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agreement makes the birth of this man the birth of a king. It is therefore the agreement,
not birth, that makes the king. If birth, in distinction from other determinations,
immediately endows man with a position, then his body makes him this determined social
functionary. His body is his social right. In this system, the physical dignity of man, or
the dignity of the human body (with further elaboration, meaning: the dignity of the
physical natural element of the state), appears in such a form that determinate dignities,
specifically the highest social dignities, are the dignities of certain bodies which are
determined and predestined by birth to be such. This is, of course, why we find in the
aristocracy such pride in blood and descent, in short, in the life history of their body. It is
this zoological point of view which has its corresponding science in heraldry. The secret
of aristocracy is zoology.
Two moments in hereditary primogeniture are to be stressed:
1. That which is permanent is entailed wealth, landed property. This is the preserving
moment in the relation - the substance. The master of the entailed estate, the owner, is
really a mere accident. Landed property anthropomorphises itself in the various
generations. Landed property always inherits, as it were, the first born of the house as an
attribute linked to it. Every first born in the line of land owners is the inheritance, the
property, of the inalienable landed property, which is the predestined substance of his
will and activity. The subject is the thing and the predicate is the man. The will becomes
the property of the property.
2. The political quality of the owner of the entailed estate is the political quality of his
inherited wealth, a political quality inhering in his inherited wealth. Here, therefore, the
political quality appears also as the property of landed property, as a quality which is
ascribed directly to the bare physical earth (nature)
Regarding the first point, it follows that the owner of the entailed estate is the serf of the
landed property, and that in the serfs who are subordinated to him there appears only the
practical consequence of the theoretical relationship with landed property in which he
himself stands. The depth of German subjectivity appears everywhere as the crudity of a
mindless objectivity.
Here we must analyse (1) the relation between private property and inheritance, (2) the
relation between private property, inheritance, and, thereby, the privilege of certain
generations to participate in political sovereignty, (3) the actual historical relation, or the
Germanic relation.
We have seen that primogeniture is the abstraction of independent private property. A
second consequence follows from this. Independence, autonomy, in the political state
whose construction we have followed so far, is private property, which at its peak appears
as inalienable landed property. Political independence thus flows not ex proprio sinu of
the political state; it is not a gift of the political state to its members, nor is it the
animating spirit [of the political state]. Rather, the members of the political state receive
their independence from a being which is not the being of the political state, from a being
of abstract private right, namely, from abstract private property. Political independence is
an accident of private property and not the substance of the political state. The political
state - and within it the legislature, as we have seen - is the unveiled mystery of the true
value and essence of the moments of the state. The significance that private property has
in the political state is its essential, its true significance; the significance that class
distinction has in the political state is the essential significance of class distinction. In the
same way, the essence of the sovereign and of the executive come to appearance in the
legislature. It is here, in the sphere of the political state, that the individual moments of
the state relate to themselves as to the being of the species, the 'species-being'; because
the political state is the sphere of their universal character, i.e., their religious sphere. The
political state is the mirror of truth for the various moments of the concrete state.
Thus, if independent private property in the political state, in the legislature, has the
significance of political independence, then it is the political independence of the state.
Independent private property, or actual private property is then not only the support of the
constitution but the constitution itself. And isn't the support of the constitution nothing
other than the constitution of constitutions, the primary, the actual constitution?
Hegel himself was surprised about the immanent development of science, the derivation
of its entire content from the concept in its simplicity (Remark to § 279), when he was
constructing the hereditary monarch, and made the following remark:
Hence it is the basic moment of personality, abstract at the start in immediate rights,
which has matured itself through its various forms of subjectivity, and now - at the stage
of absolute rights, of the state, of the completely concrete objectivity of the will - has
become the personality of the state, its certainty of itself.
That is, in the political state it comes to appearance that abstract personality is the highest
political personality, the political basis of the entire state. Likewise, in primogeniture, the
right of this abstract personality, its objectivity, abstract private property, comes into
existence as the highest objectivity of the state, i.e., as its highest right.
The state is hereditary monarch; abstract personality means nothing other than that the
personality of the state is abstract, or that it is the state of abstract personality, just as the
Romans developed the rights of the monarch purely within the norms of private rights, or
private rights as the highest norm of state, or political rights.
The Romans are the rationalists, the Germans the mystics of sovereign private property.
Hegel calls private rights the rights of abstract personality, or abstract rights. And indeed
they have to be developed as the abstraction, and thus the illusory rights, of abstract
personality, just as the moral doctrine developed by Hegel is the illusory existence of
abstract subjectivity. Hegel develops private rights and morals as such abstractions, from
which it does not follow, for him, that the state or ethical life of which they are the
presuppositions can be nothing but the society (the social life) of these illusions; rather,
he concludes that they are subalternate moments of this ethical life. But what are private
rights except the rights of these subjects of the state, and what is morality except their
morality? In other words, the person of private rights and the subject of morals are the
person and the subject of the state. Hegel has been widely criticised for his development
of morality. He has done nothing but develop the morality of the modern state and
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