The concept of political disposition (politische Gesinnung) is described in sections 267 and 268 of the Philosophy of Right. But the question of the subjective forms of political being, which Hegel first discusses at the beginning of the section on the “state” through the themes of “piety” (“feeling [Empfindung] and ethicality governed by feeling”) and “political virtue” (“the willing of that thought end which has being in and for itself”)1 is in reality the center of gravity of the text introducing the theory of the rational state, which deals with the relations between the state and the individual and with what may be called the subjective dimension of the political. The concept of political disposition refers to the fact that subjective consciousness recognizes in the institution of the state the objectivized form, and thus the condition, of its own freedom; the expression designates the spontaneously trusting attitude of a self-consciousness that knows that in the political universal it has “its essence, its end, and the product of its activity”2 and is therefore favorably disposed toward it. Of course, civil society already offers the individual the opportunity to go beyond his or her egotistical interest—ultimately, to go beyond finitude. Undoubtedly socialization has a universalizing effect, which is due to the modern mode of production and exchange: the presence of kernels of universality within civil society (economic and monetary regulations enabling the creation of a market, the actions of corrective justice, the work of social institutions) allow it to be self-administrated in large part and makes it possible for individuals to consider themselves links in a chain they depend on for their material and cultural existence and that they must therefore will in order to will themselves. But only the state, turning the necessity that social life implements externally and mechanically into “the shape of freedom”3 can create and maintain the individual’s adherence to the ethical conditions of his or her being. Thus, on the very ground of subjective dispositions, the citizen is the truth of the bourgeois.
The objective institutions of the state represent just one of its aspects. If the state is the developed, differentiated, and concrete expression of freedom, and thus the substance of free subjectivity that wills and affirms itself as such, it must be considered both “subjective substantiality,” that is, “political disposition,” and “objective substantiality,” that is, the constitutional organization of powers within the “organism of the state.”4 These two dimensions, which mediate each other, are speculatively connected and have equal weight. “The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea,”5 and we know that an idea, in the Hegelian sense, is the unity of the subjective concept and objectivity, or rather the process of harmonization that produces them, sets them against one another, connects them, and unifies them. A set of merely objective and material determinations, such as institutions in the common sense of the word, cannot therefore be an idea. The state is only an idea, an “ideality” of “necessity” embodied by social institutions,6 if its structures are animated and confirmed by the will of individuals. This is the condition on which the state can ensure “union as such” and allow individuals to “lead a universal life.”7 This volition for the universal as such is precisely what distinguishes the citizen’s attitude from that of the social actor, the bourgeois, for whom the entirely abstract and external universality of economic regulations and civil laws is only ever a tool for private happiness. A state that depends solely on the coherence and strength of its material institutions necessarily becomes despotic: this was the fate of the monarchies of the ancien régime. Conversely, a state that bases itself on subjective virtue alone will be neither stable nor free. This, in Hegel’s eyes, is the fatal flaw of democratic constitutions, which “[do] indeed depend on the disposition [of the citizens]”: the virtue of the “people” and its leaders cannot replace “the legally determined activity of an articulated organization.”8 The Terror, a consequence of a politics of virtue, emphatically proves the logical and historical necessity of the constitutional (that is, institutional) objectivization of the state, as well as of the autonomous development of subjective particularity within a civil society that is itself “constituted.” In the postrevolutionary world, the particular social being of the bourgeois guarantees the mediation between the objective constitution of the state and the subjective dispositions of the citizenry. But we must explain the content of the latter and specify the conditions for their emergence and enduring actuality.
The political disposition is defined as “certainty based on truth.”9 The general relationship of individuals to ethical objectivity in their “subjective determination to freedom”10 is presented using the same vocabulary, borrowed from the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s use of the concepts of certainty and truth shows that the political disposition is not a mere subjective opinion based on such or such a representation of what the state should be but is rather membership in and adherence to the universal: it expresses the fact that the state “ceases to be an other for me” and “in my consciousness of this, I am free.”11 Thus, the political disposition is not of the order of knowledge or even of the discernment of the understanding (Einsicht). In truth, it is only insofar as it is a lasting and stable aptitude (hexis) to act in conformity with the objective conditions of freedom that the political ethos, unknown to the individuals who act as its vehicles, includes a rationality that confirms and validates its properly ethical content, its “virtue.”
