THE PHILOSOPHICAL FORUM

Volume XXXI, Nos. 3–4, Fall–Winter 2000

SOVEREIGNTY AND REPRESENTATION IN HEGEL

JEAN-FRANÇOIS KERVÉGAN

PRELIMINARIES

It is doubtless not an exaggeration to state that sovereignty and representation

are the cardinal concepts in modern thinking about the State. This thinking was
developed at the same time as this State itself, beginning in the sixteenth cen-
tury; its first exponents, in very different genres, were Machiavelli and Bodin.
“The era of the European State form,” to use the expression of C. Schmitt,1
opens with the recognition of the supremacy of politics (whose management
came to be entrusted to this specifically modern, abstract entity, the State) over
other dimensions of human existence. Henceforth, the State, in tendency at least,
frees itself from the religious-spiritual universe whose profound rupture, at the
time of the Reformation, required that it be in some way neutralized and isolated
from the world of work activity and techno-economic interactions, that is, from
what later came to be called civil society, and also from the traditionally closed
space of the family, which also experienced profound transformations. More-
over, the State did not just free itself from these orders: it imposed upon them its
law.
The concepts of sovereignty and representation, albeit of diverse provenance
and status, are the vectors of this transformation. More precisely, it is thanks to
them, and in profoundly reworking their content, that modern political philoso-
phy has attempted to account for the arrival of the era of the State. The notion of
sovereignty is typically modern: being primordially the predicate of the State,
and not that of those who find themselves at its head, the “sovereignty of the
State” is a characteristic aspect of the process of rationalization that, according
to Weber, affects the modern forms of polity.2 Sovereignty is, in the celebrated
definition given by Bodin at the dawn of the modern age, “the absolute and per-
3
petual power of a Republic.” This definition shows that, even if it goes without
saying for Bodin himself that this power is held and exercised by a monarch, the

233
 KERVÉGAN

person of the sovereign is henceforth thought of in terms of his function, and he

himself becomes secondary in relation to the abstract essence of state sover-
eignty. It is useful moreover to emphasize, in this connection, that the Church
prepared the ground for the State: the canonical distinction between person and
function in effect makes possible the “impersonal” definition of power required
by the modern State. On its side, the notion of representation, contrary to that of
sovereignty, is not to begin with a political notion: it derives from theological
thinking, or, more precisely, ecclesiological thinking. It is in the course of the
debate, within the Church, between the supporters of conciliar representation
and the supporters of papal representation that the preeminently political signifi-
4
cance that representation can have becomes apparent; and from this Hobbes
drew all the consequences in Chapter XVI of Leviathan.
The conjunction of the theme of sovereignty, obviously tied to the flourishing
of what can conveniently be called absolutism, and that of representation, which
has (as with the champions of conciliar representation in the Church and other
precocious adversaries of absolutism) an orientation directly opposed to the cen-
tralization and monopoly of power, has about it something initially surprising; it
implies, it would seem evident, that both sovereignty and representation undergo
a profound recasting. This conjunction is accomplished in exemplary manner in
the work of Hobbes, in the form of a doctrine of “sovereign representation” that
is the exact contrary of the subsequent doctrine of “representative sovereignty.”
According to Hobbes, the sovereign represents the people (and not the individu-
als, understood not as populus but as multitudo, that compose it), but certainly
not in the sense that the people delegates its power to the sovereign (which
would suppose that it already exists as such, that it is in itself a unified multi-
tude); in this case, in effect, the problem to which the doctrine of sovereignty is
intended to respond—that of the unification of a heterogeneous mass—would be
at the outset resolved, and the “sovereign” turn out to be either to be fictional or
useless. But in reality the sovereign represents in the very special sense that he
brings into being or constitutes the represented, exactly as, in the act of speech,
meaning does not exist prior to its expression. We must accordingly interpret
literally the formulation “in a monarchy . . . the king is what I name the peo-
ple.”5 This means that the “represented” preexists neither logically nor chrono-
logically, but has its being, its identity, constituted by the very act in which it
gives itself this “representative.” This point is explained with great lucidity in
Chapter XVI of Leviathan in terms of the theory of authorization. In illustrating
the mechanism whereby sovereignty is constituted by means of the distinction
between author and actor, Hobbes concludes that “there is no way of conceiving
of the unity of a multitude in any form” save that of representation.6 Effectively
what distinguishes a people from a disunited multitude is the operation of repre-
sentation which, as we see in theatrical illusion, has an author—whom no one

