The Philosophy of Law: Public Right, § 47: Dignities in the State and the Original Contract
All these three Powers in the State are DIGNITIES; and as necessarily arising out of the Idea of the State and essential generally to the foundation of its Constitution, they are to be regarded as POLITICAL Dignities. They imply the relation between a universal SOVEREIGN as Head of the State—which according to the laws of freedom can be none other than the People itself united into a Nation—and the mass of the individuals of the Nation as SUBJECTS. The former member of the relation is the riding Power, whose function is to govern (imperans); the latter is the ruled Constituents of the State, whose function is to obey (sulditi).
The act by which a People is represented as constituting itself into a State, is termed THE ORIGINAL CONTRACT. This is properly only an outward mode of representing the idea by which the rightfulness of the process of organizing the Constitution, may be made conceivable. According to this representation, all and each of the people give up their external Freedom in order to receive it immediately again as Members of a Common wealth. The Commonwealth is the people viewed as united altogether into a State. And thus it is not to be said that the individual in the State has sacrificed a part of his inborn external Freedom for a particular purpose; but he has abandoned his wild lawless Freedom wholly, in order to find all his proper Freedom again entire and undiminished, but in the form of a regulated order of dependence, that is, in a Civil state regulated by laws of right. This relation of Dependence thus arises out of his own regulative law-giving Will.