"The German political edifice," says the writer, "is nothing else but the sum of the rights which the single parts have withdrawn from the whole; and this justice, which is ever on the watch to prevent the state having any power left, is the essence of the constitution." The Peace of Westphalia had but served to constitute or stereotype anarchy: the German empire had by that instrument divested itself of all rights of political unity, and thrown itself on the goodwill of its members. What then, it may be asked, is, in Hegel's view, the indispensable minimum essential to a state? And the answer will be, organised strength,--a central and united force. "The strength of a country lies neither in the multitude of its inhabitants and fighting men, nor in its fertility, nor in its size, but solely in the way its parts are by reasonable combination made a single political force enabling everything to be used for the common defence." Hegel speaks scornfully of "the philanthropists and moralists who decry politics as an endeavour and an art to seek private utility at the cost of right": he tells them that "it is foolish to oppose the interest or (as it is expressed by the more morally-obnoxious word) the utility of the state to its right": that the "rights of a state are the utility of the state as established and recognised by compacts": and that "war" (which they would fain abolish or moralise) "has to decide not which of the rights asserted by either party is the true right (--for both parties have a true right), but which right has to give way to the other."
It is evident from these propositions that Hegel takes that view of political supremacy which has been associated with the name of Hobbes. But his views also reproduce the Platonic king of men, "who can rule and dare not lie." "All states," he declares, "are founded by the sublime force of great men, not by physical strength. The great man has something in his features which others would gladly call their lord. They obey him against their will. Their immediate will is his will, but their conscious will is otherwise.... This is the prerogative of the great man to ascertain and to express the absolute will. All gather round his banner. He is their God." "The state," he says again, "is the self-certain absolute mind which recognises no definite authority but its own: which acknowledges no abstract rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, craft and deception." So also Hobbes describes the prerogatives of the sovereign Leviathan. But the Hegelian God immanent in the state is a higher power than Hobbes knows: he is no mortal, but in his truth an immortal God. He speaks by (what in this early essay is called) the Absolute Government(97): the government of the Law--the true impersonal sovereign,--distinct alike from the single ruler and the multitude of the ruled. "It is absolutely only universality as against particular. As this absolute, ideal, universal, compared to which everything else is a particular, it is the phenomenon of God. Its words are his decision, and it can appear and exist under no other form.... The Absolute government is divine, self-sanctioned and not made(98)." The real strength--the real connecting-mean which gives life to sovereign and to subject--is intelligence free and entire, independent both of what individuals feel and believe and of the quality of the ruler. "The spiritual bond," he says in a lower form of speech, "is public opinion: it is the true legislative body, national assembly, declaration of the universal will which lives in the execution of all commands." This still small voice of public opinion is the true and real parliament: not literally making laws, but revealing them. If we ask, where does this public opinion appear and how does it disengage itself from the masses of partisan judgment? Hegel answers,--and to the surprise of those who have not entered into the spirit of his age(99)--it is embodied in the Aged and the Priests. Both of these have ceased to live in the real world: they are by nature and function disengaged from the struggles of particular existence, have risen above the divergencies of social classes. They breathe the ether of pure contemplation. "The sunset of life gives them mystical lore," or at least removes from old age the distraction of selfishness: while the priest is by function set apart from the divisions of human interest. Understood in a large sense, Hegel's view is that the real voice of experience is elicited through those who have attained indifference to the distorting influence of human parties, and who see life steadily and whole.