234
 SOVEREIGNTY AND REPRESENTATION IN HEGEL

sees or hears in person—speak through the mouth of the actor, and is so consti-
tuted as the author of the text performed or represented. In other words, “it is the
unity of the one who represents, not the unity of the represented, which makes
the person one.” Such is the essence, paradoxical or miraculous as one prefers,
of sovereign representation.
The relation between sovereignty and representation undergoes a profound
change of meaning on the occasions of the American and the French Revolu-
tions, when a new idea of representation emerges or rather—for the idea was
already present, at least as a demand, in the Whig constitutionalism in Great
Britain—becomes increasingly prominent. This transformation may be observed
7
in the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, but it is nowhere so clear
as in Sieyès. One emphasizes perhaps to excess the novelty attaching to the
notion of constituting power, such as is distinguished in Qu’est-ce que le
Tiers-Etat? from that of constituted power(s). This distinction, it seems to me, is
in large measure simply an extension of the distinction made in the Contrat So-
cial between sovereignty and government. Sovereignty, explains Rousseau, here
faithful to Hobbes, may neither be delegated nor constituted by delegation, for
“the sovereign may only be represented by himself”;8 he may certainly have offi-
9
cers or police—such is precisely the status of government —but he cannot have
representatives who carry plenitudo potestatis. It is precisely this cardinal princi-
ple of the “classical” doctrine of sovereignty that Sieyès destroys in proclaiming
that, if they are legitimately constituted, the representatives he designates as ex-
traordinary (that is, those who exercise power to constitute) “take the place of the
nation itself.”10 One sees that Sieyès literally reverses the Hobbesian doctrine of
representative sovereignty in holding that a nation’s delegation of its sovereign
power to a corps of extraordinary representatives does not entail either its dimin-
ishment or devolution. On the contrary: it is only by virtue of the mediation of
representation that a diffuse national will is carried to expression and becomes
authentically sovereign, since “the object or end of the representative assembly
. . . may not deviate from that of the nation itself, if it can at once unify and
endow.”11 In other words, popular sovereignty is inalienable—this is the view of
Rousseau. But the people are not able to exercise this themselves, and must be
represented by the very act by which they are constituted—such is the contribu-
tion of Sieyès.
Already sketched in certain writings of Burke,12 the theory of sovereign repre-
sentation is at the foundation of the republican problematic of power. As the
history of the nineteenth century abundantly illustrates, this may include very
different political options. Schematically, one may distinguish within it a liberal
tradition (whose spokespersons, after Burke and the Founding Fathers, were
Constant and Tocqueville) and a democratic tradition (which, quickly extin-
guished after the French Revolution, recovered all its force around 1848, but

235
 KERVÉGAN

after that blended with the new current of socialism). Despite their obvious dif-
ferences, which crystallize around the question of the extent and the modalities
of suffrage (universal? property-based? ability-based?), the two traditions are
supported by the same set of theoretical convictions relative to the relations be-
tween the sovereignty of the people and political representation, their divergence
residing in this respect on the emphasis placed either on the first term (the demo-
cratic position) or on the second (the liberal position).
In what follows, I wish to establish that, in what concerns democracy, the He-
gelian treatment of the question of representation seeks in some way to over-
come the alternative on which modern thinking about the State is based: either
representative sovereignty or sovereign representation.

A POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

There does not exist in Hegel a thematic treatment of the relations between
sovereignty and representation. Nevertheless, as I shall endeavor to show, his
political philosophy (in the narrow sense of his theory of the State in its internal
aspect) is based on a certain articulation of these two concepts. This articulation
entails, moreover, a recasting of their meaning: sovereignty comes to be thought
of as exclusively an attribute of the State, distinguished at once from the mon-
arch, the people, and the “national” representation;13 representation, the polity
necessary for the existence of the community, comes to be redefined in terms of
the distinction between State and civil society, and will be required to mediate
between these two. When one raises these questions, it is indispensable to go
beyond the writings in which are formulated the principles of Hegel’s political
philosophy, that is, the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts and the doctrine
of objective spirit in the Encyclopedia; what must also be considered are the
“political writings” that, on a question like that of representation, contain ex-
tremely important clarifications.
Before the philosophy of Hegel achieved its real originality, that is after 1802,
the work on the German constitution (1798–1800) develops a relentless critique
of the premodern conception of representation on which rests the Staatsrecht of
this “State in idea”14 (Gedankenstaat), which is the Roman Empire of the
German Nation, in its last official designation. If, in the wake of the French Rev-
olution, German liberals sought to oppose the demand for a “representative con-
stitution” (Repräsentativ-Verfassung) with a “constitution of states” (ständische
Verfassung) appropriate to an ancient regime and in particular to the Germanic
Empire, Hegel, for his part, emphasizes the common theoretical basis of these
two institutional solutions that are opposed in practice. The representative prin-
ciple, whatever the form of its employment, in Hegel’s view reveals the roots of
the political constitution in the feudal system, in so far as that system is based on

