In his preface to the volume of the Jubiläumsausgabe that included the first edition of the Encyclopedia (1817), Hermann Glockner notes that the parts of that work that underwent the most changes in the later two editions were the middle sections, sites of mediations par excellence: these are the sections on the philosophy of nature, the logic of essence, and the doctrine of objective spirit.1 Glockner’s statement has merely informative value and cannot be confirmed down to the last detail. In terms of objective spirit, it was the presentation of Sittlichkeit that most significantly changed. The most remarkable of these changes—one that we now know was made during the year the first Encyclopedia was published, in the 1817–1818 course on “Natural Law and Science of the State”—was Hegel’s introduction of the distinction between family, civil society, and the state, which implies moving away from the dualism characteristic of both the Aristotelian perspective (the separation between the oikos and the polis) and the perspective of modern natural law (the separation between the state of nature and the state of society).2 Certainly, the most remarkable aspect of this change was Hegel’s redefinition of the classical concept of bürgerliche Gesellschaft, still present in the first edition of the Encyclopedia, which very classically contrasts the “fiction” of the state of nature with “the state constituted by society and the State” and maintains that “society, by contrast, is the condition in which only the law has reality”;3 here, society must be understood as the state of society, political society, and not what would later be called “civil society.” This reworking confirms Glockner’s assessment: indeed, within Sittlichkeit, civil society is “the sphere of mediation”4 and consequently a critical space, a center of tensions. Surprisingly, this remark, which came from Hegel’s course at the Nuremberg gymnasium,5 was left unchanged in a short addition included in later editions, where the term Gesellschaft has a completely different meaning.6 In the present chapter, the gradual formation of the concept of civil society and the distinction between civil society and the state will serve as my guiding thread for analyzing the changes made to the doctrine of Sittlichkeit and the structural difficulties that doctrine involves—difficulties of which Hegel seems to have become aware only gradually.
The very notion of objective spirit shows how different Hegel’s concept of spirit is from common conceptions of it as well as from earlier philosophical understandings. The notion is already tacitly present in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular in chapter 6, where the figures of spirit are presented as “shapes of a world”7 in contrast to consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason and where spirit itself is defined as an “ethical substance” in which consciousness “opposes to itself as an objective, actual world.”8 However, the expression itself first appeared in the Heidelberg Encyclopedia. In that text, the definition of objective spirit is succinct: subjective spirit, arriving at consciousness of what constitutes its determination (i.e., freedom willing itself), opens itself up to the necessity—implied by the concept of freedom as being at home with oneself in the other—of self-relinquishment, of alienation within an objectivity that at first appears to be a purely contingent given. This requirement that subjectivity be expressed in otherness, which is speculatively grounded in the Logic, is inseparable from the understanding of dialectics that from 1800 onward organized Hegelian philosophy. In the Encyclopedia, it is expressed above all in relation to Sittlichkeit.
Beginning with the Philosophy of Right (in fact, beginning with the 1817–1818 course), objectivization becomes the distinctive characteristic of spirit in general and practical spirit in particular: spirit’s freedom is measured by its aptitude to “remain with itself in this objectivity.”9 Freedom, the generic determination of spirit, thus receives “the form of necessity.”10 If we recall that the transition from objective logic (being and essence) to subjective logic (concept) is presented as an Aufhebung of necessity into freedom, then we get a sense of the dramatic change implied by the concept of objective spirit. It seems to reverse the decisive logical argument that freedom is “the truth of necessity.”11 But this is only in appearance. Indeed, in the Logic, the Aufhebung of necessity—a category that encapsulates the entire process of the “objective” logic of being and essence—by freedom, which characterizes the “subjective” dynamism of the concept, only takes on its full meaning (suppressing while maintaining, surpassing while conserving) when the concept recreates in itself the dimension of objectivity and necessity without which it would be “merely subjective”—subjective in a trivial sense. The shift from subjective concept to objectivity and from logic to nature—and thus, the conversion of freedom into necessity—is therefore decisive proof of the freedom of the concept. The Encyclopedia’s “Philosophy of Spirit” repeats the chiasmic organization of the logic of the concept, ballasting it with the weight of actuality. Indeed, the doctrine of objective spirit reproduces and reverses the general organization of the philosophy of spirit. There, the sequence subjective spirit–objective spirit–absolute (subjective-objective) spirit is reversed, and the sequence runs objectivity (abstract law)–subjectivity (morality)–subject-objectivity (Sittlichkeit). From this we see, at least at the formal level, the need for the theory of objective spirit to include a theory of moral subjectivity quite different from the doctrine of subjective spirit.12 In general, the Hegelian system both as a whole and in its parts is based on a truly unprecedented organization of subjectivity and objectivity, an organization that requires deep changes to be made to these notions.
Before 1830, the presentation of objective spirit underwent significant modifications. For example, in order to explain the claim, which is crucial for understanding Sittlichkeit, that “Freedom, shaped into the actuality of a world, acquires the form of necessity,”13 the final edition of the Encyclopedia includes an extra paragraph that develops and alters the end of section 485 from the earlier edition. The earlier version read
The rational will is not only in itself, nor internal, nor simply what is immediately natural, but rather its content is known and valid only as positive law and custom within the spiritual.14
The gist of the argument is clear. Objective spirit is freedom developed into a world, but this objective world is a spiritual world, which overcomes the abstract contradiction between subjectivity apprehended through the categories of reflection and objectivity conceived in terms of natural immediacy. However, by putting “positive laws” (which, posited by the will of an authority, connote exteriority) and customs (which add the sanction of lived—though not subjective or individual—adherence) on the same level, the 1827 text erases or at least attenuates the characteristic tension within objective spirit between the positive or implicit rules of the system of ethicality and the way in which these rules are lived by subjects and incorporated and validated in practices.
