It is clear that Hegel was not a democrat. This has contributed to the widespread negative assessments of his political philosophy. He also did a great deal to weaken his case—didn’t his last published piece criticize an electoral form that was if not democratic at least equitable? The truth is more complex, and we cannot see Hegel as a simple “enemy” of an “open society” and the regime that naturally suits it, democracy.1 His attitude is more nuanced than is often admitted, as his analysis of the French Revolution demonstrates. Hegel denounces the Terror and in particular the political principles of its actors; he openly declares himself in favor of reform and against revolution.2 But he is even more resistant to the reactionary response that swept through Europe after 1815, and he mocks those who “seem to have slept through the last twenty-five years, possibly the richest that world history has had, and for us the most instructive, because it is to them that our world and our ideas belong.”3 As regrettable as the trajectory of the French Revolution was, it marked the beginning of a new era: henceforth, nothing could be as it was before, and this “beautiful sunrise” was to be celebrated.4 Strange words from a stalwart monarchist! But after all, Hegel’s opinions on the Revolution and democracy bear no more philosophical importance than the prejudices on which they were based or which they opposed: the essential is elsewhere. His critique of democracy must be taken into consideration precisely because today, lacking any declared adversaries, the ideals of democracy seem exhausted and no longer up to the task of offering meek politicians a satisfactory principle of legitimacy. The considerations that constitute the basis of Hegel’s rejection of democracy may shed light on the difficulties encountered by forms of democracy that he neither knew of nor wished for and whose development was accompanied by an obscuring of its concept.
Let us start from the Aristotelian definition, to which Hegel’s argument tacitly refers: democracy creates an identity between the rulers and the ruled, or at least guarantees the equality of all with regard to the capacity to command and obey. It is thus the regime best suited to the definition of citizenship as the capacity for “knowing both how to rule and how to obey.”5 It is true that in principle this definition fits all good constitutions,6 but there can be no doubt that it applies best to politeia, “constitutional government,” and thus to the correct form of democracy. But this definition does not cover all of our usage of the term. For in our time, unlike in Hegel’s, democracy has become a normative concept that can apply to any social situation: thus, we speak of democratic discussion, the democratization of culture or of the academy, and so forth. The intent behind such expressions may be laudable, but they contribute to clouding our understanding of the strictly political problem of commandment and obedience, the specificity of which Aristotle emphasized in the first book of his treatise. As for most of the usual definitions of democracy (government of the majority, the rule of freedom and equality, popular sovereignty, the reign of public opinion, etc.), they simply add to the imprecision of the notion. Thus, I will restrict myself to an abstract or nominal definition, one Hegel shares: there is democracy when “all the people [are] the highest deliberative authority.”7
Though Hegel was there to witness the rise of democratic demands in Europe during the Restoration, which were in part brought forth by liberals, he did not see the great awakening of the democratic principle in 1848. If we leave aside the case of revolutionary France, the only contemporary examples he mentions are the United States and Switzerland. The rarity of democracies in the modern world bolstered his conviction that democracy is a political form lacking “rational form”;8 just like the aristocracy and traditional monarchy, it can only exist in an “undeveloped condition,” and “there can be no further discussion of such a notion [Vorstellung] in face of the developed Idea.”9 But what do we mean by democracy? In spite of the homonymy between them, does the modern concept actually fit the same horizon of thought as it did for Aristotle? In fact, it is important to distinguish two visions of democracy that may be fundamentally opposed. Classical democracy is a political regime that for us (through a tenacious retrospective illusion) is conflated with the Greek city-state in general and that (second illusion) supposedly underwent an explosive renaissance during the French Revolution with Rousseau as its ultimate theoretician. This type of democracy implies that the political dimension of life has strong influence over its private aspects. Modern democracy is quite different in both spirit and form. The democratic aspirations of the nineteenth century were associated with mistrust of the liberal state, not only of the remnants of absolutism; those aspirations combined with an awakening of national consciousness that was not present in ancient democracy. Thus, there is a difference, if not an opposition, between the now-dominant representation of democracy and what was understood by the word at the end of the eighteenth century.
Hegel’s explicit argument, the political language of which is rooted in eighteenth-century usages, concerns classical democracy. For him, as for Montesquieu, democracy has the traits of its Greek model: it rests on the Gesinnung, the political character, of its citizens, and this is what creates a problem “as the condition of society grows more advanced and the powers of particularity are developed and liberated.”10 We could speak here of pure democracy, since the modern acceptation of the word today seems to monopolize the usage of the word taken on its own. Indeed, it would seem that one must now add a qualification to democracy when we use the word to designate anything other than a representative-parliamentary regime: for example, direct democracy or, inversely, authoritarian democracy, just as in the past—strange pleonasm!—one spoke of popular democracy. But these qualifications bowdlerize the radicalness of the democratic idea. Democratic government in the classical sense is not moderate government. To see this we need only look at certain consequences of the exercise by all of the power to command, that is, the hegemony of the demos as the “gathering of a multitude,” as Cicero said,11 with the understanding that this definition of the people may well exclude a large or small portion of the population. I will focus on four of these consequences that seem to me consonant with what Hegel understands by and critiques in democracy.
First, if everyone commands, then everyone obeys, and obeys in all things, and at least among citizens everyone obeys in all things. Democracy is thus at once egalitarian and discriminatory: “[Democracy] is thought by them to be, and is, equality—not, however, for all, but only for equals.”12 The modern reader’s perplexity that this egalitarian definition of democracy can perfectly accommodate slavery shows how far our representations have moved away from such a strictly political conception of democracy.