236
 SOVEREIGNTY AND REPRESENTATION IN HEGEL

the reduction of public to private law: “Representation is closely tied to the es-
sence of the feudal constitution, which is brought to perfection with the forma-
tion of a bourgeois state (Stand); it is also an error to try to pass it off as an
15
invention of the modern epoch.” All the modern history of Germany effectively
shows that representation has been in the hands of “provinces,” the most impor-
tant of which became veritable sovereign States; it has been a weapon against
imperial power, and has contributed to undermining the juridical and political
unity of the Empire. As Hegel reminds us in the course of an elegy to
Machiavelli contained in this writing, “freedom is only possible for a people
having the juridical unity of a State.”16 Nevertheless, at the same time that he de-
tects in the feudal “constitution” and, in consequence, in a certain type of repre-
sentation, the cause of the political powerlessness of the imperial pseudo-State,
Hegel affirms—and this expresses his adhesion, which he never contradicted, to
the principles of 1789—that in the absence of representative institutions assuring
“the participation (Mitwirkung) of the general will in the most important matters
and in those concerning the universal,” “freedom is unthinkable” and in conse-
quence this institution “is today part of sound human reason.”17 One sees that, in
an implicit manner, two notions of representation, with opposite connotations,
are present in the manuscript of the young Hegel. The “feudal” (or more exactly
ständisch) notion of representation, modeled on the privatist schema of the man-
date (Stellvertretung), leads to the subordination of the representative (the Em-
peror) to the represented (who are in fact not individuals or peoples, but princely
electors or dignitaries who are at the head of the various territorial components
of the Empire); the “electoral capitulations,” in which the latter propose ever
more restrictive conditions to their support to a candidature to the imperial dig-
nity, offers an illustration. Briefly, because it is based on a conception of repre-
sentation that reduces the distinctive property of the State, sovereignty, to
nothing more than an empty word, the Empire makes us “think of a heap of
round rocks assembled in a pyramid.”18 But “The German Constitution” also has
recourse, in tension with the first notion, to the modern model of representation
as essential vector in the formation of the general will. This model is properly
revolutionary—it is for this reason it has a place in the young Hegel’s account
19
—and receives its illustration in the Constitution of 1791 and its justification in
20
the writings of Sieyès. To the extent that the unfinished character of the manu-
script allows us to judge, it does not seem that Hegel, around 1800, has the con-
ceptual equipment to deal with, or actually to surmount, this contradiction
between the two visions of representation.
The article of 1817 known as the Ständesschrift21 develops a meticulous, sub-
tle, and “engagée” analysis of the debates of the Diet convoked, after the French
occupation ended, by King Friederich II of Wurtemberg for the purposes of rati-
fying and promulgating a constitution of liberal inspiration (it must, the ruling

237
 KERVÉGAN

circles thought, correspond to the charter “bestowed” by Louis XVIII to the

French people). Hegel’s article includes important remarks concerning the
articulation of representation and sovereignty. I will briefly outline the argument
of this article, in which Hegel displays great talent as a political journalist. In op-
posing in every way they could the projects of the king (who sought, at the price
of making concessions to liberal ideas, to bring about the ratification of a power
which owed much, commencing with the crown, to the support of Napoléon),
the States of Wurtemberg adopted a typically reactionary attitude. In their desire
to combat the projects of the king, to maintain, or rather restore, the “good old
law” (das alte gute Recht), that is, the juridical and political structures of a soci-
ety of privileges, they took themselves for the “Etats généraux” of 1789, but, as
22
Hegel cruelly comments, “they performed the play the wrong way round.”
The article of 1817 opposes, more clearly than the writing on the constitution
of the Empire, two very distinct types of representation: “traditional representa-
23
tion” and “true national representation.” The specific function of representation
—a theme taken up again, in more complex form, in the Philosophy of Right
24
(Art. 302 Rem)—is to be “the vehicle of mediation between prince and people.”
The attitude of the States, particularly the emissaries of what Hegel names the
bourgeois aristocracy, is to obstruct this function; that is why, since it is obvious
that one does not a priori accord a constitution to a people whose presumptive
representatives do not wish it, one must hope at the very least that a reunion of
the States will have been the occasion for “self-education,”25 for an authentic po-
litical formation, offering to the representatives, who are squeezed by the partic-
ularity of the interests whose spokespersons they are, the possibility of elevating
themselves to the level of the universal.26 But if Hegel rigorously criticizes the
partisans of “traditional representation,” he does not fall back into the camp of
the partisans of the “representative constitution,” that is, roughly speaking, the
liberals.27 On the contrary, the article includes a detailed critique of “French ab-
28
stractions,” which will be taken up again in the Philosophy of Right. It is useful
to note, in this connection, that it is less universal suffrage (generally challenged
by the liberal bourgeoisie) than the individual vote that is rejected by Hegel. The
criticism of “democratic chaos” (Unförmlichkeit), which disintegrates a people
29
into a “heap,” into a “multitude” in the sense that classical political philosophy
contrasts with a politically unified “people,” has as much purchase against both
property-based and qualification-based suffrage (the latter dear to Sieyès) as
against universal suffrage; both systems are really based on the presupposition
that the agglomeration of individual choices necessarily gives rise to the general
will. I will return later to the reasons that underpin this critique, which is based
on the Hegelian conception of civil society and its relation to the State. The 1817
article (as well as the course given simultaneously at Heidelberg, which consti-
tutes the first form of the Philosophy of Right) sketches what will henceforth