Paragraph 485, added to the 1830 edition, clarifies the difference between law and custom. The determinations of objective spirit are manifested “in the form of necessity,” a “unity of the rational will with the particular will”; the latter is “the immediate and peculiar element of the operation of the rational will.” But their content may appear to consciousness as either a “valid power” or as “impressed on the subjective will, not in the form of feeling and urge, but in its universality, as the will’s habit, disposition and character . . . custom.” In the first case, objective spirit takes on the externally rational form of law; in the second, the form of ethical custom (Sitte), the objective incorporation of the rational into sensible (sensées) practices.15 The tension between subjectivity and objectivity that characterizes objective spirit is expressed in the possibility that individual and collective behaviors might not fit the universal pronounced by the law or that the law might not be internalized and lived positively by individuals. The concept of Sittlichkeit explicitly addresses this tension. Even when the “laws and powers” of Sittlichkeit are accepted by subjectivity, they compel it to give up its claim to complete autonomy, for “ethical substance” has “absolute authority and power” over subjectivity.16 The ethical subject (human, bourgeois, citizen) must give up his or her spontaneous (and illusory) representation of freedom or free will, a representation that is expressed in the language of morality.
The 1830 Encyclopedia explains the double subjective and objective dimension of objective spirit in terms that in the Philosophy of Right apply to Sittlichkeit alone. In 1820, Hegel defined Sittlichkeit as “the concept of freedom which has become the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness”17; ethicality unites and reconstructs the objective formalism of law and the subjective formalism of moral consciousness. But this unity, while overcoming the abstract opposition between the two, does not abolish “consciousness of the difference of these moments”18—the difference between the universal concept of free will and its particular concrete existence. Ethicality is first and foremost a world of objectivity whose determinations form a “circle of necessity.” But individuals are not mere passive “accidents” of this substance; the system of objective determinations that comprises Sittlichkeit is a lived world that has actuality only if it is an “object of knowledge”19 or at least of belief for individuals. Unlike the laws of physical nature, the laws of ethical nature have validity only through “representation”: their validity is based on individuals’ knowledge and recognition of them:
The fact that the ethical sphere is the system of these determinations of the Idea constitutes its rationality. In this way, the ethical sphere is freedom, or the will which has being in and for itself as objectivity, as a circle of necessity whose moments are the ethical powers which govern the lives of individuals. In these individuals—who are accidental to them—these powers have their representation [Vorstellung], phenomenal shape [erscheinende Gestalt], and actuality.20
Thus, the subject’s relation to the objective structures of the ethical world reproduces the double aspect of this world. On the one hand, “the ethical substance, its laws and powers,” are and appear to individuals to be completely out of reach; in this regard, their authority is “infinitely more firmly based than the being of nature.”21 On the other hand, the power of ethical objectivity also implies that the subject finds “self-awareness [Selbstgefühl]” in it and recognizes his or her own essence in it. Objectivity is only ethical to the extent that it is not something “distinct [from the subject]” and expresses “the actual living principle of self-consciousness.”22 Thus, individuals’ relation to the conditions and norms of their action, which is still external when it takes the form of a legal or moral obligation, is fully internalized when it becomes Sitte. Ethical custom, as a “general mode of behavior,”23 as a practice objectively based on the universal, manifests subjects’ adherence to the universality that constitutes them. Consequently, it is Sittlichkeit, more than morality—or anyway more clearly than morality—that reveals the decisive role of subjectivity within objective spirit: objective spirit is not only the “ground in which the concept of freedom has its concrete existence [Existenz],” it is the mode of “existence of the concept which is adequate to it.”24 Objective spirit only conforms to its concept—which is to be “a world produced and to be produced by it; in this world freedom is present as necessity”25—if particular subjectivity actualizes and verifies such a conversion. But this can only happen if, unlike moral consciousness, which is still plagued by the vertigo of radical autonomy, ethical subjectivity recognizes the primacy of the universal-objective norm and accepts that its own aspirations be relativized. In objective spirit, the normative content to which subjectivity gives actuality by adhering to it is not first posited by this adherence: that content is the substance of that subjectivity, but as substance it is always presupposed by its action. Ethicality, which is “second nature,”26 is of course radically different from external nature, for it is freedom expressing itself in the forms of necessity, not the blind reign of necessity. Nevertheless, as it is spontaneously perceived, it is still nature: it speaks the language of necessity.27
We must not be too surprised by the fact that in the 1830 Encyclopedia the definition of objective spirit corresponds to the definition of ethicality in the Philosophy of Right. Ethicality is not a part of objective spirit, juxtaposed to law and morality. Only ethicality, “self-conscious freedom become nature,”28 corresponds completely to the definition of objective spirit by carrying out, in the realm of objectivity, the reconciliation between the unilateral objectivity of law and the unilateral subjectivity of morality.
Hegel’s development of the concept of objective spirit completed his efforts, begun in 1803–1804, to “reconcile himself with the times” by conceptualizing the modern world in its specificity: the world of the Reform, the market economy, and the French Revolution. There were two aspects to this development, which was directly linked to his rejection of the model of the polis.
The notion of objective spirit gives speculative ground to the efforts Hegel had been making since Jena and even since Frankfurt to break with the framework of modern practical philosophy and natural law, whose “empirical” version (Hobbes, Grotius, Locke, Rousseau) as well as its “formalist” version (Kant-Fichte) the 1802 article mercilessly deconstructs. But, unlike the path Hegel took in the earliest Jena writings, the notion of objective spirit does not imply a rehabilitation of the classical, finalist, and naturalist conception of ethical-political life, for that conception was definitively rendered null and void by Christianity’s affirmation of the principle of autonomy and, more generally, by the “higher principle of modern times, that the ancients, like Plato, did not know.”29 The problematic of objective spirit is the means by which Hegel is able to overcome the antithesis confronting modern thought between nature and freedom (or—though this is just a variation of the same—between natural freedom and rational freedom).
