Stanisław Kozyr-Kowalski 

State Officialdom as a Modern Social Estate

Author transforms Hegelian analysis of a state official's estate (Stand) into an outline of theory concerning modern bureaucratic and state organisations. Hegel's categories have been elaborated by their confrontation with modern sociology and empirical reality. Thus Hegelianism has become Neo-Hegelianism. Officialdom is regarded in the treatise as a part of modern estate structure which is qualitatively different from estates in the archaic sense and from classes of modern societies. The main features of social position and estate ethos of officialdom have been analysed. Author emphasises an important role played by that social estate in protecting civil society from the non-democratic and openly partial class state. State officials contribute to overcoming real hired labour in all fields of economic and social life. In the paper Hegel's concepts of "non-real state officials": fahrende Ritter (knights - errant) and Staatsbedienten (lackeys of state, state's valets) have been transformed into theoretical categories. The paper demonstrates that K. R. Popper's opinion that Hegel was a theoretician of totalitarianism and an enemy of open society is wrong.. The article points out that young Marx’ valuable and profound remarks on bureaucracy can not be regarded as a good critique of Hegel's approach to rationalism of bureaucratic organisation. Marx overlooked that Hegelian categories and theses were a set of ideal types.

Contents

Hegel and Sociology

Officials are neither servants of state nor servants of the people

Die bü rgliche Gesellschaft, burgess society and civil society

Officials, macroestates and microestates of burgess society and state

Officials and the middle estate

Estates in archaic and modern sense

Officialdom as an estate of the educated persons

Truth as a professional skill

Ways of transforming “real state” into “state of bad existence”

Officials and hired work

Estate esteem of officialdom

Officials’ estate and privatisation of offices and public functions

Officialdom as an estate of extraclass state

Knight - errant as a type of official

Lackey of state as a type of official.

Officials and the people

Officials and public opinion

Is it possible to deceive the people?

Idea of official’s estate and ideal type of bureaucracy

Published in Polish as Urzędnicy państwa jako stan społeczny, [in] Roman Kozłowski (ed.), Hegel a współczesność, 1997, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk, pp. 100-131.