Second, Hegel presents the political disposition as “volition which has become habitual.”12 This points to its kinship with mores or ethical customs (Sitten), which are the true cultural bases of political institutions. Ethical customs are described in strong terms:
But if it is simply identical with the actuality of individuals, the ethical [das Sittliche], as their general mode of behavior, appears as custom [Sitte]; and the habit of the ethical appears as a second nature which takes the place of the original and purely natural will and is the all-pervading soul, significance, and actuality of individual existence [Dasein]. It is spirit living and present as a world, and only thus does the substance of spirit begin to exist as spirit.13
It is from this fertile ground that the will to live and to live together, cocitizenship, begins to grow: mores, the manifestation of an unreasoned but in no way irrational faith that the state presupposes and constantly recreates, are both the basis of institutions and the manifestation of their ethical rationality. Thus, they constantly recreate the living bond between the community and the individual, a bond that Hegel designates by the term Sittlichkeit. The political disposition is thus a type of ethical virtue (Tugend)—defined as the reflection of ethicality into individual personality14—or of rectitude (Rechtschaffenheit). This ethical virtue means that although human beings are “naturally” attached to their own egotistical interests, they see observance of the rules of the social groups to which they belong and the fulfillment of the duties prescribed by the objective system of institutions not as obstacles or limitations but rather as the conditions of their own “substantial freedom” in which they “liberate [themselves]” by conforming.15 Ethical virtue, which produces social and political action in conformity with its reasons, is the lasting consciousness of reciprocity between subjective rights (which are made actual by being inscribed within a context of objectivity) and duties (which “are not something alien to the subject”16 when they spell out what is “substantial” in subjective freedom.) Thus, ethical virtue implies that the particular will, which is itself educated and shaped by mores and customs, consciously sacrifices its primitive naturalness to its potential rationality, its abstractness to the objective conditions of its concrete actualization. The ethical is “spirit living and present as a world.”17 Its reality is thus inseparably subjective and objective: “the ethical is a subjective disposition, but of that law which has being in itself.”18
The attunement of the subjective and objective components of the ethical (but not their immediate fusion, which would necessarily suppress subjective freedom, as in the example of the democratic polis) is a process that gives rational consistency to both the ethical and the state. When Hegel says that the ethical is the living good, this is not an observation but rather the indication of a task incumbent on modernity: to achieve freedom, including the freedom of subjective individuality in its potential egocentrism, on the terrain of historical-political objectivity. From this point of view, creating a new political ethos, a spirit of citizenship that, in spite of everything, was exemplified by the French revolutionaries’ patriotism without nationalism, is as important as establishing the institutions of freedom, for the two correspond to one another.
Nonetheless it may seem surprising—especially if we do not bear in mind the Greek and French context of the argument—that Hegel simply identifies the political disposition with “patriotism.”19 It is obvious that Hegel means to reject the common representation of patriotism as a disposition to heroic sacrifice while at the same time claiming a notion inherited from the political legacy of the French Revolution, one that we know the Restoration loathed.20 For Hegel, authentic patriotism is not revealed on the battlefield but rather “in the normal conditions and circumstances of life,”21 and he understands it as a modest disposition toward cocitizenship, a peaceful civic-mindedness that strengthens the system of political institutions and supplies it with appropriate representations. Three observations should be made with regard to this argument.
First, this civic conception of patriotism relativizes Hegel’s well-known and never-renounced opinions in the article on natural law concerning the ethical value of war, which “preserves the ethical health of peoples. . . . Just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would result from a continual calm, so also corruption would result for peoples under continual or indeed ‘perpetual’ peace.”22 The everyday patriotism valorized by the Philosophy of Right gives this initially bellicose proposition a clearly circumscribed scope. The “willingness to perform extraordinary sacrifices and actions” is only the superficial layer of “the genuine [political] disposition”;23 without the latter, the former would not exist for long. Furthermore, valor (Tapferkeit), the disposition required by war, is quite particular: though it is a virtue, it is a “formal virtue,” the exercise of which (the sacrifice of life in combat) is not “in itself of a spiritual nature”;24 it cannot by itself provide a motive to act. Military valor has no meaning in itself; it only has value in the service of the supreme political end, the preservation of the state and its sovereignty. Thus, this virtue falls to a particular social group of professional soldiers and cannot be confused with the political virtue that the state expects of its members and works to instill in them. War exists, like power, and it demands valor. But this is neither what is essential nor most difficult: “human beings often prefer to be guided by magnanimity instead of by the law.”25 Hegel’s conviction is that a state cannot be sustainably built on enthusiasm and the spirit of sacrifice, at least in the context of modernity. Moreover, even if he rejects the pacifism and cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment, he rejects all nationalism, as is clear from his strictly political definition of a people. In contradiction to the usage that has since become dominant, Hegel thinks of the nation as a prepolitical and thus prehistoric reality. On the other hand, he completely identifies people and state:
In the concrete existence of a people, the substantial aim is to be a state and to stay as such; a people without the form of a state (a nation as such) has no proper history; people have existence before adopting the state form, and still others exist now as savage nations.26
We should note in passing that this represents a refusal to define the political on the basis of a limit situation such as war, confirming that although Hegel gives an eminent place to the moment of political decision—the necessity of which ultimately justifies the power of the prince, that “absolutely decisive moment of the whole”27—his rational politics fundamentally lacks any decisionist orientation.
