of civil life’ have no significance for the political sphere, or at best the significance of private, i.e. non-political, distinctions. However, according to Hegel, class does not retain the significance ‘already present’ (i.e. present in civil society), but instead, when the ‘Estates’ incorporate it into themselves, they affirm its essence and, for its part, once a class has immersed itself in the sphere of politics it acquires its ‘own’ significance, i.e. one proper not to itself but to the world of politics.

At a time when the structure of civil society was political and when the political state was civil society, this separation and duplication of the significance of the classes did not exist. They did not mean one thing in civil society and another in the world of politics. They did not take on new meaning in the world of politics, they retained what meaning they had. The dualism of civil society and the political state which the constitution based on Estates imagines that it can overcome with the aid of a reminiscence, appears in the fact that class distinctions (i.e. the distinctions within civil society) mean one thing in the political sphere and another in civil life. There is here an apparent identity, the same subject, but it has essentially different determinations, i.e. in reality there is a double subject. (That this identity is illusory is evident, despite the fact that the real subject, man, remains the same and does not forfeit his identity in the various determinations of his being. For here the subject is not man, but rather man is identified with a predicate – class – and at the same time it is maintained that he has both this definite determinacy and another determinacy and that in the latter he is different from the limited, exclusive being that he is in the former.) This illusory identity is artificially upheld by the supposition that, on the one hand, the class distinctions in civil society are defined by criteria rooted in the political sphere and, conversely, the class distinctions in the political sphere are defined by criteria rooted not in itself but in civil society. In order to represent the limited subject, the determinate class (class distinction) as the essential subject, or, in other words, in order to demonstrate the identity of the two predicates, they are both mystified and expounded in an illusory and vague duplicated form.

The same subject is given different meanings, but the meaning is not that of self-determination, but of an allegory foisted on to it. The same meaning could be given to a different subject, the same subject could be given a different meaning. The meaning of civil class distinctions in the political sphere is not their own meaning, but one derived from the political sphere itself; and moreover, they might easily have quite a different meaning, as was historically the case. The converse is equally true. This is the uncritical, mystical way in which to interpret an old view of the world in terms of a new one; the consequence must inevitably be a wretched hybrid in which the form falsifies the meaning and the meaning falsifies the form, and neither the form nor the meaning can ever become real form and real meaning. This uncritical mysticism is the key both to the riddle of modern constitutions (especially constitutions based on Estates) and also to the mystery of the Hegelian philosophy, above all the Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of Religion.

We may best free ourselves from this illusion if we take the meaning to be what it is, viz. the authentic determination, turn it into the subject and then decide whether the subject allegedly belonging to it is its real predicate, and whether it represents its essence and true realization.

‘The position’ (of the Estates) ‘is abstract to begin with, i.e. in contrast with the whole principle of monarchy or the crown, their position is that of an extreme – empirical universality. This extreme opposition implies the possibility, though no more, of harmonization, and the equally likely possibility of set hostility. This abstract position changes into a rational relation (into a syllogism, see Remark to §302) only if the middle term between the opposites comes into existence.’

We have already seen that the Estates in common with the executive form the middle term between the monarchical principle and the people, between the state-will expressed as one empirical will and as many empirical wills, between empirical individuality and empirical universality. Since he defined the will of civil society as empirical universality, Hegel had to define the will of the monarch as empirical individuality, but he does not allow the antithesis to emerge in all its clarity.

Hegel continues:

‘From the point of view of the crown, the executive already has this character (see §300). So, from the point of view of the Estates, one moment in them must be adapted to the task of existing as in essence the moment of mediation.’

But the true antitheses are the sovereign and civil society. And we have already seen the parallel between the meaning of the executive vis-à-vis the sovereign and the meaning of the Estates vis-à-vis the people. Just as the executive expands into a complex orbit, so the people are condensed into a miniature edition, for the constitutional monarch is compatible only with the people en miniature. The Estates are precisely the same abstraction of the political state vis-à-vis civil society as the executive is vis-à-vis the sovereign. The process of mediation seems therefore to have been fully achieved. Both extremes have relaxed their rigidity, have exchanged the spirit of their particular essence, and the legislature, which is made up of both the executive and the Estates, appears to be the middle term incarnate rather than the agent which brings the middle term into existence. Moreover, Hegel has already designated the Estates in common with the executive as the middle term between the people and the monarch (and likewise as the middle term between civil society and the executive, etc.). The rational relation, the syllogism, thus appears to be complete. The legislature, the middle term, is a hotch-potch of the two extremes of the monarchical principle and civil society, of empirical individuality and empirical universality, of subject and predicate. And in general Hegel regards the syllogism as a middle term, as a hotch-potch. We may say that in his exposition of this deductive process the whole transcendental and mystical dualism of his system becomes manifest. The middle term is the wooden sword, the concealed antithesis between the particular and the universal.

As a general comment on the whole argument we may point out that the ‘mediation’ that Hegel wishes to bring about here is not something that he derives from the essential nature of the legislature from its own determinate character. On the contrary, he derives it in deference to an existent being unconnected with the essential being of the legislature. It is a construction based on deference. The logical structure of the legislature is developed chiefly in deference to a third thing. For this reason, it is the construction of its formal existence that occupies the forefront of our attention. The legislature is construed very diplomatically. This follows from the false, illusory, pre-eminently political role of the legislature in the modern state (whose interpreter Hegel is). It follows inevitably that this is no true state, because its determinations (of which the legislature is one) have no theoretical standing in and for themselves, but must be regarded from a practical point of view; they are not autonomous powers but rather powers involving an antithesis, their laws are not defined according to the nature of the case but according to conventional rules.

In theory the Estates ought ‘in common with the executive’ to form the middle term between the will of empirical individuality, the sovereign, and the will of empirical universality, civil society. But in reality ‘their position’ is ‘abstract to begin with; i.e. in contrast with the whole principle of monarchy or the crown, their position is that of an extreme – empirical universality. This extreme opposition implies the possibility, though no more, of harmonization, and the equally likely possibility of set opposition.’ – An ‘abstract position’, as Hegel rightly observes.

Now it may appear at first as if there were no opposition between ‘the extreme of empirical universality’ and the ‘principle of monarchy or the crown’, the extreme of empirical individuality. For the Estates deputize for civil society, just as the executive deputizes for the monarch. In its deputy the executive, the monarchical principle ceases to be the extreme of empirical individuality, it forsakes its ‘groundless’ will and condescends to the level of ‘finite’ knowledge, responsibility and thought. Similarly, in the Estates, civil society seems to cease to be empirical universality and becomes instead a very definite whole which ‘possesses a political and administrative sense and temper, no less than a sense for the interests of individuals and particular groups’ (§302). In its miniature edition as the Estates civil society has ceased to be ‘empirical universality’. It has instead sunk to the level of a committee, a very definite number, and if the monarch has achieved empirical universality through the executive, civil society has achieved empirical individuality or particularity through the Estates. Both have become particular institutions.

The only antithesis that can still survive in this situation appears to be that between the two representatives of the two wills of the state, between the two emanations, between the executive and the Estates as a part of the legislature, and this appears as an antithesis within the legislature itself. These ‘common’ middle terms seem destined to be at loggerheads. In the executive part of the legislature, the inaccessible, empirical individuality of the sovereign has come down to earth and assumed the shape of a number of limited, tangible, responsible persons. In the Estates, civil society has ascended to Heaven in the shape of a number of political persons. Both sides have lost their definability. The crown, the inaccessible, exclusive, empirical One, loses its rigidity, and civil society, the inaccessible, amorphous, empirical All, loses its fluidity. With the Estates and the executive supplying the middle term between the sovereign and civil society we find for the first time all the prerequisites for an antithesis in which the two sides are not only drawn up ready for battle, but have also reached the point of irreconcilable conflict.

Thus this ‘middle term’ stands in great need of ‘coming into existence’, as Hegel so rightly infers. Far from accomplishing a mediation, it is the embodiment of contradiction.

Hegel seems to claim without offering any proof that this mediation is brought about by the Estates. He says:

‘From the point of view of the crown, the executive already has this character (see §300). So, from the point of view of the Estates, one moment in them must be adapted to the task of existing as in essence the moment of mediation.’

However, we have already seen how Hegel arbitrarily and illogically represents the crown and the Estates as opposed extremes. Just as the executive has the character of a middle term from the point of view of the crown, so have the Estates from the point of view of civil society. The Estates not only stand together with the executive between the crown and civil society; they also stand between the government as a whole and the people (§302). They have to do more in the way of mediation for civil society than the executive does for the crown, for the executive itself stands in opposition to the people. Their cup of mediation runneth over. Why burden the asses with even more sacks? Why should the Estates everywhere act as the asses’ bridge, even between themselves and their enemy? Why are they always so self-sacrificing? Why should they cut off one of their own hands when both are needed to repulse their opponents, the executive part of the legislature?

A further difficulty is that Hegel first derived the Estates from the corporations, class distinctions, etc., in order that they should be no ‘mere empirical universality’; whereas now he reduces them to a ‘mere empirical universality’ in order to derive the class distinctions from them! Just as the monarch uses the executive to mediate as Christ between himself and civil society, so civil society uses the Estates to mediate as priests between itself and the monarch.

But it now appears as if the extremes of the crown (empirical individuality) and civil society (empirical universality) have to assume the role of mediators ‘between their middle terms’. All the more so since ‘it is one of the most important discoveries of logic that a specific moment which, by standing in an opposition, has the position of an extreme, ceases to be such and is a moment in an organic whole by being at the same time a mean’ (Remark to §302). Civil society appears to be unable to assume this role since it has no place in the ‘legislature’ as itself as an extreme. Since the other extreme, the crown, has a place in the legislature in its own right, it seems right that it should act as mediator between the Estates and the executive. Moreover, it seems well qualified for the task. On the one hand, the whole of the state, inclusive of civil society, is represented in the crown and, in particular, the crown has one thing in common with the Estates, namely ‘empirical individuality’ of the will – for empirical universality is only real in the form of empirical individuality. Furthermore, the crown, unlike the executive, does not confront civil society simply as a formula, as a state consciousness. The crown is itself the state, and has the material, natural moment in common with civil society. On the other hand, the sovereign is the apex and the representative of the executive. (Hegel, who turns everything back to front, converts the executive into the representative, the emanation of the sovereign. When he deals with the idea which is to acquire reality in the sovereign, he does not have in mind the real idea of the executive, the executive conceived as an idea; he thinks instead of the subject of the absolute Idea which exists bodily in the sovereign. In consequence the executive becomes a mystical continuation of the soul existing in his body, the sovereign body.)