From a point of view internal to the system, the distinction between subjective spirit and objective spirit clears space for the Hegelian conception of absolute spirit; we may even say that it necessarily calls for it. Of course, the Hegelian conception of absolute spirit had already been defined, but it posed many problems when one takes account of the systematic program presented in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: to rise from the point of view of “substance” to that of “subject.”30 In truth, it is the unprecedented concept of subjectivity used by the logic of the concept that shows the path to resolution: this resolution is now no longer a property of the particular subject but first and foremost of the concept developing in a manner immanent to its determinations within an element of objectivity constituted by it. The world that is objective spirit can then be understood as “the system of determinations of freedom,” although—or rather because—with objective spirit freedom “receives the form of necessity.”31 And, so that this objectivity does not remain abstractly contraposed to subjectivity—as it does in the Kantian or Fichtean perspective that opposes law and morality (or law and ethics)—it receives the guarantee of absolute spirit, whose concept puts the true affirmation of freedom in scission and negativity:
For this reason, formally the essence of spirit is freedom, absolute negativity of the concept as identity with itself. In accordance with this formal determination, spirit can abstract from everything external and from its own externality, from its very existence [Dasein]; it can endure the negation of its individual immediacy, infinite pain, i.e. it maintains itself affirmatively in this negativity and is identical for itself.32
It is therefore appropriate to examine the forms that, within objective spirit, the overcoming or sublating (Aufhebung) of the opposition between nature and freedom takes insofar as this opposition can be regarded as final.33
In the Jena texts, despite many indications that the concept had evolved, the reference point for Sittlichkeit remains the Greek polis, or at least Hegel’s representation of it. The distinctive trait of the “kingdom of ethicality” is that “each one is custom, immediately one with the universal.”34 This immediate unity of the universal and the particular corresponds to a narrowly political understanding of ethicality: following a tradition established in the first book of Aristotle’s Politics, Hegel bases his conception of ethicality on the traditional divide between economics and politics, between the oikos and the polis (or societas civilis). The expulsion of activities of production and exchange from the ethical-political sphere is explicit in the article on natural law, which denounces the “political nullity” of the bourgeois;35 it is less explicit in the System of Ethicality,36 where we still find what Hyppolite called a “heroic conception of freedom.”37 According to such a view, war is the eminent, and even exclusive, form of the politeueien.
This political and war-based vision of ethicality is still dominant in the Phenomenology of Spirit, chapter 5 of which paints an enthusiastic picture of such communion with the universal, the self-forgetting that comprises Sittlichkeit.38 However, Hegel was already convinced that the model of the polis was outdated, but he continued to see it as the eminent form of ethicality. The 1805–1806 Philosophy of Spirit offers a striking example of this attitude, but it also points to the way out of these ambiguities. On the one hand, in an already nostalgic mode, it evokes the Sittlichkeit of antiquity, where “the beautiful public life was the custom of all”; on the other hand, one line further, it contrasts, for the first time, this model with the “the higher principle of modern times,” which requires a differentiation, if not a dislocation, of the compact unity of each with all and with the whole.39 Even more explicitly, chapter 6 of the Phenomenology of Spirit establishes the need to break with this still overly compact figure of “the true spirit”—immediately true—that the unsophisticated ethics of the polis embodies. This ethics must protect itself against any risk of division, and the quest for private happiness represents a major one; because it is based on the repression of individuality, this ethics cannot withstand the affirmation of individuality, including such politically innocent forms as Antigone’s. In Sophocles’ play, the analysis of the conflict between human law and divine law shows the contradiction that undermines a community that “can only maintain itself by suppressing this spirit of individualism.”40 From the moment this spirit of particularity occurs—and it does so, significantly, in a woman who, in the strongest and most tragic sense, embodies “the everlasting irony of the community”—the collision offers the comic or lamentable spectacle of an “absolute which is opposed to itself,”41 divided by a scission it cannot survive. The ancient figure of the “beautiful totality” is thus not factually but rather essentially over and done with because of its denegation of the scissions and contradictions that are the wellspring of all life. No matter how painful, the “working one’s way out of the immediacy of substantial life”42 is unavoidable. In addition, it is fecund, for “it [spirit] only wins its truth . . . within its absolute disruption,”43 that is, in fully experiencing the trial of its own negativity. The speculative reason for abandoning the model of the polis and the conception of ethicality it leads to is thus that model’s inadequacy to the concept of spirit developed, notably, in the Phenomenology of Spirit. But this reason can only be given retrospectively, once Hegelianism reaches its full expression in the Logic and the Encyclopedia.
First of all, the principle of subjective autonomy, which Christianity proclaimed44 but which was already present in Socrates,45 shows the fragility of the substantial ethicality of the polis. Socrates destabilized the city, and a Christian destabilized the empire quite simply because, even without contesting the ends proclaimed by city or empire (Socrates was an exemplary soldier), they recognized other ends. No matter how contestable some forms of subjective freedom may be (e.g., the moral view of the world, or the figure of the beautiful soul, wallowing in its “solitary divine service”), it can no longer be ignored or repressed, so much so that for moderns, subjective freedom is the same as freedom “in the European sense [of the word].”46
The second reason for giving up the model of the polis lies in Hegel’s critique of the French Revolution—not its principle, of course, which is the principle of political modernity itself, that is, “objective” freedom, but rather the deviation implied by unilaterally affirming this freedom. Indeed, the ideal of absolute freedom appears as an actualization of the ideal of an undivided ethical community and thus of the paradigm of the beautiful totality. But it does this within the conditions of modernity—whose recognition of an inalienable right to privacy is an essential characteristic—and this makes the revolutionary actualization of this paradigm far more formidable for individuals who can no longer believe in it wholeheartedly than it ever could have been within the universe of antiquity’s more simple certainties.
The third reason is that the elucidation of the logic of the system of needs (the market economy or the “extended order” in Hayek’s sense) by Anglo-Saxon authors convinced Hegel that the closed model of the oikos, the counterpart to that of the polis, was outmoded (in fact this outmodedness was already old: it dates back to the constitution of “world-economies”47). The Jena texts expose the dissonance between the logic of the system of needs (the logic of the division of labor, mechanized and parceled out, and of commercial trade) and the belief in an exclusively political constitution of the common good. From then on, the focus is on giving place to the abstract universality of economic regulation while maintaining the primacy of the concrete (political) universal. By positing in 1805 that “the same individual” is both “bourgeois” and “citizen,”48 Hegel makes an observation that requires developing a differentiated concept of Sittlichkeit, making room for its nondirectly political dimensions. That concept, the crowning piece of the doctrine of objective spirit, emerges from the deeper understanding of the historical and dialectic nature of spirit developed in chapter 6 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is also what allows Hegel to systematically articulate the reasons—present but not coordinated in the Jena writings—that make it necessary to renounce the paradigm of the polis.
