In an openly anti-Hegelian declaration, Carl Schmitt wrote that “The elevation of the concept of the State to the rank of universal conceptual norm . . . probably will soon end with the era of the state-form itself.”1 In any case, the “era of the European state-form” opened with the proclamation of the supremacy of the political—the specifically modern form of which is an abstract entity, the state—over other spheres of human existence. The state also tends to overcome the religious universe, where the deep fracture that followed the Reformation required that religion somehow be neutralized. Furthermore, the state separates the world of work from technical-economic interaction (what comes to be termed civil society) and similarly profoundly transforms the closed space of the family. The political does not only free itself from these spheres, it imposes its law on them. The concepts of sovereignty and representation, though they have different origins and statuses, are the cardinal points of modern thinking about the state, which began to take form (at the same time as the state itself) in the sixteenth century. The state’s first representatives, in very different genres, were Machiavelli and Bodin. With the concepts of sovereignty and representation, modern political philosophy began to attempt to think through the advent of the state.
The notion of sovereignty is typically modern: considered a property of the state rather than of the person or persons at its head, it is characteristic of the process of depersonalization and rationalization that according to Weber defines the modern form of the political.2 Bodin famously defined sovereignty as “the absolute and perpetual power of a Republic.”3 This definition shows that even if for Bodin it was almost a given that this power would be held and exercised by a monarch, the person of the sovereign was henceforth understood on the basis of his or her office; the actual person became secondary with regard to the abstract essence of sovereignty. We should note that here the church paved the way for the state: the canonical distinction between person and office made the impersonal definition of power required by the modern state possible. In any case, during the period when the “state-form” ruled uncontested, sovereignty was its essential predicate, and it is not surprising that those who, beginning in the nineteenth century, wanted, like Cassirer, to denounce the “myth of the state” criticized the metaphysical nature of that notion.
Unlike sovereignty, representation is not first a political notion: it comes from theology, and more specifically from ecclesiology. In fact, it was over the course of the debate within the church between the supporters of conciliar representation and supporters of papal representation that its eminently political meaning was revealed.4 But it was the modern theory of the sovereign state that gave this concept its most fecund applications. A state, regardless of its type of government or regime, implements forms of representation. Whether deliberation and decision are collective or whether a single person speaks for all, the state is the representative of the political community, of the people. Not, however, in the sense that the state is their mandated or commissioned agent: if that were the case, it would merely be a tool for carrying out a preexisting will, a government in the modern and restrictive sense of the word. The state, by its institutional existence and its action, represents or symbolizes the unity of the community, the common will.
The convergence between the theme of sovereignty, connected to the rise of absolutism, and that of representation, which opposed centralization (whether in conciliarism or in early adversaries of absolutism) and the monopoly of power, is surprising at first; it implies that each of these concepts underwent profound changes. This is perceptible in the Leviathan, where Hobbes develops a theory of sovereign political representation based on the concept of authorization in order to resolve certain problems in his earlier political philosophy. According to Hobbes, the sovereign represents the people, but not in the sense that the people delegates to the sovereign the people’s own power, for that would imply that the people exists as such by nature, that it is already a subject capable of willing. But if that were the case, the problem that the doctrine of sovereignty seeks to solve—the problem of the constitution of political unity out of heterogeneous diversity—would be nonexistent, and the sovereign would be either fictive or useless. In reality, the sovereign represents in the particular sense that he creates, constitutes, the subject he renders present, just as in speech acts meaning does not preexist expression. Thus, the expression from De Cive must be understood literally: “in a monarchy . . . the king (although this seems paradoxical) is the people.”5 It means that the represented do not logically or chronologically preexist the sovereign but rather that their being, their identity, is constituted by the very act in which they acquire a representative. This is what the theory of authorization explains. By illustrating the mechanism of the constitution of sovereignty through the distinction between author and actor, Hobbes concludes that “it is impossible to conceive of unity other than by the form of representation.”6 Indeed, the difference between a disunited multitude and a people is created by the operation in which—as in the illusion of theater—the author, who is neither seen nor heard in person, speaks through the mouth of the actor and thereby is constituted as the author of the piece being played or represented. In other words, “it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one.”7 This is the paradoxical or miraculous essence of representative sovereignty.
This theory of representative sovereignty does not necessarily imply a predilection for monarchy. Thus, we find the theory in Rousseau, where it serves an entirely different purpose. The first chapter of book three of the Social Contract mobilizes the political concept of representative sovereignty to characterize the relationship between the prince (government, executive), the sovereign (the active political body), and the people (the same body understood as passive, as subject). Rousseau writes that there must be an “intermediate body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual correspondence”8—a mediation between the active whole and the passive whole, between the sovereign and the people. Representation refers to the relationship a human group has with itself once it has political existence, once it gives itself a common will. The matter cannot be reduced to the presence of “representatives,” elected or otherwise, of the people, of social groups, or of individuals within the institutions of the state, for that is just one aspect, wrongly isolated and foregrounded, of the general problem of political representation.
