When Hegel and Kant, following Rousseau, sought to draw the opposition between bourgeois and citoyen (citizen) they turned to French terminology, highlighting a difficulty in German legal and political language. Hegel himself expressed this difficulty in a commentary on the Aristotelian conception of the polis: “we do not have two words for ‘bourgeois’ and ‘citoyen.’”1 The term Bürger refers both to a bourgeois in the first sense, that of a city resident (Stadtbürger), and to a member of the political community, the citizen (Staatsbürger); in the nineteenth century the French word (bourgeois) was added to German scientific terminology to designate the economic and cultural properties of a particular social class.2 But the reasons for this difficulty are not solely linguistic, for they stem from the particularities of Germany’s political history. The structures of the Ständestaat (a term that is itself nearly impossible to translate into French and is most commonly rendered in English as “corporate state”) make it impossible to conceive of a political community whose members could—even if only in certain respects—be legally equal. In short, the lack of distinction between bourgeois and citoyen that exists at the level of vocabulary expresses the chasm that separates the idea of citizenship—whether in the ancient or revolutionary sense—from the political structures of a divided Germany, where the idea of equality was more or less void of meaning.
The difficulty persisted even after the French Revolution reactivated the ethos of citizenship. The Revolution was born with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and [it is sometimes forgotten] Citizen, and the first constitutions attempted to provide a legal definition of citizenship.3 German philosophers then appropriated the new vocabulary. Fichte, for example, wrote in 1793,
But what does a caste that appropriates the exclusive right to certain professions do? . . . Such a privilege does not only make the nobility a state within a state, with its own interest separate from that of other citizens [Bürger]; it entirely eliminates other classes of the people from the list of citizens [Staatsbürger] and suppresses their right to citizenship [Bürgerrecht], turning them into slaves subjected to obstinate domination.4
However, when Fichte and Kant brought the vocabulary of citizenship to Germany, they faced not only the hostility of the Revolution’s enemies, such as Gentz or Rehberg,5 but also the sarcasm of some of its partisans. Thus, Klopstock—an honorary citizen of the French Republic!—exclaimed in 1793, after becoming aware of Kant’s opuscule Theory and Practice, “If we are to speak of a Staatsbürger, why not a Wasserfisch (water fish)?”6 implying that Kant’s distinction was mere verbal caprice. Therefore, if we want to determine what was new in Hegel’s use of the distinction between bourgeois and citizen, we must situate it within the tradition of German legal and political language.
The words bourgeois and citoyen first appeared in French during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, respectively. In the language of jurists, the first term designated the privileged status of certain residents of a city who had the right to hold office within the city’s corporate structures and communal administration. Thus, the bourgeois is distinguished, both by his place of residence and by the nature of his rights, from the nobility and clergy on the one hand and from nonfree men (serfs and servants) on the other. As for the term citoyen/citizen (civis), it does not have much meaning in a social order where the individual’s place is determined by the particularities (i.e., the privileges) of his estate. However, the term appears or reappears with the creation of the modern state, where it takes a decisive new direction.
Jean Bodin, who first defined sovereignty as “the absolute and perpetual power of a Republic”7 and made it an essential attribute of the state, was also the first to distinguish between bourgeois, citizen, and subject in a discussion of the Aristotelian concept of the polis. Aristotle, said Bodin “does not differentiate between Republic and city [cité],” though he does clearly perceive the difference between town (ville), which is merely a geographical place, and city (cité), which “is a word of law.”8 The resident of a town, insofar as he bears certain privileges, is titled to the right of the bourgeoisie. The citizen, however, is a member of the city (la cité). But—and here is Bodin’s innovation with respect to traditional political language—the citizen, although sui juris, is also a member of the Republic, and therefore a subject. Indeed, to distinguish the citizen from the bourgeois, Bodin specifies that “it is not privileges that make the citizen but rather the mutual obligation between sovereign and subject.”9 Thus, the traditional idea of citizenship should be reinscribed into the relation of protection and obedience specific to the state (or the “Republic.”) Hence, the following definition, which occurs no less than three times in Bodin’s work: a citizen is “a free subject, dependent on the sovereignty of another.”10 And he specifies:
It is the free subject’s recognition of and obedience to his sovereign prince and the prince’s protection, justice, and defense toward the subject that makes the latter a citizen; this is the essential difference between a bourgeois and a foreigner.11
The theory of natural law systematized this new understanding of the citizen-subject, which was clearly suited to the reality of what would be termed absolutism. One of Hobbes’s works is titled The Citizen (De Cive), but for him the word means nothing more than subject:
Each of the citizens, and every subordinate civil person is called a subject of him who holds the sovereign power.12
Pufendorf’s theory of the double contract gave this equation definitive grounding: from then on, the requisite complement to the contract of association was a contract of submission: the citizen essentially became subject, and his first duty was obedience.
For the most part, the identification of citizen with subject remained intact until the French Revolution. However, Enlightenment thinkers shortened its life span. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the discussion of citizen and bourgeois took a turn, thanks to the popularization of a third term that encompassed the other two: man. The short-term result was to obscure the question, resulting in a vagueness that infects the articles “Bourgeois” and “Citoyen” in the Encyclopédie, both written by Diderot—to say nothing of the articles “Société” and “Société civile” by Jaucourt, which are truly confused. The distinction between bourgeois and citizen seems to have become astonishingly slippery:
A bourgeois is someone whose regular residence is a town [une ville]; the citizen is a bourgeois considered in relation to the society of which he is a member. . . . Residency pre-supposes a place, the bourgeois pre-supposes a city, and citizenship implies a society whose affairs all individuals are familiar with and whose good they love.13
Of course, Diderot was writing against Hobbes, who “makes no distinction between subject and citizen,” and he proclaimed that “the name citizen is suitable neither for those who are subjugated nor for those who are isolated.”14 But Diderot does not at all specify what separates the two notions, saying merely that “the citizen has rights that never leave him.”15 As for the difference between bourgeois and citizen, he seems to have considered it merely a difference of degree.