The new concept of Sittlichkeit developed in Hegel’s mature writings implies that the sphere of objective spirit, which is marked by the separation between unilateral subjectivity and equally unilateral objectivity, finds in itself (and no longer, as in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the higher spheres of religion and absolute knowing) the resources for an authentic reconciliation. It is not a matter of making objective spirit a world closed on itself, for the very concept of spirit excludes this possibility. Instead, it is a matter of teasing out the possible conditions for an immanent surpassing of the contradiction specific to finite spirit. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, spirit, certain of itself and having reached the end of its process—that is, having been historically actualized as world—does not possess the “strength to alienate” the knowledge it has of itself as “beautiful soul”:49 thus, the authentic reconciliation of its self-consciousness and consciousness is located beyond its own sphere. On the other hand, in the Encyclopedia and the Philosophy of Right, ethicality performs the objective Aufhebung of the scission between subjectivity and objectivity that affects objective spirit and even finite spirit in general. Indeed, ethicality is objectivity as lived by particular subjects whose identity is constituted by their living relationship to this objective totality; inversely, this totality only exists through their actions and internal dispositions.50 From this it results that ethicality actually coincides with objective spirit in its totality even though conceptually the objective and subjective dimensions it includes still appear to be separate. In reality, law and morality are not so much separate parts or components of objective spirit as they are its moments: they are consistent only if they are articulated within the concrete unity of Sittlichkeit—this is why Hegel calls both of them abstract. From a systematic point of view, the third moment of a process is never the sum of the two previous ones (even if it is understood as a surpassing) but is rather the actual totality—in reality, primary—from which they result through a kind of operation of ideal decomposition. Of course, law and morality are not beings of reason! But they are abstract insofar as achieving their concept presupposes concepts foreign to their own principle: the actualization of the law is not only legal, and achieving the aim of morality requires that ethical objectivity be recognized in the norms that subjectivity claims to give itself by itself. Objective spirit, in the form of these two abstract moments, is thus unilateral. This unilateralism consists in “having its freedom immediately in reality, therefore in the external, the thing, partly in having it in the good as an abstract universal.”51 Because ethicality is both subjective and objective, it overcomes this unilateral separation, but that does not mean that the characteristic traits of legal normativity (the relationship of a legal person to the thing he or she owns) and of moral normativity (the relationship of a subject to a norm when acting) disappear there. To the contrary, it is there that they receive the guarantee of their actuality.52
Unlike abstract law and morality, Sittlichkeit overcomes the division between Sein and Sollen: the actuality of the Good resides in the world, which is instituted and transformed by the actions of subjects. The Good has no essence distinct from the process of its objective actualization, and this takes place in the concrete behavior of subjects who, recognizing this preestablished though not transcendental horizon, choose the ethical-political “living Good” as the norm of their practices rather than the abstract Good of morality. Thus in principle ethicality resolves the contradictions of morality by making objectivity the immanent presupposition of subjects’ actions rather than an ideal perspective: the “existing world,” which itself is the work of freedom becoming objective is, at the same time, the “nature of self-consciousness.”53 This ethical solution of course requires giving up any particular subjectivity’s illusory claim to radical autonomy, but it does not replace this claim with ethical objectivism or naturalism, as if norms were things present before it. If ethicality is “the completion of objective spirit, the truth of subjective and objective spirit itself,”54 this is because within it, subjectivity, just like objectivity, receives an inalienable albeit circumscribed right.55 This explains the importance of subjective disposition (Gesinnung) in this sphere—that is, the relationship, subjectively lived and simultaneously objectivized in regulated behaviors (customs, mores), between individuals and the objective universality that they find already there but that they continually actualize by their actions:
The ethical is a subjective disposition, but of that law which has being in itself. . . . Law and the moral self-consciousness can be seen in themselves to return to this Idea as their own result.56
Thus, there are specific subjective attitudes for each type of objective universality put into play by ethicality: Hegel gives these dispositions the general name of Tugend (virtue) or Rechtschaffenheit (rectitude).57 Within the family, ethical virtue takes the form of love;58 in civil society, it takes the form of honor attached to estate (Standesehre), which is embodied in the spirit of corporation;59 and finally, in the state, it takes the form of political disposition (politische Gesinnung), which is the true meaning of what is called patriotism.60 Liberated from the false absoluteness of moral consciousness, individuals’ subjective dispositions are integral parts of the ethical sphere, although the objectivity of structures—familial, social, and political institutions—plays a determining role. In fact, these institutions draw their strength from individuals’ subjective determinations, which guarantee “the rooting of the particular in the universal.”61
The Hegelian conception of ethicality must satisfy two requirements that at first glance appear contradictory. First, it gives full weight to the objective components of spirit. Sittlichkeit is the “existing world,”62 a “substance”;63 its objectivity differs from that of law, which merely spells out the abstract or formal conditions of free personality. Sittlichkeit (an idea now congruent with that of modernity) appears as a world that is in a sense inaccessible to the action of individuals and independent of their representations: a quasi nature. But second, this quasi naturalness of ethicality allows individuals to affirm their subjectivity without that attempt being hollow, as in the perversions of moral discourse that Hegel so forcefully denounces. Ethicality allows particular subjectivity to be fully itself and at the same time to understand that in its very self-affirmation it is subjected to the objectivized and universalized figure of its own freedom. Thus, ethical freedom is only concretely objective freedom because of the activity of subjective individuality, when this individuality “lives [in ethical objectivity] as in its element which is not distinct from itself” and in it finds “its self-awareness [Selbstgefühl].”64
Whereas up until the Jena period the paradigm of “beautiful ethicality” corresponded to individuals’ immediate identification with the political totality, in the final problematic, this identification, while remaining necessary, supposes a set of mediations that are both subjective and objective. Indeed, the particular trait of modern Sittlichkeit is that in it political being ceases to be taken for granted. According to Hegel’s point of view at Jena, it was necessary to separate the bourgeois’ particular interest from the universal vocation of the citizen and to confine the “system of property and law” and the “universal private right”65 it creates to limits that prevent them from being valid for themselves. On the other hand, in the Philosophy of Right, particular interests and the system that emerges from their random interactions constitute the mediation that articulates individuality with the statist universal. Civil society is thenceforth the “ground of mediation”66 par excellence.