And in fact, the relationship between sovereignty and representation took on a different meaning with the French and American Revolutions, when a new idea of representation was born, or rather—since the idea was already present in Whig constitutionalism, and in particular in Burke9—when the idea surged to the forefront. This transformation first appeared with the American founding fathers, who developed a new conception of the republic guided by the ideal of an “empire of laws and not of men,”10 thanks to which the notion of representation acquired the content we now recognize in it. The authors of the Federalist Papers, establishing the constitutional doctrine of the United States in 1787, wrote that a republican government is “a government in which the scheme of representation takes place”;11 it is clear that for them a representative regime has nothing to do either with the absolutism of Hobbes’s sovereign-representative or with a regime in which “the people meet and exercise the government in person.”12 The change in the concept of representation is just as clearly visible in Sieyès. Much has been made—too much, perhaps—of the innovation of distinguishing between constituting power and constituted power(s). For the most part, this distinction extends Rousseau’s distinction in the Social Contract between sovereignty and government. Sovereignty, explains Rousseau, once again faithful to Hobbes, can be neither delegated nor constituted by delegation, for “sovereign power, which is in fact a collective being, can be represented only by itself.”13 The sovereign may of course have officials or commissioners—this is precisely the status of the government14—but not representatives who would hold plenitudo potestasis. It is that very cardinal principle of the doctrine of sovereignty that Sieyès upsets when he proclaims that if what he calls extraordinary representatives (i.e., those who exercise constitutive power) are legitimately constituted, then they are “put in the place of the nation itself,” and “it is sufficient for them to will as they would will in the state of nature.”15 This literally reverses the doctrine of representative sovereignty: the nation’s delegation of its sovereign power to a body of representatives does not at all imply a lessening or diversion of this sovereign power. To the contrary: it is only through the mediation of representation that the diffuse national will is expressed and becomes authentically sovereign. Henceforth, “the object or purpose of the representative assembly . . . cannot be different from that which would propose the nation itself, if it could meet and confer in the same place.”16 Popular sovereignty is inalienable—this is Rousseau’s argument—but the people itself cannot exercise it, it must be represented in the very act that constitutes it as a people; this is Sieyès’s contribution.
This theory of sovereign representation is at the basis of what may be termed the republican problematic of power (in spite of Sieyès’s own distaste for the word). As the political history of the nineteenth century shows, this theory can span widely different political options. Schematically, we can note a liberal variant (after Burke and the founding fathers, Constant and Tocqueville were spokesmen for this version) and a democratic variant (which, quickly stifled after the French Revolution, regained its strength around 1848 but henceforth with a new current to work with: socialism). Despite the clear opposition between these two variants, in particular with respect to the scope and terms of suffrage, they were based on shared convictions regarding the relations between the sovereignty of the people and political representation. The divergence lay in whether emphasis was put on the first term (the democratic position) or on the second (the liberal position). The Hegelian theory of representation is located upstream of this divergence. It seeks to overcome the alternative confronting modern thinking about the state: between representative sovereignty (Hobbes, Rousseau) and sovereign representation (Sieyès, the founding fathers).
Hegel does not have a systematic theory of the relations between sovereignty and representation. However, his political philosophy (in the strict sense of a theory of the state in its internal aspect) is based on a particular articulation of these two concepts that implies reshaping them: sovereignty is considered the exclusive attribute of the state, which is distinct from the monarch, the people, and “national” representation;17 the task of representation is to guarantee mediation between the state and civil society. But in approaching this question, we cannot limit ourselves to the writings that express the principles of Hegel’s political philosophy, that is, the Philosophy of Right and the doctrine of objective spirit in the Encyclopedia; we must also take into consideration the political writings that in a sense present a politics of representation.
