http://philo218sum2012.blogspot.com/2012/06/hegel-540-281.html

4a) Sovereignty belongs only to the state.

Hegel argues that sovereignty is only a feature of states, that a people by itself never posses such a quality. This makes up part of Hegel’s overall suggestion that a monarch, the epitome of rational government, has absolute power over its people. In justifying the absolute authority of the monarch, Hegel attempts to dismantle the idea of a “sovereignty of the people”, a legitimate right of the people to oppose their ruler. If such a sovereign right exists among the people, than the political state must be understood as a balancing act between these two legitimate forces. Hegel imagines that such a duality of legitimacy would limit the absolute right of the monarch, a possibility that Hegel opposes given his view that the monarch ought to be the absolute personification of the power of the state. A closer look at the concept of the sovereignty of the people shows us that the force behind the observable historical instances of popular sovereignty is none other than the force which grounds the authority of the state in Hegel’s metaphysical construction. This recognition will allow us to see the way in which the legitimacy of “the sovereignty of the people”, a force fundamental to the concept of the state, still allows for the monarch to be understood as absolute.

As Hegel views it, the idea of a sovereignty of the people is impossible. Hegel suggests that sovereignty is a property of states only, and thus cannot be applied to a people with out a governing body. Hegel further asserts that a people with out a government are an amorphous mass, an indeterminate conglomeration that cannot be thought to resemble the sovereignty of the state (p.294). While Hegel can define sovereignty however he likes, the true substance of his objection is his suggestion that a people cannot posses a meaningful self-determination.

This idea can be interpreted in two ways. First, as an observation regarding the tangible state of affairs, suggesting that a people can never be so determinate as to challenge their monarch without a state to provide order. The second interpretation, as an argument that a people never has any right, any legitimacy in challenging the will of their sovereign. The first proposal can be challenged on historical grounds. If short-lived, moments of popular sovereignty, or self-determination, have occurred and will likely occur again. Just last year we witnessed a surfacing of the sovereignty of the people in both Egypt and Tunisia, where masses gathered without formal order under the banner of a single demand. This ordered and determinate will, seen in these peoples, demonstrates the occurrence of moments in which a people act like a state, in a determinate fashion, without a state. The force behind the determinate quality of these masses, within Hegel’s metaphysical framework, would be the Spirit of the people, or the objective Spirit. The phenomenon of popular uprisings illustrates the existence of a force, in the form of Spirit, comparable to the notion of “the sovereignty of the people” Hegel suggests does not exist.

This first interpretation aside, it is necessary to ask whether a people ever has the right, or any legitimate claim, to oppose their monarch. To understand this interplay of legitimacy, the authority of the monarch must be traced back to its origins, to determine on what grounds the monarch himself derives his legitimacy. The monarch is in a position of authority, for Hegel, insofar as he represents the unity of individual existence, himself, with the concept of the state (542). The monarch’s authority is the authority of the state. The state is established by the constitution of a given nation, which is coextensive with the Spirit of that people (540). In this way the Spirit of a people establishes the state and grounds the authority and legitimacy of the monarch.

Based on this lineage of legitimacy it can be seen that the demand for sovereignty directed by the Spirit of the people in these historical moments of resistance is that same force which gives the state its legitimacy. As such, the legitimacy of the state is compromised when it clashes with the sovereignty of the people, not the other way around. Any change in the Spirit of the people, as is clearly seen in any popular challenge to the established monarch, amounts to a reciprocal change in the constitution of the nation and thus a change in the authority of the state. When the people of a nation come out in outright denial of the authority of a monarch, the Spirit of the people has changed, developed further, and now denies the state the authority and legitimacy it once imbued it with. Understood in this way, the monarch has no legitimacy in challenging the Spirit of the people, this Spirit understood as the driving force behind their challenges to his authority. Hegel cannot deny the sovereignty of the people, their right to oppose to their monarch; this sovereignty being grounded in the same entity that establishes the state.

Hegel offers an objection to this line of argument, contending that any infringement on the authority of the monarch, in the positing of an opposing and legitimate sovereignty, is a denial of the absolute nature of the monarch. As Hegel argues, the monarch must be absolute in order to be adequate to its concept, the concept of the state. (p. 296). This protest is answered when we note that the monarch’s illegitimacy in opposing the Spirit of the people is not a genuine limit to its power in the sense of a confinement or outside entity forcing the monarch to govern within a set domain. This condition, that his actions be aligned with the Spirit of the people, does not bar him from any specific actions, only in acting in such a way as to estrange his own basis of legitimacy; his authority is absolute in this way. The monarch is only prevented from creating a contradiction in his own authority, least his authority be alienated from that which grants its legitimacy.

Given this internal force capable of opposing the monarch, we may still understand the monarch as both absolute and adequate to its concept. This check on the monarch’s authority is the same check that applies to any state, to the concept of the state itself; no state can deny the force that establishes and grounds it. The monarch’s legitimacy is as absolute as any state’s legitimacy can be. In this way the monarch, possessing authority to the extent that a state may have authority, is entirely adequate to its concept. Ultimately the seeming limitation to the monarch of the recognition of the sovereignty of the people amounts to nothing more than an internal check against logical inconsistency. The Spirit of the people must act in a way consistent with itself. In this way both the absolute nature and adequacy to the concept of the state are preserved in the monarch despite the existence of the sovereignty of the people.