Rousseau was certainly thinking of these (frequent) approximations when in a note to the Social Contract he observed that
The real meaning of this word [cité] has been almost completely erased among the moderns; most people take a town for a city, and a bourgeois for a citizen. They do not know that houses make the town, and that citizens make the city.16
Proof that Rousseau was thinking here of Diderot’s articles lies in the fact that he adds that besides d’Alembert, the author of the “Genève” article in the Encyclopédie, “no other French author . . . has understood the real meaning of the word citizen.”17 Although Rousseau refers to Bodin, he strongly differs from him, and no matter what he says, he is not content to reestablish a traditional concept of the citizen, from which “moderns” have unfortunately strayed. According to the Social Contract, the specific quality of a citizen is not simply that he is a member of the Republic as a “free subject”: it is that he participates in “sovereign power.”18 As Kant would later say, a citizen is essentially a “colegislator,” and not merely a “cosubject”19: the citizen is different from the bourgeois not quantitatively but qualitatively on the basis of the specific political quality that his participation in sovereignty grants him. Thus, while pretending to restore a classical concept, Rousseau introduces a fundamental innovation: he adjusts the concepts of cité and citoyen to modern conditions of political sovereignty, whereas Bodin had merely juxtaposed them. This reinterpretation involves a new relationship between bourgeois and citizen: no longer simply hierarchical, but antithetical. In Emile, bourgeois and citizen appear as the two truly contradictory types of civil man, who is himself the result of the denaturation of natural man—a denaturing process that must be total in order to succeed. And this double distinction gives rise to a highly pessimistic diagnosis of modernity:
He who in the civil order wants to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither for himself nor for others. He will be one of these men of our days; a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Bourgeois. He will be nothing. . . . Public instruction no longer exists and can no longer exist, because where there is no longer fatherland, there can no longer be citizens. These two words, fatherland and citizen, should be effaced from modern languages.20
For Kant, on the other hand—and in this respect he prefigures nineteenth-century liberal thought—the truly important contrast is no longer between citizen and bourgeois, though he does maintain the distinction; instead, it is between the citizen properly speaking, who enjoys legal and economic independence, and the Schutzgenosse (“passive citizen” in Sieyès’s words), who benefits only from rights pertaining to his quality as a man. Human beings, as such, have the right to civil liberty and to public freedoms: this is the fundamental meaning of the 1789 declaration. But a division arises between those who, politically, are merely subjects and those who are both subjects and citizens—that is, colegislators.21 This would appear to be a simple repetition of antiquity’s distinctions between, for example, Athenian citizens and metics or between cives, clientes, and peregrini in Rome. But in fact Kant was on the trail of the distinction between civil society and the state. What is important in his eyes is not so much political inequality as civil equality—in other words, the constitution of a unified space of (private) law and the limitation on political authority that results from it. This is precisely the meaning of the exclusion of the principle of public happiness, which was at the center of the doctrine of absolute sovereignty:
The public well-being . . . is precisely that lawful constitution that secures everyone his freedom by laws, whereby each remains at liberty to seek his happiness in whatever way seems best to him provided he does not infringe on that universal freedom.22
Kant’s distinction between the conditions of political citizenship and the social legal order incontestably makes him—before Hegel—one of the precursors of the Rechtsstaat.
Whereas in Germany, the most clairvoyant thinkers—Kant, Fichte, Rehberg—immediately realized that the French Revolution implied a redefinition of the concept of the Bürger and of citizenship, one cannot help but notice that in the legal literature of the time, the issue was far from clear. Let us take a few examples.23 In a work cited by Fichte three times in his Contribution to the Rectification of the Public’s Judgment of the French Revolution (1793/1794), Theodor von Schmalz, a colleague of Kant’s at Königsberg, attempts to include the new notion of citizenship in Pufendorf’s problematic of the double contract in such a way that the citizen is also a subject: “citizens can be called associates [Mitgenossen] in relation to a contract of association and subjects in relation to a contract of obedience.”24 During this same period, Karl Heinrich Heydenreich made citizen and subject identical to one another, pure and simple. Going against what was about to become the leading doctrine of the time, he refused to consider the sovereign (Oberherr) a Bürger. Indeed, “members of the state, amid the people broadly, are called citizens (Bürger) as equal participants in sovereignty, and subjects (Untertanen) as subordinates to the state.”25 These were not marginal or merely retrograde positions: Heydenreich and Schmalz were among the best-known Naturrechtler of the late eighteenth century. Their conflation of citizen and subject simply corresponded to the political reality of the German Empire: the expression Bürger und Untertanen, where the “and” means “that is,” was a common stock expression in administrative and constitutional documents of the time. As for the equally common confusion between Bürger and bourgeois, it is explained by the fact that most noncity dwellers were serfs, or at least were not sui juris. Hence, the terms Bürger (in its two meanings) and Untertan were often used interchangeably. Heinrich Gottfried Scheidemantel, for example, declared that there was “a significant difference” between citizen and subject:
There are subjects that are not citizens, for example, servants. . . . However, there are citizens who are not subjects, such as the monarch.26
This “significant difference,” however, does not mean that one is not normally both subject and citizen! While the general sense of Bürger (the subject-citizen) must be distinguished from the particular sense (“someone who enjoys advantages specific to the constitution of a town [ville]),” the term may also refer both to “members of the state” or subditi primarii and to those who participate in “the economy and administration of a town [ville].”27
These authors had at least more or less accepted the ideals of the Aufklärung. If we look to authors such as Johann Jacob Moser or Johann Stephan Pütter, writers from whom Hegel drew the information included in “The German Constitution,” we find much more traditional understandings of the political and social order. Moser, the most illustrious of the Staatsrechtler, whom the young Hegel evoked pitilessly, completely conformed to the outmoded structures of the German Empire: he is above all interested in the relations between the empire and the Stände, that is, the territories that made up the empire: principalities, church lands, free towns, and so forth. When he uses the term Bürger, it is to refer to some or all residents of a town, but it does not have unequivocal meaning. For Moser also writes that the word civis “in Latin means the same thing as subditus (subject)”28 and therefore must be translated using the German word Untertan!
To summarize: when Hegel began his philosophical career, the meaning of terms such as bourgeois and citizen were still relatively fluid in German legal language. In giving precise and in some respects entirely new meaning to these notions, he illustrated a fundamental and new aspect of modern reality. This can be seen by comparing the Bern and Frankfurt writings with those from Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin, for between the two groups of texts there was a break that casts light on his later discovery of civil society.
