ABSTRACT
An organic relation describes a set of objects integrated in such a way that they are all bound together by a common teleology, each animated by the desire to take part in a whole that has a continuity that transcends that of the finite parts. A mechanism, by contrast, is a set of objects organized by external force, atomistic individuals that only cohere together in order to preserve themselves, while remaining indifferent to the broader context of the their relations. These concepts, as was shown in the last two chapters, describe two different ways of conceiving of society. It would seem, at least in the texts that we have examined so far, that for Hegel and the Romantics organism represents the regulative ideal for understanding how a society should be organized if it is to be a sustainable whole in which individuals find agency and meaning, while mechanism represents a dangerous divergence from such a form of organization. In what follows I will demonstrate, however, that during his Jena political writings Hegel breaks with this way of opposing the mechanistic and organic aspects of society, and comes to see the need for a kind of dialectical integration of these concepts, a way of thinking modern society as an organism that does not exclude but integrates those aspects of it that tend towards mechanism. This transformation in his thinking corresponds to the development of dialectical method, as well as to Hegel’s insight into the inherent superiority of modern civil society, with its emphasis on individual, bourgeois rights, over the ancient polis, with its subjugation of labor to a ‘free’ class.