What is missing from the Jena and Nuremberg writings, and even from the first edition of the Encyclopedia, is the idea that the mediations that join a particular subjectivity to the “ethical substance” are neither solely nor essentially political mediations. We can find confirmation of this in a passage from the Science of Logic. Presenting the syllogistic structure of the absolute mechanism, Hegel takes an example borrowed from what would soon be named objective spirit:
Similarly, the government, the individual citizens, and the needs or the external life of these, are also three terms, of which each is the middle term of the other two. The government is the absolute center in which the extreme of the singulars is united with their external existence; the singulars are likewise the middle term that incites that universal individual into external concrete existence and transposes their ethical essence into the extreme of actuality. The third syllogism is the formal syllogism, the syllogism of reflective shine in which the singular citizens are tied by their needs and external existence to this universal absolute individuality; this is a syllogism that, as merely subjective, passes over into the others and has its truth in them.67
In this text, the government—which must be understood in the broad sense it had in the Jena texts (i.e., as the “universal government” and the “absolute government” from the System of Ethicality) and not in the narrow sense of “governmental power”—is charged with a task that, beginning in the 1817–1818 lectures, Hegel attributes instead to the mechanism of the system of needs and the division of labor: the mediation between individuals and their needs. Is this perhaps a throwback to the System of Ethicality, where the system of needs, of justice, and of discipline (which clearly prefigures the later division of civil society into the system of needs, the administration of law, and the police) were grouped under the heading “universal government”? In any case, this passage appears to maintain the political conception of ethicality found in the Jena writings, which in the 1805 Philosophy of Spirit was expressed in the doctrine of the Gesinnungen specific to each estate. The characterization of the mediation between individuals and the universal through needs as merely a “formal” syllogism that has its “truth” in the two other syllogisms shows that as late as 1816 Hegel did not see the system of needs and civil society more broadly as the “ground of mediation.” The mediation was still political.
In the Encyclopedia, this same example concerning government, individuals, and needs undergoes a series of revealing changes. In the first edition, it is gone; this may have been a result of the text becoming more concise, but it also corresponds to the fact that the understanding of Sittlichkeit this example illustrates (and which dates back to Jena) is now in crisis. The second and third editions once again provide an ethical-political illustration of the absolute mechanism, but the presentation is different:
Like the solar system, the state, for instance, is, in the practical sphere, a system of three syllogisms. (1) The singular individual (the person) joins itself through its particularity (physical and spiritual needs, what becomes the civil society, once they have been further developed for themselves) with the universal (the society, law, statutes, government). (2) The will, the activity of individuals, is the mediating factor which satisfies the needs in relation to society, the law, and so forth, just as it fulfills and realizes the society, the law, and so forth. (3) But the universal (state, government, law) is the substantial middle [term] in which the individuals and their satisfaction have and acquire their fulfilled reality, mediation, and subsistence.68
This passage is based on the new architecture of Sittlichkeit, which in the interim had been presented in detail in the Philosophy of Right. As far as the structure and significance of the doctrine of objective spirit, three points must be emphasized. First, the mediation between the individual and the universal (i.e., the state or political society) is now guaranteed by civil society and even by what at first glance is the least spiritual and most alienating within it: the system of needs. In fact, if civil society, the “system of all-round interdependence,”69 is the site of a split between the particular and universal and consequently of a “loss of ethicality,”70 it is also the condition for their true reconciliation. Second, the reconciliation of the particular and the universal is at first purely objective, since it takes place through the regulation of individual actions by the “invisible hand.” Thus, this reconciliation is not seen by actors in the system as liberation but rather as “the necessity whereby the particular must rise to the form of universality.”71 As the third syllogism emphasizes, true ethical reconciliation requires a mediation that is not solely objective but is, rather, both subjective and objective: that of the state, the institutional (objective) figure of (subjective) freedom. Third, the second syllogism, where the will of individuals mediates the universal (the state) and the particularity of social needs and interests, confirms what is indicated (somewhat surprisingly at first) at the beginning of the “Morality” section in the Philosophy of Right: within the economy of objective spirit, subjective will is the “aspect of concrete existence [of freedom],” or “the real aspect of the concept of freedom.”72 But it is only when the necessity and consistency of the objective (social and political) bodies of mediation have been established that this observation takes on its full meaning and thereby justifies the inclusion of moral subjectivity in the theory of objective spirit.