Hegel’s writings from Bern and Frankfurt (1794–1800) express his powerful support for the ethical and political (ethical because political) ideal of the polis. We find this enthusiasm intact in certain fragments transmitted by Rosenkranz under the titles Politische Studien and Historische Studien.29 These texts develop a vision of the city (cité) and the citizen that the French Revolution appeared to have realized (at least originally; Hegel very quickly distanced himself from the Jacobin radicalization of the 1789 reformist project).30 A fragment written in French exalting the “joys of freedom,”31 which Hegel may have written himself or simply copied, illustrates this. The characteristic quality of the ethic of the polis is the total subordination of the private sphere, the activities belonging to it—first and foremost economic practices—and “solicitude for [property]”32 to the public-political sphere and the values that emanate from it; private existence is almost reabsorbed into public existence. Because “in a Republic, one lives for an idea,”33 everything that does not help realize this idea—the idea of freedom, the idea of the city—is harmful and must be proscribed. This is the source of measures written into constitutions from antiquity dissuading citizens from being overly attached to their property, for “the disproportionate wealth of some citizens is able to endanger the freest form of constitution and [thereby] destroy freedom itself.”34
A fragment written between May and August of 1796, shortly after the text on the positivity of the Christian religion, expresses this republican ideal most forcefully. Hegel reminds the reader that for the Greek or Roman citizen, “the idea of his country, of his state [was] . . . the final goal of the world, or the final goal of his world.” Not only did he sacrifice his property and life to it, his whole being was in it, for he had being only through this “supreme order of things” and “before this idea, his individuality disappeared.”35 The city demands the citizen’s unlimited identification with what Hegel calls the “spirit of the whole” in contrast to an esprit de corps:
But when a class—of leaders, priests, or both—loses this spirit of unity that founded and animated its laws and orders, not only is the loss irreparable, but oppression, dishonor, and forfeiture of the people are then insured (that is why the fact that these classes are isolated is already a threat to freedom, because it can result in an esprit de corps that soon opposes the spirit of the whole).36
This means going so far as to rule out all personal faith: only a civic religion, a Volksreligion, can be compatible with the ethic of the state or city. For the republican citizen as for the modern Christian, “the soul is immortal,” but this soul, his soul, is the Republic itself:
The republic . . . outlived the republican, and the latter came to realize that the former, his soul, is something eternal.37
If Cato the Younger dived into his reading of the Phaedo on his deathbed, it was in a sense as a last resort, since his true soul, that is the spirit of the Roman Republic, was already dead. In short, if, as Carl Schmitt said, the article on natural law offers “the first polemically political definition of bourgeois,” the texts from Bern purely and simply deny the existence of any such thing if by “bourgeois is meant an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere.”38 The very existence of a sphere of private values—even those having to do with love39—compromises the ethical totality, which exists only if it exists without remainder. For the citizen, the “I” is always a “We,” and “before it [the assembly of the people] and from its mouth ‘we’ have complete truth.”40
There are two noteworthy effects, at two different levels, of such absolutization of the political totality and the ethos of citizenship. The first effect has to do with vocabulary. With one exception—a stock expression from traditional legal language, die Bürger und Bauern41—the terms Bürger and bürgerlich always refer to the political order, to societas civilis in the classical sense, in particular in the expressions bürgerliche Gesellschaft, bürgerliche Rechte, bürgerliche Gesetze, bürgerliche Verfassung. Thus, citizens (Staatsbürgern) of the civil state (bürgerlicher Staat) as such possess civil-political rights (bürgerliche Rechte).42 From this point of view, the idea of civil and private law distinct from public law is inconceivable. There is but one legal order, and it is political: “it lies in the nature of political society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) and in the rights of its sovereigns and legislators, that individual rights have become rights that the state is obliged to assert and to protect.”43 Clearly, the distinction between private and public law is far from being established here. But Hegel’s writings from Bern and Frankfurt quite simply exclude any such distinction. True, “civil laws [concern] the safety of the life and property of every citizen,”44 but they do not constitute their own autonomous legal space. This is not only because they presuppose the state’s sanction—which nobody contests—but above all because the privatization of human existence that would result from an autonomous legal-civic space would compromise the law of the city (in the sense of polis). However, Hegel has one important reservation regarding this principle: freedom of conscience, the only right he calls an inalienable human right (Menschenrecht) and which he sees as a “fundamental article of the social contract”45 must be upheld. On this last point, Hegel, who had just read Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, is (in spite of himself) more Aufklärer than Greek or Roman.
The second effect is that the ethic of the polis implies condemning what Hegel, echoing the Social Contract, calls “small societies,” those “partial societ[ies]” which stand in opposition to “great civil society” and whose “private laws” threaten public institutions and the spirit of citizenship.46 This theme is greatly expanded in the Bern essay on positivity, which explains the purely positive fate of Christian confession—that is, its sclerosis—by the fact that “the church went from private society to state.”47 What was once a sect whose rules and commandments only applied to members in foro interno became a clerical state, a kirchlicher Staat that first stood against the political state and then ultimately identified with it, arrogating some of its essential rights. Thus, the church and the state along with it forgot that “for faith, there is strictly speaking no social contract”:48 we may believe, we may want to believe, but we cannot commit to believing. This is not the place to examine why Hegel argues for a strict separation between the churches and the state—a separation he would later consider unrealizable—nor to analyze the connection between these considerations and the idea of a Volksreligion (which is not a religion in the state but rather a religion of the state). Another aspect will be emphasized here, for it directly concerns the subject of this chapter: the argument he lays out regarding the relations between the bürgerlicher and kirchlicher Staat in the “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” has the same structure as his analysis in “The German Constitution” of the relations between the “fictive state in idea” (Gedankenstaat)49 that the German Empire had become and the partial societies comprising it, that is, essentially, the territorial principalities. However, whereas the 1795–1796 text does not establish a difference between the two Gesellschaften of church and state, the 1799–1802 texts attribute the decline of the empire to the contamination of public law by private law and the language of privilege:
There is always an in and for itself contradiction in supposing that relationships bearing directly on the state, and not property only, are to have the form of private rights.50
This clear distinction between public law and private law allows Hegel in “The German Constitution” to recognize, as “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” had not, a specific domain of validity in which the principles of public law are absolutely legitimate. On the other hand, the text on the constitution of the German Empire, while affirming more strongly than ever the specificity of Staatssrecht and the political necessity of a strong state, clearly proclaims the existence of nonpolitical, or not directly political, aspects within the political community:
This is no place to argue at length that the centre, as the public authority, i.e., the government, must leave to the freedom of the citizens whatever is not necessary for its appointed function of organizing and maintaining authority and thus for its security at home and abroad. Nothing should be so sacrosanct to the government as facilitating and protecting the free activity of the citizens in matters other than this. This is true regardless of utility, because the freedom of the citizens is inherently sacrosanct.51
By insisting in this way on the difference between the public and the private, this passage already—though this is not its main intention—relativizes the “heroic understanding of freedom” (to use Hyppolite’s expression) that was still prevalent in the article on natural law but that would later be replaced by the idea that an individual is both bourgeois and citizen. From the critique of the spiritual state in the Bern text to the distinction between the public and the private in the Jena text we see the outlines of what the Philosophy of Right will clearly formulate: the existence of a depoliticized legal and social space.