Before Hegelian philosophy achieved its true originality (in 1802, as we know), his text on the German constitution (1798–1800) developed a merciless critique of the premodern conception of representation on which the “imaginary state” (Gedankenstaat),18 officially known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, rested. But Hegel makes an instructive comparison between this outdated vision and the one cultivated by political liberalism. In the wake of the French Revolution, German liberals contrasted the demand for a “representative constitution” (Repräsentativ-Verfassung) with the “constitution of estates” (ständische Verfassung) proper to the old regime and to the empire in particular. As for Hegel, he emphasizes that these two institutional options, which are opposed in practice, in fact share a common theoretical basis. The representative principle, regardless of the goal of its implementation, expresses in his eyes (at least it did at that moment) the rootedness of the constitution in the feudal system, which implies reducing public law to private law:
Representation is so deeply interwoven with the essence of the feudal constitution in its development along with the rise of the bourgeois estate that we may call it the silliest of notions to suppose it an invention of the most recent times.19
The entire modern history of Germany shows that in the hands of the “provinces”—the most powerful of which had become true sovereign states—representation had become a weapon against imperial power, and it contributed to undermining the political unity of the empire. As Hegel reminds the reader in the course of the homage he renders to Machiavelli in this text, “freedom is possible only when a people is united into a state by legal bonds.”20 However, at the same time that he locates the cause of the imperial pseudostate’s political impotence in a certain system of representation, Hegel maintains—showing his unflagging adherence to the principles of 1789—that in the absence of representative institutions guaranteeing “cooperation of the general will in the most important affairs of state which affect everyone,” “freedom is no longer thinkable,” so that representation “has become part of sound common sense.”21
We see that two notions of representation, with opposite connotations, coexist in the young Hegel’s manuscript. These correspond to two different German terms: Repräsentation, the constitutive relationship of the political community to itself, and Vertretung or Stellvertretung, the designation of authorized representatives of particular interests. Later, Hegel would explicitly draw on this distinction. In the remark to section 303 in the Philosophy of Right, he criticizes the “atomistic . . . view” that it is up to individuals to exercise legislative power, either on their own or through the intermediary of “representatives” (Stellvertreter).22 To the contrary, the remark to section 311 uses the vocabulary of Repräsentation to justify a parliamentary system based on the representation of social interests. Hegel specifies that in this case “representation no longer means the replacement of one individual by another.”23 In his early writings, things are not so clear: there, Hegel contrasts two models of representation that are politically and theoretically opposed. The first one is the “feudal” (more precisely, ständisch) notion of representation, based on the schema of a mandate (Stellvertretung) borrowed from private law, which subordinates the representative (the emperor) to the represented (the electoral princes or dignitaries at the head of the territories of the empire); the so-called electoral capitulations, by which the represented impose the conditions of their support on candidates for imperial dignity, are an example of this kind of understanding of representation.24 In short, because the empire is based on a conception of representation that reduces sovereignty, the distinctive trait of the state, to a mere empty word, it resembles “a heap of round stones which are piled together to form a pyramid.”25 But to combat the foregoing, “The German Constitution” also turns to the second, new model of representation as the vehicle for forming the general will. This truly revolutionary model—and it was as such that the young Hegel took it up—was illustrated by the 1791 Constitution26 and justified in the writings of Sieyès. However, insofar as we can judge from the fact that the manuscript was never completed, in 1800 Hegel did not yet have the conceptual means to overcome this contradiction between the two views of representation.
The article titled “Proceedings of the Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Württemberg, 1815–1816” is dedicated entirely to the question of representation and in particular to the difficulties, in a country that had not experienced a revolution, of shifting from a traditional system to a postrevolutionary system of “national representation.” The text develops a meticulous and engaged analysis of the debate in the Diet convoked by King Frederick II of Württemberg after the end of the French occupation in order to ratify a liberal constitution (in the mind of leading circles, it was to correspond to the model of the charter “granted” by Louis XVIII to the French); it includes significant notes regarding the articulation of representation and sovereignty. Let us go through the argument in this text, in which Hegel demonstrates his talent as a political chronicler. By opposing in every way the plans of the king—who, by multiplying the concessions to liberal ideas (which we must remember had penetrated Germany by means of France’s military victories), was seeking to make the elites accept a crown he owed to Napoleon—the States of Wurtemberg adopted a typically reactionary attitude. In their attempt to fight the king’s plans and to restore the “good old law” (das alte gute Recht), that is, the legal and political structures of a society of privileges, they thought of themselves as the General Estates of 1789, but, as Hegel scathingly put it, “only the roles are reversed.”27 Borrowing a phrase from Talleyrand, he adds, “one might say of the Wurtemberg estates what has been said of the returned French émigrés: they have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing.”
