The second estate works up the materials of nature. It lives from its labor, its understanding and its exchange with others. What it has, it owes above all to itself.

Three groups:

The craftsman works to order, for single customers. A tailor sews a suit to measure.

The manufacturer produces goods in large amounts, for many people he does not know.

The merchant exchanges goods. He works above all with money. Money contains the value of all goods.

Freedom and the city:

Whoever stands on his own like this gains a strong sense of self. He calls for right and order. That is why the sense of freedom arose above all in the cities.

The farmer, by contrast, receives his goods from nature. He is used to dependence. He more readily puts up with whatever comes. So the first estate leans more toward submission. The second leans more toward freedom.

Summary: The estate of trade lives from its own labor, understanding and exchange. It divides into craft, factory and commerce. In this estate, in the cities, the sense of freedom grew.

There must also be a reflex of the same in his empirical consciousness, and such a reflex must constitute the ethical nature of the second estate, which is in fixed reality, in possession and property, and outside of valor. It is this reflex of ethical life, then, for which the ordinary meaning of morality can more or less fit; the formal indifference-positing of the determinacies of the relationship, that is, the ethical life of the bourgeois or of the private person, for whom the difference of relationships is fixed, and who depends on them and is in them.