The countless activities of society fall into large groups. People with similar work, similar needs and similar culture form an estate.

How important is this?

Very important. The family is the first basis of the state. The estates are the second. For in them, self-seeking joins with the universal. Whoever belongs to an estate no longer cares only for himself. He belongs to a larger whole.

Summary: The activities of society fall into estates. After the family, they are the second basis of the state. In them, self-seeking joins with the universal.

§ 527. 3. But the concrete division of the universal resources — which is likewise a universal business — into the particular masses, determined according to the moments of the concept, which possess a distinctive basis of subsistence and, in connection with this, corresponding modes of labor, of needs and of the means of their satisfaction, and further of ends and interests as well as of cultivation and habituation of mind, constitutes the difference of the estates. – Individuals allot themselves to them according to natural talent, skill, choice, and chance. Belonging to such a determinate, fixed sphere, they have their actual existence, which as existence is essentially a particular one, and within it their ethical life as rectitude, their being-recognized and their honor. Where civil society, and with it the state, is present, the estates enter in their difference; for the universal substance, as living, exists only insofar as it organically particularizes itself; the history of constitutions is the history of the formation of these estates, of the legal relations of individuals to them, and of their relations to one another and to their center point.

§ 527. But the concrete division of the universal resources — which is likewise a universal business — into the particular masses, determined according to the moments of the concept, which form a particular basis of subsistence and, in connection with this, corresponding modes of labor, of the means of satisfying needs, and further of ends and interests as well as of cultivation and habituation of mind, constitutes the difference of the estates. – Individuals allot themselves to them according to natural talent, skill, choice, and chance. Belonging to such a determinate, fixed sphere, they have their essential existence — which is only as something particular — and within it their ethical life as rectitude, their being-recognized, and their honor.

Where civil society, and with it the state, is present, the estates enter in their difference; the history of constitutions is the history of the formation of these estates, of the legal relations of individuals to them, and of their relations to one another and to their center point.

§ 433. The universal work, which is the substance itself, particularizes itself and its labor into the differences that are the estates: the universal one, the activation of the substance as such; the particular one, whose work is the needs of particular determinate being and whose proximate end is particular subjectivity, but whose attainment presupposes the labor of all the others, and likewise impinges upon it. The estate of singularity is individuality, insofar as it is, for itself, a totality — a whole that is indeed natural, but that has likewise been raised into ethical life through spirituality — the family.