238
 SOVEREIGNTY AND REPRESENTATION IN HEGEL

become the Hegelian analysis of “representative mediation,” according to which

the authentic vocation of political representation is to form a people politically
that would, by itself, be politically amorphous. In other terms, without the “artic-
ulation” accorded it by representation, the people lacks that “rationality” which
30
confers on it a significance for politics and the State.
The line between the system of representation and the social and political
equilibrium at the core of the State is the theme of the last of Hegel’s political
31
writings, the article “On the English Reform Bill” published in 1831. This text
examines, in the light of the social and political situation of Great Britain, the
proposed law (bill) brought by the Whig Prime Minister Lord Grey before Par-
liament. Adopted in 1832 (after the death of Hegel), this law profoundly trans-
formed English political life by eliminating the rotten boroughs and introducing,
in default of universal suffrage, representation approximately adjusted to the
population and taking account of social and demographic changes. The point of
32
view adopted by Hegel in this article has often been described as reactionary.
Does he not oppose in the end a reform that he himself has shown, at the begin-
ning of his article, is necessary and that both common sense and equity seem to
require? In reality, things are more complex. Hegel refused to envision political
representation and its various forms from a purely technical point of view or
even a politicomoral one: he examines representation in its relation to the social
and political structure of Great Britain, submitting to severe criticism the effects
of the “great transformation,” to employ Polanyi’s expression. On the one hand,
Hegel hardly has words harsh enough to condemn the political, social, and legal
situation of England, with which we know he was long familiar thanks to his
regular reading of newspapers such as the Edinburgh Review and the Morning
Chronicle.33 But, on the other hand, he considered that the envisaged reform
of electoral law would aggravate the situation, in opening Parliament to new
strata—moreover, not the proletariat, but rather the radicalized petite bourgeoi-
sie, carrier of democratic demands—without transforming a social structure that
would remain profoundly inegalitarian and without touching an incoherent and
superannuated civil law. One may note in this connection that the article makes
constant use of the opposition of rational to positive law—whose schematism
Hegel elsewhere criticizes—in order to attack “the anomalies and the absurdity
of the English Constitution.”34 In Hegel’s diagnostic, the reform bill, instead of a
35
political reform, may actually promote a social and political revolution, and it
is for this reason that its adoption is not desirable. It also appears that the pur-
pose of the 1831 article is not unequivocally retrograde. Hegel shows himself to
be what he has for a long time, if not always, been: an authoritarian liberal, a
partisan of reform conducted from on high, such as was practiced in Prussia in
the reform era (1806–1819) by “enlightened” ministers (Stein, Hardenberg, W.
von Humboldt).36 What they, and Hegel with them, wanted is the initial program

239
 KERVÉGAN

of the French Revolution (an equal right and guarantee for all to certain funda-
mental goods, a civil society liberated from the rigidity of orders and privileges,
a strong and liberal State) but . . . without revolution.
The 1831 article articulates in a very precise manner the concepts of represen-
tation and of sovereignty, on the occasion of a critical reflection on the principle
of the sovereignty of the people. This reflection makes more precise and en-
riches what is said in the Philosophy of Right (Art. 279 Rem). After having
vigorously criticized the inequity of British electoral rights and indicated that the
introduction of universal suffrage, which some saw as a panacea, would not
have the expected effects without the appropriate ethicopolitical conditions (for
the poverty of a large proportion of the “people” entails a lack of interest in ex-
ercising these rights), Hegel adds:

This indifference with respect to the right of suffrage and its exercise contrasts in the highest de-
gree with the fact that it is in this that resides the right of the people to participate in public af-
fairs, in the highest interests of the State and government, and that its exercise is an eminent
duty, for it is on this that rests the constitution of an essential part of the power of the State, the
assembly of representatives; this right and its exercise are, to follow the French style, the act, and
even the unique act, of the Sovereignty of the people.37

It is remarkable—and one can see this as either the mark of ambiguities in Hegel
or the proof of his lucidity—that a text which, as ever, criticizes “French ab-
stractions”38 and denies that one can effectively base legislation on the rights of
man or of the citizen39 calls so clearly for the principle of the sovereignty of the
people. It is true that Hegel sets limits on its interpretation and usage, in joining
it to a conception of representation directly opposed to the principles of 1789 (or
of 1793): that of the representation of social interests.40 It remains to determine
the philosophical basis of this politics of representation.

