The interface of the universal: On Hegel’s concept of the police

The article provides a tentative reading of Hegel’s police as a concept that constitutes a crucial test for the rationality of Hegel’s state and that actually played a very important role in the formation of his model of rationality. It starts by considering some significant changes in Hegel’s approach to the subject in the Jena period, especially in reference to Fichte and Spinoza; then, it presents Hegel’s conception of the police as the interface of the universal in his mature political philosophy, together with his treatment of the disturbing problem of poverty and the rabble; and to conclude, it adds some general remarks on Hegel’s police, then and now. In the Elements of Philosophy of Right, Hegel closes his highly original treatment of civil society with a section called “Police and Corporation.” But unlike the corporation, which has managed to gain substantive scholarly attention in recent years, Hegel’s conception of the police is rarely discussed. Two reasons can be adduced to explain this strange absence. On the one hand, and despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Hegel is still often associated with the repressive state he allegedly supported in the case of Prussia. Thus, while the recent political developments helped to renew genuine interest in his corporations, designed, precisely, to curb the disintegrative tendencies of modern markets, the very fact that he accorded a prominent place in his state to the police seems to validate the perception of him as an enemy of the open society. On the other hand, and in accordance with the practice of his time, Hegel used the term “police” in a much wider sense than is common today. Nowadays we tend to forget that even for early Smith, for instance, police included everything relating to “the opulence of the state” (Smith 1896: 3), and that his famous example of the pin-factory was first presented under the heading of “police.” What is more, since the semantic shift in this case was so significant, it was a longstanding habit to translate Hegel’s “Polizey” as “public authority,” so that at least in English there was no Hegel’s police to examine at all.