Second, in the lectures on the philosophy of history, the “terrorist” inflection of the French Revolution is chalked up primarily to the Robespierrist exaltation of political virtue regardless of the external and internal threats to the young Republic:
Virtue has now to rule against the many who are unfaithful to it because of their depravity, their old interests, or [merely] the excesses of freedom and passions. Virtue is here a simple principle and distinguishes only between those who have a good disposition (Gesinnung) and those who don’t. The disposition can only be known and judged by a disposition. Suspicion therefore reigns, and virtue, when it becomes suspect is already condemned. . . . From Robespierre the principle of virtue was established as the highest, and one can say, that this man was serious about virtue. Now, virtue and terror prevail, because the subjective virtue that governs merely by disposition brings with it the most terrible tyranny. It exercises its power without legal forms, and its punishments are just as simple: death.28
This analysis does not call into question political disposition or political virtue (“the spirit of the whole”) as such. But it reminds us that political subjectivity is but one component of the simultaneously subjective and objective totality of the ethical. If political virtue is separated from its indispensable complement, free political and social institutions (let us say the institutions of a republic in the Kantian sense), it can become criminal, as the Phenomenology of Spirit shows through the figure of “Absolute Freedom and Terror”29 and its continuations, “The Moral View of the World” and “The Beautiful Soul.” The lesson to be taken from these texts and from the analysis of the French Revolution in the lectures on the philosophy of history is that virtuous political subjectivity does not contain its measure within itself but rather must be organized under a stable constitutional order that in return it enriches. “There is nothing more sacred or higher than the disposition [vis-à-vis] the state,” on the condition, however, that it is properly understood as “the disposition according to which the laws and the constitution in general is what is stable, and that it is the supreme obligation of individuals to thereby subordinate their particular will.”30 Thus, what Hegel rejects is the patriotic voluntarism of the sansculottes and the Robespierrist cult of intransigent virtue along with the violence it implies against subjects by subjectivity and not the principle of political subjectivity itself, which is the very modern right to be not only a subject (in the sense of the German Untertan, the subject who obeys the sovereign) but also and above all a citizen.
Third, the theory of politische Gesinnung in a sense constitutes the Aristotelian moment of a thought that elsewhere calls into question the Greek political ideal (the “beautiful totality”) in the name of the values of modernity. Just like Aristotle, Hegel refuses to dissociate even momentarily ethics from politics: ethical virtues (and even properly moral virtues) are to be exercised within the life of the city-state; they are “the ethical in its particular application.”31 It thus becomes clear that Hegel appreciates the Aristotelian definition of virtue: “Aristotle . . . judiciously defined each particular virtue as a mean between an excess and a deficiency.”32 Both thinkers connect virtue to a continuous process. According to the Stagirite, virtue, a habitual state (hexis),33 is the fruit of habit (ethos); in the same way, for Hegel, virtue consists in observing the mores and laws of one’s people because in them the universal substance “speaks its universal language.”34 Does this language that political subjects speak and bring to life in actualizing their ethical dispositions perhaps realize, on concrete political ground, the project for a “mythology of reason” that the young Hegel, the young Schelling, and the young Hölderlin thought would reconcile a people and its thinkers?35
However, we must be aware of a major difference between Aristotle’s and Hegel’s arguments regarding political virtue; this difference makes clear the separation between modern ethics and the ethics of the polis. For Aristotle, virtue (ethical or political) does not at all presuppose anything like subjectivity understood as an interiority that voluntarily rules behaviors; virtue is acquired not by working on oneself or practicing a technique of the self but rather by observing virtuous action and imitating the “prudent” or wise man.36 To the contrary, modern Sittlichkeit, as Hegel conceives it, essentially brings subjectivity into play even if ethical subjectivity, by virtue of its being subordinated to the objective universality of laws and mores, is absolutely distinct from the “empty principle of moral subjectivity.”37 It is not “that indeterminate subjectivity which does not attain . . . the objective determinacy of action,”38 but it is indeed a subjectivity, one that constitutes itself in action:
Subjectivity is the absolute form and existent actuality of substance, and the difference between the subject on the one hand and substance as its object [Gegenstand], end, and power on the other is the same as their difference in form, both of which differences have disappeared with equal immediacy.39
Objective spirit passes through subjectivity: we are far from the Greek polis, which the young Hegel praised for being based on the elision of individuality and the ignorance of interiority. Decidedly, the “superior principle of modern times” is not forgotten even and especially when subjective interiority is literally put back in its place.