This article does something the article on the constitution of the empire did not: it contrasts two distinct types of representation, “traditional representation” and “true national representation.”28 The true vocation of representation is—the Philosophy of Right returns to this theme—to be “the mediating body between the prince and the people.”29 However, the attitude of the estates—in particular, the attitude of delegates of what Hegel calls the bourgeois aristocracy—hindered the exercise of this function. This is why, since it is not possible to give a priori a constitution to a people when its presumed representatives do not want one, one can only hope that the gathering of the estates was at least the occasion for “self-education,”30 for an authentic political education in politics, offering representatives, who were clinging to the particularity of the interests they represented, the ability to accede the universal: “the ascent to the universal belongs to the formal aspect of the political education of a new assembly of the states.”31 But though he roundly criticized supporters of traditional representation, Hegel did not join the camp of those who supported the representative constitution—that is, in general, liberals or those presumed to be liberals.32 To the contrary, the article includes in-detail criticism of “French abstractions,”33 which Hegel would later expand on in the Philosophy of Right. The ultimate reasons for this criticism lie in the Hegelian conception of civil society and its relations to the state. The 1817 article sketches what would become the Hegelian analysis of representative mediation: the authentic vocation of representation is to institute the people, which, in its immediate being, is politically amorphous. In other words, as indicated in the lectures Hegel was giving at the same time in Heidelberg, which formed the first draft of the Philosophy of Right, without the “articulation” that representation introduces into the midst of the people, they lack the “rationality” that gives them a state and political meaning and are no more than a “mass.”34
The connection between the system of representation and social and political equilibrium within the state is the theme of Hegel’s last political article, “On the English Reform Bill,” which appeared in April-May 1831 in the Allgemeine preussische Staatszeitung, though without its final third, which was censored for being too critical of Great Britain.35 Through an analysis of the situation in Great Britain the text examines the bill brought by the Whig prime minister Lord Grey before Parliament; the bill was passed in 1832 (thus, after Hegel’s death) and would profoundly change English political life by eliminating the “rotten boroughs” and introducing more a balanced representation of the population (but not universal suffrage) that took into account social and demographic changes. Hegel’s point of view here has sometimes been described as reactionary; since Rudolf Haym, that qualification has been a constant among liberal adversaries of Hegelianism. For didn’t he, at the end of the day, oppose a reform that he himself showed to be indispensable and that common sense and parity seemed to demand? However, the matter is more complex if we examine it from the point of view of a theory of political representation. Hegel’s reasons for opposing the system of representation Great Britain was preparing to implement stemmed from what we might call his political sociology. He refuses to see representation and its modalities from a strictly technical or political-moral point of view; instead, he analyzes it in relation to the legal, social, and political structures of a Great Britain undergoing the effects of the “great transformation,” to borrow Karl Polyani’s words. Hegel does not have words harsh enough to fustigate the “anomalies and absurdity of the English constitution.”36 England’s situation, which he had long been familiar with thanks to his regular reading of the English press,37 made reforms indispensable, especially in the system of representation. But Hegel thought that the reformation of electoral law would aggravate the situation by opening Parliament to new social strata—not the proletariat, but rather the radicalized petty bourgeoisie, followers of Bentham and demanders of democracy—but without transforming either a social structure that would remain deeply inegalitarian or an incoherent and outdated civil law. Hegel’s diagnosis: instead of (political) reform, the Reform Bill could spark (social and political) revolution, and this is the primary reason why it should not be adopted.38
Against the individualist understanding of representation that emerges from the principles of 1789 and that seems to have guided Lord Grey’s plan, Hegel sets the representation of social interests. The representation of the “various great interests of the nation”39 must be promoted, for only this can set “political life” on its “real basic constituents”40—the competition of organized interests within civil society. Whether one likes it or not, civil society, in its diversity and conflicts, is the presupposition of the process of unification that takes place on the terrain of the political, and it must be institutionally recognized as such; otherwise, one “leaves political life hanging, so to speak, in the air,” and it is better to recognize this fact than to deny it in the name of abstract principles such as the right to individual suffrage.41 It thus becomes clear that the argument in the 1831 article is not simply retrograde. Rather, Hegel shows himself for what he had long if not always been: an authoritarian liberal, a supporter of top-down reform as it was carried out in Prussia during the era of reforms (1806–1819) by enlightened ministers (Freiherr vom Stein, chancellor Hardenberg, Wilhelm von Humboldt).42 What Hegel, like them, wants is for the initial program of the French Revolution to be realized (equal rights to certain fundamental goods guaranteed for all, a civil society freed from the rigidity of orders and privileges, a strong, liberal state)—but without revolution. This requires an adequate politics of representation, one entirely different from the risky politics of English liberals. We must now specify the theoretical basis for such a politics.
