he whole. Class distinctions
are based on the division of labor demanded by the variant needs of men
(the agricultural, industrial, and thinking classes). Class and party honor
is, in Hegel's view, among the most essential supports of general morality.
Strange to say, he brings the administration of justice and the police into
the same sphere.

The state, the unity of the family and civil society, is the completed
actualization of freedom. Its organs are the political powers (which are
to be divided, but not to be made independent): the legislative power
determines the universal, the executive subsumes the particular thereunder,
the power of the prince combines both into personal unity. In the will of
the prince the state becomes subject. The perfect form of the state is
constitutional monarchy, its establishment the goal of history, which
Hegel, like Kant, considers chiefly from the political standpoint.

History is the development of the rational state; the world-spirit the
guiding force in this development; its instruments the spirits of the
nations and great men. A particular people is the expression of but one
determinate moment of the universal spirit; and when it has fulfilled
its commission it loses its legal warrant, and yields up its dominion to
another, now the only authorized one: the history of the world is the
judgment of the world, which is held over the nations. The world-historical
characters, also, are only the instruments of a higher power, the purposes
of which they execute while imagining that they are acting in their own
interests--their own deed is hidden from them, and is neither their purpose
nor their object. This should be called the cunning of reason, that it
makes the passions work in its service.

History is progress in the consciousness of freedom. At first one only
knows himself free, then several, finally all. This gives three chief
periods, or rather four world-kingdoms,--Oriental despotism, the Greek
(democratic) and the Roman (aristocratic) republic, and the Germanic
monarchy,--in which humanity passes through its several ages. Like the sun,
history moves from east to west. China and India have not advanced beyond
the preliminary stages of the state; the Chinese kingdom is a family state,
India a society of classes stiffened into castes. The Persian despotism is
the first true state, and this in the form of a conquering military state.
In the youth and manhood of humanity the soverei