How is the political hexis acquired? Where does the political disposition come from, and how is it instilled in individuals when everything, in particular their bourgeois social being, encourages them to turn away from the universal? True, their attitudes are shaped by mores and the Volksgeist, but this fact is too general to account for individuals’ trust in and support of the state institution and its mode of operation. First of all, the “[political] disposition takes its particularly determined content from the various aspects of the organism of the state.”40 Since this organization of powers is inseparable from the mode of governance—in Kantian terms, its “despotic” or “republican” nature41—we may conclude that democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy require specific dispositions and virtues on the parts of rulers and ruled alike—an idea that Hegel acknowledges comes from Montesquieu. He writes, for example,
Nevertheless, in this as in so many other instances, we must acknowledge Montesquieu’s depth of insight in his famous account of the principles of these forms of government. . . . It is common knowledge that he specified virtue as the principle of democracy; and such a constitution does indeed depend on the disposition [of the citizens] as the purely substantial form in which the rationality of the will which has being in and for itself still exists under this constitution. . . . [But] we must avoid the misunderstanding of imagining that, since the disposition of virtue is the substantial form in a democratic republic, this disposition thereby becomes superfluous, or may even be totally absent, in a monarchy; and still less should we imagine that virtue and the legally determined activity of an articulated organization are mutually opposed and incompatible.42
Thus, there are subjective dispositions and virtues appropriate to the various types of regimes even if democracy (understood in the classical sense) most obviously supposes and mobilizes the political virtue of its citizens, who are immediately actors in the life of the state. But any regime, and in particular the “constitution of developed reason,” constitutional monarchy, requires a certain mode of politische Gesinnung. This clarifies the claim that since a constitution is not created artificially, each people has the constitution appropriate to it.43 That expression does not seek to legitimize every established order but rather indicates that a political regime is only established, and thus durable, if it bases itself on individuals’ subjective dispositions and is able to kindle them by conforming to “the general spirit of the nation.”
But this still does not explain where the political disposition comes from, for the state, no matter its regime, presupposes it more than creates it. We must therefore look elsewhere, in a direction very significant for the general economy of Sittlichkeit: the political disposition is “a consequence of the institutions within the state, a consequence in which rationality is actually present, just as rationality receives its practical application through action in conformity with the state’s institutions.”44 We could take this to mean that political institutions, by performing a kind of practical pedagogy, create and maintain within individuals the attitudes suited to their own operation. But in addition to the fact that this functionalist interpretation is unsatisfying, it is not compatible with the letter of the text, for here, at the beginning of the section on the state, it is not yet a matter of the political institutions that form the “internal constitution for itself”45 of the state. On the contrary, in the immediately preceding paragraphs,46 the term Institution refers to prepolitical forms of ethical organization, the family and civil society, which are the “ethical root[s]”47 of the state, although the state is at the same time their “true ground.”48 Thus, it is self-organized familial and social communities that can inspire the political disposition in individuals, and we have seen that without this virtue, the state is condemned to die or to misunderstand the rational freedom it embodies and makes objective. The social estates (Stände) in particular contribute to engendering the political disposition: the individual is able to accesses them by free choice49 and from them receives a specific disposition, a type of social virtue, “rectitude” or “the honour of one’s estate”50 that is adapted to the activity he or she practices and the social context to which he or she belongs.
We must recall that in the 1805 Philosophy of Spirit, the differences between estates was not based directly on the structures of production and exchange (i.e., on the objective configuration of the system of needs or the market economy) but rather on differences in the mental dispositions proper to each type of social activity.51 The peasant’s disposition was trust, the bourgeois’s was honesty, the merchant’s severity and intelligence, and the disposition of the universal estate was duty (or obligation). In the Philosophy of Right, this doctrine of Gesinnungen disappears, or at least ceases to be foundational. But if the distinction between estates is there based above all on the objective characteristics of processes of production and exchange,52 it also implies a specification of the “theoretical and practical education” particular to each one of them.53 Thus, Hegel continues to reject a definition of the estates that would be based solely on their function within the mode of production: a Stand is an ethical reality, not a grouping of economic interests. This is why it, along with civil society, is the true site of individuals’ formation and flourishing: it is what gives determinate and specific content to the notion of ethical disposition. Thus, rectitude (Rechtschaffenheit), which is first defined abstractly as “the simple adequacy of the individual to the duties of the circumstances [Verhältnisse] to which he belongs,”54 is explicitly instituted as a specific virtue of civil society in the form of honor attached to estate (Standesehre), which we could also call a form of “estate consciousness” by analogy to the concept of class consciousness:
The ethical disposition within this system is therefore that of rectitude and the honour of one’s estate, so that each individual, by a process of self-determination, makes himself a member of one of the moments of civil society through his activity, diligence, and skill, and supports himself in this capacity; and only through this mediation with the universal does he simultaneously provide for himself and gain recognition in his own eyes [Vorstellung] and in the eyes of others.55
Thus, citizens’ political virtue, accurately understood as everyday patriotism, is based on their belonging to a given social estate, to civil society and its institutions: “each member of the state is a member of an estate.”56 We should not be surprised by this rootedness of political subjectivity in the ethical mode of being of social institutions. Civil society, the external state, is the external of the state, its other, its phenomenon. As the Logic establishes, there is no essence that both goes together with its phenomenal manifestation and remains withdrawn from it. This explains the relationship between the rational political essence of Sittlichkeit and the moving and muddled diversity of the social world. It also, by the way, sheds light on Hegel’s words regarding the rabble, who have sunk below a certain standard of living and therefore “that feeling of right, integrity [Rechtlichkeit], and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity and work is lost,”57 and his obvious worry in seeing civil society engender a mass of disadvantaged, “asocial” elements who are condemned to poverty. This is not only a social problem but a political one, since the lack of defined social status and its correlative qualities and guarantees destroys the very possibility of political consciousness and a sense of community. From this perspective we also understand why for Hegel the basis of parliamentary representation is not the individual will but rather the social estate institutionalized by corporations.58 Parliamentary assemblies (“estates” in the old terminology), which represent the “higher offices of the state,” are, as we know, “a mediating organ”59 between the state and the social body, between the universal and its moment of particularity. As the repositories of this function, parliamentary assemblies provide a favorable opportunity for their members to develop within themselves “the sense and disposition of the state and government.”60 Their task consists first and foremost in representing the point of view of civil society and the particular interests that emerge within it to the government and the administration. But the sense of the state that they acquire through their function also allows deputies to perform a kind of political pedagogy for social actors by changing their naive point of view that the state is hostile toward them by nature. Thus, they play an important role in the formation and education of public opinion:
Public opinion . . . arrive[s] for the first time at true thoughts and insight with regard to the condition and concept of the state and its affairs, thereby enabling it to form more rational judgments on the latter. In this way, the public also becomes familiar with, and learns to respect, the functions, abilities, virtues, and skills of the official bodies and civil servants. And just as such publicity provides a signal opportunity for these abilities to develop, and offers them a platform on which they may attain high honours, so also does it constitute a remedy for the self-conceit of individuals and of the mass, and a means—indeed one of the most important means—of educating them.61
Political disposition and civic virtue are thus exercised in this double circulation of meaning from the bottom up and from the top down, which culminates in the development within individuals—especially those who hold public office—of “the sense of authority and political sense.”62
But when Hegel discusses “institutions within the state” in paragraph 268 of the Philosophy of Right—that is, the institutions of civil society—he refers more directly to corporations than to social estates, which are semi-institutional realities, so to speak. Corporations are institutions in the strict sense63 both because they are statutory groupings constituted within civil society and because they in a way extend the state into the social world by carrying out, locally and partially, its function as a promoter and representative of the people’s identity. This, in Hegel’s mind, justifies the government overseeing their operation.64 But corporations are not only the tools of the state’s dominance over civil society, a means of social control, although they may also play that role. The corporation, precisely as an institution, exudes a dimension of universality within a civil society that seems doomed to the juxtaposition and confrontation of particular interests: it has, in particular, thanks to its power of regulation, a “wholly concrete” “universal end.”65 Thus the corporation is the social prefiguration of the political state. While it is true that the modern individual has “become a son of civil society,”66 it is in his belonging to a “second family,”67 the corporative institution, that this filiation can be expressed. Corporations, themselves a first overcoming of social particularity and also themselves social, are essential mechanisms for “constitution . . . in the realm of particularity,”68 just as civil society is in the external state. Prefiguring the rational universality of the political constitution, they are the “firm foundation of the state and of the trust and disposition of individuals towards it.”69
This explains the social provenance of the political disposition. The vocation to the universal appears and develops through participation in corporate life and the social virtues the latter generates: institutionalized professional honor inculcates the aptitude for a “way of life of a more general kind.”70 The corporate spirit, incorporated into regulated practices, institutes a sort of culture of the universal that will find its true vocation in civic participation in the life of the state. It also guarantees the prevalence of a political point of view in handling social situations and confrontations. In conjunction with the mechanisms of political representation, this social culture guarantees, or at least contributes to guaranteeing, the community’s ethical-political identity.