Why must there be representation within the state in the sense that the term had taken on since the eighteenth century—that is, one or more assemblies of “representatives of the people”? In other words, what makes Hobbes’s solution (the unity of the sovereign creates, on its own, the unity of the people represented) insufficient? Once again, the answer stems from the changes entailed by the separation of civil society and the state. Once the socioeconomic is distinguished from the political, a separation that is the defining trait of modern Sittlichkeit, in order to prevent this differentiation from becoming a dangerous competition, it is necessary to invent procedures of dynamic integration for a social universe increasingly divided into particular, antagonistic interests.43 Among these procedures, representation—in the technical sense of the term—plays a decisive role: through it, as Hegel says, “the private estate attains a political significance and function.”44 In other words, representation guarantees the presence of the social world—divided, as it is, into divergent and even antagonistic interests—within state institutions and at the same time makes it possible to reaffirm the supremacy of the political universal—which is only concrete if it is not isolated from what contradicts it—over social particularity. But the political integration of social diversity can only be achieved if it takes into account—or better yet, bases itself on—actual divisions in civil society, which are institutionalized by corporations. Whence the surprising choice of representation of social interests instead of representation based on the free suffrage of individuals, which corresponds to an atomistic vision of civil society that does not conform to its reality.45 This explains why representation is necessary to the world that emerged from the French Revolution and from the industrial and capitalist revolutions (and also shows how far Hegel’s reasons are from the points of view of liberals as well as of democrats). In such a world, the separation of the political and the social and the tensions that run through the latter require a mechanism that guarantees the institutional integration (not left to the spontaneous regulations of the market) of social diversity, that is, essentially, parliamentary representation, which allows the people, faced with its impassable diversity, to be “face to face with a lively presence of spirit.”46
From this we understand the reason for the political representation of social interests. It fits with a particular understanding of the organization of powers: for Hegel, the various powers among which the state’s action is distributed are interactive moments of its organism and thus cannot exist or act independently, as the common understanding of their separation would suggest. Princely power, the power of the hereditary monarch, has the authority of ultimate decision; it closes the deliberative process with the “I will” that initiates “all activity and actuality.”47 Within the state, governmental power is the moment of particularity. It has a double role, both deliberative and executive. Composed of expert bureaucrats with precise knowledge of the concrete conditions in which the state acts, the government is in charge in particular of administrative tasks and economic and social regulation—of “policing.” By virtue of these characteristics, the government is a moment of mediation between the prince and the legislative power just as its administration of concrete situations contributes to creating the never-stabilized link between the social world and the political universe. Finally, the legislature decrees universal norms, laws, for the ethical-political community. Thus, it defines—though only at a general level—the relations between individuals and social groups on the one hand and with the state on the other.48 We see, thus, that state powers differ in terms of their functions, not the people or bodies charged with carrying them out. This is why the prince and the government also participate in legislative work alongside assemblies.49 This participation is not limited to a right of initiative: they make actual contributions to legislation on the basis of their technical expertise and their sense of the state. Here, Hegel is faithful to his refusal of the separation of powers, though he does make one exception, which is not negligible: only with regard to the legislative power does he explicitly mention the interpenetration of the three powers, which should also apply to the two others. Clearly one may be tempted here to suspect him of wanting to restrict as much as possible the influence of the people’s representatives within the state. But that interpretation supposes that Hegel shares the common view of their mission, which is far from the case. Regardless, statutory representation is but one of the elements of legislative power.
Above all else, Hegel emphasizes the role representative institutions play in mediation; I will return to this shortly. Thus, he presents in detail the bases of an original bicameral system. The general principle is as follows: because the representative assemblies—the “estates” in traditional terminology—mediate between the political state (der Staat) of which they are a part and a people that itself is socially divided into social estates, political representation must reflect the actual elements of civil society and base itself on the divisions within it:
In the Estates, as an element of the legislative power, the private estate attains a political significance and function. In this capacity, the private estate cannot appear either as a simple undifferentiated mass or as a crowd split up into atomic units. It appears rather as what it already is, namely as an estate consisting of two distinct parts. . . . Only in this respect is there a genuine link between the particular which has actuality in the state and the universal.50
Thus, social differentiation, which in modern society results from the technical division of labor, can structure political representation. Thanks to representative institutions, the state gives concrete shape to one of its missions, which is to guarantee the political mediation of civil society with itself. This is the main reason why Hegel preserves the vocabulary of “estates,” which by 1820 was completely outdated: because one and the same word (die Stände) refers to both socioprofessional groups and to the assemblies that exercise legislative power or at least participate in it.
Bicameralism reflects the opposition between the city and the country, between the capitalist industrial and commercial world and the rural world, between the modern and the premodern: these are the two “ethical roots” of the state.51 The quasi-natural element that within civil society forms the estate of landowners is politically expressed in a high chamber, comparable to the British House of Lords or the Chamber of Peers of the French Restoration.52 However, it must be noted that these landowners are members of this high chamber not because they belong to the nobility but rather because of their economic and social role. The second chamber is made up of mandated agents (Vertreter) of the “changing element in civil society,”53 that is, social groups that make up the urban world. More specifically, this chamber emerges from cooperative associations (Genossenschaften), communities, and corporations that are the “particular circles” of civil society.”54 Hegel considers these various groups to have “the same right as the others to be represented.”55 The question of the person and mode of selecting deputies becomes secondary with respect to the question of the representation of the “special needs” and “particular interests” of the social body.56 Through this type of representation, the universal (the state) includes within itself the particular social moment in its diversity. However, deputies are not mere mandated agents of a particular interest and must not act as such. This is why Hegel rejects the Jacobin doctrine of the imperative mandate, which according to its supporters allows electors to control the elected and is similar to the liberal theory of free mandate as Burke, for example, advanced it:
Since deputies are elected to deliberate and decide on matters of universal concern, the aim of such elections is to appoint individuals who are credited by those who elect them with a better understanding of such matters than they themselves possess. It is also the intention that these individuals will not subordinate the universal interest to the particular interest of a community or corporation, but will give it their essential support. Their position is accordingly not that of commissioned or mandated agents, especially since the purpose [Bestimmung] of their assembly is to provide a forum for live exchanges and collective deliberations in which the participants instruct and convince one another.57
Although deputies come from particular groups and guarantee that these have political existence, they are first and foremost agents of the universal. The necessary political representation of the social world cannot be an institutional endorsement of lobbying.