In the legislature, therefore, the sovereign has to form the middle term between the executive and the Estates. However, the executive already forms the middle term between the sovereign and the Estates, and the Estates mediate between him and civil society. How, then, can he mediate between things which he needs as a means to avoid being a one-sided extreme? We see here the confusion that results from the definition of extremes which assume the roles both of extremes and of mediating factors. They are Janus-heads facing both ways, with one character from the front and another from behind. What at first appeared as middle term between two extremes, now appears as an extreme in its own right, and one of the two extremes that had formerly been mediated by it now reappears as an extreme³¹ (because distinct from the other extreme) between its extreme and its middle term. There is a mutual exchange of compliments. It is like one man intervening between two men fighting, whereupon one of the disputants intervenes between his opponent and the mediator. It is the old story of the quarrel between a man and his wife. When the doctor attempts to intervene the man has to mediate between the doctor and his wife and the wife has to mediate between the doctor and her husband. It is like the lion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who proclaims both that he is the lion and that ‘I one Snug the joiner am, No lion fell’.³² At one moment an extreme is the lion of opposition, at another moment it is the Snug of mediation. Once one extreme has called out: ‘Now I am in the middle!’, the other two may not touch each other but must attack him. It is evident that the company as a whole like a fight but are too afraid of getting bruised to take things too far. So the two who wish to fight arrange matters so that the third man who intervenes will bear the brunt of the blows. But then one of the original two becomes the third and altogether they are so cautious that they never reach a decision. This system of mediation can also arise when a man wishes to thrash his opponent but must at the same time protect him against other enemies so that his dual role prevents him from carrying out his original intention. It is remarkable that Hegel could have reduced this absurd process of mediation to its abstract, logical and hence ultimate undistorted form, while at the same time enthroning it as the speculative mystery of logic, as the scheme of reason, the rational mode of deduction par excellence. Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require mediation, for their natures are wholly opposed. They have nothing in common with one another, they have no need for one another, they do not complement one another. The one does not bear within its womb a longing, a need, an anticipation of the other. (However, when Hegel treats universality and individuality, the abstract moments of the logical inference, as real antitheses, he reveals the fundamental dualism of his logic. This point needs to be developed further in a critique of Hegel’s Logic.)

This appears to be refuted by the dictum that ‘extremes meet’. The North and South Poles mutually attract each other; male and female likewise attract one another and human beings can arise only from the union of these two extremes.

And on the other hand: every extreme is its opposite. Abstract spiritualism is abstract materialism; abstract materialism is the abstract spiritualism of matter.

To the first point we may reply that both the North and South Poles are poles; they are identical in essence. Similarly, both the male and female sex belong to one species and have one essence, the essence of man. North and South are the opposite determinations of a single essence; the distinct sides of one essence at the highest point of its development. They are the essence in a state of differentiation. They are what they are only as a distinct determination, and moreover as this distinct determination of an essence. The true, real extremes would be a pole as opposed to a non-pole, a human as opposed to a non–human sex. The differentiation in this case [i.e. ‘extremes meet’] is one of existence, in the former situation [‘the true real extremes’] it is one of essence, of two essences.

On the second point, we may remark that the issue turns on the fact that a concept (existence, etc.) is viewed abstractly, that it is not treated as something autonomous but as an abstraction from something else and that only this abstraction has meaning; thus, for example, mind is only an abstraction from matter. It is then self-evident that, precisely because this form constitutes its content, the concept is in fact the abstract opposite, while the object from which it abstracts (in this case abstract materialism) is in its abstract state its real essence. If it had been possible to avoid confusing the distinctions within one essence partly with autonomous abstractions (of course, not abstractions from something else, but, ultimately, self-abstractions), and partly with the real antitheses between mutually exclusive essences, it would also have been possible to avoid three pitfalls. (1) The first fallacy is to infer that, because only the extreme is true, it must follow that every abstraction and one-sidedness is true. This leads to a situation in which a principle does not appear as a totality in itself, but only as an abstraction from something else. (2) The second mistake occurs when the sharp definition of real antitheses, their assumption of extreme forms, is held to be something pernicious which has to be prevented, whereas this is nothing but the process of self-knowledge and the preliminaries necessary to resolving the conflict between them. (3) The final error is to attempt to mediate between them. For however much it may appear as if both extremes were equally real and extreme it nevertheless remains true that only one is an extreme by nature, while the extremity of the other does not have the significance of true reality. The one affects the other, but their positions are not identical. For example, Christianity or religion in general is an extreme opposite of philosophy. But in reality there is no true antithesis between religion and philosophy. For philosophy comprehends religion in its illusory reality. In the eyes of philosophy, religion – inasmuch as it wishes to become a reality – must necessarily disintegrate. There is no real dualism of essence. More about this later.

We may ask why Hegel arrives at the necessity for a new mediation on the Estates’ side? Does he share the ‘popular, but most dangerous, prejudice which regards the Estates principally from the point of view of their opposition to the executive, as if that were their essential attitude’? (Remark to §302.)

The position is simply this. On the one hand, we have seen that in the ‘legislature’ civil society in the form of the ‘Estates’ has for the first time come into immediate, real, practical conflict with the crown in the form of the ‘executive’.

On the other hand, the legislature is the totality. It contains the (1) the monarchical principle as represented by the ‘executive’; (2) the representatives of civil society, i.e. the ‘Estates’; but in addition we find also (3) one extreme as such, viz. the monarchical principle, while the other extreme, civil society, is excluded as such. This means that whereas civil society ought to form the opposite extreme to the ‘monarchical’ principle, the ‘Estates’ do so in fact. We recollect that civil society comes into political existence only with the ‘Estates’. The ‘Estates’ are its political existence, its transubstantiation into the political state. Therefore, as we have seen, it is only with the ‘legislature’ that we arrive at the political state in its totality. Thus we have (1) the monarchical principle, (2) the executive and (3) civil society. The ‘Estates’ are ‘the civil society of the political state’, of the ‘legislature’. Therefore, the extreme that civil society is supposed to form in opposition to the monarchical principle is the ‘Estates’. (Because civil society represents the unreality of its political existence, the political existence of civil society represents its own disintegration, its separation from itself.) In similar fashion it forms an antithesis to the executive.

Hence Hegel refers to the ‘Estates’ as the ‘extreme position of empirical universality’, which actually applies properly to civil society itself. (Hence it was pointless for Hegel to cause the political Estates to arise out of the corporations and the different classes. This would only have been meaningful if the different classes as such were the Estates and if the determination of civil life were in reality identical with that of political life. In that case we would not have a legislature of the state as a whole, but a legislature of the different Estates, corporations and classes over the state as a whole. In that event the classes of civil society would not receive their political determination from elsewhere, but instead they would determine the political state. They would turn their particularity into the power determining the whole. They would represent the power of the particular over the universal. We would not have a single legislature but a plurality of legislative powers which would come to an understanding among themselves and with the executive. But what Hegel has in mind here is the modern significance of the Estates, viz. the realization of state-citizenship, of the bourgeois. He wants the ‘absolute universal’, the political state, to determine civil society instead of being determined by it. He resuscitates the form of the medieval Estates but reverses their meaning by causing them to be determined by the political state. But in that case the Estates which represented the corporations, etc. would not be ‘empirical universality’ but ‘empirical particularity’, the ‘particularity of empirical reality’!) The ‘legislature’ therefore requires mediation within itself, i.e. the concealment of its internal antagonisms. This mediation must proceed from the Estates because within the legislature the latter cease to represent civil society and so become a primary moment, i.e. they become the civil society of the legislature. The ‘legislature’ is the totality of the political state and precisely for that reason forcibly brings out its contradictions. To that extent it is its established disintegration. Widely differing principles come into conflict within it. This becomes manifest, of course, as a conflict between the monarchical principle and the principle of the Estates, etc. But in reality it is the antinomy of the political state and civil society, the contradiction of the abstract political state with itself. The legislature is the political state as revolt. [Die gesetzgebende Gewalt ist die gesetzte Revolte.]

(Hegel’s chief error is that he regards contradiction in the phenomenal world as unity in its essence, in the Idea. There is however a profounder reality involved, namely an essential contradiction, e.g. in this case the contradiction in the legislature is itself only the self-contradiction of the political state, and hence of civil society.

Vulgar criticism falls into the opposite dogmatic error. Thus it criticizes the constitution. It points to the existence of antagonistic powers, etc. It discovers contradictions everywhere. A criticism that still struggles with its object remains dogmatic. For example, it was dogmatic to attack the dogma of the Holy Trinity by pointing out the contradiction of the three that were one. True criticism shows the inner genesis of the Holy Trinity in the brain of man. It describes its birth. Similarly, a truly philosophical criticism of the present constitution does not content itself with showing that it contains contradictions: it explains them, comprehends their genesis, their necessity. It grasps their particular significance. This act of comprehension does not however consist, as Hegel thinks, in discovering the determinations of the concepts of logic at every point; it consists in the discovery of the particular logic of the particular object.)

Hegel expresses this by saying that the opposition of the political Estates to the monarch ‘implies the possibility, though no more, of harmonization, and the equally likely possibility of set hostility’.

The possibility of hostility is to be found everywhere where different wills come into contact. Hegel himself states that the ‘possibility of harmonization’ is the ‘possibility of hostility’. He must therefore attempt to construct an element that would guarantee the ‘impossibility of hostility’ and the ‘reality of harmonization’. Such an element would be the freedom of thought and decision vis-à-vis the will of the monarch and the executive. This would no longer be a part of the ‘Estates’. It would rather be an element of the will of the monarch and of the executive and would thus find itself in the same conflict with the real classes as does the executive.

This requirement is considerably toned down in the conclusion to this Paragraph:

‘From the point of view of the crown, the executive already has this character (see §300). So, from the point of view of the Estates, one moment in them must be adapted to the task of existing as in essence the moment of mediation.’

The moment emerging from the Estates must have the opposite meaning to that which the executive has in relation to the sovereign, because sovereign and Estates stand at opposing extremes. Just as the monarch democratizes himself in the executive, so the Estates monarchize themselves in the power that is to deputize for them. What Hegel requires, then, is a sovereign-moment arising from the Estates. Just as the executive represents an Estate-moment on the side of the sovereign, so there must also be a sovereign-moment on the side of the Estates.

The ‘reality of harmonization’ and the ‘impossibility of hostility’ thus become translated into the following postulate: ‘So, from the point of view of the Estates, one moment in them must be adapted to the task of existing as in essence the moment of mediation.’ Adapted to the task! According to §302 this is the general task of the Estates. What is required here is not a ‘task’, but something more specific.

And what sort of a task is it that requires one to ‘exist as in essence the moment of mediation’? It is the task of being ‘in essence’ Buridan’s ass.³³

The position is simply this:

The Estates are supposed to ‘mediate’ between the sovereign and the executive on the one hand, and the people on the other; but they do not do this. Instead they are the organized political antagonism of civil society. The ‘legislature’ itself stands in need of mediation. This mediation, moreover, should proceed from the Estates. It does not suffice to posit a moral harmony between the two sides, between the political will in the form of the will of the sovereign and the political will in the form of the will of civil society. It is true that it is only with the legislature that we find the organized, total political state, but it is precisely here at the apex of the system that we also find the self-contradictions of the political state revealed in all their starkness. Hence there is a need to establish the appearance of a real identity between the will of the sovereign and the will of the Estates. The Estates must be established as the will of the sovereign, or the will of the sovereign must be established as the Estates. The Estates must establish themselves as the reality of a will which is not their own. The unity which cannot be found in the essence of the situation (for otherwise it would have to prove itself in terms of the efficacy of the Estates, and not their mode of existence) must at least be present in its existence, in other words, an actually existing element of the legislature (of the Estates) has the task of representing the unity of the disunited. This moment of the Estates, the chamber of peers or upper house, etc., is the highest synthesis of the political state in the organization under consideration. It does not, it is true, achieve Hegel’s aim of the ‘reality of harmonization’ and the ‘impossibility of hostility’. On the contrary, it does not advance beyond the ‘possibility of harmonization’. Nevertheless, it establishes the illusion of the unity of the political state in itself (i.e. the unity of wills of the sovereign and the Estates, and unity of the principle of the political state with that of civil society); moreover, this unity is a material principle, i.e. it is not merely the case that two opposed principles are reconciled, but that their unity exists in nature, in actual existence. This moment of the Estates is, then, the romanticism of the political state, it contains its dreams of its essential unity, its harmony with itself. It is an allegorical existence.