The spirit of the corporation, which arises when the particular spheres gain legal justification [Berechtigung], is now at the same time inwardly transformed into the spirit of the state. . . . This is the secret of the patriotism of the citizens. . . . In so far as the rooting of the particular in the universal is contained immediately in the spirit of the corporation, it is in this spirit that such depth and strength of disposition as the state possesses are to be found.71
Considered as social institutions, churches—which in this respect are corporations just like professional associations72—participate in the development of this culture of the universal which is the specific contribution of instituted social life to politics. Belonging to a church, independent of its doctrine, could even be an ethical-political obligation: the state can “require all its citizens to belong to such a community.”73 This holds true at least as long as the church does not come to consider the state as a mechanism external to true ethicality (which would then be essentially religious), as a mere means to ends that only the church would be able to reveal. This example shows that the rootedness of political subjectivity in the institutional structures of social life—and a church is such a structure, though it is not only that—must not be understood as the subordination of the state to civil society. To the contrary, social institutions depend on the political institution, a rational totality that guarantees their ethical nature; this is why they are subject to its control. Thus, the chain of causality within Sittlichkeit runs in opposite directions depending on whether we are looking at its subjective dimension or its objective configuration.
However, one question arises: why isn’t it the state itself that engenders civic virtue among citizens and makes itself loved for itself to the point of convincing individuals to subordinate their particular ends to the universal? Why must there be, from the point of view of both subjects and the objective order, a social mediation of the political, just as there is a political mediation of the social? To understand the answer, we must briefly go back to Hegel’s analysis of morality. It is clear that Hegel’s attitude toward the moral point of view is far from unilaterally negative.74 But there is reason to ask why the theory of moral subjectivity is included in a philosophy of objective spirit. Indeed, this theory has a tight relationship to the idea of the social rootedness of the political disposition.
The subjective taking-on of freedom gives this freedom actual content. In other words, objective freedom requires that the subject exercise his or her capacity for self-determination within normatively ordered action. The normative point of view of morality constitutes the effective reality of subjectivity: this is what justifies its inclusion in the doctrine of objective spirit. In civil society and the state, which are more concrete configurations than morality, this right of subjective will cannot be eliminated even if it can be relativized. The dialectic of moral consciousness certainly leads subjectivity to recognize that in order to will the good, it must suppose that the good is in a way realized in the human world; in this way, ethicality, in the entirety of its development, is the condition of actuality of the moral point of view. But it does not thereby strip it of its value. The subject’s noncoerced adherence is presupposed by all action claiming actuality and rationality; at the same time, if one were to limit oneself to the point of view of an abstract ought, subjectivity would not achieve its concrete completion, which is political.
