Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 7
The Universal and the Particular — A Methodological Preliminary Remark on the Analysis of Institutions
One final preliminary remark needs to be clarified in advance for the analysis of the later parts—particularly of ethical life. Anyone who speaks conceptually of family, civil society, or the state regularly runs into an objection that can call the entire investigation into question. The objection runs: certainly there are families, civil societies, states—but they are so different that any structural generalization does injustice to their concrete differences. Swedish social democracy functions differently from American liberalism; French central administration has different traditions from the German federal structure; the Japanese family is organized differently from the Brazilian family; Chinese statehood follows its own logic. How can a conceptual analysis do justice to this diversity without either flattening it out or dissolving into a mere collection of individual descriptions?
The answer lies in a distinction that Hegel, in his Logic, described as the core business of thought: to find the universal in what differs, and to see the particular in the universal. The two belong together; anyone who sees only one of them misses the matter at hand. Whoever sees only the universal loses sight of the concrete forms in which the universal exists in the first place. Whoever sees only the particulars loses the structural unity that persists despite all differences. Hegel’s Logic is precisely the methodological instruction to think both at once—not as a middle course, but as what Hegel calls “concrete universality” (cf. Philosophy of Right, §6, Remark): a universal that does not stand abstractly alongside the particulars but articulates itself in them and is actual only in them.
The consequence for the analysis that follows is twofold. On the one hand: the particulars are real, and no serious engagement with a concrete family, a concrete state, a concrete corporation can disregard them. Anyone who wants to understand why the German family is structured differently from the Russian family, or why the French state functions differently from the American state, must work historically, culturally, sociologically. This work has its own legitimacy, and nothing in the following analysis is meant to replace it. On the other hand, however: what recurs structurally despite and through these differences is just as real. That every developed society brings forth a form of the family, a form of economic mediation, and a form of political universality—and that these three forms build upon one another and interlock—is the structural insight that Hegel’s ethical life seeks to grasp.
It is worth adding an observation here that anyone can make for themselves. While people usually perceive the particularities of their own institutions quite precisely, they often see more clearly, at the same time, what is structurally distinctive about other countries and cultures—French centralization, American market interconnection, the Chinese fusion of state and party. What is familiar is easily taken for granted and thereby drops out of view. Hegel captured this insight in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit in a formula that fits here: “What is familiar is not, for that reason, actually known, just because it is familiar” (TWA 3, 34). In this sense, the structural conditions of one’s own form of life are the most familiar phenomenon and, precisely for that reason, the least understood. Making them visible is a central achievement of conceptual analysis—and it cannot be accomplished simply by describing one’s own institutions, but only by grasping them as particular concretions of a more general form.
A methodological clarification about the direction of the analysis is important here. The universality at issue is not applied from above onto the particulars—say, by defining an abstract concept of family or state and then checking which concrete formations fall under it. Rather, it is derived from the particulars: by comparing various concrete families, states, or forms of economic mediation, we seek what is common among them and why it is common—and what dynamic links the respective particulars to one another. Once we have worked out this universal, it in turn helps us better understand the particulars, because we now see which structural requirements they fulfill, each in its own way. Emmanuel Todd himself characterized this methodology as “empirical Hegelianism,” and it is indeed Hegelian in the strict sense: concrete universality is nothing that stands alongside the particulars but rather what emerges, through their comparison, as their inner connecting principle. A simple and harmless example from an entirely different discipline illustrates this: in biological taxonomy, the determination vertebrate or mammal is not an arbitrary classification imposed from outside, but the disclosure of an inner structure—a skeleton, a body plan—that recurs across the most diverse animal species and that simultaneously explains why these species resemble one another in certain respects and differ in others. Once one knows what a mammal structurally is, one can find this structure in every concrete mammalian species and explain its particular features on the basis of the general body plan.
For the analysis of human forms of life, two dimensions appear in which universality and particularity present themselves. The horizontal dimension is that of geography: different regions of the earth, different climate zones, different material conditions produce different forms of life that can be compared with one another. Hegel’s Berlin contemporaries Carl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt together founded modern geography—Humboldt primarily with respect to flora, fauna, and geology, Ritter with respect to the human beings who inhabit and transform these geographies. Geography as a science arose in the same intellectual atmosphere in which Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was written, and it supplies the material from which the universal in human forms of life can be extracted. The vertical dimension is that of history: the same region passes through various forms of life over time—from early tribal societies through the high civilizations, the ancient inheritance, medieval Europe, the early modern period, up to capitalist modernity and beyond. Here too, structural repetitions and differences emerge from which the universal can be read off. Both dimensions—the geographical and the historical—are necessary to arrive at a concrete universality of human forms of life that does not secretly elevate the particularities of one’s own position into a norm.
From this follows a rule of thumb for what is to come. When the following parts speak of the family, civil society, or the state, they do not mean a particular concrete family, a particular historical civil society, or a particular current state. What is meant are the structural determinations that appear in every concrete form, even if in each case with a different concretion. This is not a reduction of diversity to a single unified type, but the disclosure of what makes diversity a diversity of something in the first place. A family is not just anything that people happen to call family; it has structural determinations without which the word could not hold. The same holds for civil society and the state. Uncovering these structural determinations is the task at hand; describing their concrete manifestations then belongs to the historical, sociological, and political analysis that builds upon the conceptual one.