A PHILOSOPHY OF REPRESENTATION

The political philosophy of Hegel, to be sure, belongs to the classical tradi-

tion; one may, in this respect, underline the features that are connected with
Aristotelianism (this is the point of view of J. Ritter) or emphasize its critical re-
lation with modern natural law (the position of M. Riedel). But it also belongs to
another debate, more immediately political, and one that is specific to the nine-
teenth century: that between liberalism and democracy. One of the great merits
of Hegel’s thought is to reveal a certain number of fundamental theoretical di-
vergences between the liberal and the democratic visions of the political order,
despite the divergences remaining, around 1830–1840, still largely unperceived
by the parties to the debate. The Hegelian critique of democracy41 is directly
concerned with ancient democracy in which, as Rousseau says, the people is at

240
 SOVEREIGNTY AND REPRESENTATION IN HEGEL

once sovereign and magistrate; but it also applies to the modern idea of repre-
42
sentative democracy laid down by the American and French Revolutions. In
approaching the question of representation, Hegel’s critical reflections encom-
pass liberal political philosophy, whose options he nevertheless largely shares. It
is as if Hegel, though wishing to base his contribution on the argumentation that
the liberals employ both against the partisans of return to the ancient order and
against the partisans of a democratic radicalization of the principles of 1789, un-
dermines the very foundations of liberal political discourse in exhibiting its pre-
suppositions, indeed its ulterior motives. The article on the Reform Bill is, on
this point, exemplary.
Hegel shares the views of “authoritarian liberalism,” whereby certain Ger-
mans, above all the Prussians, have attempted to organize, from above, a set of
social and political reforms with a view to obtaining results comparable to those
of the French Revolution (exported by the Napoleonic armies in saving a revolu-
tion): the institution of a constitutional monarchy, social and administrative
reforms, and the setting up of a system of representation based neither on
more-or-less generalized universal suffrage nor on “estates” in the ancient man-
ner but on Berufstände or occupations.43 “Sociopolitical” representation (I avoid
saying “corporative” on account of the later use of this term by Italian fascism)
appears in the perspective of a Stein, a Hardenberg, a W. von Humboldt, but
also in Hegel,44 as a sui generis third way, properly reformist, between programs
of democratic and revolutionary inspiration and the reactionary views of those
who believe it is possible to restore a political regime whose social foundations
have crumbled.
Never, even though politically close to the Prussian reformers, does Hegel
employ their mode of argumentation. It is striking to observe, on a question as
decisive as that of representation, how Hegel discards the usual justifications
and proposes, on foundations that are philosophically foreign to the reformist
current, a completely novel discourse. He is not really opposed to liberal solu-
tions, but rather to the philosophical vision upon which they are commonly
based. For the liberals,45 what justifies the introduction of a means of representa-
tion is the necessity of compensating for the power of the monarch, or limiting
46
it, by the power of the people. This argument not only proposes an extremely
precarious compromise between two possible attributions of sovereignty (to the
people or to the monarch), but it rests on a questionable presupposition: that a
“political people” exists by itself (or, what comes to the same thing, is self-con-
stituting) and by this very fact knows its own interest. Such a presupposition
once again involves the failure to recognize the fundamental distinction between
populus and multitudo, known since Cicero (if not since Aristotle) but systemati-
47
cally elaborated by Hobbes; this distinction is also present, as one knows, in
Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant, and, in a general way, plays an important role in

241
 KERVÉGAN

the idea that modern political philosophy comes to have of the people. The
people—the Hobbesian theory of representation does not say otherwise—does
not exist naturally: it is politically constituted. In other words, between
multitudo and populus, some form of mediation is required; this mediation,
which is constitutive of polity or the State (if it is true that the State is nothing
48
but “reunion as such” ), is provided by representation. To become a political
unity and not a mere “agglomeration” (Haufen) of individuals or groups consid-
ered as natural (as in the traditional definition of the State as a unity of families,
49
which one still finds in the Nuremberg lectures ), the people must be consti-
tuted: such is the role of representative mediation. This immediately shows that
the profound meaning of representation, as Hegel conceives it, is not that a “sub-
ject” be represented by another or for another (which is its common justifica-
tion), but to permit this “subject” to be present to itself and for itself, to become
a political subject. This also explains, be it in passing, why Hegel, in confronting
a tendency that was growing in his own time, refuses to confer on the State a
national, still less a racial, substratum. The nation is really nothing more than
“the natural principle of a people”;50 to acquire a political significance, it ac-
cordingly requires an operation of constitution whose author—and on this point
Hegel has understood the lesson of Sieyès and the French constitutionalists—
can only be the people itself.
The representative institutions (the “estates” as Hegel calls them in keeping
with the state of discussion in Germany at this time, terminology that appears
outdated) have as their chief function, at the core of the ethicopolitical totality
which is the rational State,51 “mediation.”52 This mediation is even multiple: it
operates between the monarch and his subjects, between the State and civil soci-
ety, between the people and itself. If Hegel criticizes so harshly the usual justifi-
cation of political representation (the “people” must be able to express its desires
and defend its interests), that is because he rejects the thesis according to which
the people by nature knows what it wants. Not that he attached much importance
to the traditional appeal to the diversity of the people, which is an empirical ar-
gument. But if the people does not know spontaneously what it wishes, that is
because it is not immediately what it is: a people. Only representation, which
gives body and voice to the “amorphous mass”53 that is the multitude, permits
the people to be politically, to overcome in a universal mode its contradictory
diversity and particularity. At the same time, political representation appears as
the decisive condition of sovereignty—and one knows that Hegel prefers to
speak of the sovereignty of the State rather than the people54—at least if it is
true, as Hermann Heller has said, that sovereignty designates the possibility of a
55
reign of the people as unity over the people as plurality.
But why is representation, in the sense that this term has acquired since the
eighteenth century, necessary to secure this mediation? What is it, in other

