In this individuality, as [an] absolute self and [as the] negativity of the individual person, the government is fulfilled as the peak of the totality. In war, the government, as self-subsisting, shakes up the organization of its classes – as well as the all-embracing systems of right, of personal security and property. It becomes apparent that all this vanishes in the power of the universal. What this transition involves in its concept is now at hand: the unsettling [of the entire system], its subjugation and coercion under pure power. No longer are work and advancement, property right and personal security, granted their absolute status; rather, [what we see is] injury done them. The individual’s rootedness in his own existence [to the exclusion of the public interest), this sundering of the totality into atoms, here suppresses itself. The individual has his absolute freedom [in his submission to the totality], and this itself is the strength of the government.
This immediate pure will is likewise self-conscious will. Government is this willing, the abstract universal willing of right, etc.; it is the resolution, the single will. The wisdom of government, primarily, is to suit these abstract elements to the classes in general, and in individual cases to make exceptions to the law. The implementation, as such, is not this lifeless doing. Rather, the individualization of the universal is at the same time the supersession (aufheben) of the universal, and, in individual cases, acting against it. Government is the spirit that is certain of itself, doing the right [although] independently of spirit, acting in immediacy.
Thus spirit is freedom fulfilled. Class, determinate character [now serve] as reality – and through it [an] all-embracing abstract system of individual subsistence. [There are] branches of powers – yet likewise the freedom of the subsistent as such [i.e., of the individual], and of his immediately conscious spirit.