[1] The term “_Stände_” it must be remembered, has for a German the association of elements of the representative assembly; “états”, estates of the realm.
[2] Cf. the English workman’s phrase, “a good tradesman,” _i.e._ a competent member of his trade.
If the family is the first basis of the State, the classes or estates are the second. The Corporation or Trade Society is a second family to its members. It is the very root of ethical connection between the private and the general [1] interest, and the State should see to it that this root holds as strongly as possible. [2]
[1] “We can only say that these men, if they leave us, will bitterly regret it. ... The man who is so unselfish as to care nothing for himself or his fellow-men will soon find himself, as years creep over him, and grey hairs and glasses, completely cut out.”--“Branch Trade Report (Birmingham) to National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, January, 1896.”
[2] Sects. 201 and 255. I omit Hegel’s characterisation of the classes, which has a good deal in common with theories which represent occupations as determining character. The contrast between agricultural and industrial or commercial life, between country and town, is of great importance in his view. He almost seems to confine Bourgeois industrialism as such to the life of town-dwellers; though, again, ultimately the whole division into classes is characteristic of Bourgeois Society (cf. sects. 256 and 305).
“If,” Hegel writes, [1] “in recent days the “Corporation has been abolished, this has the significance { 280} that the individual ought to provide for himself. This may be admitted; but the corporation did not alter the individual’s obligation to earn his livelihood. In our modern States the citizens have only a limited share in the universal business of the State; but it is necessary to permit the ethical human being a universal activity over and above his private end. This universal, which the modern State does not always provide for him, he finds in the Corporation. We saw before that the individual providing for himself in the Bourgeois Society also acts for others. But this unconscious necessity is not enough; it needs the Corporation to bring it to a conscious and thoughtful social ethics. Of course the Corporation needs the higher superintendence of the State, or it would ossify, shrink into its shell, and be degraded into a wretched guild. But in and for itself the Corporation is no closed guild; it is rather the bringing of an isolated trade into an ethical connection, and its admission into a sphere in which it wins strength and honour.” [2]