242
 SOVEREIGNTY AND REPRESENTATION IN HEGEL

words, which renders insufficient, other than in special circumstances, a

Hobbesian solution: the unity of the sovereign creates the unity of the people
represented? To respond to this question requires an elucidation of the theoreti-
cal reason for Hegel’s dislike both of absolute monarchy and of an integral de-
mocracy such as was projected by some participants in the French Revolution. It
is, fundamentally, that these political forms are inappropriate to the differentia-
tion between the social and the political that is the distinctive trait of the modern
world, particularly since the development of an economy of free enterprise,
which has as its aim going beyond the framework of the territorially closed
56
State. From the moment that the socioeconomic tends to be dissociated from
the political, which is the major difference between modern Sittlichkeit and
ancient Sittlichkeit in which everything is immediately political, it is crucially
necessary, in order to prevent this differentiation from becoming a mutually
57
alienating complication, to invent procedures of dynamic integration of a social
universe ever more thoroughly split into particular and antagonistic interests.
Among these procedures, representation, in the modern, “technical” sense of the
term, plays a decisive role: it is that by which, in Hegel’s terms, “the private
58
estate” accedes to a “political signification.” In other terms, it assures the pres-
ence of State authority within a social world split into divergent, in truth antago-
nistic, “interests,” and at the same time permits the reaffirmation of the
supremacy of the political universal—a concrete universal because not isolated
from what contradicts it—over the social particularity integrated as a “moment.”
This political integration of social diversity cannot succeed unless it takes ac-
count of, or more exactly bases itself on, the real divisions of civil society, them-
selves institutionalized thanks to the “corporations.” From this arises the choice,
at first sight surprising, because contrary to current tendencies, of a representa-
tion of social interests instead of representation founded on the “free” suffrage
of individuals, which corresponds to an unrealistic and “atomistic” vision of
59
civil society.
One comes to understand at the same time (and here one becomes aware of
the point at which the reasons evoked by Hegel depart from the views of both
liberals and democrats) why representation is necessary for the contemporary
world, let us say (to simplify) for the world arising from the French Revolution
and from the industrial, capitalist revolution. In such a world, the real differenti-
ation of the political and social worlds, as well as the tensions which mark soci-
ety, require arrangements assuring the institutional integration of social diversity
(and not simply leaving that role to the spontaneous regulation of the market).
The essential arrangement is political representation, which permits a people,
confronting its ineliminable diversity, to be “in intimate contact with the living
60
presence of the spirit.”

243
 KERVÉGAN

In one of his first writings, which dates from 1796–1797, Hegel denounces, in
the manner of Rousseau, the perversion of the modern State by the “esprit de
corps,”61 mark of the substitution of the “bourgeois,” anchored in the particular-
ity of his interest, for the “citizen,” living by and for the universal. In a so-to-
speak symmetrical fashion, the texts of Hegel’s maturity affirm that the culture
of the universal, the spirit of citizenship, must support itself on the “esprit de
corps” that expresses itself in organized and “represented” social interests. Nev-
ertheless, at the same time—and this is what separates Hegel definitively from
both political and economic liberalism—the ethos of citizenship may and must
achieve the Aufhebung of the corporatively structured social particularity. It thus
seems, if one accords this example wider significance, that the key to Hegelian
politics is the discovery that civil society is, for better or for worse, the central
question of modernity. It is the source of its difficulties, its convulsions (the
Revolution), and its disturbing symptoms (the poverty of the masses); but it is
also, in every sense of the term, the locus of its wealth and the possibility of its
flourishing. If, in the post-revolutionary world, the sovereignty of the State re-
quires representative mediation, that is because it is the only guarantee of the re-
covery, always ongoing, of social particularity, henceforth legitimate as such,
within that political universality it helps to bring about.