In the Bern text, the condemnation of partial societies goes along with discussion of a topic that also closely concerns the later concept of civil society: the harmful effects that the separation of classes (Stände) has on the city and on the spirit of citizenship. In a standard panegyric to the simplicity of the ways of antiquity, Hegel writes,
But when a class—of the leaders, priests, or both—loses this spirit of unity that founded and animated its laws and orders, not only is the loss irreparable, but oppression, dishonor, and forfeiture of the people are then insured (that is why the fact that these classes are isolated is already a threat to freedom, because it can result in a feeling of pride that soon opposes the spirit of the whole). . . . [Thus] it is no longer a community that comes together, unanimously, before the altar of the gods.52
On its own, there is nothing particularly original about this observation; it repeats the classical idea that political equality, the foundation of democracy, requires a high level of homogeneity among a people and cannot accommodate strong inequality. Among the moderns, Rousseau expressed this idea most forcefully, writing that unequal conditions are perilous for the state:
If, then, you wish to give stability to the State, bring the two extremes as near together as possible; tolerate neither rich people nor beggars. These two conditions, naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the general welfare.53
Especially in a democracy, there must be “considerable equality in class and fortune, without which equality in rights and authority could not long survive.”54 It is less the content of the young Hegel’s text that is remarkable than the fact that its author would later go against this analysis and make esprit de corps the principle means of upholding the “spirit of the whole.” The understanding of patriotism, or the politische Gesinnung developed in the Philosophy of Right, consciously breaks with the heroism of freedom praised by the young Hegel, who found it alive and well among the soldier-citizens of the year II, the new Hellenes.55 In 1795, Hegel’s position was exactly the opposite:
It is in a manner similar to the church that corporations relate to the state vis-à-vis their rights to it. They also form a corporation in the state. . . . Here, the state has renounced the rights of its citizens.56
The difference is even more striking when we read the 1817–1818 lectures in parallel with the 1794 fragment that contrasts the esprit de corps with the esprit du tout: the later text uses the same terms but emphasizes the ethical and indirectly political vocation of the corporate institution and the subjective dispositions it creates:
A universal spirit of patriotism is formed by the fact that universal freedom comes about through particularization. There must be universal patriotism, but it must come about through esprit de corps.57
Here we can see what separates the young Hegel’s purely political conception of ethicality from a differentiated ethical totality whose political moment, while it encompasses and relativizes two other moments, is only truly universal and rational because those moments (the family and civil society) are each organized according to their own principles. Between the Bern texts and the mature writings lies a major discovery implying new appreciation for the figure of the bourgeois: the discovery of the modern significance of civil society.
Hegel’s works from Frankfurt, very few of which have been published, played a decisive role in forming Hegelian thought. His encounter with Kant’s practical philosophy, his return to thinking about the “destiny” of Christianity, and his discovery of the specific traits of modern reality through his studies of history and economy all contributed to the change of scale that marks the Jena writings, though at the time, Hegel did not conceive of their unity. Let us examine what paved the way for this major change. There seems to be little or no difference between the Frankfurt and Bern texts regarding the bourgeois-citizen relationship. Several fragments provided by Rosenkranz—some of which date back to Hegel’s time in Bern—reaffirm the Greek ideal of citizenship, contrasting it to the “bourgeois” spirit of modern institutions. The characteristic property of what the article on natural law calls “the class of the property owners [die erwerbende Klasse; i.e., the bourgeoisie]”58—that is, its valorization of the economy and law—is once again contrasted with the political ethos of the citizen of antiquity. First, Hegel questions economism:
In modern states, security of property is the pivot around which all legislation turns, and it is connected to the most citizen rights. In some free republics of antiquity, strict property rights . . . the pride of our states, were wronged simply because of the state constitution. In the Spartan constitution, security of property and industry almost never came into consideration. . . . One has perhaps not done justice to the system of sanscullotism in France if one sees its source in rapacity alone rather than in an aspiration to the greatest equality of property.59
Thus, at the moment this passage was written, Hegel still admired the classical ethical-political idea and the Revolution’s effort to restore it even in its “terrorist” form. It is presented with surprising enthusiasm given Hegel’s later assessments of the harmful effects of “absolute freedom.”
Juridism, a corollary of economism, is also judged severely. Reading Hume’s History of England, Hegel makes the following observation:
The object of his [Hume’s] history is a state of the modern era, whose internal relationships are not only legally determined, as with the ancients, but that owes its consistency more to legal form than to the free, unconscious life at the heart of it. The legal, which is consciousness of universality and also of its opposition, particularity, assigns the various estates to their place, but the people [within] do not act as a whole people from an idea that animates all.60
Subjected to the double alienation of legal formalism and economic necessity, modern man is a bourgeois—in the sense of Emile—who has become incapable of immediately and unreservedly supporting the “spirit of the whole.” In his eyes, this whole is no longer his true being or essence: it “exerts on [him] a domination.”61 “Torn and separated,” the life of modern peoples has lost, the Systemfragment says, the “most perfect wholeness” that “happy peoples” enjoy, or rather used to enjoy.62
However, without Hegel necessarily realizing it clearly, the break with the ideal of classical citizenship was being prepared. It would take three paths. In Bern, Hegel had begun reading history (Hume, Gibbon, etc.) and discovered Montesquieu. During his time in Frankfurt, these readings, along with his study of the history and legal structures of the German Empire, brought him to what would soon become a certainty: the irreducible originality of modern ethical-political reality and, consequently, the outmodedness of ideals that did not take this reality into account. Hegel’s interest in England—which he no longer denied—played a determining role in this regard: he read Hume’s historical works, he followed parliamentary debates, and he reflected on Montesquieu’s famous chapter on the English Constitution. His concern for historical particularities and details, his attention to the actual conditions in which general principles were implemented—what would later be called Hegelian “realism”—are reflected in his annotated translation of Jean-Jacques Cart’s Lettres confidentielles and in what remains of the 1798 text lampooning the political situation in Württemberg.