Second, democracy is totalizing if not (as is often said) totalitarian;13 it reduces the nonpolitical sphere to a minimum. In the Greek context, this was the sphere of the oikos, the enlarged family structure that included both the family and slaves and which was therefore the site of the elementary activities of production. The first book of the Politics is dedicated to distinguishing the properly political relationship of command and obedience, which is always based on similarity (the equality of equals) from interfamily relations (man-woman, parent-child, master-slave), which are all based on natural inequality. Aristotle emphasizes what separates “political” power from the “despotic” power of the head of family: “the rule of a master is not constitutional rule, and . . . all the different kinds of rule are not, as some affirm, the same as each other.”14 From this we understand why ancient democracy was destabilized by the incursion of the economy—which “normally” belonged to the autarchic operation of the oikos—into the public space, which was supposed to be purely political: whence Aristotle’s exclusion of chresmatics, in the narrow sense of lucrative forms of production and exchange, from the category of legitimate modes of acquisition.15
Third, democracy reduces the role of representation in political life as much as possible and even tends to annul it. The state does not represent the city: it is the universalized expression of the common will, and it is the community, subject and object of the general will, that is sovereign. As Aristotle says, the city is the citizens. Regardless of the difficulties in implementing it, “direct” democracy is the authentic form of democracy, in which all individuals can declare what they think is the general interest and participate in acts of sovereignty.16 In a democracy, Hegel writes, “all individuals ought to participate in deliberations and decisions on the universal concerns of the state.”17 Of course, one must then distinguish, as Rousseau did, between acts of sovereignty properly speaking, which occur “when the whole people decree concerning the whole people” and bring together in the form of law “the universality of the will with the universality of the object,”18 from acts of government in the narrow sense, the administrative acts that emanate from the “executive power” as the “intermediate body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual correspondence.”19 In the Philosophy of Right, it is in this classical sense of the subsumption of the particular under the political universal (the law) that Hegel speaks of government. To the contrary, the Encyclopedia defines government in general as “the continual production of the state in general and of its constitution,”20 and there the executive is no more than a “particular governmental power.”21
Fourth, strictly speaking democracy precludes the separation of powers. The popular will is singular, for it actualizes the unity of the political community. Unless the sovereign is to be a “fantastic being, formed of disparate parts,”22 the sovereign can speak with only one voice; hence, the unified will of the people has undivided power. The idea of a balance of powers contradicts the democratic principle. The Federalist Papers makes this an argument against “pure democracy”: republican government, “in which a scheme of representation takes place,” differs by nature from democracy, in which “the people exercise the government in person.”23 Consequently, in democracy, as Rousseau says,24 not only is the government simply an officer or commissioned agent of the sovereign general will (which it is in any case), but the very power to judge, which is exercised “in the name of the people,” is also in principle a political attribute of sovereignty.
More than any other form of government, democracy implies an expansion of the political sphere and an intensification of the forms of life that develop in it. It demands a mobilization of the people and citizenry, which can be observed both in Athens and in the French Revolution. However, this tendency does not easily align with the modern world’s representation of freedom, which is completely different from the Greek notion of Êλευθερία, or with the importance it attaches to it. Freedom, writes Aristotle, is “the end of democracy.”25 Unlike the slave, who is subject to economic necessity and “despotic” violence, a free man is sui juris and can thus live any way he likes.26 But we must not project the modern notion of free will onto this locution. To live freely means to be able to dispose, as one likes, of the part of existence that does not belong to the public space; that is, not to be a slave. But freedom also and above all includes the political sense of being by turn ruler and ruled and thus acceding to the magistracy and taking part in the exercise of the people’s supreme power within a community of equals.27 In contrast, the modern idea of freedom has a strong antistate connotation. Freedom is a quality of the individual and essentially is achieved in a nonpolitical context. To put it briefly, the modern view of freedom, which is fundamentally individualist, is in consonance with the existence of a social space detached from the political (state) sphere; thus, it provides an anthropological, legal, and moral basis for free enterprise and its logic of differentiation. In a democratic perspective, freedom is “based on equality.”28 Of course, democratic equality has a strictly political meaning, and does not imply social or economic equality: civic equality is not the same as equality of fortunes. But it does suppose that the eventual political effects of wealth (or poverty) are neutralized. This explains why partisans of democracy judge it to be incompatible with strong social differentiation, and in fact it is difficult for democratic institutions to withstand the expansion of economic activities and the private sphere (classical Athens is an example of this).
It is understood that Hegel, a thinker of the separation between the social and the political, considers democracy to be foreign to the modern world, even more so than the aristocracy or the old (patriarchal or feudal) forms of monarchy. Indeed, the entire classical typology of forms of government and the problematic underlying it seems obsolete to him in the postrevolutionary context. The appearance of a new and superior form of government, constitutional monarchy, different in every way from classical monarchy,29 is a sign of this obsolescence. But it is Hegel’s analysis of the deep structures of modernity that establishes that democracy is ill suited to it; democracy is an untimely idea and reality. Indeed, democracy demands not only the subordination but also the sacrifice of personal individuality and personal goals to the substance that, so to speak, carries them: the city, its institutions, and its ethos. The heroism of citizens of democracy comes from the supremacy of the political practice over all other dimensions of existence. Montesquieu emphasized that virtue (Âρετή) is the principle of democracy.30 Obviously this is not moral virtue but rather the eminently political virtue or excellence that consists in the individual fully acquiescing to the universal by fusing subjective mental dispositions with the traditions, mores, and customs that structure the community and its memory. Classical citizenship corresponds to this democratic requirement, though the cities that adopted and conserved a democratic regime were quite rare. For Athenian or Spartan citizens, to be free was not, as it is for modern people, to be master of one’s person and opinions; it was not the ability to dispose freely of one’s property; instead, it meant being a citizen of a just city with good laws.31 Democratic virtue consisted in taking part in the destiny of the community. Hegel’s youthful writings glorified this civic ethics, renewed by the French Revolution. But we know that during his stay in Jena, he became aware of the inadequacy of this ethics to the modern conditions of individual life, both social and political.32 What explains Hegel’s effacement of the model of a Sittlichkeit structured by the values of the polis, by the democratic paradigm? It is the fact that Greek citizens’ mode of existence has become foreign to us. Three elements contributed to making this the case.