NOTES

1 “The elevation of the concept of the State to the rank of universal normative concept . . . came to
an end with the era of the State form itself.” C. Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze (Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, 1958), 376. See also C. Schmitt, La notion de politique (Paris:
Calmann-Lévy, 1972), 53–54.
2 See, for example, Max Weber, Economie et Société (Paris: Plon, 1971), 58–59. On “legal-ratio-
nal domination,” in which the impersonality of relations of power is one of the principal ingredi-
ents, see C. Colliot-Thélène, Le désenchantement de l’Etat (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 224ff.
3 Jean Bodin, Les six Livres de la République (Paris: Fayard, 1986), livre 1, chap. 8, p. 179. The
novel character of Bodin’s doctrine of sovereignty, so far as it is the basis of a “monopoly of
positive law by the State,” is emphasized by O. Beaud, La puissance de l’Etat (Paris: PUF,
1994), 29–196, esp. 50–52.
4 On the prehistory of the modern political concept of representation, see the excellent work of
H. Hofmann, Repräsentation. Studien zur Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1990); see especially chap. 5, “Repraesentatio Identitatis,” 191ff, and the beginning of
chap. 6 on De Concordantia Catholica of Nicholas of Cusa.
5 Hobbes, De Cive, trans. Sorbière (Paris: GF, 1982), chap. 12, Art. 8, p. 223.
6 Hobbes, Leviathan, trans. Tricaud (Paris: Sirey, 1971), 166.
7 Hamilton, who became one of the authors of the Federalist, was the first to speak in 1777 of
“representative democracy.” Alexander Hamilton, Papers, ed. Harold C. Syrett, vol. 1 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 255. Hamilton used this term for a republic that real-
izes the constitutionalist ideal—as John Adams put it—of “an empire of laws and not of men.”
John Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” Works, vol. 4 (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries

244
 SOVEREIGNTY AND REPRESENTATION IN HEGEL

Press, 1969), 194. The American constitution is based on this new conception of the republic.
The project of “grafting representation onto democracy” in effect entails, as Thomas Paine indi-
cates in his response to Burke’s Considerations on the French Revolution, a radical modification
of “the simple democratic form” that the Ancients knew. Thomas Paine, Les droits de l’homme
(Paris: Belin, 1987), 205–09. The course of events in America at all times resulted in the main
currents of thought not retaining this terminological innovation. The authors of the Federalist,
setting forth in 1787 the constitutional doctrine of the United States, opposed a republican gov-
ernment, “totally based on the principle of representation,” to a democracy where “the people as-
semble and govern themselves.” Federalist No. 14 (Paris: Economica, 1988), 10–101. See also
Federalist Nos. 9, 10, 39.
8 Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, livre 2, chap. 1, Oeuvres Completes 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),
368.
9 See Du Contrat Social, livre 3, chap. 1, 396; chap. 15, 430; chap. 17, 433–34.
10 Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? (Paris: Champs/Flammarion, 1988), 136.
11 Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? 167.
12 This theory is sketched in his address to the electors of Bristol (1774), where he outlines his
doctrine of “free mandate” and fights against the idea that representation may be a commission.
See The Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 3 (London: Rivington, 1803), 20.
13 It is this that Hegel calls the “idealism of sovereignty.” See Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie
des Rechts (Berlin: Akademie, 1981), § 278 Rem. Cited henceforth as RPh, § no.
14 Hegel, Ecrit politiques (Paris: Champs Libre, 1977), 73. Cited henceforth as Pol., page no.
15 Pol., 101 (translation modified); concerning the reduction of public to private law, see Pol.,
28–30.
16 Pol., 118.
17 Pol., 134 (translation modified).
18 Pol., 72.
19 “The nation, from which alone emanates all powers, may not exercise them save by delegation.
The French Constitution is representative: the representatives are the Legislative Body and the
king” (Titre 3, article 2).
20 See Sieyès, “Opinion sur la constitution fondamentale de la Convention”(Paris: De L’Imprimerie
de Lottin & Lottin, 1791).
21 The full title is “The Debate at the Assembly of States of the Realm of Wurtemberg in 1815 and
1816” (Verhandlungen in der Versammlung der Landstände des Königreichs Württemberg im
Jahre 1815 und 1816).
22 Pol., 256. Alluding to a word of Talleyrand, Hegel comments pitilessly: “one can say of the as-
sembly of Wurtemberg States what was said of the French émigrés on their return: “they forgot
nothing and they learned nothing” (Pol., 256).
23 Pol., 334.
24 Pol., 282.
25 Pol., 329. See, on this theme, C. Jamme, “Die Erziehung der Stände durch sich selbst,” in Hegels
Rechtsphilosophie im Zusammenhang der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. H.-C. Lucas
and O. Pöggeler (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1986), 149–73.
26 “This ascension to the universal is part of the formal aspect of the political education of the new
assembly of states” (Pol., 337).
27 The inadequacy of this characterization arises from the fact that, as Lothar Gall has shown in his
“Liberalismus und bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” Historische Zeitschrift 220–22, (1975): 350ff.,
Früliberalismus combines, because of the economic and political particularities of Germany at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, both “progressive” and “retrograde” features. The situa-
tion analyzed by Hegel is a striking illustration.