The comparison between these two parallel texts, one from 1816 and the other from 1827–1830, shows the scope of the change that occurred in the doctrine of Sittlichkeit if not in the entire doctrine of objective spirit. In the Science of Logic, the third syllogism of absolute mechanism, in which individuals and the universal are connected by needs, or rather by the objective coordination of these needs in civil society, is described as “the syllogism of reflective shine.”73 In the second and third editions of the Encyclopedia, this same syllogism, now presented first, gives access to the economy of the whole insofar as it is placed under the sign of mediation:
Since the mediation joins each of the determinations with the other extreme, each joins itself precisely in this way together with itself; it produces itself and this production is its self-preservation.74
Beyond its empirical justification, the systematic reason for introducing the concept of civil society into the doctrine of objective spirit seems to be to give consistency to the mediations capable of overcoming the tensions that structurally affect that sphere and consequently to give concrete content to the prospect of reconciliation that orients the thematic of Sittlichkeit. However, some questions remain unanswered, in particular, the following:
Ethicality is “the Idea of freedom as the living good.”75 This phrase, which evokes and in a sense hijacks the vocabulary of morality, reminds us that ethical norms, made objective in institutions, have actuality only through the action of concrete subjects who follow these norms when formulating their plans to act. However, the statement also indicates that such action merely follows “given” norms, which are unavailable to actors. In this respect, the ethical solution to the contradictions of the moral point of view perhaps remains inconclusive. The gap between the weight of objectivity and the weight of subjectivity, including within the sphere of Sittlichkeit, entails the possibility of an imbalance. To use a vocabulary that is not Hegel’s own, we might say that ethicality can only claim to resolve the tension or contradiction between the system and the lived world if we consider the latter to already be more or less in conformity with the requirements of the functioning of the system.76 Of course, according to Hegel, the hypothesis of a complete discordance between the subjective and objective dimensions of objective spirit must be rejected. The intersubjectivity achieved in the ethical-political field relies on the process of recognition being carried out on the basis of objective, systemic conditions. This indicates how we should interpret the following remark from the Encyclopedia regarding the original, though not foundational, nature of violence:
The struggle for recognition and the subjugation under a master is the appearance in which man’s social life, the beginning of states, emerged. Force, which is the basis in this appearance, is not on that account the basis of law, though it is the necessary and legitimate moment in the passage of the condition of self-consciousness engrossed in desire and individuality into the condition of universal self-consciousness. This moment is the external beginning of states, their beginning it appears, not their substantial principle.77
Of course, the harmony between the system and the lived world—or to use more traditional vocabulary, the harmony between law and custom—cannot always be achieved in fact but is nevertheless the horizon of Sittlichkeit. But what guarantees that this reconciliation will always be actual, which is a requirement for the coherence of the concepts of ethicality and objective spirit? I argue that such a guarantee cannot be offered by the sphere of objective spirit itself, where the agreement between institutions and subjective dispositions, between law and customs, between the objective and the subjective, always remains precarious.
This becomes clear in the very place where harmony should be objectively produced and maintained by the mechanical mediations of the market and the institutional mediations of the legal system, the police, and corporations: in civil society. Civil society should provide a corrective for the imbalance that affected the earlier (political) understanding of Sittlichkeit by introducing a series of objective mediations between individuals and the universal; however, civil society itself is the site of a possible pathological devolution. This is indicated in a famous passage from the Philosophy of Right:78 a disintegration of the ethical nature of ethicality could result from the formation, within civil society, of a nonsocialized or desocialized fraction of the population whose material situation makes it impossible for them to possess the subjective dispositions required by a life in conformity with the social system and the exigencies of its reproduction. According to Hegel, first among the dispositions required is Standesehre, “the honour of belonging to an estate,” that is, awareness of belonging to an institutionally recognized social group.79 This is exactly what the “rabble” (Pöbel) lacks; suffering causes members of this group to lose the “feeling of law, integrity [Rechtlichkeit], and honour.”80 The poverty of the masses and the creation of an army of underprivileged endanger not only the other strata of civil society but above all the very idea of Sittlichkeit and the reconciliatory perspective it opens within objective spirit. Hegel takes this phenomenon very seriously and with great lucidity assesses the acute contradiction it creates at the very heart of civil society, specifically within the most developed and most modern civil society: Great Britain in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. The conclusion is clear:
This shows that, despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough—i.e. its own distinct resources are not sufficient—to prevent an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble.81
The question then arises of the status of the anxious observations found in the Philosophy of Right and other texts from Berlin on the matter: are these remarks circumstantial, or do they mean that the phenomenon in question is a necessary consequence of civil society in its most recent development? Furthermore, is it possible to remedy this disturbance within the framework of civil society as Hegel understands its operation? The answer to these questions depends on whether one considers this social pathology to be circumstantial (and thus specific to the particular historical, political, and social circumstances of the English Industrial Revolution) or rather inherent to civil society as such (which brings Hegel’s analysis strikingly close to Marx’s later arguments). In any case, the solution to this dilemma requires a precise understanding of the role Hegel attributes to corporations as forms of institutionalization of social life. Can corporations contain the risk of explosion that accompanies the polarization of civil society into integrated and nonintegrated elements? Hegel’s answer is complex, if not wavering.
On the one hand, Hegel seems to think that the existence of the rabble (which would soon be named the Lumpenproletariat) is a necessary effect of the development of civil society, an effect that in significant part escapes the concerted action of public authorities (in Hegel’s terms, the police) as well as what Karl Polanyi names the strategies of self-protection of institutionalized social groups (“corporations”).82 Indeed, “as the connection [Zusammenhang] of human beings through their needs is universalized,” this simultaneously—and contradictorily—creates “the accumulation of wealth” on one hand and “dependence and want” on the other.83 Of course, the rabble Hegel speaks of must not be confused with the industrial proletariat: in his lectures, he uses the example not of the English working class, at the time in the midst of being formed, but rather the Neapolitan lazzaroni,84 which certainly cannot be considered a product of industrial capitalism. However, it is only regarding this segment of “the excluded” and the “wealthy” who face them that Hegel speaks of “class” (Klasse) rather than estate (Stand), as if the novelty of the phenomenon required new vocabulary. It is the Industrial Revolution, an essential component of the formation of civil society in the Hegelian sense, that transforms what was a vaguely exotic curiosity into a structural consequence of social modernization.