The first break with the intellectual universe of classical democracy was caused by Christianity, which made the autonomy of the subject a fundamental value:
The right of subjective freedom is the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age. This right, in its infinity, is expressed in Christianity, and it has become the universal and actual principle of a new form of the world.33
The constitution of subjective consciousness as an autonomous normative moment, which was perfected by a “Protestant consciousness” that combined religious and ethical dimensions,34 had significant political consequences. It made slavery unacceptable and thereby condemned the social and political organization of the ancient world. It also laid the groundwork for the bourgeois reign of property:
It must be nearly one and half millennia since the freedom of personality began to flourish under Christianity and became a universal principle for part—if only a small part—of the human race. But it is only since yesterday, so to speak, that the freedom of property has been recognized here and there as a principle.35
In short, the (Christian) principle of subjective (personal) freedom gradually became part of the order of things, until it came to seem the very core of the law; this explains, by the way, why in Hegel’s philosophy of objective spirit, moral subjectivity is placed between abstract law and ethicality.36 Two effects of this reshaping of the deep structures of objective spirit may be mentioned here. First, although theories of social contract misunderstand the true nature of the political bond, they do show awareness of the modern requirement that the individual consent to belong to a collectivity. The second effect of Christianity’s promotion of subjectivity is that it renders obsolete the ancient mode of the individual’s fusional adhesion to community values and to the absolute will of the demos. The “right of the subjective will,”37 whose premises, nevertheless, can be found in Greek philosophy, was thus the condemnation of the Greek political idea.
The second factor rendering democracy foreign to modern times is the redefinition of public space that began with the Enlightenment.38 The site of public life was no longer the ecclesia, the gathering of citizens on the agora, but rather public opinion, a “relatively harmless nemesis” that can also be “base and spiteful.”39 The public sphere was no longer conflated with the political sphere and even less with the system of the state’s functions and operations.
In modern societies, public opinion is clearly political. Along with representative institutions, which Hegel studies directly before turning to public opinion, it guarantees the mediation between “the universal in and for itself” and “its opposite,” “the particular opinions of the many,” insofar as the latter, no matter how majoritarian, are constitutively particular.40 Public opinion is not so much the sentiment of the populus grasped in its identity as it is the judgment—often unfounded but still critical and thereby necessary—that civil society in its diversity makes of political institutions. Thus, public opinion is a “self-contradiction,”41 and for that it “deserves to be respected as well as despised.”42 Whether they like it or not, rulers must take it into account, for it expresses, even if in a confused way, the representation a divided community has of its identity, its needs, its aspirations, and even the “eternal and substantial principles of justice.”43 One cannot rule against it for long even if its expression takes the form of prejudices or ideology, which is of course always the case. But rulers must also despise public opinion not only because of its changeability and frequent superficiality but above all because it is affected by particular interests and the centrifugal tendencies that run through a community that must, and yet cannot be, politically unified. Many political decisions must be made in spite of it or against its immediate sentiment, for often “the people is deceived by itself.”44 This argument cannot merely be chalked up to Hegel’s supposed aversion to democracy, for Rousseau says more or less the same thing:
the general will is always right and always tends to the public good; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people always have the same rectitude.45
Thus, public opinion may be compared to the will of all, which, when it separates from the general will, “has regard to private interests, and is merely a sum of particular wills.”46 In any case, its existence is a fact that rulers must reckon with. It is no longer enough for us to have good laws; we must, at the risk of erring, put them to the test of public opinion, the collective judgment.
The third, and probably decisive, reason why democracy is untimely is the creation of a depoliticized space that is susceptible to organization and regulation independent of state tutelage: civil society. In precapitalist societies, economic circuits, social relations, and family or interindividual relations were symbolically or statutorily coded in a way that was immediately political. It’s not that they were subject to the regulatory power of an administrative apparatus such as the one the modern state has. But all the matters that we call social were completely political, just like warfare, justice, and taxes; conversely, what would later be called the state did not have a monopoly on these activities. In the feudal state or the Ständestaat, the postfeudal state to which the complicated structures of the empire gave surprising longevity, there was thus no clear boundary between what was political and what was not. The status of corporations or free cities was political, as were relations of vassalage, servitude, and the church’s jurisdictional powers. The notion of privilege (lex privata) expresses a politicization of the social bond that has gradually become both incomprehensible and inadmissible: for does it not contradict the principle of individual freedom and the imperatives of competition and social mobility if every individual is assigned—as was formerly the case—an “estate” with statutory qualifications largely independent of the individual’s actual activity and merits? Modernity is defined by an ever-increasing differentiation between statuses, functions, and social positions, and Hegel attempts to account for this transformation while formally maintaining the old vocabulary. Thus, for example, he writes that “the essential determinant” of an individual’s belonging to such or such social “estate” “is subjective opinion and the particular arbitrary will,” which “for the subjective consciousness . . . has the shape of being the product of its own will.”47 Of course it is not a matter of subordinating the state, in charge of the universal, to the egotistical and opposing goals of individuals and social groups, which as “partial associations” are necessarily “to the detriment of the whole”:48 “in relation to the spheres of civil law [Privatrecht] and private welfare, the spheres of the family and civil society, the state is . . . the higher power.”49 But the state must take into consideration this increasing differentiation in civil society that, as we know, justifies the political representation of social interests.50 Furthermore, the modern understanding of politics as a particular function of society, assigned to an institution that claims a monopoly to it (the state), contradicts the principles of democracy.
Let us go one step further. If we consider that the telos of the modern world is the “catallactic”51 functioning of a society without a state, the state must abstain from getting involved in the social process and must limit itself to the external conditions (legal, in particular) of its operation. Individual freedom, and above all the freedom to property and enterprise, requires that the state refrain from stepping into a social sphere next to which it is merely juxtaposed. The exercise of its traditional functions hinders economic progress and is a factor of social injustice, if that term can have meaning here. A self-organized society needs politics to be dethroned and the state—though it may have to subsist to carry out some minimal functions—to be stripped of its prestige and mysteries. It is clear that Hegel does not share this liberal, even libertarian view. He rejects it soundly, for it turns the state into a mediocre extension of civil society, “an arrangement dictated by necessity [Not],”52 an institution of necessity and not of freedom. For Hegel, the liberals’ night watchman state, the minimal or ultraminimal state in Robert Nozick’s sense53 is, like the civil society he is satisfied with serving, a “state of necessity and of the understanding”;54 in other words, it is merely a nonstate. However, like the liberals, Hegel saw that the increasing autonomy of civil society from the state made true democracy impossible, for democracy requires the identification of individual aspirations with the goals of the political community; it is therefore incompatible with modern civil society—a powerful factor in the dispersion of interests and wills. The modern state can no longer be the “undivided and substantial unity”55 presupposed by the democratic city-state. The state, “the whole, articulated into its particular circles”56 recognizes the relative independence of society and bases itself on its institutions;57 the state is a continuous political process of the recomposition of a society that never stops differentiating itself, decomposing itself; it is, in the dynamic sense of the term, “union as such.”58 Thus, Hegel agrees with liberals in considering that the modern individual is “a son of civil society” before he is a citizen of the state.59 But unlike them he thinks that the particular social properties of this individual nourish a political “vocation,” a Beruf that carries him beyond these properties. The political universal is the truth of a social space dedicated to the particularity of interests and the competition of passions, whether joyful or sad: this is what liberalism refuses to see. But this universal finds in social differentiation a supplementary reason for existing, and this is what condemns the ideal of pure democracy.
