§ 532. The function of judicial administration is only to actualise to
necessity the abstract side of personal liberty in civil society. But this
actualisation rests at first on the particular subjectivity of the judge,
since here as yet there is not found the necessary unity of it with right
in the abstract. Conversely, the blind necessity of the system of wants is
not lifted up into the consciousness of the universal, and worked from
that period of view.
c. Police and Corporation(166).
§ 533. Judicial administration naturally has no concern with such part of
actions and interests as belongs only to particularity, and leaves to
chance not only the occurrence of crimes but also the care for public
weal. In civil society the sole end is to satisfy want—and that, because
it is man’s want, in a uniform general way, so as to _secure_ this
satisfaction. But the machinery of social necessity leaves in many ways a
casualness about this satisfaction. This is due to the variability of the
wants themselves, in which opinion and subjective good-pleasure play a
great part. It results also from circumstances of locality, from the
connexions between nation and nation, from errors and deceptions which can
be foisted upon single members of the social circulation and are capable
of creating disorder in it,—as also and especially from the unequal
capacity of individuals to take advantage of that general stock. The
onward march of this necessity also sacrifices the very particularities by
which it is brought about, and does not itself contain the affirmative aim
of securing the satisfaction of individuals. So far as concerns them, it
_may_ be far from beneficial: yet here the individuals are the
morally-justifiable end.
§ 534. To keep in view this general end, to ascertain the way in which the
powers composing that social necessity act, and their variable
ingredients, and to maintain that end in them and against them, is the
work of an institution which assumes on _one_ hand, to the concrete of
civil society, the position of an external universality. Such an order
acts with the power of an external state, which, in so far as it is rooted
in the higher or substantial state, appears as state “police.” On the
_other_ hand, in this sphere of particularity the only recognition of the
aim of substantial universality and the only carrying of it out is
restricted to the business of particular branches and interests. Thus we
have the _corporation_, in which the particular citizen in his private
capacity finds the securing of his stock, whilst at the same time he in it
emerges from his single private interest, and has a conscious activity for
a comparatively universal end, just as in his legal and professional
duties he has his social morality.
CC. The State.