Hegel's Philosophy of the Modern State
Kant said the end in itself is a good will. Virtue involves a continuous and deliberate effort on the part of every individual to purify moral consciousness in the face of repeated temptation.[176] Hegel replied that culture is historically cumulative, and the specific content of a good will is objectively determined within the ethical life of the modern state: ‘If men are to act, they must not only will the good, but they must also know whether this or that is good.
that question is answered by the laws and customs of a state’[177] [178] When Kant said freedom means laying down the law to ourselves, Hegel concluded that the modern state of self-determined laws is both the condition for human freedom and the actual existence of Kant’s ethical commonwealth. The ambition of Hegel’s project was expressed in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History:The State is the Divine Idea, as it exists on earth. the State is the precise object of world history in general. It is in the State that freedom attains its objectivity. For the law of the State is the objectification of Spirit; it is will in its true form. Only the will that is obedient to the law is free, for it obeys itself and, being self-sufficient, it is free. Insofar as the State. constitutes a community of existence [rather than Kant’s noumenal kingdom], and insofar as the subjective will of human beings submits to laws, the antithesis between freedom and necessity disappears. The rational is the necessary, the substantiality of a shared existence. The objective and the subjective will are then reconciled, as one and the same serene whole.93
The problem that political philosophy now faced was this: How might freedom be reconciled with private property, with the capitalist market, with social classes and with the modern division of labour - all of which presupposed using others as mere ‘means’ to our own ends? How could Kant’s ethical commonwealth be realised in face of the limitations upon the ideal of a social contract that Kant himself saw in poverty and economic inequality? Hegel undertook to answer these questions in The Philosophy of Right.
He began with right as purely abstract - that is, one-sidedly objective (in property) - then proceeded dialectically to right as abstractly subjective (in morality), which then ultimately issues, through the mediating associations of civil society, in political life as the concrete unity of objective and subjective freedom.The discussion of Abstract Right began with the individual ego that represents consciousness in itself, abstracted from family, civil society and the state. Ego is like abstract being in the Logic: it is potentiality without determinate existence and must therefore determine itself through an act of will, which is ‘thinking as the urge to give itself existence’.[179] Thinking must objectify itself in the thing, which, rather than being ‘in itself’ - as Kant thought - exists to be appropriated as property[180] Property, at this stage, has nothing to do with economics: ‘The rationale of property is to be found not in the satisfaction of needs but in the supersession of the pure subjectivity of personality. In his property a person exists for the first time as reason’[181] Consciousness gives itself properties (determines itself) through appropriating things, thereby becoming an object to itself.9[182] No free will is conceivable without property.
The result must then be movement beyond the immediacy of individual property through a continuing dialectic of property owners. Property entails the power of disposal over the thing, so that each owner relates to others through transferring property in accordance with contracts, each of which posits a common will[183] [184] The problem is that when property owners are still abstract persons, and there is yet no law, each can act capriciously and expose the contract to ‘wrong’. Wrong is a negation of the posited common will that must in turn be negated. Each party to the contract knows that the Right ought to be restored, but the problem is to define one’s duty, which at this level of abstraction is still indeterminate. The unity of subjective and objective morality, or ethical substance, originates in the family. Abstract means one-sided, but the family is a community of consciousness, whose bond is not yet law (universal reason), only the immediate ‘feeling' of love.101 The objective embodiment of this subjective bond is property that has now become the ‘family capital'.ω2 Capital is possession that has been ‘specifically determined as permanent and secure'.ω3 What makes the family capital ‘ethical' is that it serves the good of a whole rather than the ‘arbitrariness of a single owner's particular needs'.ω4 ‘This capital is common property so that, while no member of the family has property of his own, each has his right in the common stock'.ω5 Capital embodies the family's ethical ‘spirit', and immediate ethicality supersedes the self-interest of abstract individuality. Movement beyond the immediate community of the family occurs, however, when children become persons in their own right and inheritance occurs, involving ‘the transfer to private ownership of property which is in principle common'.106 Marriages create new families, each of which again behaves as ‘a self-subsistent concrete person'.ω7 The unity of the family dissolves into difference, which is the transition to civil society, the association of burghers ‘whose end is their own interest’[193] [194] [195] [196] [197] [198] [199] and among whom the ethical spirit appears once more to be lost. ‘In civil society, the Idea is lost in particularity and has fallen asunder with the separation of inward and outward'.