The moral individual must be willing to identify personal morality with the morality of the community, or state. Key to that is finding one's "station" in the community, where one may "realize" one's moral self (117). One's station "teaches us to identify others and ourselves with the station we fill; to consider that as good, and by virtue of that to consider others and ourselves good too" (117). He (!) who can take his place in the world "ought not to be discontented" (117).

Bradley quotes Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind to the effect that the "realm of morality is nothing but the absolute spiritual unity of the essence of individuals, which exists in the independent reality of them" (120). For Bradley, the "true account of the state" is nothing else than "the moral organism, the real identity of might and right," which has the ability and option to "refute every other doctrine, and do with moral approval of all what the explicit theory of scarcely one will morally justify" (119).

This could be interpreted as an articulation of communitarian values wherein disinterested public service drives the engagement of social beings who make up the community. Now Bradley's community (or state) is presumed to be

Having cited the disconnect between the reality of imperfect community and the reality of self imperfectly integrated with it, Bradley articulates the need to balance right with responsibility (duty), both being necessary to the concept of the good and to affirmation of the moral universe, which indeed would not exist without both. Nevertheless, Bradley specifically says that the state is entitled to expect that citizens will do duty to the state even as they develop themselves individually within the protections given by the state, "for the state lives in its individuals; and . . . the individual lives in the state" (146). By extension, state good lives in individuals, and individual good lives in the state.

The facts of post-1876 history are far from confirming Bradley's vision of a state, despite his implication that real-world state goodness is imperfectly realized. Havel's discussion of state-enforced communitarianism aimed at programmatic disempowerment of individuals, which was the reality of experience in Eastern Europe for most of the twentieth century, shows that notions of hopeful, participatory, and obligatory subsumption of individual morality into the morality of the whole fall before facts that are far more than mere imperfection. Havel develops the view that some states (specifically in Eastern Europe) are not only "in a confused or rotten condition" but also