The Hegelian state grants parliament, and in particular the lower chamber, the role of mediating between the government and the people, between the state and civil society. But this mediation must be understood in its truth. It is both a way for a differentiated and even fractured social body to accede to political being and an organ for the continual politicization and repoliticization of civil society, which is constantly undermined by the conflicts of interest that run through it. In other words, if the state in general is a mediation of society with itself, if it is the authority that confers on it an ethical identity, it is above all up to the specific body of representation (parliament and its chambers) to solder the identity of the state, symbolized in the person of the monarch, and the divided social multitude. Contrary to what liberals claim, the mission of assemblies is not only to make the views of civil society heard within the state and ultimately to subordinate the state to civil society. They must also, and above all, allow the point of view of the state to penetrate society and practice a sort of political pedagogy toward their mandators through the publicity of debates:
The determination of the Estates as an institution does not require them to achieve optimum results in their deliberations and decisions on the business of the state in itself. . . . They have the distinctive function [Bestimmung] of ensuring that, through their participation in [the government’s] knowledge, deliberations, and decisions on matters of universal concern, the moment of formal freedom attains its right in relation to those members of civil society who have no share in the government. In this way, it is first and foremost the moment of universal knowledge [Kenntnis] which is extended by the publicity with which the proceedings of the Estates are conducted.58
As the article on the Estates of Wurtemberg indicated, parliamentary debate is above all the instrument of civil society’s political “self-education” through those who represent its interests; representation is the work of the political.
Neither individual suffrage nor a vote based on estate but rather socioprofessional representation of Berufstände, of “guilds”: this, according to Hegel, is the third way, the reformist way, between the revolutionary views of democrats that were unfortunately adopted by French and English liberals and the reactionary views of those who wanted to restore an old regime whose social bases had collapsed. Rejecting the usual arguments for political representation, Hegel secures an unprecedented philosophical basis for it: within the rational state (and of course not every state deserves to be called rational), representative institutions have a “mediating function.”59 This mediation actually has multiple forms: it occurs between the monarch and his subjects, between the state and civil society, and between the people and itself. For many, what justifies the creation of a mechanism of representation is the need to limit the monarch’s power with the power of the people; thus, a great Prussian reformist minister wrote in 1806 that “the state has no constitution, as the supreme power is not shared by the head of state and delegates from the nation.”60 But this argument—leaving aside the fact that it proposes a very precarious compromise between two possible attributions of sovereignty (to the people or to the monarch)—rests on the presupposition that the people knows what it wants and must have the means to express it. Hegel contests this. He does not attach much importance to the classical argument of the people’s fickleness, which is empirical. No, if the people does not know what it wants, it is because it is not immediately what it is, a people rather than a multitude. Representation, which gives body, thought, and voice to this “formless mass,”61 allows the people to reach political being, to overcome its contradictory diversity, its particularity turned in on itself. At the same time, political representation appears as the decisive condition of sovereignty—and we know that Hegel prefers to speak of sovereignty of the state rather than sovereignty of the people62—if it is true, as Hermann Heller said, that sovereignty is the rule of the people united over the people as plurality.63
The people does not exist naturally, it is politically constituted. This constitution presupposes a mediation, and this mediation is representation. In order to become what it must be—that is, a political unity and not merely a “heap” (Haufen) of individuals or of groups considered to be natural (we may think here of the traditional definition of the state as a group of families, which is still found in the Nuremberg lectures64)—the people needs representative mediation. The deep meaning of mediation as conceived by Hegel is not that a subject would be represented by an other and for an other (which is its common justification) but rather that this subject, the people, would arrive at itself, become a political community. Representation is the mediation of identity; it corresponds to the fact that a community (a nation in Hegel’s vocabulary) or multiple communities juxtaposed within a society do not on their own form a political entity, a state. This is representation understood not as an individual’s or group’s delegation of power (whether real or supposed) but rather as a mediation that institutes political identity. And this political constitution of the people functions better through the institutional representation of social interests than through the abstract mechanisms of personal suffrage.65
Thus, the Hegelian theory of the state is structured by the idea of representative mediation. Representation ensures a dynamic relationship between the people as a group of individuals (the masses), the people as a diversity of social and cultural interests (the nation) and the political people (the state). A people stops being a collection of individuals or atoms, “an aggregate of private persons”66 in an “arbitrary and inorganic situation”67 when it constitutes itself as a state—that is, when it puts itself into representation. The meaning of the expression goes beyond the simple fact of the people giving itself representatives: it designates the constitutive act itself, a primary and permanent act, the continuous creation of political unity. The constitution is not only the definition of the organization of powers (the constitutional text): a people, just like an individual, always has a constitution, even “the constitution appropriate and proper to it.”68 It would be an exaggeration to say that the identity of a people is exclusively political or state based, for its economic, social, and cultural dimensions are also important. But the constitution of a collective identity necessarily implies the basis of state institutions. The definition of community is political before all else. This explains why Hegel, going against the trend of his time, refuses to give the state national or racial grounding. The nation is only the “natural principle of the people”;69 in order to achieve political meaning, it requires an operation of constitution, the author of which—and this is a point on which Hegel follows Sieyès and the writers of the French Constitution—can only be the people itself.