In the French Revolution, modern history experienced a grandiose attempt at actualizing the democratic principle. Hegel does not contest this, and no doubt that is where he originally drew the reason for his adherence to the Greek model, which, like many others, he saw as being reborn in revolutionary France. But in reality things are more complex. In the Hegelian texts there is a double reading of the major event of his time: the Revolution has a liberal as well as a democratic orientation, and in the end Hegel considers that the former is its most durable legacy. The democratic orientation of the Revolution manifested itself above all in its radical phase. The Jacobin Constitution of 1793, which was to go into effect at the end of the state of emergency caused by the war but which the Thermidorian reaction made obsolete, was authentically democratic: it organized the participation of all citizens in major political decisions. Hegel’s article on the Reform Bill mentions the Constitution of the Year I, whose Articles 56–60 called for at least tacit ratification of all planned laws by citizen assemblies.60 Up until the excesses of the Terror, the revolutionary government was a democratic dictatorship of virtue:
Robespierre established the principle of virtue as the highest principle, and that man was serious about virtue. Now, virtue and terror prevail.61
But the Revolution was also, and perhaps above all, an insurrection of civil society and its forces against the absolutist political order and estate society, and that is what survived the upheaval. In this sense, unknown to those who were directly involved in it, its effect was more social than political, and its orientation was liberal rather than democratic. After all, its most lasting achievement was the proclamation of the rights of man, which set forth the principles of liberal individualism and abolished privileges and all the ancien régime’s obstacles to free enterprise. On this point Hegel’s argument anticipates Marx’s, who describes the “supposed rights of man” as those of “an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself,”62 basically, of the bourgeois and not of the citizen.
The Jacobin attempt to restore the vocabulary and democratic mores of the polis was destined to fail for at least two reasons. The first reason was the distance between the abstract principles it claimed and actual political action. Liberty, equality, and fraternity do not institute a politics. In other words, “men of principles,” doctrinaires, are not ipso facto “statesmen” whose “knowledge, experience, and business routine” is required to introduce principles of “life as it is lived.”63 For Hegel as for Marx, there cannot be a politics of the rights of man, for they concern social existence above all else. The second reason, on which the first probably depends, is that the democratic tendency of the Revolution, embodied by Robespierre, Marat, and Saint-Just, betrays a misunderstanding of the social and cultural conditions of modernity, in particular those conditions that contribute to the emancipation of the political sphere and the retreat of the state. This is why the dream of direct democracy rapidly turned into the political dictatorship of the Jacobins and created the conditions for its own destruction. The directorate and the empire are in certain respects civil society’s revenge against a democratic politics that threatened its autonomous development even though it also freed it from the hindrances of the ancien régime. The Restoration, that “farce that lasted fifteen years,”64 did not change the fundamentals of the situation.
However, although Hegel considered democracy outdated, his critique of one of the capital institutions of the representative democracy to come—universal suffrage—and its conceptual basis—the idea of the sovereignty of the people—shows that for him the question of democracy is not merely a historically bygone question. Beyond his choice of constitutional monarchy, which reminds us that philosophy cannot project itself ahead of its time, there are in Hegel elements of a critique of modern democracy that may have something to teach us.
Too often, Hegel’s assessment of universal suffrage and elective procedures is isolated from its context. In fact, his rejections of them can be explained by the problematic of political representation and the theory of the exercise of sovereignty that results from it. It should also be specified that his critique of the “democratic mode of election”65 in reality applies not to classical democracy, which used lots rather than elections to choose representatives,66 but rather to what would later be called representative democracy, where what he questions is the idea of citizens’ delegation of their will to an assembly. The various forms taken by the elective process include two irreconcilable presuppositions: all individuals must take part in political life by exercising their right to vote but at the same time the people (understood as a group of citizens) must be represented within the state as if on foreign territory. On this point we should note that what Hegel rejects is not so much the universal vote (which anyway was rejected by the liberal bourgeoisie during the first half of the nineteenth century) but the individual vote. His critique was of “democratic formlessness [Unförmlichkeit],”67 where a “whole dissolve[s] into a heap”68 or a multitude targets both selective or capacity-based suffrage (dear to Sieyès), which subordinates the right to vote to an “external condition,”69 and universal suffrage. Thus, Hegel condemns both democratic egalitarianism and selective oligarchy, for they share the erroneous belief that the general will is exclusively formed by the agglomeration of individual preferences. In a striking expression, Hegel writes that such an understanding, which deprives political life of a “[social] foundation that is stable,” “leaves political life hanging, so to speak, in the air.”70
There are three specific reasons behind Hegel’s harsh judgment of the elective process. The first is that the individual vote convinces the voter of his or her political near nullity, “weakening his idea of its importance and consequentially his interest in exercising this right.”71 This has two effects. First, the voter is tempted to refrain from taking part in “universal life” and to retreat to private existence, where he or she is aware of being active and effective. Second, the individual vote favors active minorities and can in fact lead to an organized party taking control of the state:
In the earlier years of the French Revolution the zeal and the behavior of the Jacobins at elections disgusted peaceful and decent citizens and even made it dangerous for them to cast their votes. So faction alone held the field.72
In such cases, the very vocation of a universal politics is compromised, as Rousseau notes when he condemns ruses.73
Second, Hegel’s critique of the elective system was sparked by the implosion of the political and verbal monstrosity that was the Roman Empire of the German Nation (Römisches Reich deutscher Nation), the Holy Roman Empire’s last and final name. It was good and dead even before Napoleon signed its official death notice in 1806. One of the reasons for Hegel’s bitter observation in 1800 that “Germany is a state no longer”74 was its status as an elective empire (Wahlreich). Hegel’s experience of its disintegration explains his conviction that the Wahlreich is “the worst of institutions.”75 In fact, it subordinated the state to the particular, self-interested, and competing wills of voters and was surely brought to ruin by the transformation of the political constitution into a cartel of interests protected by electoral capitulations. These capitulations, which had existed since Charles V was elected, were conventions by which the Empire’s electors used their votes to gain an ever-expanding sphere of privileges. Hegel emphasizes that this institution is harmful to the state’s political unity and to the autonomy of the political sphere from the procedures of private law: “German constitutional law is not a science derived from principles but a register of the most varied constitutional rights acquired in the manner of private rights.”76 This historical background—the outdatedness of which was emphasized by the French Revolution and Empire—sheds unique light on Hegel’s support for a hereditary constitutional monarchy.