Whether this illusion is efficacious or whether it is a conscious self-deception depends on the real status quo of the relationship between the Estates and the crown. As long as Estates and crown have an actual understanding and are in actual harmony, the illusion of their essential unity is a real and hence efficacious illusion. Where this is not the case it becomes conscious untruth and farce as soon as it has to prove itself.

§305. ‘The principle of one of the classes of civil society is in itself capable of adaptation to this political position. The class in question is the one whose ethical life is natural, whose basis is family life, and so far as its livelihood is concerned, the possession of land. Its particular members attain their position by birth, just as the monarch does, and, in common with him, they possess a will which rests on itself alone.’

We have already exposed the fallacies of Hegel’s argument here. (1) After he has argued that the Estates develop from the corporations he goes on to confound this with the Estates in their modern abstraction from civil society. (2) After he has defined the Estates as such as the ‘extreme of empirical universality’, he goes on to define them in terms of the class distinctions of civil society.

Logic would not require him to consider the Estates as a new element in their own right and then to deduce from them the mediation he postulated in §304.

But let us see how Hegel re-introduces civil class distinctions while at the same time creating the impression that the legislature as the highest political sphere, is not determined by the reality, the particular nature of civil class distinctions, but that, on the contrary, this reality, this particular nature of class distinctions, sinks to the level of material that is shaped by the political sphere in accordance with its own self-generated needs.

‘The principle of one of the classes of civil society is in itself capable of adaptation to this political position. The class in question is the one whose ethical life is natural…’ (i.e. the agricultural class).

But what is the nature of the principled ability of the agricultural class, what is the capability of its principle? It has ‘its basis in family life, and, so far as its livelihood is concerned, the possession of land. Its particular members attain their position by birth, just as the monarch does, and, in common with him, they possess a will which rests on itself alone.’

The ‘will which rests on itself alone’ is treated here in the context of the livelihood afforded by the ‘possession of land’, while the fact that like the monarch one owes one’s position to one’s birth is based on ‘family life’.

The livelihood based on ‘the possession of land’ and ‘a will which rests on itself alone’ are two quite separate things. Hegel should speak rather of ‘a will which rests on the possession of land’. Even more properly he should speak of a will resting ‘on political principles’, i.e. not a will which rests on itself, but one which rests within society as a whole.

The place of ‘principles’, of the ‘possession of political mind’, is taken by the ‘possession of land’.

Furthermore, as for the basis in ‘family life’, the ‘social’ ethical life of civil society seems to be superior to this ‘natural’ ethical life. Moreover, ‘family life’ is the ‘natural ethical life’ of the other classes, i.e. of the citizens in civil society, as much as it is of the agricultural class. But if among the agricultural class ‘family life’ supplies not only the principle of the family but also the foundation of social life as such, this would seem to debar it from the highest political tasks because it involves the attempt to apply patriarchal laws to an unpatriarchal situation and to treat the political state and state-citizenship in terms of father and child, master and servant.

As to the statement that the monarch owes his position to his birth, it should be pointed out that Hegel has expounded the theory not of a patriarchal monarch but of the modern constitutional king. The fact of his birth ensures that he is the physical representative of the state and is born to kingship, in other words that the kingdom is his family inheritance. But what has this to do with family life as the basis of the agricultural class, what has natural ethical life in common with the fact that one owes one’s position to one’s birth? The king has this much in common with a horse, that just as the latter is born a horse, so the king is born a king.

Once Hegel had turned his own class distinctions as such into political distinctions, the agricultural class as such became an independent part of the Estates; but if as such it is already a moment of mediation with the crown, why did Hegel need to construct a new mediation? And why was it necessary to isolate this class from the actual moment of the Estates when it is only this isolation that brings it into its ‘abstract’ relation to the crown? And having once shown that the Estates have a proper identity,

involving the transubstantiation of the class of private citizens into citizens of the state, and having argued further that they therefore stand in need of mediation, how can Hegel go on to dissolve this organism back into the distinct private classes and then hope to derive the middle term in the political state from them?

And in general is it not anomalous that the highest synthesis of the political state should be none other than the synthesis of family life and landownership!

In a word:

If the civil classes as such are political classes there is no need for any mediation, and, if there is a need for mediation, then the civil classes cannot be political and hence cannot provide that mediation. The farmer is then a part of the Estates as a citizen and not as a farmer and, conversely (where it is as a farmer that he is a citizen, or is a farmer in his capacity as citizen), his citizenship is his membership of the agricultural class and it is not as a farmer that he is a citizen but as a citizen that he is a farmer!

We are confronted here with an inconsistency within Hegel’s own analysis and such an inconsistency is part of a compromise. The Estates in their modern sense, i.e. in the sense given to them by Hegel, postulate a complete separation of civil society from the class of private citizens and its components. How can Hegel put forward the class of private citizens as a solution to the internal contradictions of the legislature? Hegel would like to retain the medieval system of Estates but in the form of the modern legislature, and he would like to retain the modern legislature but in the shape of the medieval system of Estates! It is syncretism of the very worst sort.

§304 begins with the words:

‘The Estates, as an element in political life, still retain in their own function the class distinctions already present in the lower spheres of civil life.’

But in their own function the Estates only retain these distinctions by annulling them, by destroying them and abstracting from them.

If the agricultural class or, as we shall learn later on, the potentiated agricultural class, namely the landed gentry, is converted in the way already described into the mediating factor of the total political state, of the legislature, this will undoubtedly lead to mediation between the Estates and the crown in the sense that the Estates will cease to function as a real political element. The operative factor in restoring the unity of the political state is not the agricultural class but class, the class of private citizens, the analysis (reduction) of the Estates into a private class. (Not the agricultural class as such, but rather its separation from the political Estates in its quality as private, civil class, is the mediating factor here; it is the fact that its private status gives it a special position in the Estates and this ensures that the other portion of the Estates acquires the position of a particular private class and thus ceases to represent the citizens of civil society.) Thus we are no longer confronted with the political state in the form of two opposed wills but, on the one hand, with the political state (government and monarch) and, on the other, with civil society as distinct from the political state (i.e. the different classes). This completes the destruction of the political state as a totality.

The most obvious meaning of the internal duplication of the Estates as a means of mediation with the crown is that this separation, this internal contradiction in the Estates represents the restored unity with the crown. The fundamental dualism between crown and Estates within the legislature is neutralized by the internal dualism in the Estates. In Hegel this neutralization is achieved by separating the Estates from their political dimension.

We shall return later to the question of the correspondence of landed property as a means of livelihood with the sovereign will, the sovereignty of the crown and family life as the basis of the agricultural, class – something which corresponds to the natural birthright of the monarch. Here in §305 Hegel expounds the ‘principle’ of the agricultural class as something ‘capable of adaptation to this political position’.

In §306 the process of ‘adaptation to this political position and significance’ is elaborated. It reduces itself to the statement that ‘their wealth becomes inalienable, entailed and burdened by primogeniture’.³⁴ ‘Primogeniture’ is thus seen as the institution by which the landowning class is ‘fitted’ for politics.

‘Primogeniture is grounded on the fact that the state should be able to reckon not on the bare possibility of political inclinations, but on something necessary. Now an inclination for politics is of course not bound up with wealth, but there is a relatively necessary connection between the two, because a man with independent means is not hemmed in by external circumstances and so there is nothing to prevent him from entering politics and working for the state.’ [Addition to §306]

First statement. The state cannot remain content with ‘the bare possibility of political inclinations’, it must be able to reckon on something ‘necessary’.

Second statement. ‘An inclination for politics is not bound up with wealth’, i.e. the political inclinations bound up with wealth remain a ‘bare possibility’.

Third statement. But there is a ‘relatively necessary connection’ and this lies in the circumstance that ‘there is nothing to prevent a man with independent means, etc. from working for the state’, i.e. wealth provides the ‘possibility’ of political inclinations, but according to the first statement ‘possibility’ does not suffice.

Furthermore, Hegel has not shown that landed property is the only form of independent means’.

The fact that the wealth of the agricultural class is so constituted as to be independent is what fits this class ‘for political position and significance’. Or, in other words, the ‘independence’ of its ‘means’ is its ‘political position and significance’.

Hegel elaborates on this independence as follows:

The ‘means’ of the agricultural class are ‘independent of the state’s capital’. By the state’s capital he evidently means the government treasury. In this respect a contrast is intended with ‘the universal class’ which is ‘essentially dependent on the state’. Thus in the Preface [to the Philosophy of Right] Hegel writes:

‘Apart from anything else, philosophy with us is not as it was with the Greeks for instance, pursued in private like an art, but has an existence in the open, in contact with the public, and especially, or even only, in the service of the state.’

Thus even philosophy is ‘essentially’ dependent on the government treasury.

The wealth of the agricultural class is independent ‘of the uncertainty of business, the quest for profit, and any sort of fluctuation in possessions’. In this respect it is to be contrasted with the ‘business class’ which is based ‘on particular needs and the work whereby these are met’.

This wealth is likewise ‘independent of favour, whether from the executive or the mob’.

Finally, it is even fortified against its own wilfulness because ‘those members of this class who are called to political life are not entitled, as other citizens are, either to dispose of their entire property at will, or to the assurance that it will pass to their children, whom they love equally, in similarly equal divisions’.

The antagonisms have now assumed a wholly novel and very material shape – something that we had hardly expected to find in the heaven of the political state.

Expressed in all its starkness, the antagonism Hegel has uncovered is the conflict between wealth and private property.

Landed property is the pre-eminent form of private property, it is private property par excellence. The exact nature of its privacy emerges in that (1) in its ‘independence of the state’s capital’, of the ‘favour of the executive’, of property existing as the ‘universal property of the political state’, it emerges as one particular form of wealth among other forms, in accordance with the structure of the political state. It appears (2) as ‘independent of the needs’ of society or ‘social wealth’ or the ‘favour of the mob’. (The fact that a share in the state’s capital should be regarded as a ‘favour of the executive’ is just as significant as that a share in the wealth of society should appear as the ‘favour of the mob’.) The wealth of the ‘universal class’ and of the ‘business class’ is no true private property because in the first case directly and in the second case indirectly it is conditioned by its connections with the wealth of the whole society, with property conceived as social property. There is no doubt that a share in this property is indeed mediated on both sides by ‘favour’, i.e. by ‘accident of will’. In contrast with this landed property is sovereign private property which has not yet acquired the form of wealth, i.e. has not yet become property as established by the will of society.

The political constitution at its highest point is thus the constitution of private property. The loftiest political principles are the principles of private property. Primogeniture is merely the external manifestation of the inner nature of landed property. Because such property is inalienable, the nerves connecting it to society are severed and its isolation from civil society is assured. Because it may not even pass to equally loved children in similarly equal divisions, it is even compelled to renounce the smaller natural society of the family with its will and its laws. It thus even preserves the harsh nature of private property from passing over into family wealth.