The first of these two texts contains an observation that does not agree with the previously cited extracts: Hegel deplores the fact that “security of property” had in many respects been “compromised” by Pitt’s policies, that “personal freedom” had been limited “because of the fact of the suspension of fundamental law” and that civil rights (staatsbürgerliche Rechte) as well were “under the effect of positive laws.”63 Rosenzweig would later write that the “revolutionary will and inventive future” had not disappeared from the 1798 texts and that at that moment Hegel was not yet the philosopher who would task himself with “conceiving what is”64 and thus, in a sense, justifying it. Nevertheless, passages such as this one do not agree either with the condemnation of the bourgeois ethics of property or with the refusal to grant absolute value to personal freedom.
As for the text on the political situation in Württemberg, the concern expressed therein for the concrete, immediate consequences of decisions made on principle incontestably prefigures the lucid realism of “The German Constitution”, the 1817 Ständeschrift, and the article titled “On the English Reform Bill.” Certainly Hegel eloquently calls on individuals and social groups to “rise above their petty interests and reach justice.”65 But the crux of the text—the need for elected political representation—is connected, if we are to believe “The German Constitution,” to the entirely modern existence of a “bourgeois estate [Stand].”66 However, this claim is not advanced without restriction: it is certainly in conformity with justice but will be politically effective only under certain conditions (first and foremost, the existence of a common mind [Gemeingeist], a truly unifying political culture) in the absence of which the claim, though just, could be harmful. Thus, Hoffmeister was correct to emphasize that in his translation of Cart, “Hegel’s teacher was not Rousseau but rather Montesquieu.”67 Undoubtedly, Hegel was already on the path that would eventually lead him to condemn abstract ideals to which, at the time, he still subscribed. At the beginning of his address to the people of Württemberg, he wrote,
The image of a better, more just time has come alive in the souls of men, and a longing, a sigh for a purer, freer state has moved all hearts and separated them from reality.68
This assessment concerns the attitude of some of Hegel’s compatriots at the time. But it also seems to refute a certain fragment from Bern denouncing the corrupting influence of withdrawal to the private sphere by a people “lacking civic virtue.” There we read
Only a nation of the highest depravity . . . could make blind obedience to the wicked whims of despicable men into a maxim. Only time and complete forgetting of a better situation could have led to this point.69
Isn’t it clear that in this sort of self-criticism lies the sign of a reconciliation with the times, with concrete historical actuality?
This brings me to the second path that this reconciliation took. As we know, it was at Frankfurt that Hegel discovered political economy, crucial to his development of the concept of civil society. Hegel would later say that this new discipline was “one of the sciences which have originated in the modern age as their element.”70 We know from Rosenkranz that “between February 19 and May 16 of 1799”—so, in Frankfurt—Hegel wrote a “commentary in the form of annotations” of the German translation (by Garve, a colleague of Kant’s at Königsberg) of J. Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767).71 However, this piece, which was decisive in shaping Hegel’s economic thought, has disappeared. In any case, some of the characteristics of Hegel’s thought that are considered retrograde with respect to what would become the dominant classical doctrines (Smith’s, Ricardo’s) can be explained by Steuart’s long-lasting influence on him. Marx, for his part, emphasized that Steuart offered a “rational expression of the monetary and mercantile system” and in contrast to Smith “is much more concerned with the genesis of the process of capital,” thus, with its history.72 This study was undoubtedly at the source of certain themes that would be developed in Jena: reflection on the beneficial effects of luxury commerce, the doctrine of social estates (Stände) developed in the System of Ethicality and later in the Philosophy of Spirit of 1805, the figure of the administrator (Geschäftsmann),73 perhaps related to the figure of the legislator in Steuart, and, in general, Hegel’s understanding of the relations between the state and the system of needs were some of the lasting effects of this reading. But there is more: it was undoubtedly in Steuart (and in Smith of course) that Hegel first encountered the idea that the common good—at least if it is reduced to what he would later call formal universality—results from the interaction of selfish pursuits; in fact, an interest in the common good need not be consciously pursued by social actors and indeed even excludes all concerted aims. At the beginning of the second volume of the translation of Steuart’s text used by Hegel, we find the following remark:
If, instead of private interest, love of country should be the motive for the actions of the members of a well-ordered state, everything would be corrupted. Patriotism among the governed must be as superfluous as it ought to be in powerful statesman.74
No doubt this is a subject that since Swift and Mandeville has become almost banal within Anglo-Saxon thought: “private vices, public benefits,” to quote the subtitle of Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. In any case, the young Hegel encountered the topic through Steuart. That author’s remarks, which directly contradict the ancient ethos of citizenship, certainly contributed to Hegel’s later reevaluation of the figure of the bourgeois and to his raising civil society to the status of a necessary component—in its relative right of course—of an ethical totality that can no longer be immediately or exclusively political. It is likely that Hegel at first rebelled against a doctrine that went counter to what was still his ethical and political ideal at the time. A fragment from his time at Frankfurt (written on the basis of his reading of Hume) offers an echo of this probable reaction. Whereas Steuart uses the image of the individual as a cog in the economic machine, Hegel regrets the fact that most actors within the historical record “present themselves as no more than cogs in a machine.”75
One last element should be mentioned. Why didn’t the reconciliation of bourgeois and citizen occur as soon as Hegel became definitively aware of the irreducibility of the modern world to the model of the beautiful totality? It is probably because he was still lacking the speculative means for thinking the identity of ethicality in its difference from its familial, social, and political moments. It was at Frankfurt that he found those means. However, the discovery occurred in a context that does not yet allow it to be applied to the issue in question here, the emergence of the positive figure of the bourgeois: this context was in fact Hegel’s reflection on the fate of Christianity. It was in this connection that Hegel, at the same time (or nearly the same time) as he was reading Steuart and beginning to become interested in current forms of political life, developed concepts (that at the time he wanted to be nonconceptual, “inconceivable,” as a reaction against Kantianism) that would lead him, at Jena, to the explicit program for a speculative—that is, also dialectic—rationality. The statement from the Systemfragment that “life is the linking of the linking and the nonlinking”76 undoubtedly marks the moment when Hegelian philosophy came into its own. It led Hegel down a path, and he himself did not know where it would take him. It was by following this path that, at the end of his stay in Jena, he came to reconsider the ideas he had hitherto supported in the ethical-political domain.