Finally, Hegel thinks that one’s status as a “member of a state” (citizenship) is an “abstract determination,”77 while one’s status as member of civil society (being bourgeois) is not. At first glance this is surprising, since it seems to make the political more abstract than the social, whereas the entire analysis of Sittlichkeit makes the state the universally concrete truth, the “true ground” of the competitive world of abstract social particularity.78 But the Logic provides a way of overcoming this apparent difficulty. In the logical process, the result is both mediated and absolutely immediate so that beyond its apparent beginning and end, the process is itself both origin and end.79 The same is true in the ethical-political sphere. The state results from civil society in the sense that civil society is the negative and particular mediation that its universal identity presupposes; for this reason, political citizenship is built on particular social affiliations and remains an abstract quality if it is separated from these affiliations. Conversely, the state is the “true ground” of civil society, which can only be thought as the product of a historical process of the differentiation of the ethical-political totality. Thus, there is a sort of chiasmus: the state, the moment of the concrete universal, is the logical foundation of civil society, which is the “abstract moment of the reality of the Idea,”80 but social being constitutes the real basis of the citizen’s political being.
However, we must not think that Hegel makes citizenship a mere consequence of social status. To the contrary, it is essential for him that each individual be recognized as having identical political being from which obligations and rights derive even if the equality thus ushered in remains abstract. This is the whole difference between the modern state and ancient democracy. The latter had slaves, and “slaves have no duties because they have no rights, and vice versa.”81 But Hegel also takes his distance from a principle that was becoming dominant at the time: “one man, one vote.” For him, citizenship cannot consist in bracketing or denying social inequality; it must recognize it in order to accomplish its Aufhebung. On this view, I do not have political being insofar as I am an abstract individual, a legal atom, or a private person; it is, rather, because of my social position, my concrete and particular rootedness that comes from having an estate (Stand). In the modern world, the individual is a citizen neither in spite of his or her social determination nor because of it; he or she is a citizen with it:
The concrete state is the whole, articulated into its particular circles. Each member of the state is a member of an estate of this kind, and only in this objective determination can he be considered in relation to the state. His universal determination in general includes two moments, for he is a private person and at the same time a thinking being with consciousness and volition of the universal. But this consciousness and volition remain empty and lack fulfillment and actual life until they are filled with particularity, and this is [to be found in] a particular estate and determination.82
Thus the political and the social are neither conflated nor separate; they are moments that mutually presuppose and engender one another. On the one hand, my political being is shaped by my social being: it is only as a member of one of the “particular circles” of civil society that I can access actual political existence. On the other hand, the political universal is the condition of social particularity, the foundation that allows the “external state” to survive. Political identity, guaranteed by the institutions of the state, anticipates the ever-possible devolution of social competition into civil war. (Co)citizenship keeps civil society from returning to a state of nature. In this way, Hegel’s critique of universal suffrage, even if it targets classical democracy, shakes one of the foundations of liberal political philosophy.
The state is the rational condition of freedom. In the absence of a strong state, the simply agonistic logic of civil society risks devolving into a war of all against all.83 For this reason it acts as a constraint on the abstract will, when it compels individuals to abandon the summary representation they may have of their freedom and, as Rousseau puts it, forces them to be free.84 Thus, the individual is both citizen (Staatsbürger) and subject (Untertan). Two understandings of the notion of a people, and above all two theories of sovereignty, correspond to this double relation between the state and the individual. Indeed, whose sovereignty is proclaimed when it is said to belong to the people or to the nation? Basing himself on the distinction between populus and multitude found in Cicero and Hobbes,85 Hegel contrasts the political people, the “organized people” understood in its unity (das Volk) with the “aggregate” “of private persons,” the collection of individuals and groups thought to exist on their own that he calls the vulgus and which, if it could exist as such, would unleash “a shapeless, wild, blind force, like that of the stormy, elemental sea.”86 The unity of the populus, however, is not natural; it is continuously produced and reproduced by political mediation, in particular through mechanisms of representation. Thus, a notion like the sovereignty of the people ultimately has no meaning—and Hegel is very hesitant to use an expression with such strong connotations in the political debates of his time—unless one gets rid of the “garbled notion” of the people as a “formless mass”87 that in a sense stands across from the political institution. Hegel writes that such a mass “does not know [its] own will,”88 because no rational will can emerge from a particular group, no matter how majoritarian. Hegel points out that this “inorganic” representation of what a people is is held in particular by those belonging to the “rabble.” It is telling that hostility toward the state is attributed to those who have reason to think that the state is hostile toward them.