In §305 Hegel judged the class of landed property to be capable of adaptation to ‘political position’ because of its ‘basis in family life’. He has himself declared that ‘love’ is the basis, the principle and the spirit informing family life. We now see that the class which is based on family life is deprived of the basis of family life, it is deprived of love as the real, and thus effective and determining, principle. It is the illusion of family life, family life in its most soulless form. At the point of its highest development the principle of private property contradicts the principle of family life. Family life therefore comes into its own as the life of the family, the life of love, only in civil society, and not in the class ‘whose ethical life is natural’, i.e. the class of family life. This latter represents the barbarism of private property as opposed to family life.

This then is private property, landed property in all its sovereign glory; it is this that has been the occasion of so much sentimentality in recent years, it is for this that so many colourful crocodile tears have been shed.

It is of no avail for Hegel to argue that primogeniture is merely an exigency of politics and so must be judged according to its political significance. It is of no avail for him to assert that ‘the security and stability of the landowning class may be still further increased by the institution of primogeniture, though this institution is desirable only from the point of view of politics, since it entails a sacrifice for the political end of giving the eldest son a life of independence.’ Hegel is not without a certain decency, the decency of the understanding. He does not wish to retain primogeniture in and for itself, but only in reference to something else, as something determined rather than self-determining, not as an end but as a means to justify and construct an end. In reality primogeniture is a consequence of private property in the strict sense, private property petrified, private property (quand même) at the point of its greatest autonomy and sharpest definition. What Hegel asserts to be the end, the determining factor, the prime cause of primogeniture is in fact an effect of it, a consequence. Whereas according to Hegel primogeniture represents the power of the political state over private property, it is in fact the power of abstract private property over the political state. He makes the cause into the effect and the effect into the cause, the determining factor into the determined and vice-versa.

But what is the content of its political function, of its political purpose, what is the purpose of this purpose? What is its substance? Primogeniture, the superlative form of private property, private property supreme. What power does the political state exercise over private property through primogeniture? It isolates it from society and the family by bringing it to a peak of abstract independence, What then is the power of the political state over private property? It is the power of private property itself, its essence brought into existence. What remains to the state as opposed to this essence? The illusion that it determines where it is in fact determined. No doubt it breaks the will of the family and society, but only to make way for the will of a private property purified of family and society and to acknowledge the existence of this private property as the highest reality of the political state, as the highest ethical reality.

Let us consider the different component parts of the legislature, of the total state, the real, consequential and conscious state, the real political state, let us see how they behave and let us view them in the light of their ideal of what ought to be, and of their logical form and determination.

(Primogeniture is not as Hegel claims ‘a chain on the freedom of private rights’, it is rather ‘the freedom of private rights that has liberated itself from all social and ethical chains’.) (‘The highest political construction is the construction of abstract private property.’)

Before entering into this comparison let us first take a closer look at one assertion contained in this paragraph [§306], viz. the statement that thanks to primogeniture the wealth of the agricultural class, landed property, private property ‘is even fortified against its own wilfulness, because those members of this class who are called to political life are not entitled, as other citizens are, to dispose of their entire property at will’.

We have already emphasized how the social nerves of private property were severed by the ‘inalienability’ of landed property. Private property (landed property) is fortified against the wilfulness of its owner in consequence of the conversion of his universally human wilfulness into the specific wilfulness of private property; that is to say, private property has become the subject of will; the will survives only as the predicate of private property. Private property is no longer a determined object of wilfulness, but instead wilfulness is the determined predicate of private property. But let us compare what Hegel has said himself in the context of civil law:

§65. ‘The reason I can alienate my property is that it is mine only in so far as I put my will into it […] provided always that the thing in question is a thing external by nature.’

§66. ‘Therefore those goods, or rather substantive characteristics, which constitute my private personality and the universal essence of my self-consciousness are inalienable and my right to them cannot lapse. Such characteristics are my personality as such, my universal freedom of will, my ethical life, my religion.’

In the institution of primogeniture, then, landed property, private property in the strict sense, becomes inalienable, and thus a substantive characteristic which constitutes the ‘private personality and the universal essence of the self-consciousness’ of the class of noble entailed estates, ‘its personality as such, its universal freedom of will, its ethical life, its religion’. It is perfectly logical that where private property, landed property, is inalienable, ‘the universal freedom of will’ (of which the right to dispose freely of an external object, such as landed property, is an essential part) is alienable. The same thing holds good for ethical life (which includes love as the moving spirit and the real law governing the family). The ‘inalienability’ of private property implies the ‘alienability’ of the universal freedom of the will and of ethical life. Property is no longer mine in so far as ‘I put my will into it’; it is truer to say that my will only exists ‘in so far as it exists in the property’. My will does not possess, it is possessed. What makes the glories of primogeniture appear in such a romantic light is that private property, i.e. private wilfulness in its most abstract form, utterly philistinic, unethical and barbaric wilfulness, is made to appear as the highest synthesis of the political state, the loftiest elimination of wilfulness and the bitterest, most self-denying struggle with human frailty. For the humanization of private property appears to be nothing more than a piece of human frailty. Primogeniture is private property enchanted by its own independence and splendour, and wholly immersed in itself; it is private property elevated to the status of a religion. By analogy with its protection against direct alienation, private property is similarly excluded from contract. Hegel presents the transition from property to contract in the following manner:

§71. ‘Existence as determinate being is in essence being for another […] One aspect of property is that it is an existent as an external thing, and in this respect property exists for other external things, and is connected with their necessity and contingency. But it is also an existent as an embodiment of the will, and from this point of view the “other” for which it exists can only be the will of another person. This relation of will to will is the true and proper ground in which freedom is existent. – The sphere of contract is made up of this mediation whereby I hold property not merely by means of a thing and my subjective will, but by means of another person’s will as well and so hold it in virtue of my participation in a common will.’

(In primogeniture the fact that property is held not in virtue of participation in a common will, but only ‘by means of a thing and a subjective will’ is made an integral part of the law of the land.) Whereas in civil law Hegel confers the status of true idealism upon the alienability of private property and its dependence on a common will, in constitutional law he extols the imaginary virtues of independent property in contrast with’ the uncertainty of business, the quest for profit, the fluctuations of possessions and dependence upon the government treasury’. What sort of a state is it that cannot even tolerate the idealism of its own civil law? What sort of a philosophy of right is it that assigns one meaning to independent private property in civil law and another in constitutional law?

As contrasted with the barbaric stupidity of independent private property, the uncertainty of business is pure elegy, the quest for profit has a moving solemnity (drama), the fluctuations of possessions have a grim inevitability (tragedy), the dependence upon the government treasury has a high ethical content. In a word, in all these relations the human heart can be heard throbbing behind the façade of property, in all of them we witness man’s dependence upon man. Whatever the nature of this dependence it is human, unlike the situation of these slaves who, because they are bound not to society but to the soil, imagine themselves free; freedom of will in these circumstances amounts simply to the absence of any content but that of private property.

To define such monstrosities as primogeniture as a determination of private property by the state is the kind of unavoidable error that arises when an old world-view is seen in terms of a new one, when an institution like private property is given two contrary meanings, one in the courtroom of abstract law, the other in the heaven of the political state.

Let us turn now to the comparison foreshadowed above [p. 144].

In §257 we find:

‘The state is the reality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself […] The state exists immediately in custom, mediately in individual self consciousness […] while self-consciousness in virtue of its sentiment towards the state finds in the state, as its essence and the end and product of its activity, its substantive freedom.’

In §268:

‘The political sentiment, patriotism pure and simple, is assured conviction with truth as its basis […] and a volition that has become habitual. In this sense it is simply a product of the institutions subsisting in the state, since rationality is really present in the state, while action in conformity with these institutions gives rationality its practical proof. This sentiment is, in general, trust (which may pass over into a greater or lesser degree of educated insight), or the consciousness that my interest, both substantive and particular, is contained and preserved in another’s (i.e. the state’s) interest and end, i.e. in the other’s relation to me as an individual. In this way, this very other is immediately not an other in my eyes, and in being conscious of this fact, I am free.’

The reality of the ethical idea becomes manifest here as the religion of private property. (Because primogeniture is the religious form of private property we find that in our modern age religion has generally become an integral part of landed property and all writings on the subject of primogeniture are imbued with religious unction. Religion is the highest conceptual form of this brutality.) The ‘substantial will manifest and revealed to itself becomes transformed into a mysterious will broken on the soil, a will intoxicated by the very opacity of the element to which it is attached. The ‘assured conviction with truth as its basis’ which is Hegel’s description of ‘political sentiment’ is a conviction based (literally) ‘on its own ground’. The political ‘volition that has become habitual’ is no longer ‘simply a product’ etc., but an institution subsisting outside the state. Political sentiment is no longer ‘trust’ [Zutrauen] but rather ‘the confidence [Vertrauen], the consciousness that my interest as an individual, both substantive and particular, is independent of another’s (i.e. the state’s) interest and end’. This is the nature of my consciousness of my freedom from the state.

‘The maintenance of the state’s universal interest’, etc., was the task assigned to the ‘executive’ (§289). The latter was the repository of ‘the consciousness of right and the developed intelligence of the mass of the people’ (§297). It actually renders ‘the Estates unnecessary’ because [the higher civil servants] ‘even without the Estates are able to do what is best, just as they also continually have to do while the Estates are in session’ (Remark to §301). ‘The universal class, or, more precisely, the class of civil servants, must, purely in virtue of its character as universal, have the universal as the end of its essential activity’ (§303).

And how does the universal class, the executive, appear now? ‘As essentially dependent upon the executive’, as ‘wealth, dependent upon the favour of the executive’. Civil society underwent a similar transformation. At first it had achieved an ethical existence in the corporation; later it was found to be dependent upon ‘the uncertainty of business’ etc. and ‘the favour of the mob’.

What then does Hegel see as the specific quality of the owner of an entailed estate? And what could the ethical value of inalienable wealth possibly consist in? In its incorruptibility. Incorruptibility thus becomes the highest political virtue, an abstract virtue. At the same time in Hegel’s construction of the state, incorruptibility is held to be something so very special as to require a special political institution and it becomes conscious precisely because it is not the spirit informing the political state, not the rule, but an exception, and it is in fact constructed as such an exception. In order to preserve the owners of entailed estates from bribery, they are bribed by their independent property. In theory dependence upon the state and the feeling of this dependence represent the pinnacle of political freedom, because it is the feeling experienced by the private person as an abstract, dependent person who feels and should feel himself to be free only in his capacity as a citizen. Here, by contrast, Hegel develops the idea of the independent private person. ‘Their capital is independent alike of the state’s capital as of the uncertainty of business’ etc. It is thus contrasted with the business class which is based on particular needs and the work whereby these are met, and the universal class with its essential dependence upon the state. Thus independence of the state and civil society, and this abstract embodiment of both (which in reality represents the most primitive dependence upon the soil), come to form the mediating synthesis of both the state and civil society in the legislature. Independent private capital, i.e. abstract private property and the private person corresponding to it, are the logical apex of the political state. Political ‘independence’ is interpreted to mean ‘independent private property’ and the ‘person corresponding to that independent private property’. We shall soon see the true nature of this ‘independence’ and ‘incorruptibility’ and the political sentiment they engender.

It is self-evident that an entailed estate is acquired through inheritance. The fact that it falls to the first-born (as Hegel points out in the Addition) is an accident of history.

§307. ‘The right of this section of the landowning class is thus based in a way on the natural principle of the family. But this principle is at the same time reversed owing to hard sacrifices made for political ends, and thereby the activity of this class is essentially directed to those ends. As a consequence of this, this class is summoned and entitled to its political vocation by birth without the hazards of election.’

