Democratic Governments: Individual Will or Multiple Wills

Our recent discussion on whether Hegel's comment that governments must become individual in order to will one specific thing distilled into essentially (ha ha) this: in today's democratic governments, are there legitimately many wills in one government (as opposed to individual desires with diverse wants who alternately hold power)? My claim is that today's democratic governments are no longer what Hegel meant by "individual wills," and though they may tend that way during some periods of consolidation of power, they do not necessarily tend that way. What is more, we do not want them to become individual wills. That is, because they do not fit Hegel's individual will picture does not mean that they are not functioning governments, or at least, functioning near the level that we want them to be functional.

A little note in support of what I am trying to say, though it's a bit of a tangent, can be seen at Philosophy et cetera. The gist of this post is that institutions matter in terms of validating actions, which outside the institution might not be appropriate. I'd move that this is because the of will we recognize the institution to have. So a policeman can dole out justice and a vigilante cannot, just because we expect that the policeman is carrying out the will of the institution he represents and thus can be swayed away from his own opinion, should it deviate. A vigilante has no such institution whose will to be a part of. 

Small institutions like the police force can have a will (just like Hegel's government, but in a complete sense). Further, I think institutions of the government can have separate wills, and that indeed they must in order to act as real checks and balances. They must be able to at times pit their wills against one another in order to keep the government functioning (or, "functioning")  the way we want it to.

Absolute Freedom and Terror

III. Absolute Freedom and Terror (§582-595)

As the individual self-consciousness identifies with the whole, it understands itself as the universal. The individual will becomes the universal will. The goal of will is utility. The universal will, however, uses its utility because to will an action the will-er must be singular, unique. Even the government discovers this problem, as it must become individual to will one definite thing. As the universal will constantly dirempts into individual representations of it, class and function differences again arise, throwing Spirit back to the beginning of the dilemma. Again, the Spirit runs into a paradox of intention and the impossibility of carrying it out.

The Spirit leaves this realm of paradox for a world in which it is free: the realm of absolute freedom. The Spirit leaves behind the essential negativity of the universal will / individual action dichotomy, and enters a world in which it is sure of its will, divorced from specificity (therefore consequences).

A note on this section: Hegel's comments on the government necessarily becoming "individual" does not apply well to the kind of democracy we have today. Would Hegel say anything different now, with more evidence of functioning democracies, or would he say that the arguing voices in our government is exactly why we, as a country, can't will one definite thing?