Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 32
Why This Conclusion Is Necessary
One might take these three sections for appendices and let the volume end with the state. That would be a misunderstanding — indeed the most consequential one the Philosophy of Right has ever suffered. Whoever stops at § 257 — “The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea” — reads Hegel as a deifier of the state. Whoever reads on finds the opposite.
For what happens in the final paragraphs is the determination of the finitude of the state. The state, which a moment ago was determined as the actuality of the ethical Idea, now appears as a particular state among others. Hegel says this with full sharpness: in the relation of states to one another, “because they are therein as particulars,” there falls “the highly agitated play of the inner particularity of passions, interests, purposes, of talents and virtues, of violence, wrong, and vices, as well as of external contingency” — a play “in which the ethical whole itself, the independence of the state, is exposed to contingency” (§ 340).
This is the logical structure at work here, one that runs through the entire system: every concept is the highest within its own sphere and at the same time something particular in relation to what lies beyond that sphere. The state realizes its concept — and never realizes it completely, because it stands within time, is bound to a second nature, is struck by contingencies, and is limited by other states. A difference remains between the universal and the singular, and it is precisely this difference that is the reason things move on.
Hegel draws two conclusions from this, both of which bear the weight of this volume.
Civil society reappears between states. Because their relation has sovereignty as its principle, states stand “in a state of nature toward one another,” and their rights do not have their actuality in a universal will constituted as power over them (§ 333). What is mediated internally through courts and law remains unmediated between states. Even mutual recognition, as Hegel notes, remains “at the same time merely formal” — whether a state “is in fact such a being in and for itself” is thereby not yet decided (§ 331). This is the same structure as in the system of needs, one level higher: many individuals who remain external to one another, with no authority above them.
The parallel extends further than it first appears. Like the individual citizen, the state too can conceive of itself as a separate atom — as a singular entity that knows only its own interests and sees others as competitors, against whom one must secure oneself or whom one must pressure. And as with the citizen, this is not the whole truth: the state too has, alongside its sovereignty, an interest in an interstate common good, in an order that sustains coexistence. For even the most powerful state pays a price for the atomistic order — it generates the insecurity, the armament, the antagonism, and it fails at the tasks that no state can solve alone. The freedom–common-good dialectic thus repeats itself at the level of states. [KF][1]
World history is the court that judges the states. Hegel’s formula of the world court is no rhetorical flourish but a conceptual determination, and he grounds it: world history is a court “because, in its universality which is in and for itself, the particular — the household gods, civil society, and the spirits of nations in their variegated actuality — are only as ideal” (§ 341). The state, then, is not the ultimate standard by which things are measured; it is itself what is measured.
And this same paragraph already accomplishes the transition to absolute spirit. Hegel places the element of world history alongside the three forms in which universal spirit otherwise exists: intuition and image in art, feeling and representation in religion, pure free thought in philosophy (§ 341). World history is the fourth mode in which the same content appears — only now as “spiritual actuality in the whole compass of its inwardness and externality.” The path from the state through world history to absolute spirit is thus not appended afterward but is already laid out by Hegel himself.
This is also why absolute spirit is indispensable for this volume, even though its internal articulation is not treated here. It is in absolute spirit that the standards by which purposes are oriented at all are developed and become conscious: what a given purpose is worth, which purposes take precedence over others, what a community organizes itself toward. These standards do not arise within the state and are not set by it. They have their own movement — and a state that claims to set them has already collapsed the distinction between objective and absolute spirit. [KF]
On the economic side of atomistic logic, see Kapitalismus – eine Einführung, 17a. Elaborated in detail in grenzen, 28b. ↩︎