ABSTRACT universal User Manual download pdf (Page 27)

This way of moving from the structure of the will to a social holism is clearly

very diﬀerent from the sort of position envisaged by Hobhouse, and would

thus seem to do without any appeal to the holistic conception of the

concrete universal, of the kind that Hobhouse attributes to Bosanquet.

Even if this much is accepted, however, it might still be said that it cannot

do full justice to the way in which Hegel speaks of the state in organic terms:

for how can diﬀerent individuals constitute the state as a kind of organism,

unless there is ‘an element of sameness in all’, akin to the ‘single pervading

life’

that ﬂows through diﬀerent organs of the body and makes them one?

Does not this conception once more suggest that Hegel had a holistic view of

the concrete universal, as precisely constituting this ‘element of sameness’?

It is important to note here, however, that the primary focus of Hegel’s

discussion of the state in organic terms is the political co nstitution of the

state. In this context, Hegel talks of the state as an organism not because it is

a whole of which its individual citizens are parts,

but rather that the

elements that make up the constitution of the state depend on one another

in the way that the categories that comprise the Concept are dependent on

one another.

Put very sim ply, this means that while the monarchy is a

Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, 169.

Cf. Dudley Knowles’s recent discussion of Hegel’s organicism in his Hegel and the ‘Philosophy

of Right’ (London: Routledge, 2002), 323, where Knowles writes: ‘Citizens are ‘‘not parts, but

members’’, Hegel says (x286R), exploiting the primary sense of Glied as a bodily member or

limb’. But, taken in context, it seems that Hegel is not talking here about individual citizens; for

this context is a discussion of feudal monarchies where ‘vassals, pashas, etc.’ had a role in

‘political business’ and so formed part of the constitution of the state, but in an atomistic way,

because ‘each part [of this political structure] maintains itself alone, and in so doing, it promotes

only itself and not the others along with it, and has within itself the complete set of moments

which it requires for independence and self-suﬃciency’ (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, x286, p. 328

[‘So erha

lt und bringt jeder Teil, indem er sich erha

lt, nur sich und darin nicht zugleich die

anderen hervor und hat zur unabha

ngigen Selbsta

ndigkeit alle Momente vollsta

ndig an ihm

selbst’, Werke, Vol. VII, pp. 456–7]). In contrasting this structure with an organic one, Hegel is

therefore speaking here about an organic view of the constitutional parts of the state, rather than

of the state in relation to its individual citizens.

The only other place I know of in the Philosophy of Right where an organicist view of citizens in

relation to the state might be found is the Addition to x270, where Hegel expresses the idea that

‘human beings should have respect for the state as a whole of which they are the branches’ (ibid.,

303 [‘daß die Menschen Achtung vor dem Staat, vor diesem Ganzen, dessen Zweige sie sind, haben

sollen’, Werke, Vol. VII, p. 430]). However, even here Hegel is not expressing so much his own view,

but that of a position he is discussing, in the context of a consideration of the relation between the

church and the state. The speciﬁc issue is the claim that ‘the state must be founded on religion’,

where the proponent of this view may mean by this not that they can thereby be better oppressed by

the state, but brought to have respect for it ‘as that whole of which they are branches’, which Hegel

(not surprisingly) thinks is a better way of conceiving of the role of religion.

Cf. ibid., x272 Addition, p. 307:

W]hile the powers of the state must certainly be distinguished, each must form a whole

in itself and contain the other moments within it. When we speak of the distinct

activities of these powers, we must not fall into the monumental error of taking this to

mean that each power should exist independently and in abstraction; on the contrary,

the powers should be distinguished only as moments of the concep.

HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 141

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