However, on the other hand, Hegel never doubts the relevance or actuality of the reconciliatory horizon of his concept of ethicality. As he exposes the “dialectic” that pushes civil society “beyond itself,” he analyzes the fundamental contradiction that affects civil society in terms that appear to presage Marx and Lenin: civil society can only deal with this contradiction by exporting it as part of an indefinite expansion, which itself generates new contradictions.85 But immediately after, he presents the institution of the corporation as the means by which “the ethical returns to civil society as an immanent principle.”86 This leads him, against the apparent current of history, to advocate not only maintaining but also developing this type of institution. For him, the corporation (which is not the Zunft of old, fixated on its privileges, but rather the modern form of institutionalizing socioprofessional groups that make up “the estate of commerce”87) is the necessary counterweight to the deregulation of work and social life expressed by the phrase “freedom of enterprise.” Thus, in the Berlin lectures he says,
The municipality, the corporation, is the big point that currently must be negotiated in the world with regard to the constitution. It has against it the principle of abstract equality, and this conflict is the point around which, in the present state of the culture of understanding, our interest turns. The corporation is closely linked to the issue of the freedom of enterprise. The task on the agenda is to form corporations; but one does not want to do it; the need exists, but there is also a fear of acting on principles that are abstract.88
A note dating from the 1820s indicates the opposition:
Commercial freedom is nowadays the opposite of what [was] formerly the legal freedom of a city, village, guild [Zunft]—freedom of industry [was] the privilege a trade had. Now commercial freedom [means] that a trade has no rights, one can practice [it], more or less, without any conditions or rules.89
However, neither the institutionalization of social life (even if it is successful) nor the rootedness of social life in the political-state universal suffice to explain the presence of a perspective of reconciliation in the very place where objective spirit seems to have lost its rationality; that is, where its mechanisms of regulation no longer work, as is the case in the phenomenon of mass poverty, if it is not merely temporary. Ultimately, from the point of view of Hegelianism itself, the agreement between the system and the lived world, between the objective and subjective components of ethicality, cannot be guaranteed by the resources of objective spirit alone, because this, as finite spirit, remains marked by a “disproportion between the concept and the reality”90 (just as subjective spirit is). The figures of finite spirit—even the highest ones, even the earthly divine, are but “stages of its liberation.”91 Their specific coherence is thus precarious and is subordinate to the guarantee of absolute spirit, the infinite and living form of this spiritual freedom. But if this is true, we are justified in wondering whether when Hegel presents the concept of ethicality that he adopted after renouncing “nostalgia for Greece” in the Philosophy of Right and in the Encyclopedia, he is not attributing to it a power of reconciliation between subjectivity and objectivity that is greater than what the economy of the system allows him to recognize de jure and de facto. In this respect, Hegel’s demonstration of the structural imbalances of civil society is a remarkable indicator. It is precisely at that level of Sittlichkeit—which for Sittlichkeit is certainly a moment of alienation but which conversely must offer political universality an objective basis that it lacks in the premodern context—that the precariousness of objective ethical mediations is made manifest. It is true that reconciliation only takes on its full meaning with the state, which is the conscious institution of the universal. But the state—at least the modern state, which alone is capable of it—can only guarantee the reconciliation between subjectivity and objectivity (by creating appropriate subjective dispositions, which in return strengthen it) because it has its roots in civil society and its institutions, which are “the firm foundation of the state and . . . the pillars on which public freedom rests.”92 For the rational state to be able to carry out its vocation, that is, to ensure objective reconciliation, the possibility of an insurmountable fracture in the social body must be foreseen; furthermore, this possibility cannot be ruled out absolutely. Hegel tells us many times that the state cannot possibly claim to definitively resolve the constantly reoccurring tension between itself and modern society, or else it risks abdicating its vocation, which is to produce a specifically political, universalizing form of reconciliation, and becomes a “social” or “economic” state. Through the pathologies produced by its development, civil society introduces a crack into ethicality that the state does not have the means to fill. Consequently we must recognize that the actuality of an ethical reconciliation of objectivity and subjectivity—which indeed seems to be the end toward which all conceptualization of objective spirit is aimed—ultimately requires a metaethical and metaobjective guarantee. Hence, no doubt, the inclusion within this sphere of a philosophy of history whose final moment, the Weltgeist, is, in spite of its objectivity, nothing other than the mundane figure of absolute spirit.
1. SW, 6:xxxv–xxxvi.
2. See above, preliminary to part 2.
3. Enzykl 1817, § 415 Anmerkung, GW 13, p. 228 (Encyclopedia 1817, 245).
4. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, 113; Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right, §89A, 162.
5. See Propädeutik, W 4, p. 247.
6. See Enzykl, § 502 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 488 (Encyclopedia 223).
7. PhG, GW 9, p. 240 (Phenomenology, ¶ 441).
8. PhG, GW 9, p. 238 (Phenomenology, ¶ 439).
9. RPh, § 28, GW 14.1, p. 45 (Elements, 57; see Outlines, 46).
10. Enzykl, § 484, GW 20, p. 478 (Encyclopedia 217).
11. See WdL 3, GW 12, p. 12 (Science of Logic, 509): “freedom reveals itself to be the truth of necessity and the relational mode of the concept.” Cf. WdL 3, GW 12, p. 14; Enzykl, §§ 158, 159 Anmerkung, GW 20, pp. 174–76.
12. See chapter 10 below.
13. Enzykl, § 484, GW 20, p. 478 (Encyclopedia 217).
14. Enzykl 1827, § 485, GW 19, p. 353.
15. Enzykl, § 485, GW 20, p. 479 (Encyclopedia 217).
16. RPh, § 146, GW 14.1, p. 138 (Elements, 190; see Outlines, 155).
17. RPh, § 142, GW 14.1, p. 137 (Elements, 189; see Outlines, 154).
18. RPh, § 143, GW 14.1, p. 137(Elements, 189; see Outlines, 154).
19. RPh, § 146, GW 14.1, p. 138 (Elements, 190; see Outlines, 155).
20. RPh, § 145, GW 14.1, pp. 137–38 (Elements, 190; see Outlines, 154–55).
21. RPh, § 146, GW 14.1, p. 138 (Elements, 190; see Outlines, 155).
22. RPh, § 147 and Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 138 (Elements, 191; see Outlines, 155–56).
23. RPh, § 151, GW 14.1, p. 141 (Elements, 195; see Outlines, 159).
24. RPh, § 152 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 142 (Elements, 196; see Outlines, 160).
25. Enzykl, § 385, GW 20, p. 383 (Encyclopedia 20).
26. RPh, § 151, GW 14.1, p. 141 (Elements, 195; see Outlines, 159). This same expression, which clearly comes from Aristotle, is used to refer to the sphere of the law or objective spirit in general: see RPh, § 4, GW 14.1, p. 31 (Elements, 35; see Outlines, 26).
27. We are here at the heart of the debate over the degree of autonomy that Hegelian institutionalism recognizes in the individual; see chapter 12 below.