The opposition between bourgeois and citizen appears in the Jena texts. It occurs explicitly for the first time in the 1805 Philosophy of Spirit but is also perceptible in the article on natural law and in the System of Ethicality. However, it cannot be found in any of the earlier writings, though it is prefigured in them in multiple ways. The reason for this is clear: such a distinction could only become relevant with the abandonment, or at least the relativization, of the ethical ideal of the beautiful Greek totality, which lay at the heart of the Bern and Frankfurt writings. Hegel’s return to a distinction he found in Rousseau and then in Kant is tightly connected, as we will see, to his acknowledgment of the existence of nonpolitical or not immediately political forms of ethicality, which beginning in 1817 would correspond to what he would call bürgerliche Gesellschaft.
In the Jena writings, the distinction between citizen and bourgeois has a critical content that it would maintain, albeit in attenuated form: following in Rousseau’s footsteps, Hegel underscores the dangers of the modern reduction of the individual to a legal person and economic actor. The bourgeois point of view is based on a belief in the self-sufficiency of the private sphere and its supremacy over the political sphere. The article on natural law develops this critique polemically: the opposition it draws between “those who are free” and “those who are not free” in fact measures the distance separating the “general life”77 of the politeuein and the “universal private life,”78 condemned to “political nullity” of the “Bürger in the sense of bourgeois.”79 To support this polemical characterization, Hegel cites a passage from Gibbon, but we may wonder whether he did not have in mind the passage from Emile cited above, where Rousseau says precisely that the bourgeois is “nothing.”
In the other Jena texts, the tone of the argument is less polemical. The System of Ethicality defines the bourgeois as someone who, because of his “sinking into possession and particularity,”80 “is not capable of virtue or bravery”;81 the bourgeois is a man of work and profit, and he seeks to abstract himself from the universal, for he only knows and recognizes its abstract form: money. However, the doctrine of social estates and ethical dispositions (Gesinnungen) developed in this text hints at a new direction. Indeed, the autonomy Hegel recognizes at various levels—which are of course hierarchically organized—in fact points to the way the ethical whole enriches the differences that exist within it.
In the absolute real totality of ethicality, the three forms of ethicality must be equally real. Each one must organize for itself, be an individual, and have a shape, for their mixing is the absence of form of what is naturally ethical, the absence of wisdom.82
We see here that Hegel’s recognition of the (entirely relative) right of the bourgeois goes along with his questioning of a naturalist vision of ethicality that no doubt corresponds for the most part to the older paradigm of the beautiful totality.
The 1805 Philosophy of Spirit also maintains a strict hierarchy between the estate of universality—the public estate dedicated to carrying out the state’s administrative and warring functions—and the estates of the peasantry, the merchant class, and the bourgeoisie, which are confined to the lesser tasks of producing, distributing, and consuming commodities. But the work also brings about a turn, essentially prefiguring the later significance of the doctrine of civil society.83 It states that the objective attitudes and practices designated by the terms citizen and bourgeois correspond to different though connected aspects of modern reality. No doubt these attitudes oppose one another, but this opposition is an internal cleavage within modern man, divided between contradictory “vocations” (in the complex sense of the German world Beruf) rather than a Platonic “division of labor”:
The same person takes care of himself and his family, works, concludes contracts, and so forth, but this person also works for the universal, driven by one goal; the first aspect is known as “bourgeois,” and the second as “citizen.”84
At the very moment that he makes this point, Hegel introduces a connection to the analyses contained in “The German Constitution”: “Bourgeois [Spießbürger] and citizen of the empire, each is as much a formal bourgeois as the other.” In a state-in-idea, there is neither state nor civil society, neither bourgeois nor citizen. This insight represents a break and certainly owes a great deal to Hegel’s readings in economics.85 Earlier I discussed Steuart’s influence on Hegel. As for Adam Smith, the Jena manuscripts show that Hegel’s reading of The Wealth of Nations made a decisive contribution to his analysis of work and consequently of the “cunning of reason” as well as of “recognition.”86 The result of this appropriation of economic knowledge is the realization that the ideal of the polis and the ethics of citizenship cannot be transposed as such into modern conditions, for modern conditions have superior ethical resources. True, the 1805 manuscript still evokes “the beautiful and happy freedom of the Greeks, which was and remains envied,”87 but the immediate identification of the individual with the ethical substance already appears too simple, too abstract. The modern world allows subjectivity to affirm itself as an autonomous ethical figure thanks to both the appearance of a subjective moral authority and the creation of a nonpolitical or indirectly political-social space: “By this principle, external freedom is lost, effectively, by individuals in their immediate concrete existence, but obtained is inner freedom, freedom of thought.”88 In fact, Hegel would never go back to such a judgment, decreeing the end of “nostalgia for Greece,” that is, the ethics of the polis.
It was in Heidelberg and Berlin that Hegel, giving definitive shape to the doctrine of civil society, completed his reflection on the bourgeois-citizen relationship. The term bürgerliche Gesellschaft appears in its truly Hegelian sense in the 1817–1818 lectures at Heidelberg on “Natural Law and Science of the State.” Here, Hegel says in defining civil society that “members of the state are bourgeois, not citizens,”89 which means before (eventually) dedicating themselves to the political service of the universal, they are legal persons and economic actors who seek to satisfy their selfish goals and are caught in a system of needs. The Philosophy of Right and the Encyclopedia present civil society as the “external State.”90 This description highlights two opposing or complementary aspects. First—this is the principal aspect—civil society is, or is merely, “the state of necessity and of the understanding.”91 Hegel here uses the Fichtean motif of the Notstaat, though not in regard to the state strictly speaking but rather to civil society: it is civil society insofar as it is the external reflection or “phenomenon” of the political coming together of citizens that must be qualified as Notstaat. Based on the mechanical operation of the system of needs, this social Notstaat is governed by necessity, which distinguishes it entirely from the state strictly speaking (which is political). If the universal is present in civil society, it is so only in the external form of unconscious and abstract regulations of the economy and in the formal dictates of private law. The competition between particular ends evokes, though from afar, the war of each against all: civil society “[contains] remnants of the state of nature.”92 This is why the state, because of its particular political task and its conscious orientation toward the principles of objective freedom and concrete universality, must be clearly distinguished from the space of abstraction that is civil society. Thus Hegel’s repeated denunciation of the liberal tendency to “confuse the state with civil society.” Anyone who sees the state’s vocation as the “protection of personal property and liberty” does not understand that the state’s true vocation is to guarantee “union as such,”93 and by failing to recognize this, thereby lowers the citizen to the rank of bourgeois.