Hegel has failed to prove that the right of this landowning class is based on the natural principle of the family unless by this he means landed property is acquired by inheritance. But this does not establish the entitlement of this class to any political rights but only the right of the landowner to inherit his land. ‘But this’ – i.e. the natural principle of the family – ‘is at the same time reversed owing to hard sacrifices made for political ends.’ We have indeed seen hpw ‘the natural principle of the family is reversed’, not so much ‘owing to hard sacrifices made for political ends’ but in order to give concrete reality to the abstraction of private property. On the contrary, this reversal of the natural principle of the family leads naturally to the reversal of the political end, ‘whereby’ – by the fact of the emancipation of private property? – ‘the activity of this class is essentially directed to those ends. As a consequence of this, this class is summoned and entitled to its political vocation by birth without the hazards of election.’

Participation in the legislature is then an innate right of man. Here we have born legislators, the born mediation of the political state with itself. Many people and especially the owners of entailed estates have made fun of the innate rights of man. Is it not even funnier that a particular race of men should have a natural right to the highest dignity of government? Nothing could be more ridiculous than for Hegel to oppose the selection by birth of legislators, of representatives of the body politic, to their selection by ‘the hazards of election’. Can he be unaware that elections, the conscious product of the trust of the citizenry, stand in quite a different necessary connection to the political end than does the physical accident of birth? At every point Hegel’s political spiritualism can be seen to degenerate into the crassest materialism. At the apex of the political state birth is the decisive factor that makes particular individuals into the incarnations of the highest political office. At the highest level political office coincides with a man’s birth in just the same way that the situation of an animal, his character and mode of life, etc., are the direct consequence of its birth. The highest offices of the state thus acquire an animal reality. Nature takes revenge on Hegel for the contempt he has shown her. If matter is to be shorn of its reality in favour of human will then here human will is left with no reality but that of matter.

The false identity, the fragmentary, intermittent identity of nature and spirit, body and soul, becomes manifest here as embodiment, incorporation. Birth only provides a man with his individual existence and constitutes him in the first instance only as a natural individual, while political determinations such as the legislature etc are social products, born of society and not of the natural individual. Hence what is striking and even miraculous is to conceive of an immediate identity, an immediate coincidence, between the birth of an individual and the individual conceived as the individual embodiment of a particular social position or function. In this system nature creates kings and peers directly just as it creates eyes and noses. What is striking is to discover the product of a self-conscious species represented as the product of a physical species. I am a man simply by my birth without the agreement of society; a particular birth can become the birth of a peer or a king only by virtue of general agreement. Only this agreement can convert the birth of a man into the birth of a king: hence kings are made not by birth but by agreement. If it is true that a man can owe his position directly to his birth, as distinct from other determinations, then it must be by virtue of his body that he can fulfil this particular social function. His body is his social prerogative. According to this system the physical dignity of man or the dignity of the human body (or we might go further and say: the dignity of the natural physical element of the state) is made manifest in such a way that definite social positions, indeed the highest ones, are in fact the dignity of specific bodies predestined by birth. Hence, the nobility takes a natural pride in its blood, its extraction, in short the whole life-history of its body: this is its natural, zoological way of thinking and heraldry is the science appropriate to it. Thus zoology is the secret of the nobility.

Two aspects of the institution of primogeniture are particularly worthy of note:

(1) What is lasting is the hereditary landed property. It is the permanent element in the situation – the substance. The hereditary proprietor, the owner, is in reality only an accident. Landed property thus anthropomorphizes itself in the various generations. One might say that the estate always inherits the first-born of the family as an attribute bound to itself. Every first-born in the series of landowners is the inheritance, the property of the inalienable estate, the predestined substance of its will and activity. The subject is the thing and the predicate is the human being. The will becomes the property of property.

(2) The political qualifications of the hereditary landowner are the political qualifications of his estate, qualifications inherent in the estate itself. Thus political qualifications appear here as the property of landed property, as something directly arising from the purely physical earth (nature).

The first point implies that the hereditary landowner is a serf attached to the estate and that the serfs subject to him are no more than the practical consequence of the theoretical relationship binding him to the estate. The profundity of Germanic subjectivity becomes manifest everywhere as the barbarism of mindless objectivity.

We have here to analyse (1) the relation between private property and inheritance, (2) between private property, inheritance and the resulting prerogative of certain families to a share in the sovereign power of the state, and (3) the real historical situation, i.e. the Germanic situation.

As we have seen, primogeniture is an abstraction of ‘independent private property’. This has yet another implication. Independence, autonomy within the political state whose structure we have been considering, is embodied in private property which appears in its highest form in inalienable landed property. Thus political independence does not proceed from the nature of the political state, it is not the gift of the political state to its members, it is not the spirit that breathes life into the state. On the contrary, the members of the political state receive their independence from a being other than that of the state, from a being belonging to abstract civil law, from abstract private property. Political independence is an accident of private property, not the substance of the political state. As we have seen, the political state, and in it the legislature, is the revealed mystery of the true value and essence of the moments of the state. The meaning that private property acquires in the political state is its essential, true meaning; the meaning acquired by class distinctions in the political state is their essential meaning. In the same way, the essential meaning of the crown and the executive becomes manifest in the ‘legislature’. It is here, in the sphere of the political state, that the individual moments of the state achieve the essential reality of their species, their ‘species-being’. And this is because the political state is the sphere of their universal meaning, their religious sphere. The political state is the mirror of truth which reflects the disparate moments of the concrete state.

Therefore, if ‘independent private property’ acquires in the political state and in the legislature the meaning of political independence, then it is the political independence of the state. In that case ‘independent private property’ or ‘real private property’ is not only the ‘pillar of the constitution’ but also the ‘constitution itself. And indeed what is the pillar of the constitution if not the constitution of constitutions, i.e. the primary, the real constitution?

In his analysis of the hereditary monarch, Hegel, who seems himself to be somewhat astonished about ‘the immanent development of a science, the derivation of its entire content from the concept in its simplicity’ (Remark to §279), makes the following observation:

‘Hence it is the basic moment of personality, abstract at the start in immediate rights, which has matured itself through its various forms of subjectivity, and now – at the stage of absolute rights, of the state, of the completely concrete objectivity of the will – has become the personality of the state, its certainty of itself’

That is to say, what becomes manifest in the political state is that ‘abstract personality’ is the highest political personality, the political basis of the state as a whole. Similarly, in primogeniture the right of this abstract personality, its objectivity, ‘abstract private property’, comes into existence as the highest objectivity of the state, its highest expression of right.

The statement that the state is the hereditary monarchy, abstract personality, means no more than that the personality of the state is abstract, or that it is the state of abstract personality, in the same way that the Romans placed the prerogatives of the monarch within the sphere of civil law or viewed civil law as the highest development of constitutional law.

The Romans are the rationalists of sovereign private property, the Germans its mystics.

Hegel describes civil law as the law of abstract personality, as abstract law. And in fact it must be represented as the abstraction of law and hence as the illusory law of abstract personality, just as he previously represented morality as the illusory existence of abstract subjectivity. Hegel shows both civil law and morality to be such abstractions, but he does not proceed to infer from this that the state whose ethical life is based on these presuppositions can only be the society (the social life) of these illusions. On the contrary, he concludes that they are subordinate aspects of this ethical existence. But what is civil law if not the law relating to the subjects of the state, and what is morality if not their morality? In other words the juridical person of civil law and the subject of morality are the person and the subject of the state. Hegel has often been attacked for his theory of morality. But he has done no more than describe the morality of the modern state and modern civil law. Others have wished to separate morality further from the state and emancipate it. But what does this prove? That the divorce of the contemporary state from morality is moral, that morality is remote from the state and the state is immoral. It should rather be seen as a great achievement on Hegel’s part to have provided a true assessment of modern morality, even though in one sense he did so unconsciously (viz. in the sense that Hegel holds the state based on such a morality to be the actual incarnation of the ethical Idea).

In the constitution guaranteed by primogeniture, private property is the guarantee of the political constitution. In primogeniture this guarantee appears to be provided by a particular form of private property. Primogeniture is merely the particular form of the general relationship obtaining between private property and the political state. Primogeniture is the political meaning of private property, private property in its political significance, i.e. in its universal significance. Here then, the constitution is the constitution of private property.

When we meet primogeniture in its classical form, i.e. among the Germanic peoples, we also encounter the constitution of private property. Private property is the universal category, the universal bond of the state. Even the general functions appear to be privately owned, the property of either a corporation or a class.

The various forms of trade and business are here the private property of particular corporations. Offices at court, powers of jurisdiction, etc., are the private property of particular classes. The different provinces are the private property of particular princes, etc. Service for one’s country is the private property of the ruler. Spirit is the private property of the clergy. Any activities I carry out in the course of my duty are the private property of someone else, just as my rights are the private property of someone else. Sovereignty, in this case nationality, is the private property of the Emperor.

It has often been claimed that in the Middle Ages every form of law, freedom or social existence appeared as a privilege, an exception from the rule. The empirical evidence that all of these privileges appeared in the form of private property could not be ignored. What is the general reason for this coincidence? Private property was the generic form of privilege, of law as an exception.

Where, as in France, the rulers attacked the independence of private property they directed their assault at the property of the corporations, before impugning that belonging to individuals. But by attacking the private property of the corporations they attacked private property as corporation, as social bond.

Under the feudal system even the power of the sovereign looked as if it were the power of private property and the power of the sovereign thus became the repository of the secret of universal power, the power of all the elements in the state.

(As the representative of the state power, the monarch expresses what is powerful in the state. Hence the constitutional monarch expresses the idea of the constitutional state in its most abstract form. On the one hand he is the Idea of the state, the sacred majesty of the state, in the shape of one particular person. But at the same time he is a mere figment of the imagination, and neither as person nor as monarch does he possess real power or a real function. Here the separation of the political person from the real one, the formal from the material, the universal from the particular, of man from social man, is expressed in its most contradictory form.)

Private property is the child of Roman reason and Germanic sentiment. It will be instructive here to compare these two extreme versions of the same phenomenon. Such a comparison will aid us in finding a solution to the political problem we have been discussing.

The Romans were the first to develop the law of private property, abstract law, civil law, the law relating to the abstract person. Roman civil law is the classical form of civil law. But the Romans never mystified the law of private property as the Germans have done. They never developed it into constitutional law.

The law of private property was the jus utendi et abutendi,³⁵ the law enabling one to dispose of things as one wished. The chief preoccupation of the Romans was to develop and determine the abstract relations pertaining to private property. The actual foundation of private property, ownership, was a fact, an inexplicable fact with no basis in law. It only assumed the character of rightful ownership, of private property, by virtue of the legal determinations which society bestowed upon the mere fact of possession.

On the subject of the relationship between private property and the political constitution in Rome, we find the following situation:

(1) Man (appears as a slave). He is an article of private property, as was generally the case among the ancients.

There is nothing specific to the Romans here.

(2) Conquered countries are treated as private property, the jus utendi et abutendi is applied in them.

(3)Their history itself exhibits the struggle between the rich and the poor (patricians and plebeians).

Apart from this, private property as a whole asserts itself as public property, as with all the ancient classical peoples, either (in times of prosperity) in the form of grand display on the part of the republic, or else as luxurious forms of general welfare for the benefit of the mob (public baths, etc.).

Slavery is explained in terms of the rights of war, of conquest: men become slaves because their political existence has been destroyed.