It is now possible to specify the relationship between moral consciousness, the ethical disposition, and the political disposition. The moral point of view raises the finite subject to a concrete reality that produces normatively oriented actions. Through it, the individual is truly constituted, for him- or herself and for other acting subjects. But, if the individual remains stuck in this point of view, his or her goal is doomed to remain inactual. If subjectivity does not nourish itself with the objectivity of the social world, it risks becoming idle. Only then will it succumb to moralism, the practical consequences of which can be terrifying. But moral consciousness remains the mode in which the individual becomes actual and strives to master the causes and effects of his or her action. In the modern world, the individual, precisely because he or she has the will to be an individual and not a mere result of objective forces, is led to live his or her relation to the real, and first and foremost to the ethical-political real, in the moral mode. The ethical disposition (social virtues) and the political disposition express the permanence of the point of view of subjectivity within Sittlichkeit. Social and political individuality, each one of which is characterized by a type of virtue (corporate honor, the spirit of everyday civic-mindedness), are thus the completion of moral individuality, which they protect from itself by awakening it to its objective extensions. This elevation of morality to the rank of a mediation internal to objective spirit, this active presence of subjectivity within ethical configurations (society and state), where it must recognize its own rational actuality, can be considered the Kantian moment of the doctrine of objective spirit. If it is true that the theory of political disposition is its Aristotelian moment, we may then represent this thought as an effort not at arbitration but rather at reconciliation set against the background of the dialectical tension between two orientations considered incompatible: deontological morality and the ethics of virtue.75
1. RPh, § 257 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 201 (Elements, 275; see Outlines, 228).
2. RPh, § 257, GW 14.1, p. 201 (Elements, 275; see Outlines, 228).
3. RPh, § 266, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240).
4. RPh, § 267, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240).
5. RPh, § 257, GW 14.1, p. 201 (Elements, 275; see Outlines, 228).
6. RPh, § 267, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240). On social institutions as “the constitution . . . in the realm of particularity,” see RPh, § 265, GW 14.1, 211 (Elements, 287; see Outlines, 239).
7. RPh, § 258 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 201 (Elements, 276; see Outlines, 229).
8. RPh, § 273 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 228 (Elements, 310; see Outlines, 261).
9. RPh, § 268, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240).
10. RPh, § 153, GW 14.1, p. 142 (Elements, 196; see Outlines, 160).
11. RPh, § 268, GW 14.1, pp. 211–12 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240).
12. RPh, § 268, GW 14.1, pp. 211–12 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240).
13. RPh, § 151, GW 14.1, p. 141 (Elements, 195; see Outlines, 159).
14. See RPh, § 150, GW 14.1, p. 140 (Elements, 193; see Outlines, 157).
15. RPh, § 149, GW 14.1, pp. 139–40 (Elements, 192; see Outlines, 157).
16. RPh, § 147, GW 14.1, p. 138 (Elements, 191; see Outlines, 155).
17. RPh, § 151, GW 14.1, p. 141 (Elements, 195; see Outlines, 159).
18. RPh, § 141 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 135 (Elements, 186, modified; see Outlines, 152).
19. RPh, § 268, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240).
20. In response to the demand for German national unity, supported at the time by the left and some liberals, Metternich quipped, “Germany? It is merely a geographic notion!”
21. RPh, § 268 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 212 (Elements, 289; see Outlines, 241).
22. Naturrecht, W 2, p. 482 (Natural Law, 93). Hegel cites this passage in the Philosophy of Right to support his argument that war is “the moment in which the ideality of the particular attains its right and becomes actuality”; see RPh, § 324 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 266 (Elements, 361; see Outlines, 306–7).
23. RPh, § 268 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 212 (Elements, 289; see Outlines, 241).
24. RPh, § 327, GW 14.1, p. 267 (Elements, 364; see Outlines, 309). The System of Ethicality defined courage as “indifference to the virtues” and concluded that “it is only a formal in-itself virtue” (SS, GW 5, p. 329).
25. RPh, § 268 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 212 (Elements, 289, modified; see Outlines, 24).
26. Enzykl, § 549 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 526. See also RPh, §§ 331, 349, GW 14.1, pp. 269, 276 (Elements, 366–67, 375; see Outlines, 311, 318); Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 180. The second Philosophy of Spirit says of the Germans that “they disappeared as a people, they were only a nation” (GW 8, p. 259).
27. RPh, § 279, GW 14.1, p. 232 (Elements, 317; see Outlines, 267).
28. Geschichte, W 12, pp. 532–33.
29. PhG, GW 9, p. 316ff (Phenomenology, ¶¶ 582, 599).
30. Geschichte, W 12, p. 531.
31. RPh, § 150 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 140 (Elements, 194; see Outlines, 158).
32. RPh, § 150 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 141 (Elements, 194; see Outlines, 158). See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1106.b.36 ff.
33. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1106.a.11. On virtue, hexis, and ethos, see Eudemian Ethics, 1220.b.9–20 and 1222.b.5–14.