245
 KERVÉGAN

28 Pol., 231.
29 Pol., 233.
30 “It is completely incorrect to oppose the people to the State; for without the side of articulation,
without the side of the State, the people lacks rationality and is no more than a mass.”
Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft. Heidelberg 1817–1818, ed. O Pöggeler et
al. (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1983), Art. 148, p. 223. See as well RPh, § 279 Rem.
31 This article, the last published by Hegel, appeared in April–May 1831, in the Allgemeine
preussische Staatszeitung; its last third was suppressed by the censor, judging it too critical of
Great Britain. The historical and theoretical context of this publication is thoroughly analyzed in
Politik und Geschichte, ed. C. Jamme and E. Weisser-Lohmann, Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 35 Sup-
plement (Bonn: Buvier, 1995). See also W. Jaeschke, “Hegel’s Last Year in Berlin,” in Hegel’s
Philosophy of Action, ed. L. Stepelevich and D. Lamb (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities
Press, 1983), 31–48.
32 This has indeed become a constant, since Rudolf Haym’s Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), in liberal
critics of Hegelianism.
33 See Michael J. Petry, “Hegel and the Morning Chronicle,” Hegel-Studien 11 (1976):11–80; and
N. Waszek, “Hegels Exzerpte aus der Edimburgh Revue,” Hegel-Studien 20 (1985):79–112.
34 Pol., 356.
35 See the last lines of the article: Pol., 395.
36 On this period, see the classic work of R. Koselleck, Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution
(Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1967). The work shows the kinship, sometimes literal, of certain themes de-
veloped in the Philosophy of Right with the views of the Prussian reformers.
37 Pol., 381 (translation modified).
38 See, notably, Pol., 385–86, where certain views of Sieyès on constitutional matters are evoked
and criticized; see also Pol., 390.
39 Pol., 394.
40 See Pol., 375–77. The representation of the “various great interests of the nation” must be fa-
vored, for it causes political life to rest on “real foundations,” actually, on the distinction of inter-
ests organized within civil society.
41 See J.-F. Kervégan, “De la démocratie à la representation,” Philosophie 13 (1986): 38–67.
42 According to Paine, the essential contribution of the two Revolutions has consisted in “grafting
representation on democracy.” Paine, Les droits de l’homme, 209.
43 Concerning the projects of Hardenberg, see especially H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte
im 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1927), vol. 2, 625–27.
44 See RPh, § 301–08.
45 What is meant here, to be sure, is political liberalism as it developed in the first half of the nine-
teenth century, that is to say, constitutionalism.
46 In a plan of reform dating from 1806, Baron von Stein writes that “the Prussian State does not
have a constitution, because the supreme power is not divided between the head of State and the
delegates of the nation.” Baron von Stein, Briefwechsel, Denkschriften und Aufzeichnungen
(Berlin: Heymann, 1937), vol. 2, 76.
47 See Hobbes, De Cive, XII, 8. Other references are to be found in the article, “Peuple,” in the
Dictionnaire de Philosophie politique (Paris: PUF, 1996).
48 RPh, § 258 Rem.
49 See Hegel, Propédeutique philosophique, trans. Maurice de Gandillac (Paris: Minuit, 1963), 74,
217.
50 Hegel, La raison dans l’histoire, trans. K. Papaioannou (Paris: UGE, 1965), 211.
51 It should be recalled that not every State, according to Hegel, is entitled to be called rational.
52 RPh, § 302 Rem.

246
 SOVEREIGNTY AND REPRESENTATION IN HEGEL

53 RPh, § 279 Rem.

54 See RPh, § 276–79.
55 Hermann Heller, Die Souveränität (1928), in Gesammelte Scriften, vol. 2, 97.
56 See on this point the extraordinary §§ 246ff. of the Philosophie du Droit, which sketch a theory
of the globalization of the market as a response to the structural difficulties of a national econ-
omy and society, that is, one that is politically “delimited.”
57 In the sense of Rudolf Smend: see “Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht” in Staatsrechtliche
Abhandlungen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1968), 154.
58 RPh, § 303.
59 See RPh, § 308.
60 Pol., 265 (translation modified).
61 Hegel, Fragments de la période Berne (Paris:Vrin, 1987), 44.

247