Their practice differs from that of the Germans chiefly in two respects.

(1) The Imperial power was not the power of private property, but the sovereignty of the empirical will as such. Far from regarding private property as the bond joining him to his subjects, the Emperor could dispose freely of private property as of all other social goods. In consequence the Imperial power was only hereditary as a matter of fact. It is true that private property and civil law experienced their greatest development under the Empire but this was nevertheless more an effect of political degeneration, rather than political degeneration being an effect of private property. Moreover, by the time civil law had become fully developed in Rome, constitutional law was in the process of dissolution, whereas in Germany the opposite was true.

(2) The dignities of state were never hereditary in Rome, i.e. private property was not the dominant political category.

(3) In contrast to the Germanic system of primogeniture, the result of private property in Rome was the arbitrary practice of testamentary inheritance. This distinction illuminates the entire difference between the Roman and Germanic conceptions of private property.

(In primogeniture it appears that private property is the relationship to the state which makes the state into an inherent characteristic or an accident of immediate private property, of landed property. Thus at the highest levels the state appears as private property, whereas private property should really appear as the property of the state. Instead of making private property into an attribute of the body politic, Hegel transforms the body politic, political existence and political sentiment into an attribute of private property.)

§308. ‘The second section of the Estates comprises the fluctuating element in civil society. This element can enter politics only through its deputies; the multiplicity of its members is an external reason for this, but the essential reason is the specific character of this element and its activity. Since these deputies are the deputies of civil society, it follows as a direct consequence that their appointment is made by the society as a society. That is to say, in making the appointment, society is not dispersed into atomic units, collected to perform only a single and temporary act, and kept together for a moment and no longer. On the contrary, it makes the appointment as a society, articulated into associations, communities and corporations, which although constituted already for other purposes, acquire in this way a connection with politics. The existence of the Estates and their assembly finds a constitutional guarantee of its own in the fact that this class is entitled to send deputies at the summons of the crown, while members of the former class are entitled to present themselves in person in the Estates (see §307).’

Here we come to a further antithesis within civil society and the Estates: Hegel distinguishes between the fluctuating, mobile element and an immobile element (viz. landed property). This antithesis has also been represented as the antithesis of time and space, conservative and progressive. On this point see the foregoing paragraphs. Incidentally by bringing in the corporations Hegel has introduced an element of stability into the fluctuating part of society.

The second antithesis arises from the fact that the first element in the Estates expounded above, the landed gentry, are legislators in their own right; the legislature is an attribute of their empirical person; they are there not as deputies but in their own right. By contrast, election and representations are characteristic of the second Estate.

Hegel gives two reasons to explain why this fluctuating part of civil society may enter the political state, the legislature, only by means of deputies. The first is the multiplicity of its members, but as he himself admits that this is an external reason we do not need to rebut it.

The essential reason, however, ‘is the specific character of this element and its activity’. ‘Political activities’ and ‘preoccupations’ are alien to ‘the specific character of this element and its activity’.

Hegel then resumes his old song to the effect that these Estates are the ‘deputies of civil society’. They are appointed ‘by the society as a society’. On the contrary, they are appointed by the society acting as what it is not, for society is unpolitical, and here it is supposed to perform a political act as an act essential to itself and proceeding from itself. Thus society is ‘dispersed into atomic units, collected to perform only a single and temporary act and kept together for a moment and no longer’. In the first place, its political act is single and temporary and must therefore appear as such in the moment of its realization. It is a sensational act, it is political society at a moment of ecstasy and it can only appear as such. In the second place, Hegel raised no objection, in fact he presented it as necessary, that civil society should materially divorce itself from its civil reality (emerge as a second society deputizing for the first) and posit itself as that which it is not. How then can he now reject this formally?

Hegel believes that because society is represented through its corporations, etc’, these ‘although constituted already for other purposes, acquire in this way a political connection’. However, this means either that they acquire a significance which is not their own, or that their connection is political in itself and does not need to ‘acquire’ the political complexion proposed above, as ‘polities’ rather derives its meaning from its connection with them. By describing only this section of the Estates as ‘representative’ Hegel unconsciously summed up the essential nature of the two chambers (at the very point where they really have the relation to each other that he claims for them). The chamber of deputies and the chamber of peers (or whatever else they are called) are not different manifestations of the same principle. Instead they spring from two essentially different principles and social conditions. The chamber of deputies is the political constitution of civil society in the modern sense, while the chamber of peers belongs to a constitution in the sense of the old Estates. In the antithesis between the chambers of peers and of deputies we are confronted by the opposed principles of the hierarchical and political representation of civil society. The first is the existing hierarchical principle of civil society, the second is the realization of its abstract political existence. It is obvious that the latter cannot act as the representative of Estates, corporations, etc., because it represents not the Estates element but the political existence of civil society. It is no less obvious that only the hierarchical section of civil society, only the ‘sovereign landowners’, the hereditary nobility, can have a seat in the first chamber. For the nobility is not one class among others, but on the contrary it would be more accurate to say that the hierarchical principle, the principle of the Estates, survives as a really social and hence political principle only in this one class. It is the Estate. Thus in the chamber of the Estates civil society has the representative of its medieval existence, in the chamber of deputies it has the representative of its political (modern) existence’. The only advance here over the Middle Ages lies in the fact that the Estates have been reduced to a particular political existence alongside the citizens. England, the empirical instance of this political system which Hegel has in mind here, has therefore quite a different significance from the one he imputes to it.

In this respect the French constitution also shows an advance. It has indeed reduced the chamber of peers to an empty formality, but within the framework of a constitutional monarchy as ostensibly set out by Hegel it can be nothing but an empty formality, representing the fictitious harmony between the monarch and civil society, the fictitious or internal harmony of the legislature and the political state as embodied in a particular and hence contradictory institution.

The French have retained life peers as an expression of their independence of election either by the government or the people. But they have abolished the medieval concept of the hereditary peerage. The advance here is that the chamber of peers now no longer grows naturally out of civil society as it really is, but is an abstract creation. Elevation to the peerage is the prerogative of the actual political state, the monarch, who is not bound by any other factor in civil society. In this constitution the peerage really represents a purely political class in civil society, an abstract creation of the political state. However, it is much closer to being a political decoration than a real class equipped with particular rights. The chamber of peers during the Restoration was a reminiscence. The chamber of peers resulting from the July revolution is the authentic creation of the constitutional monarchy.

Since in the modern world the idea of the state can appear only in the abstraction of the ‘merely political state’, or the abstraction of civil society from itself, from its own real situation, the French deserve the credit for having produced and held onto this abstract reality and hence for having produced the political principle itself. The accusation of abstraction so often levelled at them misses the point, for what is called abstract is the authentic logical product of the rediscovery of political sentiment; admittedly this is rediscovered in an antithesis, but it is a necessary antithesis. Thus the achievement of the French is to have established the chamber of peers as a product peculiar to the political state, in other words, to have made the political principle as such into the effective determining principle.

Hegel also observes that in the system of representation as he has presented it, in ‘the entitlement of the corporations etc. to send deputies’, ‘the existence of the Estates and their assembly finds a constitutional guarantee of its own’. Thus what guarantees the existence, the true, primitive existence, of the Estates and their assembly is the privilege of the corporations, etc. Such views show that Hegel has regressed entirely to the standpoint of the Middle Ages and has wholly abandoned his ‘abstraction of the state as the sphere of the state as itself, as the actual and explicit universal’.

To a modern view the existence of the assembly of the Estates is the political existence of civil society and its true guarantee. To question the existence of the assembly of the Estates is to question the existence of the state. Just as Hegel had previously located the guarantee of ‘political sentiment’, the essence of the legislature, in ‘independent private property’, so here he discovers the guarantee of the existence of the legislature in the ‘privileges of the corporations’.

However, one of the elements of the Estates is itself the political privilege of civil society, its privilege of being political. Therefore it can never be the privilege of a particular, civil mode of the existence of civil society, even less can it discover its own guarantee in it. On the contrary, the Estates themselves are supposed to constitute the universal guarantee.

Thus Hegel constantly retreats from the view of the ‘political state’ as the highest actual and explicit reality of society, and assigns to it instead a precarious reality, dependent upon other factors: instead of regarding the state as the true reality of the other spheres of society, he forces the state to discover its reality in these other spheres. The state constantly requires the guarantee of spheres external to itself. It is not realized power. It is supported impotence; it represents not power over these supports but the power of these supports. The power lies in the supports.

What sort of sublime existence is it that stands in need of a guarantee outside itself, especially when it is supposed to be the universal embodiment of that guarantee, i.e. the real guarantee of the guarantee? In his analysis of the legislature, Hegel continually regresses from the philosophical point of view to the other standpoint which refuses to see a thing in relation to itself.

If the Estates stand in need of a guarantee of their existence, then they are not a real but only a fictitious form of the state. In constitutional states it is the law that provides the Estates with this guarantee. Thus their existence is legal, it is dependent not on the power or impotence of particular corporations and associations but on the universal essence of the state; their existence is the reality of the state as an association. (It is precisely here, in the Estates, that the corporations, etc., the particular spheres of civil society, were supposed to come into their own universal existence; but now Hegel changes his tack and conceives of this universal existence as a privilege, as the existence of these particular spheres.)

If political rights are the rights of corporations, etc., this contradicts the idea of political rights as something political, as the right of the state, of citizenship. For the whole point is that these rights should not be the rights of a particular existent being, not right, law, as a particular existence.

Before we move on to consider the concept of election as the political act whereby civil society separates out into a political committee, let us first examine some of the comments from the Remark to this Paragraph.

‘To hold that all, as individuals, should share in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern on the ground that all individuals are members of the state, that its concerns are their concerns, and that it is their right that what is done should be done with their knowledge and volition, is tantamount to a proposal to put the democratic element without any rational form into the organism of the state, although it is only in virtue of the possession of such a form that the state is an organism at all. This idea comes readily to mind because it does not go beyond the abstraction of “being a member of a state”, and it is superficial thinking which clings to abstractions.’ [§308]

In the first place Hegel describes ‘being a member of a state’ as an abstraction, although even according to the Idea, and thus the tendency of his own theory, it is the highest, most concrete social determination of the legal person, of the member of a state. To arrive at the definition of ‘a member of a state’ and to see it as the attribute of the individual does not appear to be an instance of the ‘superficial thinking which clings to abstractions’. But if ‘being a member of a state’ is an ‘abstraction’ this is not the fault of thought but of Hegel’s theory and the realities of the modern world, in which the separation of real life from political life is presupposed and political attributes are held to be ‘abstract’ determinations of the real member of the state.

The direct participation of all individuals in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern is, according to Hegel, ‘tantamount to a proposal to put the democratic element without any rational form into the organism of the state, although it is only in virtue of the possession of such a form that the state is an organism at all’. This is to say that where the state organism is purely formal, the democratic element can enter into it only as a formal element. However, the democratic element should rather be the real element which confers a rational form on the organism of the state as a whole. If on the other hand it enters the organism or formalism of the state as a ‘particular’ element, its ‘rational form’ will be nothing more than an emasculation, an accommodation, denying its own particular nature, i.e. it will function purely as a formal principle.

We have already hinted that Hegel has developed only a political formalism. His authentic material principle is the Idea, the abstract mental form of the state as a subject, the absolute Idea innocent of any passive, material elements. Confronted with the abstraction of this Idea the determinations of the real, empirical formalism of the state appear as content, while the real content appears as formless, inorganic matter (in this case, real human beings, real society, etc).