There is even reason to distinguish two variants of the apolitical understanding of the people as multitude. In the first version, it is a mass that stands across from rulers. This is the trivial democratic interpretation of the principle of popular sovereignty. But such an unorganized mass cannot have a unified political will. Rousseau, who based his theory of sovereignty on the distinction between the atomized multitude, incapable of willing, and the “common self” that is born with the political body, understood this well.89 But he thought that in order to explain the passage from one to the other, it was necessary to preserve the fiction of the social contract. This amounts to presupposing the state as a given, which Hegel, too, would grant, albeit on other premises. The second version is of the people as a conglomerate of individuals, each with his or her own plan or will. This is a liberal view of what a people is, in which the will of the people is the will of the majority of individuals. Hegel rejects this understanding even more clearly than he does that of the democrats: first, because it rests on the incorrect postulate of the independence of the particular will, and second, because it makes the political bond itself, “unity as such,” unthinkable.90 Liberal individualism includes a deeply antipolitical orientation, one that is not only antistate; in this respect it espouses the point of view of civil society kept separate from its political foundation. Liberal individualism, thinking it is fighting absolutism, ruins the very idea of sovereignty and of the state. As important a liberal thinker as Constant recognized this clearly:
Sovereignty exists only limitedly and relatively. At the point where independence and individual existence begin, the jurisdiction of sovereignty ends.91
Thus, it would be a simplification to say only that Hegel rejects popular sovereignty; it is more accurate to say that he rejects the disfiguring, parallel interpretations that democrats and liberals have of it. For doesn’t he write, regarding the right to vote, that
it is in this right that there lies the right of the people to participate in public affairs and in the highest interests of the state and the government. . . . This right and its exercise is, as the French say, the act, the sole act, of the “sovereignty of the people.”92
It is remarkable—and here one will see either the mark of Hegel’s ambiguousness or the proof of his lucidity—that the article on the Reform Bill, which criticizes “French abstractions”93 more than ever before and denies that legislation or a constitution can be based on the rights of man and citizen,94 so solemnly proclaims the principle of the sovereignty of the people. But it is insofar as individual elements of the people, the populus, is united through representative mediation—thus, insofar as the people is the state—that it is sovereign:
We may also say that internal sovereignty lies with the people, but only if we are speaking of the whole [state] in general, in keeping with the above demonstration . . . that sovereignty belongs to the state.95
This identification of the sovereign people with the state is combined with an initially enigmatic definition of sovereignty as the “universal thought of this ideality” of the state.96 But context provides the key. Ideality corresponds to the fact that the various powers of the state have their principle, their “ultimate roots,” in “the unity of the state as their simple self.”97 This implies the impossibility of any division of sovereignty, as Rousseau and Hobbes already asserted. The sovereignty of the state is ideal because the state itself is an ideality: it is the life of all, the moving identity of a multiplicity, “unity as such.” Here we arrive at the reason for the refutation of both variants of the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people: each one reduces the populus to the vulgus or the multitudo. But these should instead be thought of as the poles (identity and atomization) between which the process of constituting the political takes place. From this perspective, sovereignty has no foundation other than itself: the state is sovereign because it is the only foundation of its own power. The immediate objection that this legitimates all tyranny ignores the fact that tyranny has nothing in common with the very real “idea” of the state, for it does not unify. Sovereignty, however, the identity of identity and difference, implies the differentiation of the state’s power. And if by constitution (Verfassung) is meant the necessary self-differentiation of the state into distinct but not independent powers, the idea of sovereignty coincides with that of constitutionality:
Sovereignty is to be found specifically under lawful and constitutional conditions as the moment of ideality of the particular spheres and functions [within the state]. In other words, these spheres are not independent or self-sufficient in their ends and modes of operation, nor are they solely immersed in themselves; on the contrary, in these same ends and modes of operation, they are determined by and dependent on the end of the whole (to which the indeterminate expression “the welfare of the state” has in general been applied).98
State, people, sovereignty, and constitution are so many different expressions, each with their own specific connotation, of the idea that the political is the infinite process of a community’s creation of identity. But we must add that sovereignty needs to be embodied in a concrete existence that is physically and subjectively individual: “The personality of the state has actuality only as a person, as the monarch.”99 Even in democracy, an individual must detach from and take upon himself the actualization of the general will; otherwise, it would have to be up to blind fate or various forms of divination to choose the opportune moment (kairos).
If, as Hegel said (and he was not the only one), democracy is so foreign to the postrevolutionary world, why did this notion acquire such a normative charge in later political vocabulary, including our own? For what regime, what political school, does not claim democracy? To understand this paradox, we must take into account two interdependent circumstances. First, the concept of democracy underwent a profound transformation and ultimately became almost synonymous with “representative government.” Whereas in Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, democracy is construed on the (idealized) model of the Athenian city-state of the fifth and fourth centuries and is therefore incompatible with the new problematic of representation, toward the end of the eighteenth century there occurred what Thomas Paine called an “ingrafting” of representation onto “simple democracy” that deeply affected the latter.100 Second, it so happens that starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, political liberalism gradually reconciled with democracy, whereas up until 1848, it was highly distrustful of it—and the fact that the content of the concept of democracy had been radically altered played, of course, a role in this shift. In both cases, it is clear that the matter of the individual vote (whether universal or restricted) was a powerful means of convergence.101
For Hegel, “philosophy is . . . its own time comprehended in thoughts”;102 thus, it is normal that his political philosophy takes part in the lively debate that developed during the postrevolutionary period between liberalism and democracy. His argument reveals a number of fundamental differences between liberal and democratic views of the political order, though during the 1820s these were not always clearly perceived. True, the immediate object of Hegel’s critique of democracy was ancient democracy, in which, as Rousseau said, the people is both sovereign and magistrate. But it can also apply to the new idea of representative democracy that emerged from the American and French Revolutions. Then, the argument turns against liberal political philosophy, with which Hegel, however, shares some premises. Thus, it is as if in contributing to the argument liberals made against both those who supported a return to the old order and those who wanted a democratic radicalization of the principles of 1789, Hegel undermines the very foundations of liberal political discourse by displaying its tacit assumptions (the article on the Reform Bill is exemplary on this point).
Hegel does not conflate the liberal state of law with democracy; he is well aware that political liberalism was created in reaction to both democracy, assimilated with the Terror, and to restored monarchy. But his critique of the point of view that, in confusing the state with civil society, makes the sole purpose of the former the “security and protection of property and personal freedom,” that is, “the interest of individuals [der Einzelnen] as such,”103 indirectly contributes to thinking about what is called the crisis of representative democracy. I have already described what distinguishes the state in the Philosophy of Right from the liberal state. The latter is an external organ of civil society: its only necessity stems from marginal conditions of self-regulation of economic and social processes as well as civil society’s possible dysfunctions. For liberals, the state is a necessary evil and it certainly is not the objectivization of freedom. It is a constant threat to individuals and commerce, not their condition of being. This is why liberal democracy strives to erect safeguards against the power of the state. Two elements contribute to this: the problematic (which became powerfully ideological) of the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person, and the constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers.104 The rights of man circumscribe the sphere of inalienable independence of the legal person and the social subject, the bourgeois; they are thus guaranteed by the process of constituting or reconstituting the nonpolitical dimension of human existence. As for the separation of powers, which is completely different from the necessary differentiation of power within the constitution of the rational state, its clearly restrictive intention with regard to a state perceived as a threat to fundamental freedoms can lead to “the destruction of the state.”105 Fortunately, this view of things is an illusion: when there is a clash between the powers of the state, one of them will quickly reconstitute its unity to its benefit.
