The form of State which Hegel analyses is a modern constitutional monarchy, with an executive (ministers sitting in the chambers, as he is careful to urge) and Chambers or Estates representing the classes developed in the civic community. Representation, he urges, is of bodies or interests rather than of masses of individuals, and the Corporations or Trade Societies have also an important place directly, by their touch with the departments of the executive government. [1] The general principle is, as indicated above, that the problems of connection between considerable particular interests and the universal interests of the community are, so to speak, prepared on the ground of the Corporation and Bourgeois Society for a solution in the interest of the common good by the Legislative and the Executive Government.
[1] Much as through inspectors and commissions the opinion of Trade Unions, Friendly Societies, and Co-operators is elicited by our Government Departments with a view to legislation, independently of the House of Commons.
The logical division of power, in his language, {284} is that the Legislature has to establish universal principles, the executive has to apply these principles to particular cases, and the prince has to bring to a point the acts of the State by giving them, “like the dot on the i,” the final shape of individual volition.
The distinction of States into Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy, Hegel refuses to regard as applicable to the modern world. At best, it could only apply to the undeveloped communities of antiquity. The modern State is a concrete, and, according to its principle, all the elements of a people’s life are represented in it as an indivisible unity.
A curious point is Hegel’s insistence on the function of the personal Head of the State. By a junction of the extremes, he connects it with the recognition of free individuality, which is usually regarded as the democratic principle of the modern world. There is no act, we may say in illustration, according to the modern idea of an act, if it is not done in the end by an individual, though in a developed political system the monarch’s action may only consist in signing his name. It is at least remarkable to compare this view with the tendency to one-man government in the administration of the United States of America.
The State, then, is on one side the external force and automatic machinery implied in the maintenance and adjustment of the rights and purposes of the family and the Bourgeois Society as an actual life. On the other side, and most essentially, it is that connection of feeling and insight, working throughout the consciousnesses of {285} individuals as parts in a connected structure, which unite in willing a certain type of life as a common good in which they find their own. It has the same content as that of Religion; but in an explicit and rationalised form as contrasted with the form of feeling. Only the separation of Church and State, and the division of the Churches against one another, have made it possible for the State to exhibit its own free and ethical character in true fulness, apart from both dogmatic authority and anarchic fanaticism.
9. Publicity of discussion in the assembly of the classes or estates is the great means of civic education. It is not in the least true that every one knows what is for the good of the State, and has only to go down to the House and utter it. It is in the work of expression [1] and discussion that the good takes form by adjustment of private views to facts and needs brought to bear by criticism. “The views a man plumes himself on when he is at home with his wife and friends are one thing; it is quite another thing what happens in a great assembly, where one shrewd idea devours the other.” [2]
[1] It is a remarkable point in English politics to-day that legislation is practically in the hands of the Government departments. Bills are rejected or “knocked about in Committee”; but the mass of organised knowledge necessary to initiate legislation in a complex society can hardly be found outside the gathered experience of an office which has continuity in dealing with the same problems. This tendency more than justifies Hegel’s point of view. An act of the “General Will” has not only, as he said, to be moulded by running the gauntlet of public and critical discussion, but has even to be first drafted by the help of immense piles of experience, which the general mind does not possess, and could not deal with, but which, nevertheless, enable its typical wish and intention to be embodied in effective form.
[2] Rechtsphil., sect. 315.
{286} The free judgment of individuals based on the publicity of political discussion is “public opinion.” In public opinion we have an actual existent contradiction. As public, it is sound and true, and contains the ethical spirit of the State. As expressed by individuals in their particular judgments, on which they plume themselves, it is full of falsehood and vanity. It is the bad which is peculiar, and which people pride themselves on; the rational is universal in its nature, though not necessarily common. Public opinion is a contradictory appearance, in which the true exists as false. It is no accident, but inevitable insight, that leads both of these characters to be proverbially expressed, as in “Vox populi, vox Dei,” contrasted with Ariosto’s