28. Enzykl, § 513, GW 20, p. 495 (Encyclopedia 228).
29. GW 8, p. 263.
30. PhG, GW 9, p. 18 (Phenomenology, ¶ 17).
31. Enzykl, § 484, GW 20, p. 478 (Encyclopedia 217).
32. Enzykl, § 382, GW 20, p. 382 (Encyclopedia 215, modified).
33. See Manfred Riedel, “Freiheitsgesetz und Herrschaft der Natur,” in Riedel, Zwischen Tradition und Revolution, 65–84.
34. GW 8, p. 262.
35. See Naturrecht, W 2, p. 495 (Natural Law 103). This entire passage emphasizes the connection between ethicality, nobility, and war.
36. In this text, in fact, the state of rectitude (the “bourgeois” state of artisans and merchants) is recognized as having “relative ethicality” while remaining strictly subordinate to the absolute state, the only truly political state. See SS, GW 5, p. 331.
37. Jean Hyppolite, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire de Hegel (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983), 94.
38. See PhG, GW 9, pp. 194–96 (Phenomenology, ¶¶ 349–53).
39. GW 8, p. 263.
40. PhG, GW 9, p. 259 (Phenomenology, ¶ 474).
41. PhG, GW 9, p. 252 (Phenomenology, ¶ 464).
42. PhG, GW 9, p. 11 (Phenomenology, ¶ 4).
43. PhG, GW 9, p. 27 (Phenomenology, ¶ 32).
44. See RPh, § 124 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 110 (Elements, 151; see Outlines, 122).
45. See RPh, § 138 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 121 (Elements, 166; see Outlines, 134).
46. Enzykl, § 503 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 489 (Encyclopedia 224).
47. See Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1985). See also Fernand Braudel, La dynamique du capitalisme (Paris: Arthaud, 1985), 84–89.
49. PhG, GW 9, p. 360 (Phenomenology, ¶ 668).
50. See Enzykl, §§ 514–15, GW 20, p. 495 (Encyclopedia 228).
51. Enzykl, § 513, GW 20, p. 494 (Encyclopedia 228).
52. Regarding law, see RPh, §§ 208, 217, GW 14.1, pp. 174, 181 (Elements, 239, 249; see Outlines, 197, 206); regarding morality, RPh, §§ 207, 242, GW 14.1, pp. 174, 193 (Elements, 238–39, 265; see Outlines, 197, 220).
53. RPh, §§ 207, 242, GW 14.1, pp. 174, 193 (Elements, 238–39, 265; see Outlines, 197, 220).
54. Enzykl, § 513, GW 20, p. 494 (Encyclopedia 228).
56. RPh, § 141 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 135–36 (Elements, 186, modified; see Outlines, 152).
57. See RPh, § 150 A, § 252, GW 14.1, pp. 140–41, 197 (Elements, 193–94, 270–71; see Outlines, 157–59). See also Enzykl, § 527, GW 20, pp. 499–500 (Encyclopedia 231).
58. RPh, § 158, GW 14.1, p. 144 (Elements, 199; see Outlines, 162).
59. RPh, §§ 207, 253 A, 289 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 173, 198, 242 (Elements, 238, 272, 329–30; see Outlines, 196–97, 225–26, 278–79).
60. RPh, §§ 267–68, GW 14.1, pp. 211–12 (Elements, 288–89; see Outlines, 240–41). See chapter 11 below.
61. RPh, § 289 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 242 (Elements, 330; see Outlines, 279).
62. RPh, § 142, GW 14.1, p. 137 (Elements, 189; see Outlines, 154).
63. RPh, §§ 144, 152, GW 14.1, pp. 137, 141–42 (Elements, 189, 195–96; see Outlines, 154, 160).
64. RPh, § 147, GW 14.1, pp. 138 (Elements, 191; see Outlines, 155).
65. Naturrecht, W 2, p. 492 (Natural Law, 102).
66. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 3:567.
67. WdL 3, GW 12, pp. 144–45 (Science of Logic, 642).
68. Enzykl, § 198 Anmerkung, GW 20, pp. 206–7 (Encyclopedia 273, modified).
69. RPh, § 183, GW 14.1, p. 160 (Elements, 221; see Outlines, 181).
70. RPh, § 181, GW 14.1, p. 159 (Elements, 219; see Outlines, 180).
71. RPh, § 186, GW 14.1, p. 162 (Elements, 224; see Outlines, 184).
72. RPh, § 106 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 99 (Elements, 135; see Outlines, 109).
73. WdL 3, GW 12, p. 145 (Science of Logic, 642).
74. Enzykl, § 198 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 207 (Encyclopedia 273).
75. RPh, § 142, GW 14.1, p. 137 (Elements, 189; see Outlines, 154).
76. I am borrowing these notions from Habermas: see Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon, 1987), chap. 6.
77. Enzykl, § 433 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 431 (Encyclopedia 160, modified).
78. See RPh, §§ 241–45, GW 14.1, pp. 192–94 (Elements, 265–67; see Outlines, 219–22).
79. See RPh, § 253 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 197–98 (Elements, 271–72; see Outlines, 225–26).
80. RPh, § 244, GW 14.1, p. 194 (Elements, 266, modified; see Outlines, 221).
81. RPh, § 245, GW 14.1, p. 194 (Elements, 267; see Outlines, 222).
82. See in particular chapter 11 of Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origin of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1985).
83. RPh, § 243, GW 14.1, p. 193 (Elements, 266; see Outlines, 220–21).
84. See Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 4:609.
85. See RPh, §§ 246–49, GW 14.1, pp. 195–96 (Elements, 267–70; see Outlines, 222–24).
86. RPh, § 249, GW 14.1, p. 196 (Elements, 270; see Outlines, 224).
87. RPh, § 204, GW 14.1, p. 172 (Elements, 236; see Outlines, 195).
88. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 4:619.
89. Hegel, W 11, p. 567.
90. Enzykl, § 386, GW 20, p. 383 (Encyclopedia 22).
91. Enzykl, § 386, GW 20, p. 383 (Encyclopedia 22).
92. RPh, § 265, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 287; see Outlines, 239).