The state is not ‘abolished’: it withers away.
Engels, Anti-Dühring

The more the social bond is stretched the slacker it becomes.
Rousseau, The Social Contract

In an earlier article I argued that the contemporary crisis of political agency reflects the division between the aggregated outcomes of individual choice and the decisions of the collective will.footnote¹ Yet the contraction of political possibility to the invisible hand of the market and populist reaction does not restrict individual actors to one or the other. It is precisely because different types of agency are not exclusive to particular actors that the cycle of unintended effect and ineffectual intent is so obvious. Appealing to the agency of the multitude serves only to reinforce the divide, for the multitude acts either as one or as many, and becomes a political agent either through the unity of the will or through the workings of the invisible hand. Starting with the multitude, as early modern political theory invariably did (and as Negri, Hardt, and Virno now propose to do once more), results in a dichotomy: general will or general intellect, the political or the social, state or society.

To these divisions, the Hegelian theory of the state offers a resolution. Hegel consciously worked with a double inheritance. On one hand, a conception of the state as the united will of the multitude, on the other, an account of civil society in which society is governed not by the will, but the rationality of the invisible hand. Though versions of the former were at least as old as Cicero, Hegel gave Rousseau the credit ‘for adducing the will as the principle of the state’. However, he complained (somewhat unfairly) that Rousseau ‘takes the will only in a determinate form as the individual will, and he regards the rational will not as the absolutely rational element in the will, but only as a “general” will which proceeds out of this individual will as out of a conscious will.’ Rousseau had undermined ‘the divine principle of the state’ by reducing ‘the union of individuals in the state to a contract and therefore to something based on their arbitrary wills’. The consequences could be seen in the French Revolution, which embodied only the arbitrary will and not the rational, and so ended in the ‘maximum of frightfulness and terror’.footnote²

Hegel’s vision of civil society, and the role of the invisible hand of the market within it, is derived from Ferguson and Smith.footnote³ In the course of achieving selfish ends, ‘there is formed a system of complete interdependence, wherein the livelihood, happiness, and legal status of one man is interwoven with the livelihood, happiness, and rights of all’.footnote⁴ Although ‘each individual is his own end, and all else means nothing to him . . . he cannot accomplish the full extent of his ends without reference to others’. And so ‘through its reference to others, the particular end takes on the form of universality, and gains satisfaction by simultaneously satisfying the welfare of others’.footnote⁵ However, for Hegel, civil society too has its limitations. Because its rationality relies upon the mechanism of the invisible hand, particularity (the individual agent) and universality (the product of the invisible hand) remain disjoined: ‘Unity is present here not as freedom but as necessity, since it is by compulsion that the particular rises to the form of universality’.footnote⁶

In Hegel’s account, the limitation inherent in the rationality of the invisible hand is its unintended, unwilled emergence, while the problem with the unity of the will is its arbitrary nature and potentially destructive consequences. Both are overcome in the fusion of the two in the state. According to Hegel, it is through the invisible hand that individuals become aware of their own unity. When men are interdependent and ‘reciprocally related to one another in their work and the satisfaction of their needs, subjective self-seeking turns into a contribution to the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else’. In this way, ‘self-seeking turns into the mediation of the particular through the universal’.footnote⁷ Thanks to the invisible hand, ‘If I further my ends, I further the ends of the universal, and this in turn furthers my end’.footnote⁸

Because ‘a particular end . . . is attained in the simultaneous attainment of the welfare of others’ it follows that ‘individuals can attain their ends only in so far as they themselves determine their knowing, willing, and acting in a universal way’.footnote⁹ So when, through the invisible hand, particular self-consciousness is raised to consciousness of its universality, its knowing and willing becomes ‘formal freedom and formal universality’ insofar as its universality is no longer that of necessity but of a will conscious of its universality: