Hegel explained:
“The state is … the ultimate end which has the highest right against the individual, whose highest duty is to be a member of the state …
The nation state … is therefore the absolute power on earth. A single person, it hardly needs saying, is something subordinate.”
Under Hegel’s system, the “general will” is determine by the ruler. In Philosophy of History (Jacob Loewenberg, ed., Hegel: Selections, New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1929, p. 398), he wrote:
“… It is not the isolated will of individuals that prevails;
individual pretensions are relinquished, and the general will is the essential bond of political union …
… The origin of a state involves imperious lordship on the one hand, instinctive submission on the other.
Obedience — lordly power, and the fear inspired by a ruler.”