However, civil society is the outside of the state, its other, its mediation. The being-outside of itself of the ethical totality is the moment of negativity through which it achieves its political being-at-home. Thus, living adhesion to the universal and the seemingly immediate trust the citizen feels for the state as an institution are not obtained by reprimanding the egoism of the bourgeois, “private persons who have their own interests as their end,”94 but instead by leaning on it. For, as the Logic establishes, freedom is not the opposite of necessity, its abstract other, but rather its truth, which means that it includes necessity within itself structurally as its own moment of negativity. Within Hegelianism, the bourgeois and the citizen, like society and state, are as identical as they are different. Rousseau saw them as two antithetical figures. Hegel, on the contrary, arrived at the idea that modern civil society, by reducing the individual to the abstract properties of homo oeconomicus, for the first time gave concrete content to the idea of humanity. For the bourgeois is man himself, man in general, abstract man engaged in abstract work and in this very abstraction possesses distinct existence.95 As for the citizen, he is true confirmed man who has arrived at the concrete expression of his effective universality. Without the reality that modernity gives to the abstract existence of the bourgeois, the very old idea of citizenship itself remains an abstraction.
The difficulty Hegel faced once he was no longer content to contrast antiquity’s ethics of citizenship with the negation of ethicality implied by being rooted in particularity lay in establishing mediations that would make it possible to think the necessary conjunction of contradictory realities and attitudes. The Frankfurt reflections on Christianity and the “nonconceptual” tools it provides—life, love, destiny—are the first theoretical sketches of this later task because they attempt to conceptualize the identity of the identical and the nonidentical. Hegel’s intense reflection in Frankfurt and then in Jena on ethical-political questions allowed him to develop the core of the solution to the problem facing him. But this problem, illustrated by the difficult articulation of the “esprit de corps” and the “spirit of the whole” would only find its philosophical conclusion thanks to the vast undertaking of the Logic. To fully think politics and its modern limitations, Hegel needed all the resources of speculative philosophy, even metaphysics. That does not mean that one must accept those resources in order to draw on his sociopolitical views.
1. GdP, W 19, p. 228.
2. See the title of Werner Sombart, Der Bourgeois (1913).
3. French Constitution of 1791, Title 2, Article 2; French Constitution of 1793, Articles 4–6 and especially Article 7: “The French people is the whole of its citizens.”
4. Fichte, Beitrag, Werke, 6:235.
5. Rehberg wrote in 1793, “To introduce the new system, which was to build on the universal equality of all citizens, we should abolish the prerogatives of certain states and destroy these states themselves.” August Wilhelm Rehberg, Untersuchungen über die Französische Revolution (Hannover: Ritscher, 1793), 1:177.
6. See M. Riedel, “Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum” in Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1:692.
7. See I/8 in Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la république (Paris: Fayard, 1986), 1:179. For more on Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, see Olivier Beaud, La puissance de l’état (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 53ff; J. H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
8. Bodin, Les Six Livres, I/6, 1:118–19.
9. Ibid., 131.
10. Ibid., 113.
11. Ibid., 141.
12. Hobbes, De Cive: English Version, 5:11, 134.
13. Encyclopédie; ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1777), s.v. “Bourgeois.”
14. Ibid., s.v. “Citoyen.”
15. Ibid,.
16. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:361; Social Contract 1:6, 164, modified.
17. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:362; Social Contract, 1:6, 164.
18. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:362; Social Contract, 1:6, 164.
19. Kant, Gemeinspruch, Ak. 8, pp. 292–94; PP, pp. 292–94.
20. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 4:249–50; Emile; or, On Education, trans. Christopher Kelly and Alan Bloom (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2002), 164–65.
21. Kant, Gemeinspruch, Ak. 8, pp. 292–94; Frieden, Ak. 8, pp. 349–50; Rechtslehre: MdS, § 46, Ak. 6, p. 314; PP, pp. 292–94, 322–23, 457.
22. Kant, Gemeinspruch, Ak. 8, p. 298; PP, p. 297. This brings to mind a sentence from Benjamin Constant: “Let us ask the authorities to keep within their limits. Let them confine themselves to being just. We shall assume the responsibility of being happy for ourselves.” Constant, Political Writings, 326.
23. I rely on Manfred Riedel, “Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum”; Hans-Peter Schneider, “Der Bürger zwischen Stadt und Staat im 19. Jahrhundert,” Der Staat 8 (1988): 143–78; Michael Stolleis, “Untertan-Bürger-Staatsbürger: Bemerkungen zur juristischen Terminologie im späten 18. Jahrhundert,” in Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1981): 65–99; Paul-Ludwig Weinacht, “Staatsbürger: Zur Geschichte und Kritik eines politischen Begriffs,” Der Staat 8, no. 1 (1969): 41–63.
24. Theodor Anton Heinrich Schmalz, Das natürliche Staatsrecht (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1794), §§ 49, 39. See also Schmalz and Friedrich Nicolovius, Das reine Naturrecht (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1792), §§ 141–77.
25. Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, Grundsätze des natürlichen Staatsrechts und seiner Anwendung nebst einem Anhange staatsrechtlicher Abhandlungen (Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1795), 178.
26. See the article “Bürger” in Heinrich Gottfried Scheidemantel, Repertorium des teutschen Staats- und Lehnsrechts (Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 1782), 1:439.
27. Scheidemantel, Das Staatsrecht nach der Vernunft und den Sitten der vornehmsten Völker Betrachtet (Cröcker, 1773), 3:174, 179, 242–43.