One of Hegel’s earliest texts denounced, as Rousseau also did, the replacement of the point of view of the citizen, living for the universal, with the point of view of the bourgeois, glued to personal interest, the weakening of the state by the esprit de corps.70 Inversely, his mature writings affirm that the culture of the universal, the spirit of citizenship, must be based on that esprit de corps, on organized and representative social interests.71 This confirms the conclusion of my previous chapter, that the key to Hegelian politics is the discovery of the fact that for better or for worse, civil society is the central issue of modernity. It is the source of its upheavals (the Revolution) and of its internal pathologies (mass poverty), but it is also, in every sense of the term, the site of its wealth and possible flourishing. If in the postrevolutionary world the sovereignty of the state requires representative mediation, it is because this alone guarantees that social particularity, now become legitimate, will be included within the political universal that it decisively contributes to creating. However, and this is what will forever separate Hegel from political and economic liberalism, the ethos of citizenship can and must surpass institutionally structured social particularity. This is what democracy presupposes, which leads Hegel to tackle the concept of democracy.
1. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954: Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker und Humbolt, 1953), 376. See also Der Begriff des Politischen, 10–11 (this is from the 1963 preface, not translated in The Concept of the Political).
2. See Weber, Economy and Society. On legal-rational domination, see Catherine Colliot-Thélène, Le désenchantement de l’Etat (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 224 ff.
3. Bodin, Les six livres, I/8, 1:179. Olivier Beaud emphasizes the innovative nature of Bodin’s doctrine of sovereignty insofar as it founds a “monopolization of positive law by the state.” In Beaud, La puissance de l’état, 29–196, esp. 50–52.
4. On the prehistory of the modern concept of representation, see Hasso Hoffman, Repräsentation: Studien zur Wort und Begriffsgeschichte (Berlin: Duncker und Humboldt, 1990), especially chapter 5 (“Repraesentatio identitatis”), 191 ff., and the beginning of chapter 6 about Nicolaus Cusanus (“De Concordantia Catholica”), 286 ff. See also Giueseppe Duso, La rappresentenza politica: Genesi e crisi del concetto (Milan: F. Angeli, 2003), especially chapters 1 and 2.
5. Hobbes, De Cive: English Version, 12:8, 190.
6. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2:248.
7. Ibid.
8. See Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:396; Social Contract, 3:1, 194.
9. In his address to the electors of Bristol (1774), Burke presents the doctrine of “free mandate” and attacks the idea that representation can be a commission: “Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests . . . but . . . a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.” Edmund Burke, The Works of Edmund Burke (London: Rivington, 1803), 3:20.
10. John Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles F. Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 4:194.
11. Federalist Papers, no. 10, p. 52.
12. Ibid., no. 14, p. 68.
13. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:368; Social Contract, 170.
14. See Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 3, §§ 1, 15, 17.
15. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 185.
16. Ibid., 204.
17. This is what Hegel calls “the idealism” of sovereignty (RPh, § 278 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 231 [Elements, 315; see Outlines, 239]).
18. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 507; “German Constitution,” in Hegel’s Political Writings, 180 (modified).
19. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 536; “German Constitution,” in Hegel’s Political Writings, 206 (modified). Regarding the reduction of public law to private law, see “Verfassung,” W 1, pp. 454–56 (passage not included in the English translation).
20. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 555; “German Constitution,” in Hegel’s Political Writings, 220.
21. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 572; “German Constitution,” in Hegel’s Political Writings, 234–35.
22. RPh, § 303 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 252 (Elements, 343–44; see Outlines, 291).
23. RPh, § 311 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 256 (Elements, 350; see Outlines, 297).
25. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 504; “German Constitution,” in Hegel’s Political Writings, 180.
26. “The nation, from which alone emanates all the powers, can exercise them only by delegation. The French constitution is representative, the representatives are the Legislative Body and the King” (Heading III, Article 2).
27. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 507; Proceedings, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 282.
28. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 588 (passage not translated in Hegel’s Political Writings).
29. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 533 (passage not translated in Hegel’s Political Writings). See RPh, § 302 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 251 (Elements, 342–43; see Outlines, 290).
30. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 582 (passage not translated in Hegel’s Political Writings). See Christoph Jamme, “Die Erziehung der Stände durch sich selbst,” in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie im Zusammenhang der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. Otto Pöggeler and Hans-Christian Lucas (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1986), 149–73.
31. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 591 (passage not translated in Hegel’s Political Writings).
32. For reasons having to do with the economic and political conditions particular to nineteenth-century Germany, German liberalism combined progressive and regressive traits. Lothar Gall, “Liberalismus und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft,’” Historische Zeitschrift 220, no. 2 (1975): 350 ff. The positions analyzed by Hegel are an example of this.
33. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 483; Proceedings, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 263.
34. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, 223; Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right, 273.
35. The historical and theoretical context of this analysis is discussed in Christoph Jamme and Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann, Politik und Geschichte: Zu den Intentionen von G.W.F. Hegels Reformbill-Schrift (Bonn: Bouvier, 1995). See also Walter Jaeschke, “Hegel’s Last Year in Berlin,” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Action, ed. Lawrence Stepelevich and David Lamb (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983), p. 31 ff.
36. Reformbill, W 11, p. 84; Reform Bill, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 296.
37. See Michael J. Petry, “Hegel and the Morning Chronicle,” Hegel-Studien 11 (1976): 11–80; Norbert Waszek, “Hegels Exzerpte aus der Edinburgh Review 1817–1819,” Hegel-Studien 20 (1985): 79–112.
38. See Reformbill, W 11, p. 128; Reform Bill, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 330.
39. Reformbill, W 11, p. 105; Hegel’s Political Writings, 312.
40. Reformbill, W 11, p. 107; Hegel’s Political Writings, 314.
41. RPh, § 303 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 252 (Elements, 344; see Outlines, 292).
42. On this period, see Reinhart Koselleck, Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1967). Koselleck emphasizes the convergence between Hegel’s point of view and that of Prussian reformers.
43. See Rudolf Smend, “Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht,” in Staatsrechtliche Abhandlungen: Und andere Aufsätze (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1968), 154.
44. RPh, § 303, GW 14.1, p. 251 (Elements, 343; see Outlines, 291).
45. See RPh, § 308, GW 14.1, p. 254 (Elements, 346–47: see Outlines, 294).
46. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 516 (passage not translated in Hegel’s Political Writings).
47. RPh, § 279 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 233 (Elements, 317; see Outlines, 267).
48. RPh, § 299, GW 14.1, p. 247 (Elements, 337; see Outlines, 285).
49. See RPh, § 300, GW 14.1, p. 248 (Elements, 339; see Outlines, 287).
50. RPh, § 303, GW 14.1, p. 251 (Elements, 343; see Outlines, 291).
51. See RPh, § 255 and 256 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 199–200 (Elements, 272–74; see Outlines, 226–27).
52. See RPh, §§ 304–307, GW 14.1, pp. 252–54 (Elements, 344–46; see Outlines, 292–93).
53. RPh, § 308, GW 14.1, p. 254 (Elements, 346; see Outlines, 294).
54. RPh, § 308 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 254 (Elements, 347; see Outlines, 294). It is interesting to note the similarity in vocabulary between Hegel and Gierke’s theory of Genossenschaftsrecht, which was presented as an anti-Hegelian reaction; this, in any case, is how it is commonly interpreted, for example by Gurvitch (see L’idée du droit social).
55. RPh, § 311 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 256–57 (Elements, 350; see Outlines, 297).
56. RPh, § 311, GW 14.1, p. 256 (Elements, 350; see Outlines, 296–97).
57. RPh, § 309, GW 14.1, p. 255 (Elements, 348, see Outlines, 295).
58. RPh, § 314, GW 14.1, p. 258 (Elements, 351–52; see Outlines, 298).
59. RPh, § 302 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 251 (Elements, 342; see Outlines, 290).
60. Freiherr vom Stein, Briefwechsel, Denkschriften und Aufzeichnungen (Berlin: Heymann, 1937), 76.
61. RPh, § 279 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 234 (Elements, 319; see Outlines, 269).
62. See RPh, § 278, GW 14.1, p. 230 (Elements, 315; see Outlines, 265).
63. Herman Heller, Die Souveränität (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1971), 2:97.
64. See Propädeutik, W 4, p. 62: “Extending the natural society that is the family leads to the universal society that is the state.”
65. See Reformbill, W 11, pp. 110–14; Reform Bill, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 317–20.
66. Enzykl, § 544 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 518 (Encyclopedia 243).
67. RPh, § 279 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 234 (Elements, 319; see Outlines, 269).
68. RPh, § 274 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 229 (Elements, 312; See Outlines, 263).
69. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 180; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 148.
70. Hegel, W 1, p. 57.
71. See Hegel, Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, 186ff; Lectures on Natural Right, 233 ff.