make claims upon the feelings, thoughts, and relations all at once. A life insists on being, and on meaning something as well, and the confusion of our ideas is made worse confounded by the fact that, to-day, as in Hellenistic times, political parties, in their desire to ameliorate the upkeep-standards of certain economic groups, have elevated these groups to the dignity of a political Estate, as Marx, for instance, elevated the class of factory-workers.
Confusion — for the first and genuine Estate is nobility. From it the officer and the judge and all concerned in the highest duties of government and administration are direct derivatives. They are Estate-like formations that mean something. So, too, the body of scholars and scientists belongs to the priesthood[1] and has a very sharply definite kind of class-exclusiveness. But the grand symbolism of the Estates goes out with castle and cathedral. The Tiers, already, is the Non-Estate, the remainder, a miscellaneous and manifold congeries, which means very little as such save in the moments of political protest, so that the importance it creates for itself is a party importance. The individual is conscious of himself not as a bourgeois, but because he is a "liberal" and thus part and parcel of a great thing, not indeed as representing it in his person, but as adhering to it from conviction. In consequence of this weakness of its social "form," the economic "form" of the bourgeoisie becomes all the more relatively conspicuous in its callings, guilds and unions. In the cities, at any rate, a man is primarily designated according to the way in which he makes his living.
Economically, the first (and anciently almost the only) mode of life is that of the peasant,[2] which is pure production, and therefore the pre-condition of every other mode. Even the primary Estates, too, in early times, base their way of life entirely upon hunting, stock-keeping, and agricultural landowning, and even in Late periods land is regarded by nobles and priests as the only truly honourable kind of property. In opposition to it stands trade, the mode of the acquisitive middleman or intervener,[3] powerful out of all proportion to its numbers, already indispensable even in quite early conditions — a refined parasitism, completely unproductive and, therefore, land-alien and far-ranging, "free," and unhampered spiritually, too, by the ethic and the practice of the countryside, a life sustaining itself on another life. Between the two, now, a third kind of economy, the preparatory economy of technics, grows up in numberless crafts, industries, and callings, which creatively apply reflections upon
- ↑ Including the medical profession, which indeed is indistinguishable in primitive times from the priests and magicians.
- ↑ Herdsmen, fishermen, and hunters included. There is, moreover, a strange and very profound relation between peasant and miner, evidenced in ancient sagas and rites. The metals are coaxed out of the shaft as the corn out of the earth, and the game out of the thicket. And for the real miner even metal is something that lives and grows.
- ↑ This is true from the earliest sea-voyaging to the Bourse of the world-city, and all traffic, whether by river, road, or rail belongs with it.