28. Johann Jacob Moser, Neues Teutsches Staatsrecht: Von der Landeshoheit in Steuer-Sachen (Metzler, 1773), 17:1–2; see also pp. 460–61.
29. See Karl Rosenkranz, Hegels Leben (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1844), 59–61, 85–94. The texts published in the appendix of this biography were collected with some others and published in Johannes Hoffmeister, ed., Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung (Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog, 1974), 257–82. In current editions, see Hegel, Werke, 1:427–48. For problems of dating, see Gisela Schüler, “Zur Chronologie von Hegels Jugendschriften,” Hegel-Studien 2 (1963): 111–15.
30. The letter to Schelling from December 24, 1794, already condemned “the shame of Robespierrists.” See Hoffmeister, Briefe von und an Hegel, 1:12.
31. Hoffmeister, Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, 276.
32. W 1, p. 126; on the same topic, see also pp. 204–5, 206, 213–14, and esp. 439.
33. W 1, p. 207n60.
34. W 1, p. 439.
35. W 1, p. 205.
36. W 1, p. 57.
37. W 1, p. 206.
38. Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker und Humboldt, 1979), 62; The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 62.
39. See the diatribe by Aristide, who fancifully rails against the language of courtly love, indignant that one would devote “all this luxury of feelings, acts, enthusiasm” to something other than the city. W 1, p. 437.
40. W 1, p. 433.
41. W 1, p. 167.
42. W 1, p. 171.
43. W 1, p. 160.
44. W 1, p. 149.
45. W 1, p. 170.
46. W 1, pp. 63 and 66. Compare with Rousseau: “partial associations are formed to the detriment of the whole society.” See Rousseau, Social Contract, 173; Oeuvres complètes, 3:371–72.
47. W 1, p. 179.
48. W 1, p. 166.
49. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 507–8; “German Constitution,” in Hegel’s Political Writings, 180.
50. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 538; “German Constitution,” in Hegel’s Political Writings, 207, modified.
51. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 482; “German Constitution,” in Hegel’s Political Writings, 161–62.
52. W 1, p. 57. Similarly, p. 94. And with respect to corporations and guilds, see W 1, p. 150.
53. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:392; Social Contract, 2:11, 189.
54. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:405; Social Contract, 3:4, 201.
55. See chapter 11 below.
56. W 1, pp. 150–51.
57. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, § 132A, 86; Lectures on Natural Right.
58. Naturrecht, W 2, p. 490 (Natural Law, 100).
59. W 1, p. 439.
60. W 1, p. 446.
61. W 1, p. 433.
62. W 1, p. 426.
63. W 1, pp. 257–58.
64. See Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat, 1:50.
65. W 1, p. 270.
66. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 536 (“German Constitution,” in Hegel’s Political Writings, 206): “Representation is so deeply interwoven with the essence of the feudal constitution in its development along with the rise of the bourgeois that we may call it the silliest of notions to suppose it an invention of the most recent times.”
67. Hoffmeister, Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, 464.
68. W 1, pp. 268–69.
69. W 1, p. 100.
70. RPh, § 189 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 165 (Elements, 227; see Outlines, 187).
71. Rosenkranz, Hegels Leben, 86.
72. Karl Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert (Berlin: Dietz, 1965), 1:11.
73. See GW 8, p. 273.
74. Sir James Steuart, Untersuchungen über die Grundsätze von der Staatswissenschaft (Hamburg, 1796), 2:4. Hoffmeister emphasizes the importance of this passage to the future doctrine of ethics. But it is a simplification to think that Hegel later opposes these “capitalist principles” to a “proclamation of the reign of the state in the economy”; even in the Berlin writings, the state does not have any vocation to govern the system of needs. Hoffmeister, Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, 467.
75. W 1, p. 446. See also “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” W 1, pp. 234–35.
76. W 1, p. 422.
77. Naturrecht, W 2, p. 489 (Natural Law, 100).
78. Naturrecht, W 2, p. 492 (Natural Law, 102).
79. Naturrecht, W 2, p. 494 (Natural Law, 103).
80. SS, GW 5, p. 336.
81. SS, GW 5, p. 338.
82. SS, GW 5, p. 333.
83. See the preliminary to part 2, “The Archaeology of Society.”
84. GW 8, p. 261.
85. For a clear analysis of the Hegelian “reception” of political economy and of the Scottish Enlightenment more broadly, see Waszek, Scottish Enlightenment, 60–65, 112–34. See also Waszek, “Hegels Lehre von der ‘Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft’ und die politische Ökonomie ser schottischen Aufklärung,” Dialektik 3 (1995): 35–50. There are also the classic articles by Manfred Riedel: “Die Rezeption der Nationalökonomie” and “Hegels Begriff der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und das Problem seines geschichtlichen Ursprungs,” in Riedel, Zwischen Tradition und Revolution, 116–38 and 139–69, respectively.
86. See “Philosophie des Geistes” (1803–1804), GW 6, pp. 321–24; “Philosophie des Geistes” (1805–1806), GW 8, pp. 223–25.
87. GW 8, p. 262.
88. GW 8, pp. 263–64. Compare with RPh, § 124 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 110 (Elements, 151; see Outlines, 122–23).
89. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, § 89, 112; Lectures on Natural Right. See also Hegel, Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, § 72, 89.
90. RPh, §§ 157, 183, GW 14.1, pp. 143, 160 (Elements, 198, 221; see Outlines, 162, 181). See Enzykl, §§ 523, 534, GW 20, pp. 498, 506–7 (Encyclopedia 230–31).
91. RPh, § 183, GW 14.1, p. 160 (Elements, 221; see Outlines, 181).
92. RPh, § 200 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 170 (Elements, 234; see Outlines, 192). Only remnants; civil society is not, according to Hegel, a state of nature precisely because it is not limited at any moment to a system of the needs (a point of view that separates Hegel from Marx).
93. RPh, § 258 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 201 (Elements, 276, see Outlines, 229).
94. RPh, § 187, GW 14.1, p. 162 (Elements, 224; see Outlines, 184).
95. See RPh, § 190 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 166 (Elements, 228; see Outlines, 188). On this point, see Riedel, “Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum,” 706–9. See also Bernard Bourgeois, “L’homme hégélien,” in Etudes Hégéliennes: Raison et décision, 181–205.