Weber noted with lucidity that “as soon as mass administration is involved, the meaning of democracy changes so radically that it no longer makes sense for the sociologist to ascribe to the term the same meaning.”106 Today’s democratic states are certainly quite far from classical democracy, which on principle could not accept the delimitation or weakening of the governance of men. However, they do bear resemblance to Hegel’s version of the liberal state (or nonstate) as a counterpoint to the speculative theme of the rational state. Democracies make the liberal principle of delimitation of the political sphere their own. Henceforth, the true subject of power is perhaps not the demos, though the principle of popular sovereignty is proclaimed. It is here that Hegel’s double critique of democracy and liberalism (which for him are clearly two very distinct things) turns out to be very fertile.
Among the aspects of Hegelian politics that have been most harshly judged are his condemnation of democracy, his rejection of universal suffrage, and his corporative interpretation of parliamentary representation. As his adversaries indeed saw, these aspects form a system, but in general it has not been understood why. Hegel’s reason for thinking that the total democracy certain actors in the French Revolution planned to implement was illusory is first and foremost theoretical. Fundamentally, the democratic project in the strict sense is incompatible with the way in which the modern world differentiates between the social and the political, especially in light of the development of an economy of free enterprise, with its mandate to exceed the territorially closed limits of the state. But this argument becomes unintelligible (including its controversial aspects) if one posits the state and society as two adversaries whose perspectives can at best be reconciled. The center of gravity of Hegel’s political theory is the creation of a not immediately political organization of the social world. Thus, his theory leads us to contemplate one of the paradoxes of modernity: even though the institutionally political space is based on the fluidity of the social world, in order for the latter not to succumb to the contradictions that animate it, it requires the mediation of that which it mediates. Therein lies the impossibility of overcoming the political.
1. See Popper, Open Society, 2:27 ff. The argument is as follows: “I have tried to show the identity of Hegelian historicism with the philosophy of modern totalitarianism” (p. 78).
2. See Reformbill, W 11, p. 128; Reform Bill, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 330.
3. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 507; Proceedings, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 282.
4. Geschichte, W 12, p. 529.
5. Aristotle, Politics, 3.1.1275b5–6. The definition of citizenship I cite is from 3.4.1277a27.
6. See Aristotle, Politics, 3.13.1283b40.
7. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 4:656.
8. RPh, § 308 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 254 (Elements, 347; see Outlines, 294).
9. RPh, § 279 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 234 (Elements, 319; see Outlines, 269).
10. RPh, § 273 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 228 (Elements, 310; see Outlines, 261).
11. The populus is “the gathering of a multitude associated with a legal act and the common good” (Cicero, De republica, 1.39). The distinction between people and multitude is also found in Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant; it plays an important role in the modern political philosophy’s idea of the people.
12. Aristotle, Politics 3.9.1280a12–13.
13. See for example Jacob L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1952).
14. Aristotle, Politics 1.7.1255b16–18.
15. See Aristotle, Politics 1.9.1257b. Chresmatics refers both to the art of acquisition in general and to its speculative perversion.
16. Direct democracy corresponds to “the happiest nation in the world,” where “troops of peasants” decide “the affairs of the State under an oak and always . . . wisely.” Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:379; Social Contract, 4:1, 227.
17. RPh, § 308 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 254 (Elements, 347; see Outlines, 294).
18. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:379; Social Contract, 2:6, 179.
19. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:379; Social Contract, 3:1, 194.
20. Enzykl, § 541, GW 20, p. 514 (Encyclopedia 240).
21. Enzykl, § 543, GW 20, p. 517 (Encyclopedia 242).
22. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:379; Social Contract, 2:2, 171.
23. Federalist Papers, no. 10, p. 52.
24. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:379; Social Contract, 2:6.
25. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.8.1366a.
26. See Aristotle, Politics 6.2.1317 to 40 ff. and 5.9.1310a25–33. See also Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 2.37, and Plato, Republic 8.557b and 562b–c.
27. See Aristotle, Politics 2.2.1261 to 30–1262b6 and 6.2.1317b2.
28. Aristotle, Politics 6.2.1317b16. According to Cicero, “there is no freedom that is not equal” (De republica 1.47).
29. See RPh, § 273 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 226–27 (Elements, 308–9; see Outlines, 259), as well as Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 147. Constitutional monarchy is the “true monarchy” (Enzykl, § 544 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 518).
30. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 3:3, 21–31. See RPh, § 273 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 437–38 (Elements, 310; see Outlines, 261).
31. RPh, § 153 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 142 (Elements, 196. See Outlines, 160). The phrase comes from Xenophon (Memorabilia 1.1.3), who attributes it to Socrates, or from Diogenes Laertius (8.16), who refers to Xenophiles the Pythagorean. Cf. PhG, GW 9, p. 195 (Phenomenology, ¶ 352).
33. RPh, § 124 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 110 (Elements, 151; see Outlines, 122).
34. Enzykl, § 552 Anmerkung. We find here an early version of Weber’s analysis of Protestant ethics in the Lutheran rather than Calvinist version.
35. RPh, § 62 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 68 (Elements, 92; see Outlines, 74).
36. See chapter 10 below.
37. RPh, § 107, GW 14.1, p. 100 (Elements, 136; see Outlines, 110).
38. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), in particular chapters 3 and 4. For a counterpoint, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis (Oxford: Berg), 1988.
39. RPh, § 319 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 263 (Elements, 358; see Outlines, 304).
40. RPh, § 316, GW 14.1, p. 258 (Elements, 353; see Outlines, 299).
41. RPh, § 316, GW 14.1, p. 258 (Elements, 353; see Outlines, 299).
42. RPh, § 318, GW 14.1, p. 260 (Elements, 355; see Outlines, 301).
43. RPh, § 317, GW 14.1, p. 259 (Elements, 353; see Outlines, 299).
44. RPh, § 317 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 260 (Elements, 354; see Outlines, 300).
45. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:371; Social Contract, 2:3, 172. See also 4:1 and 4:2.
46. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:371; Social Contract, 2:3, 172. See also 4:1 and 4:2.
47. RPh, § 206, GW 14.1, p. 172 (Elements, 237; see Outlines, 195).
48. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:371; Social Contract, 2:3, 173.
49. RPh, § 261, GW 14.1, p. 208 (Elements, 283; see Outlines, 235–36).
51. See Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 2:207. He also speaks of an “extended or macro-order,” which he distinguishes from “organizations” such as the state (Fatal Conceit, 37).
52. RPh, § 270 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 219 (Elements, 298; see Outlines, 249).
53. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 26. The positions of Hayek and Nozick seem moderate in comparison to those of a radical libertarian such as Murray Rothbard, for whom the state is no different than a band of gangsters: see Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982), 161–72.
54. RPh, § 183, GW 14.1, p. 160 (Elements, 221; see Outlines, 181).
55. RPh, § 273 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 226 (Elements, 309; see Outlines, 259).
56. RPh, § 308 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 254 (Elements, 347; see Outlines, 294).
57. See RPh, § 255, GW 14.1, p. 199 (Elements, 272; see Outlines, 226): “The family is the first ethical root of the state; the corporation is the second, and it is based in civil society.”
58. RPh, § 258 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 201 (Elements, 276; see Outlines, 229).
59. RPh, § 238, GW 14.1, p. 192 (Elements, 263; see Outlines, 218).
60. Reformbill, W 11, p. 11 (not translated in Hegel’s Political Writings). See Jacques Godechot, Les constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970), 87. On this matter the Montagnard text adopted in 1793 is less democratic than Condorcet’s Girondin plan, which called for the Primary Citizens’ Assemblies to sit at all times rather than intermittently.
61. Geschichte, W 12, p. 533.
62. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 43. This critique of the rights of man constantly draws on the Hegelian distinction between the state and (bourgeois) civil society.
63. Reformbill, W 11, p. 122; Reform Bill, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 326.
64. Geschichte, W 12, p. 534.
65. Enzykl, § 544 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 520 (Encyclopedia 244).
66. See Aristotle, Politics 4.9.1294b8–9: “the appointment of magistrates by lot is thought to be democratic, and the election of them oligarchical.”
67. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 485; Proceedings, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 265.
68. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 482; Proceedings, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 262.
69. RPh, § 310 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 256 (Elements, 349; see Outlines, 296).
70. RPh, § 303 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 252 (Elements, 344; see Outlines, 292).
71. Reformbill, W 11, p. 115; Hegel’s Political Writings, 320. See also RPh, § 311 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 256–257 (Elements, 350; see Outlines, 297).
72. Reformbill, W 11, p. 114–115; Hegel’s Political Writings, 320. See also Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 4:717.
73. Rousseau, Du contrat social, in Oeuvres complètes, 3:371; Social Contract, 2:3, 173.
74. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 46; Hegel’s Political Writings, 143.
75. RPh, § 281 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 238 (Elements, 324; see Outlines, 274).
76. “Verfassung,” W 1, p. 468; Hegel’s Political Writings, 149. See also “Verfassung,” W 1, pp. 454–55 (not included in Hegel’s Political Writings): “by its original legal basis, German constitutional law is actually private law.”
77. RPh, § 308 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 254 (Elements, 347; see Outlines, 294).
78. RPh, § 256 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 199 (Elements, 274; see Outlines, 227).
79. See WdL 3, GW 12, p. 243 ff. (Science of Logic, 743ff).
80. RPh, § 184, GW 14.1, p. 160 (Elements, 221; see Outlines, 182).
81. RPh, § 261 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 209 (Elements, 284; see Outlines, 237).
82. RPh, § 308 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 254–55 (Elements, 347; see Outlines, 294–95).
84. See Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:364; Social Contract, 1:7, 165–66.
85. See Cicero, De republica, 1.39: a people is not a “group of men gathered in any way.” According to Hobbes, in contrast to the multitude, an aggregate to which “any action or any right” can be attributed, a people is “something which has a will, and to which action can be attributed” (De Cive: English Version, 12:8, 190).
86. Enzykl, § 544 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 518 (Encyclopedia 244).
87. RPh, § 279 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 234 (Elements, 319; see Outlines, 269).
88. RPh, § 301 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 249 (Elements, 340; see Outlines, 288).
89. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3:361; Social Contract, 1:6, 163–64.
90. RPh, § 258 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 201 (Elements, 276; see Outlines, 229).
91. Constant, Political Writings, 177.
92. Reformbill, W 11, p. 112; Hegel’s Political Writings, 318.
93. See in particular Reformbill, W 11, pp. 117–18, 122; Hegel’s Political Writings, 322, 325. The first passage criticizes some of Sieyès’s views regarding constitutions.
94. Reformbill, W 11, p. 127; Hegel’s Political Writings, 329.
95. RPh, § 279 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 234 (Elements, 318; see Outlines, 268).
96. RPh, § 279, GW 14.1, p. 232 (Elements, 316; see Outlines, 267).
97. RPh, § 278, GW 14.1, p. 230 (Elements, 315; see Outlines, 265).
98. RPh, § 278 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 231 (Elements, 316; see Outlines, 266).
99. RPh, § 279 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 233 (Elements, 317; see Outlines, 267).
100. Paine, Rights of Man, 232. As early as 1777, one of the future authors of the Federalist Papers spoke of “representative democracy” (A. Hamilton, Papers, vol. 1 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1961], 255).
101. Kant illustrates the safeguards of original liberalism against democracy, for he considers democracy to always be despotic and thinks it is incompatible with the “republican constitution” (see Ak. 8, pp. 352–53; PP, pp. 324–25). In 1848, Guizot heard in the cry for a democratic republic “the echo of an old social war cry” (De la démocratie en France [Paris: Masson, 1849], 39–40).
102. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 15 (Elements, 21; see Outlines, 15).
103. RPh, § 258 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 201 (Elements, 276; see Outlines, 228).
104. “Basic rights and separation of powers denote, therefore, the essential content of the Rechtsstaat component of the modern constitution.” Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 127; Constitutional Theory, 170.
105. See RPh, § 272 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 225 (Elements, 307; see Outlines, 258).
106. Weber, Economy and Society, 951.