253

In the corporation, the family has not only its firm ground, as the securing of its subsistence conditioned by qualification, a firm resource (§ 170), but both are also recognized, so that the member of a corporation has no need to demonstrate, through any further external declarations, his competence and his orderly livelihood and progress — that he is something. It is likewise recognized that he belongs to a whole that is itself a member of the universal society, and that he has interest and exertions for the less self-interested purpose of this whole; he thus has, in his estate, his honour.

|238| The institution of the corporation corresponds, through its securing of resources, to the introduction of agriculture and private property in another sphere (§ 203, Remark). — If complaints are to be raised about the luxury and extravagance of the trading classes, with which the production of the rabble (§ 244) is connected, then, alongside the other causes (for example, labour’s becoming ever more mechanical), the ethical ground, as it lies in what has been said above, is not to be overlooked. Without being a member of an authorized corporation (and it is only as authorized that something held in common is a corporation), the individual is without the honour of an estate; through his isolation, he is reduced to the self-seeking side of his trade, and his subsistence and enjoyment have nothing settled about them. He will thus seek to attain his recognition through external demonstrations of his success in his trade — demonstrations that are unbounded, because living in a manner appropriate to his estate does not take place, since the estate does not [truly] exist — for only what is held in common exists, in civil society, when it is legally constituted and recognized — and thus no more universal mode of life appropriate to him is formed either. — In the corporation, the help that poverty receives loses its contingent character, as well as its wrongfully humiliating character, and wealth, in its duty toward its association, loses the arrogance, and the envy, that it can arouse — the former in its possessor, the latter in others; rectitude thereby receives its true recognition and honour.