Hegel has already defined the essence of the Estates by the fact that in them the ‘empirical universal’ becomes the subject of the actually and explicitly existing universal. Can this have any other meaning than that the concerns of the state ‘are the concerns of all, and that it is their right that what is done should be done with their knowledge and volition’? Who if not the Estates can be the embodiment of that right? And is it really so strange that ‘all’ should wish to possess this right in ‘reality’?

‘All, as individuals, should share in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern.’

In a really rational state one could reply: ‘Not all, as individuals should share in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern’, for ‘individuals’ do share in deliberating and deciding on matters of general concern as ‘all’, i.e. within society and as the members of society. Not all as individuals, but the individuals as all.

Hegel poses the dilemma himself. Either civil society (the Many, the mass) shares in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern through its deputies, or all people do so as individuals. There is no essential contradiction here, as Hegel later attempts to show, but only an actual one, a contradiction of the most external sort moreover, namely a numerical one. And it turns out that the objection that Hegel himself had dismissed as ‘externat’, i.e. the mass of individuals, is still the best argument against the direct participation of all. The problem whether civil society should participate in the legislature through deputies or in such a way that ‘all’ act directly as ‘individuals’ is itself a problem arising in the abstraction of the political state, or in the abstract political state; it is an abstract political problem.

On Hegel’s own showing, either solution reveals the political significance of the ‘empirical universal’.

The true formulation of the antithesis is as follows: either all the individuals act, or a few, i.e. not all the individuals act. In either case ‘all’ refers only to an external multiplicity or totality of the individuals. ‘Allness’, the aggregate, is not an essential, mental, real attribute of the individual. An aggregate is not acquired at the cost of one’s abstract individuality. Instead, the aggregate is only the complete sum of individuality. One individual, many individuals, all individuals. One, many, all – none of these determinations affects the essence of the subject, of the individual.

‘All’ should ‘as individuals share in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern ‘; i.e. all people should play their part, not as all but as ‘individuals’.

The problem seems to contain a twofold contradiction.

The general concerns of the state are political concerns, the state as a real concern. Deliberation and decision are the means by which the state becomes effective as a real concern. It therefore appears to be self-evident that all the members of the state have a relation to the state: it is a matter of real concern to them. The very concept ‘member of the state’ implies that they are a part of the state, that the state regards them as a part of itself. However, if they are a part of the state, it is obvious that their very social existence already constitutes their real participation in it. Not only do they share in the state, but the state is their share. To be a conscious part of a thing means to take part of it and to take part in it consciously. Without this consciousness the member of the state would be an animal.

When people speak of the ‘general concerns of the state’, the impression is given that the ‘general concerns’ are one thing and the ‘state’ is another. However, the state is the ‘matter of general concern’, and in reality by ‘matters of general concern* we mean the state.

Thus to take part in the general concern of the state is identical with taking part in the state. It is therefore a tautology to assert that a member, a part of the state takes part in the state, that this participation can only take some such form as deliberation and decision, and to say at the same time that every member of the state takes part in deliberating and deciding on general matters of concern to the state (always assuming these functions to involve real participation in the state). So that when we are speaking of real members of the state we cannot assert that they ought to participate in the affairs of the state. For in that event we would be talking about those subjects who want and ought to be members of the state, but are not in reality.

On the other hand, when we speak of specific affairs of state, of a single political act, it is again obvious that it cannot be performed by all people individually. If this were not so it would mean that the individual was himself the true society and thus would make society superfluous. The individual would have to do everything all at once, whereas in fact society has him act for the others, just as it has them act for him.

The question whether all people individually ‘should take part in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern’ is a problem that arises from the separation of the political state from civil society.

As we have seen, the state exists only as a political state. The totality of the political state is the legislature. To take part in the legislature, therefore, is to take part in the political state, it is to prove and realize one’s existence as a member of the political state, as a member of the state. The fact that all as individuals should wish to share in the legislature only proves that it is the will of all to be real (active) members of the state, or to acquire a political existence, or to prove and give reality to their existence as something political We have also seen that the Estates constitute civil society as a legislature: they are its political existence. Hence if civil society forces its way into the legislature en masse, or even in toto, if the real civil society wishes to substitute itself for the fictitious civil society of the legislature, then all that is nothing but the striving of civil society to create a political existence for itself, or to make its real existence into a political one. The efforts of civil society to transform itself into a political society, or to make the political society into the real one, manifest themselves in the attempt to achieve as general a participation as possible in the legislature.

The question of quantity is not without importance here. If an increase in the Estates involves a physical and intellectual increase in the forces of the enemy – and we have seen that the various elements in the legislature exist in a state of mutual hostility then the problem of whether all are individually members of the legislature or whether they are represented there by deputies implies the questioning of the principle of representation from within itself, within the fundamental idea of the political state as found in a constitutional monarchy.

(1) The abstract view of the political state is that the legislature is the totality of the political state. Because this single activity [of legislation] is the only political activity of civil society, everyone both wishes and ought to share in it at once.

(2) All people as individuals. In the Estates the act of legislation is not regarded as social, as a function of societal existence, but rather as the activity by virtue of which individuals first begin to perform social, i.e. political, functions really and consciously. Thus in this view the legislature is not a function of society, not something that grows out of it, but only its formation. The formation of civil society into a legislature requires all the members of society to see themselves as individuals, and stand opposed to each other as individuals. To define them as ‘members of the state’ is to define them ‘abstractly’, a definition which is not realized in their actual lives.

There are two possibilities here: (1) Either the political state is separated from civil society; in that event it is not possible for all as individuals to take part in the legislature. The political state leads an existence divorced from civil society. For its part, civil society would cease to exist if everyone became a legislator. On the other hand, it is opposed by a political state which can only tolerate a civil society that conforms to its own standards. In other words, the fact that civil society takes part in the political state through its deputies is the expression of the separation and of the merely dualistic unity.

(2) Alternatively, civil society is the real political society. If so, it is senseless to insist on a requirement which stems from the conception of the political state as something existing apart from civil society, and which has its roots only in the theological conception of the political state. On this assumption the legislature entirely ceases to be important as a representative body. The legislature is representative only in the sense that every function is representative. For example, a cobbler is my representative in so far as he satisfies a social need, just as every definite form of social activity, because it is a species activity, represents only the species. That is to say, it represents a determination of my own being just as every man is representative of other men. In this sense he is a representative not by virtue of another thing which he represents but by virtue of what he is and does.

‘Legislative power’ is not sought for its content but for the sake of its formal political significance. Intrinsically executive power, for example, is a much more appropriate goal for the people’s wishes than the legislature, the metaphysical function of the state. The legislature embodies the energy of the will in its theoretical and not in its practical form. The point here is not to substitute the will for the law, but to discover and formulate the real law.

This division of the legislature into its real legislative function and its representative, abstract political function gives rise to a peculiarity which is particularly evident in France, the land of political culture.

(The executive always contains two things: a real activity and the reason given by the state for this activity. This latter exists as another real consciousness which in its total organization constitutes the bureaucracy.)

The real content of the legislature is always treated very marginally, as something of secondary importance (unless dominant special interests come into a significant conflict with the object in question). A question really attracts attention only when it becomes political, and for this to happen either it must be linked with a ministerial issue, i.e. the problem of the power of the legislature over the executive, or else it must involve rights which themselves implicate the political formalism. What is the source of this phenomenon? It arises because the legislative power also represents the political form of civil society; because the fact that a question is political means that it exists in relation to the different powers of the political state; and because the legislature represents political consciousness and this can show itself to be political only through a conflict with the executive. It is an essential requirement that every social need, law, etc., should be investigated politically, i.e. as determined by the totality of the state, in its social meaning, but in the abstract political state this requirement is given a format meaning over against another power (content) lying outside its real content. This is no mere abstraction on the part of the French but a necessary logical consequence of the fact that the real state exists only in the shape of the political state-formalism we have been examining. The opposition within the representative power is the pre-eminently political form of the representative power. However, within this representative constitution the problem we are investigating takes a form different from the one it assumes for Hegel. The question is not whether civil society should exercise legislative power through deputies or through all people as individuals. What is crucial is the extension and the greatest possible universalization of the vote, i.e. of both active and passive suffrage. This is the real point of conflict on the issue of political reform both in France and in England.

To consider the vote in its relation to the power of the crown or the executive is to fail to look at it philosophically, i.e. to grasp its particular nature. The vote expresses the real relation of real civil society to the civil society of the legislature, to the representative body. Or, in other words, the vote is the immediate, direct, not merely representative but actually existing relation of civil society to the political state. It is therefore self-evident that the vote must constitute the chief political interest of real civil society. Only when civil society has achieved unrestricted active and passive suffrage has it really raised itself to the point of abstraction from itself, to the political existence which constitutes its true, universal, essential existence. But the perfection of this abstraction is also its transcendence [Aufhebung]. By really establishing its political existence as its authentic existence, civil society ensures that its civil existence, in so far as it is distinct from its political existence, is inessential And with the demise of the one, the other, its opposite, collapses also. Therefore, electoral reform in the abstract political state is the equivalent to a demand for its dissolution [Auflösung] and this in turn implies the dissolution of civil society.

We shall encounter the problem of electoral reform later on in another guise, namely in the context of specific interests. We shall likewise have occasion to discuss the other conflicts that arise out of the twofold determination of the legislature (viz. on the one hand the deputies with a mandate from civil society, and on the other hand the specific political existence of civil society itself within the political state-formalism).

For the moment let us return to the Remark to this Paragraph.

‘The rational consideration of a topic, the consciousness of the Idea, is concrete, and to that extent coincides with a genuine practical sense. Such a sense is itself nothing but the sense of rationality of the Idea.’… ‘The concrete state is the whole, articulated into its particular groups. The member of a state is a member of such a group, i.e. of a social class, and it is only as characterized in this objective way that he comes under consideration when we are dealing with the state.’ (§308)

We have already made the necessary comments on this passage.

‘His’ (the member of the state’s) ‘mere character as universal implies that he is at one and the same time both a private person and also a thinking consciousness, a will which wills the universal. This consciousness and will, however, lose their emptiness and acquire a content and a living reality only when they are filled with particularity, and particularity means determinacy as particular and a particular class-status; or, to put the matter otherwise, abstract individuality is a generic essence, but has its immanent universal reality as the generic essence next higher in the scale.’

All that Hegel says here is correct with the reservation (1) that he equates determinacy and particular class position, and (2) that this determinacy, this species, this generic essence next higher in the scale should have been really established, not merely in itself but also for itself as the species belonging to the universal generic essence, as its particularity. However, Hegel is content to show that in the state, which he has defined as the self-conscious existence of the ethical mind, this ethical mind only becomes a determining thing in itself in accordance with the universal Idea. He does not allow society to become a truly determining thing because this would require a real subject while he has nothing more than an abstract one, a figment of the imagination.

§309. ‘Since deputies are elected to deliberate and decide on political matters of general concern, the point about their election is that it is a choice of individuals on the strength of confidence felt in them, i.e. a choice of such individuals as have a better understanding of these affairs than their electors have and such also as essentially vindicate the universal interest, not the particular interest of a community or corporation in preference to that interest. Hence their relation to their electors is not that of agents with a commission or specific instructions. A further bar to their being so is the fact that their assembly is meant to be a living body in which all members deliberate in common and reciprocally instruct and convince each other.’

