Disputes between states can have as their object any particular aspect of their relationship; for such disputes, too, the particular part devoted to the defense of the state has its principal function. But insofar as the state as such, its independence, is placed in danger, duty calls upon all its citizens to its defense. When the whole has thus become a power and is torn out of its inner life, in itself, and directed outward, the war of defense passes over into a war of conquest.

That the armed power of the state, a standing army, and the function assigned to the particular business of its defense, become an estate, is the same necessity by which the other particular moments, interests, and occupations become marriage, or the estates of trade, of the civil service, of business, and so forth. The reasoning that shuttles back and forth among grounds indulges in considerations of the greater advantages or the greater disadvantages of introducing standing armies, and opinion readily decides in favor of the latter, because the concept of the matter is harder to grasp than isolated and external aspects, and further because the interests and purposes of particularity (the costs, with their consequences, greater taxes, and so forth) are rated more highly in the consciousness of civil society than what is necessary in and for itself, which in this way counts merely as a means for those particular ends.