34. PhG, GW 9, p. 195 (Phenomenology, ¶ 351). See RPh, § 153 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 142 (Elements, 196; see Outlines, 160).
35. “We need a new mythology, but this mythology must be in the service of the idea, it must become a mythology of reason” (Systemfragment, W 1, p. 236).
36. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1106.b.36–1107.a.1. On the notion of “techniques of the self,” see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).
37. RPh, § 148 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 139 (Elements, 191; see Outlines, 156).
38. RPh, § 149, GW 14.1, p. 140 (Elements, 192; see Outlines, 157).
39. RPh, § 152, GW 14.1, p. 142 (Elements, 196; see Outlines, 160).
40. RPh, § 269, GW 14.1, p. 212 (Elements, 290; see Outlines, 241).
41. Kant, Frieden, Ak. 8, p. 352; PP, p. 324. On Kant’s definition of the republican constitution and Hegel’s modification of it, see chapter 5 above.
42. RPh, § 273 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 227–28 (Elements, 310–11; see Outlines, 261). See Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 3:3, 23.
43. RPh, § 274 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 229 (Elements, 312; see Outlines, 263): “Each nation . . . has the constitution appropriate and proper to it.”
44. RPh, § 268, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240).
45. Title of subsection I: RPh, GW 14.1, p. 208 (Elements, 305; see Outlines, 256).
46. See RPh, §§ 263–65, GW 14.1, pp. 210–11 (Elements, 286–88. See Outlines, 238–39).
47. RPh, § 255, GW 14.1, p. 199 (Elements, 272; see Outlines, 226).
48. RPh, § 256 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 199 (Elements, 273; see Outlines, 227).
49. See RPh, § 185 Anmerkung 206, 262, GW 14.1, pp. 161, 172, 210 (Elements, 223, 237, 286; see Outlines, 182–83,195–96, 238).
50. See RPh, §§ 150, 207, 252, GW 14.1, pp. 140, 173–74, 197 (Elements, 193, 238–39, 270–71; see Outlines, 157, 196–97, 224–25).
51. See GW 8, p. 266 ff.
52. See RPh, §§ 203–5, GW 14.1, pp. 171–72 (Elements, 235–37; see Outlines, 193–95).
53. RPh, § 201, GW 14.1, p. 170 (Elements, 234; see Outlines, 193).
54. RPh, § 150, GW 14.1, p. 140 (Elements, 193; see Outlines, 157).
55. RPh, § 207, GW 14.1, pp. 173–74 (Elements, 238; see Outlines, 196–97).
56. RPh, § 308 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 254 (Elements, 347; see Outlines, 294).
57. RPh, § 244, GW 14.1, p. 194 (Elements, 266; see Outlines, 221).
59. RPh, § 302 and Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 250–51 (Elements, 342; see Outlines, 289).
60. RPh, § 302 and Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 250–51 (Elements, 342; see Outlines, 289).
61. RPh, § 315, GW 14.1, p. 258 (Elements, 352; see Outlines, 298).
62. RPh, § 310, GW 14.1, p. 255 (Elements, 349 see Outlines, 296).
63. See RPh, § 253 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 198 (Elements, 271; see Outlines, 225;): “the institution of the corporation.”
64. See RPh, §§ 252, 288, GW 14.1, p. 197 (“under the supervision of the public authority”) and p. 241 (“these circles must be subordinated to the higher interests of the state”) (Elements, 270, 329; see Outlines, 224, 278). Hegel also justified government intervention in choosing their leaders, leaving them a limited autonomy to say the least.
65. RPh, § 251, GW 14.1, p. 197 (Elements, 270; see Outlines, 224).
66. RPh, § 238, GW 14.1, p. 192 (Elements, 263; see Outlines, 218).
67. RPh, § 252, GW 14.1, p. 197 (Elements, 271; see Outlines, 225).
68. RPh, § 265, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 287; see Outlines, 239).
69. RPh, § 265, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 287; see Outlines, 239).
70. RPh, § 253 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 198 (Elements, 272; see Outlines, 225).
71. RPh, § 289 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 242 (Elements, 329–30; see Outlines, 278–79).
72. RPh, § 289 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 242 (Elements, 329–30; see Outlines, 278–79).
73. RPh, § 270 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 216 (Elements, 295; see Outlines, 246).
74. See chapter 10 above.
75. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), esp. chaps. 2, 9 12; Whose Justice? Which Rationality (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), esp. chaps. 7, 8.