conscious ranking under the highest purpose, to which the whole relationship is ultimately subordinate, is not so necessary.
In what manner the relation between superiority and subordination is modified by the fact that in its entirety it is subsidiary to an ideal purpose, depends upon the question, is the person in the superior station the representative of the higher objective principle as against the subordinate, or have they a similar relation to this principle, so that the gradation between them is a matter of technique and organization? The former case occurs in the relation of an official to the public; the second in his relation to subordinate officials. In the former instance the official represents the whole idea and power of the state over against the citizen, who by transgression of law, may have placed himself outside of normal civic relations. The power which the official exercises flows from that higher civic principle to which, to be sure, the citizen belongs, yet for the moment this power confronts the latter as an external constraint, and asserts itself as superior to him. In the relation of the higher to the lower official on the other hand, the civic principle, the superior idea, is alike present in both. The one represents this idea as well as the other. Superiority and subordination between them are not produced by the antithesis of two principles, but by organization within one and the same principle.
These two forms of superiority and subordination dominated by a higher principle, with their very different consequences, emerge in the most various social spheres and with the most manifold complications. In all the countless cases in which an objective idea, an abstract unity, manifests itself in hierarchical organization, this double relationship of the individual is to be found. He is clothed with the dignity and importance of that principle, and he therewith enters into a relationship of superiority to all those over whom the principle has power. This occurs most obviously in the case of civic officials, who by no means owe their superiority over the citizens to the power of their own personality, but only to that of the principle of which they are the exponents. The same is often the case with a member of a