ω9 The social bond is no longer immediately apparent in love, yet Hegel claims that ‘ethical life’ remains the ‘essence’ of market relations. For that insight he credits Adam Smith, who demonstrated that subjective, individual selfseeking also objectively benefits the whole community. Even as they use each other as mere means, the individuals of civil society are mediated through the market to serve each other’s needs (as they do immediately in the family). Hegel congratulates Smith for proving that while civil society appears to be merely ‘a mass of accidents’,110 in fact it is governed by its own rational laws: Political economy is the science which starts from... needs and labour but then has the task of explaining mass-relationships and mass-movements in their complexity and their qualitative and quantitative character. This is one of the sciences which have arisen out of the conditions of the modern world. Its development affords the interesting spectacle (as in Smith, Say, and Ricardo) of thought working upon the endless mass of details which confront it at the outset and extracting therefrom the simple principles of the thing, the Understanding effective in the thing and directing it.111 Hegel calls civil society ‘the external state, the state based on need, the state as the Understanding envisages it'.n2 The external state is an order that happens to us, as in Kant’s ‘hidden plan'.n3 It is the association of economic actors ‘brought about by their needs, by the legal system - the means to security of person and property - and by an external organization for attaining their particular and common interests’.n4 It includes police, courts and Corporations, or legally recognised communities of shared economic interest. From economic life within civil society, new forms of community emerge. ‘The family is the first precondition of the state, but class divisions are the second. The importance of the latter is due to the fact that although private persons are self-seeking, they are compelled to direct their attention to others’.[200] [201] [202] [203] Since Hegel’s dialectic is throughout a movement of consciousness, social classes are determined by the particular forms of consciousness that characterise their members. Classes are a rational necessity as a further step from the abstract towards the concrete whole. Hegel speaks of three classes. The agricultural class has an immediate relation to the soil; its consciousness is characterised by ‘family relationship and trust’. The business class includes both employers and workers engaged in crafts, manufacturing and trade; its consciousness involves the application of technical Understanding, using the laws of nature to transform natural material into useful things. The universal class is the civil service, which is consciously committed to the work of Reason in ‘the universal interests of the community'.n6 Classes and Corporations extend the horizons of consciousness. They create an esprit de corps that transcends - that is to say, goes beyond but also affirms - individual self-interest. The right of the Corporation, Hegel says, ‘is to come on the scene like a second family for its members'.n7 But since Corporations each represent a particular interest, the contradictions between them must in turn be transcended at the higher level of political representation. The state, for Hegel, is the concrete universal, the whole that lives through its parts, or Reason that becomes concrete through the final unity of subject and object. The mediation that makes this possible occurs through the Estates, where the activity of determining the laws occurs. Kant thought property owners must represent the economically dependent, but Hegel declared that ‘all the associations, communities and Corporations’^8 or all the particular communities of civil society, must represent themselves. All citizens, through political representation, are thereby ‘in’ the state. The Estates form the laws at the same time as the laws form the ethical consciousness of citizens in a mediated whole that constitutes a universal community of consciousness: ‘The real significance of the Estates lies in the fact that it is through them that the state enters the subjective consciousness of the people and that the people begins to participate in the state’.[204] [205] [206] [207] [208] [209] [210] Through institutionalised mediation, the ‘external’ state of civil society has now become ‘internal’, and the abstraction (one-sidedness) of Kantian philosophy and political life is transcended. The laws, determined by ‘our’ representatives, are genuinely ‘our’ laws. The ethicality of Corporations is affirmed when political labour makes their particular wills congruent through determining the laws in common and affirming the whole through mutual recognition of the parts. The result is that particular wills ‘pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal’?20 ‘The state is actual only when its members have a feeling of their own self-hood and it is stable only when public and private ends are identical’.i2i The principle of the modern state ‘requires that the whole of an individual’s activity shall be mediated through his will’,122 that is, through a concrete unity of subjective and objective self-determination. Compliance with self-imposed rational necessity is the objective fulfilment of self-determined freedom. In place of a Kantian good will, Hegel regarded the state as the end-in-itself that makes all other ends possible. It is the universal as the self-determining individual (the community as a whole). In the state ‘mind is objective and actual to itself as an organic totality in laws and institutions which are its will in terms of thought’.^3 Common property in things can never achieve such an end, for things are by nature particular and can never be possessed universally. Laws, however, are thoughts, and all can think the same thoughts simultaneously.^4 The state is a spiritual second nature. It transcends natural- empirical history as ‘the world which mind has made for itself.125 The state is Objective Spirit, beyond which lies the dialectical fulfilment of Absolute Spirit, or thought contemplating thought, which is logic. Hegel’s Logic is the beginning of his system, but also its end. In logic, the dialectic completes and at the same time renews its circle of rational necessity. The end is the beginning. The parts presuppose the whole, but the whole simultaneously objectifies itself in each and every part.