{246} “The most fitting simile to elucidate this notion is that of an organised natural product, which has often been employed in modern times to describe the different branches of the public power as a unity, but not, so far as I know, to throw light on the whole civic relation. Just as, in the natural product, every part can be what it is only in this combination, and out of this combination simply would not be this (indeed outside all organic combination there would simply be nothing …): just so it is only in the combination of the State that man attains a definite position in the series of things, a point of rest in nature; and each attains this determinate position towards others, and towards Nature, only through the fact that he is in this determinate combination. … In the organic body every part continually maintains the whole, and while it maintains it, is itself maintained thereby; just such is the citizen’s relation to the State.”
Here we seem to be back with Plato and Aristotle. We are in fact too near to Plato; for the distinction between maintenance of the citizen’s determinate activity, and maintenance of the general conditions of such activity, being destroyed by Fichte in his desire to make State action positive and not negative, the conclusion necessarily arises that the citizen must be secured and maintained in his definite activity or occupation, and from this springs the notion of the closed commercial State; “closed” against foreign trade in order that the government may be able to determine prices and assign occupations. In other words, the basis of the State is still the Ego conceived as the individual self; it is not the social good operating by its own {247} power on intelligent will. And, arising from this individualism, the precautions which seem necessary to protect and sustain the individual in his fixed relation to the whole, make Fichte’s “Closed Commercial State” perhaps the earliest document of a rigorous State Socialism. Freedom, as he himself recognises to be prima facie the case, is annihilated by the provisions for its protection. [1] It is curious to see Rousseau’s phrase “forced to be free,” [2] which refers in him to the supremacy of law, reappearing as a defence of the enforcement of leisure time, [3] as though freedom were not realised in labour and in loyalty. Here is Hegel’s judgment of the transition we have just been considering.
“Kant began to found right on freedom, and Fichte too in his Natural Right made freedom his principle; but it is, as in Rousseau, the freedom of the particular individual. This is a great beginning; but in order to get to particular results they were obliged to accept presuppositions. The universal (for them) is not the spirit, the substance of the whole, but the external mechanical negative power against individuals. … The individuals remain always hard and negative against one another; the prison-house, the bonds, become ever more oppressive, instead of the State being apprehended as the realisation of freedom.” [4]
[1] Fichte, Nachgelassene Werke, ii. 535.
[2] Ibid., 537.
[3] Of course such enforcement may have justification.
[4] Hegel, Geschichte der Philosophie, iii. 576. The idea of organism was thus mechanically apprehended.
4. To apprehend the State as the realisation of freedom was the aim of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which has perhaps been more grossly misrepresented {247} than any work of a great political philosopher, excepting Plato’s Republic.
Popular criticism will tell us that Hegel found his ideal in the Prussian bureaucracy, and will further hint that his doing so was to his advantage. Such suggestions imply two misapprehensions, for one of which Hegel’s tactlessness was responsible, while the other depends on a genuine difficulty attending any philosophical analysis of society. I will try to throw light on each of these misapprehensions.
(a) If Hegel had wished to have a partisan tendency attributed to his book, he could not have timed it better nor written a preface more certain to mislead. In 1820, when the book was published, the minds both of governments and of peoples were full of irritation. The anti-constitutional reaction had recently declared itself. [1] The demonstration at the Wartburg, celebrating the anniversary of the Reformation, and of the Battle of Leipzig, took place in October, 1817. The unaccountable change in the ideas of the Czar from Liberalism to reaction took place, we are assured, [2] in June, 1818. The murder of Kotzebue, a Russian agent, reactionary journalist, and decayed dramatist, took place in March, 1819. Kotzebue seems to have been popularly credited with perverting the views of the Czar. His assassination had an effect in no way related to his real importance. Hardenberg, the Prussian minister, exclaimed on hearing of it that a Prussian constitution had now become impossible. Innocent persons {249} were arrested in Prussia at Metternich’s instigation, and private papers were seized and published in a garbled form. The publication of Hegel’s book with a preface attacking Fries for some expressions used by him at the Wartburg festival, took place, as we said, in 1820, and Hegel had moved from Heidelberg to Berlin, having obtained the honour of a Berlin professorship, in 1818. Small wonder that “it was pointed out that the new professor was a favourite of the leading minister, that his influence was dominant in scholastic appointments, and that occasional gratuities from the Crown proved his acceptability,” or that Fries remarked that Hegel’s theory of the State had grown, “not in the garden of science, but on the dunghill of servility.” [3] Hegel himself “was aware that he had planted a blow in the face of a shallow and pretentious sect, and that his book had given great offence to the demagogic folk.” [4]