(1) The deputies are not supposed to be ‘agents with a commission or specific instructions’, because ‘they essentially vindicate the universal interest, not the particular interest of a community or corporation in preference to that interest’. Hegel began by regarding the representatives as representing the corporations, etc., but then introduces the further political determination to the effect that they should not vindicate the particular interest of the corporation, etc. He thereby nullifies his own definition, for he draws a dividing line between their essential determination as representatives and their existence as part of a corporation. Furthermore, he also cuts the corporation off from itself, from its own real content, for the corporation is supposed to elect deputies not from its own point of view but from the point of view of the state, i.e. it votes in its non-existence as corporation. Hegel thus acknowledges in the material determination what he denied formally, namely that civil society abstracts from itself at the moment of its political activity, and that its political existence is nothing but this abstraction. Hegel explains this by saying that the deputies are elected precisely in order that they may take part in ‘public affairs’; but the corporations are not instances of public affairs.

(2) ‘The point about the election of deputies’ is that ‘it is a choice of individuals on the strength of confidence felt in them, i.e. a choice of such individuals as have a better understanding of these affairs than their electors have.’ This too should lead us to the conclusion that the deputies are not agents with a mandate.

The fact that they do not ‘simply’ understand, but have a ‘better’ understanding can only be proved by a piece of sophistry. This would only follow if the electors had the choice either to deliberate and decide on public affairs for themselves or to delegate specific individuals to perform these tasks on their behalf. That is to say, it would follow only if delegation or representation were not an essential part of the legislative power of civil society. But, as we have seen, it is just this that constitutes the specific essence of the state as expounded by Hegel.

This example illustrates very well how Hegel half intentionally abandons the crux of the matter and imputes to it in its narrow form a significance the very opposite of narrow.

Only at the end does Hegel reveal the true explanation. The deputies of civil society are constituted into an ‘assembly’ and only in this assembly does the political existence and will of civil society become real. The separation of the political state from civil society takes the form of a separation of the deputies from their electors. Society simply deputes elements of itself to become its political existence.

There is a twofold contradiction:

(1)A formal contradiction. The deputies of civil society are a society which is not connected to its electors by any ‘instruction’ or commission. They have a formal authorization but as soon as this becomes real they cease to be authorized. They should be deputies but they are not.

(2) A material contradiction. In respect to actual interests. More on this later. Here we find the converse. They have authority as the representatives of public affairs, whereas in reality they represent particular interests.

It is significant that Hegel singles out trust as the substance of delegation, as the crux of the relation between elector and deputy. Trust is a personal relation. In the Addition, Hegel has this to say about it:

‘Representation is grounded on trust, but trusting another is something different from giving my vote myself in my own personal capacity. Hence majority voting runs counter to the principle that I should be personally present in anything which is to be obligatory on me. We have confidence in a man when we take him to be a man of discretion who will manage our affairs conscientiously and to the best of his knowledge, just as if they were his own.’

§310. ‘The guarantee that deputies will have the qualifications and disposition that accord with this end – since independent means attains its right in the first section of the Estates – is to be found so far as the second section is concerned – the section drawn from the fluctuating and changeable element in civil society – above all in the knowledge (of the organization and interests of the state and civil society), the temperament, and the skill which a deputy acquires as a result of the actual transaction of business in managerial or official positions, and then evinces in his actions. As a result he also acquires and develops a managerial and political sense tested by his experience, and this is a further guarantee of his suitability as a deputy.’

Hegel first constructed the upper chamber, the chamber of independent private property, as a guarantee for the crown and the executive against the sentiments of the lower chamber as the political existence of empirical universality. Now, however, he demands a new guarantee, one which will guarantee the sentiments, etc, of the lower chamber itself.

Previously, trust – the guarantee of the electors – had also been the guarantee of the deputies. Now, however, this trust itself stands in need of a further guarantee of its value.

Hegel would not be averse to making the lower chamber into the chamber of pensioned-off civil servants. He calls not only for ‘political sense’ but also for ‘managerial’, bureaucratic sense.

What he really wants is for the legislature to be the real governing power. He expresses this by making a double demand on the bureaucracy, on the one hand as the representative of the crown, and on the other as the representative of the people.

If in constitutional states it is permissible for civil servants to become deputies this is possible only because class, civil status is set aside and abstract state citizenship is the decisive factor.

But Hegel forgets that he had based representation on the corporations and that these stand directly opposed to the executive. His forget fulness – which recurs in the very next paragraph – goes so far that he even creates an essential distinction between the deputies of the corporations and the deputies of the classes.

In the Remark to this Paragraph he states:

‘Subjective opinion, naturally enough, finds superfluous and even perhaps offensive the demand for such guarantees, if the demand is made with reference to what is called the “people”. The state, however, is characterized by objectivity, not by a subjective opinion and its self-confidence. Hence it can recognize in individuals only their objectively recognizable and tested character, and it must be all the more careful on this point in connection with the second section of the Estates, since this section is rooted in interests and activities directed towards the particular, i.e. in the sphere where chance, mutability and caprice enjoy their right of free play.’

Hegel’s mindless illogicality and ‘managerial’ sense are really nauseating here. The conclusion to the Addition to the preceding paragraph [§309] reads as follows:

‘The electors require a guarantee that their deputy will further and secure this general interest.’

Imperceptibly this guarantee required by the electors has been transformed into a guarantee against the electors, against their ‘self-confidence’. In the Estates the ‘empirical universal’ was supposed to embody the ‘moment of subjective formal freedom’. ‘Public consciousness’ was supposed to come into existence in the Estates as ‘an empirical universal, of which the thoughts and opinions of the Many are particulars’. (§301.)

Now, however, these ‘thoughts and opinions’ must first prove to the executive that they are ‘its’ thoughts and opinions. For, stupidly enough, Hegel speaks of the state here as if it were a finished existence even though he is actually engaged in finishing it with his construction of the Estates. He speaks of the state as a concrete subject which ‘does not take offence at subjective opinion and its self-confidence’ and for which individuals have first made themselves ‘recognizable’ and have ‘proved’ themselves. The only thing Hegel omits is to require the Estates to submit to an examination at the hands of the gracious executive. His attitude here borders on servility. He has evidently been thoroughly contaminated by the wretched arrogance of Prussian officialdom which, full of its own bureaucratic narrow-mindedness, regards with disdain the ‘self-confidence’ of the ‘subjective opinion of the people’. At every point Hegel consistently equates the ‘state’ with the ‘executive’.

To be sure, a real state cannot rest content with ‘mere trust’ and ‘subjective opinion’. But in the state constructed by Hegel the political convictions of civil society are mere opinion just because its political existence is an abstraction from its real existence; just because the state in its totality is not the objectification of those political convictions. If Hegel had wished to be consistent he would have had to do all in his power to show that according to their essential determination (§301) the Estates were the being-for-itself of public affairs in the thoughts, etc., of the Many, and thus that they were independent of the other premises of the political state.

Earlier on Hegel said that to assume the executive to be actuated by bad will was characteristic of the rabble. It is just as true if not truer that the assumption that the people is actuated by bad will is the view of the rabble. Hegel has no right to find it either ‘superfluous’ or ‘insulting’ when the theoreticians he despises require guarantees in respect to the so-called state, the soi-disant state, the executive, viz. guarantees that the sentiments of the bureaucracy should be patriotic sentiments.

§311. ‘A further point about the election of deputies is that, since civil society is the electorate, the deputies should themselves be conversant with and participate in its special needs, difficulties, and particular interests. Owing to the nature of civil society, its deputies are the deputies of the various corporations (see §308), and this simple mode of appointment obviates any confusion due to conceiving the electorate abstractly and as an agglomeration of atoms. Hence the deputies eo ipso adopt the point of view of society, and their actual election is therefore either something wholly superfluous or else reduced to a trivial play of opinion and caprice.’

Firstly, with the simple word ‘further’, Hegel conflates the definition of deputation as ‘legislature’ (§309, 310) with its definition as ‘arising from civil society’, i.e. as representation. The tremendous contradictions implicit in this ‘further’ are then spelled out just as thoughtlessly.

According to §309 the deputies should ‘essentially vindicate the universal interest, not the particular interest of a community or a corporation in preference to that interest’.

According to §371 the deputies are drawnfrom the corporations, they represent these particular interests and needs and do not allow themselves to be distracted by ‘abstractions’, as if the ‘universal interest’ were not just such an abstraction, namely an abstraction from their corporate and similar interests.

According to §310 the deputies have to ‘acquire and develop a managerial and political sense as a result of the actual transaction of business, etc.’. In §311 they are required to have corporate and civic sense.

In the Addition to §309 it is stated that ‘representation is grounded on trust’. According to §311 ‘election’, the realization of trust, its activation and manifestation ‘is either something wholly superfluous or else reduced to a trivial play of opinion and caprice’.

The basis of representation, its essence, turns out to be ‘something wholly superfluous, etc’ for representation. With one and the same breath Hegel puts forward absolutely contradictory statements: representation is grounded on trust, on the confidence placed by one man in another, and, at the same time, it is not grounded on trust. It is rather a merely formal game.

The object of representation is not the particular interest but man and his citizenship of the state, the universal interest. On the other hand, the particular interest is the material of representation, and the spirit of this interest is the spirit of the representative.

In the Remark on this Paragraph, which we shall now consider, these contradictions become even more glaring. At one moment representation is the representation of the man, at another of the particular interest, the particular matter.

‘It is obviously of advantage that the deputies should include representatives of each particular main branch of society (e.g. trade, manufactures, etc.) – representatives who are thoroughly conversant with it and who themselves belong to it. The idea of free unrestricted election leaves this important consideration entirely at the mercy of chance. All such branches of society, however, have equal rights of representation. Deputies are sometimes regarded as “representatives”; but they are representatives in an organic, rational sense only if they are representatives not of individuals or a conglomeration of them, but of one of the essential spheres of society and its large-scale interests. Hence representation cannot now be taken to mean simply the substitution of one man for another; the point is rather that the interest itself is really present in its representative, while he himself is there to represent the objective element of his own being.

As for popular suffrage, it may be further remarked that especially in large states it leads inevitably to electoral indifference, since the casting of a single vote is of no significance where there is a multitude of electors. Even if a voting qualification is highly valued and esteemed by those who are entitled to it, they still do not enter the polling booth. Thus the result of an institution of this kind is more likely to be the opposite of what was intended; election actually falls into the power of a few, of a caucus, and so of the particular and contingent interest which is precisely what was to have been neutralized.’ [Remark to §311]

The substance of the two Paragraphs 312 and 313 has already been dealt with and requires no special discussion. We simply cite them as they stand:

§312. ‘Each class in the Estates (see §§305–8) contributes something particularly its own to the work of deliberation. Further, one moment in the class-element has in the sphere of politics the special function of mediation, mediation between two existing things. Hence this moment must likewise acquire a separate existence of its own. For this reason the assembly of the Estates is divided into two houses’

God help us all!

§313. ‘This division, by providing chambers of the first and second instance, is a surer guarantee for ripeness of decision and it obviates the accidental character which a snap division has and which a numerical majority may acquire. But the principal advantage of this arrangement is that there is less chance of the Estates being in direct opposition to the executive; or that, if the mediating element is at the same time on the side of the lower house, the weight of the lower house’s opinion is all the stronger, because it appears less partisan and its opposition appears neutralized.’³⁶