is the formal unity, or the right, that is possible within it; over both of which stands the third, as the absolute, or the ethical; but the reality of the sphere of relative unity, or of the practical and juridical, is constituted, within the system of its totality, as its own estate. Thus, according to the absolute necessity of the ethical, two estates are formed: the one, as the estate of the free, is the individual of absolute ethical life, whose organs are the individual human beings; and this, considered from the side of its indifference, is the absolute living spirit, [and] considered from the side of its objectivity, is the living movement and the divine self-enjoyment of this whole in the totality of individuals as its organs and members; whose formal or negative side, however, must likewise be the absolute – namely labor that is directed not at the annihilation of individual determinacies but at death, and whose product is likewise not something individual but the being and preservation of the whole of the ethical organization. To this estate Aristotle assigns as its business that for which the Greeks had the name politevein, which expresses living in and with and for one’s people, leading a universal life belonging wholly to the public; – or philosophizing; which two occupations Plato, in accordance with his higher vitality, wishes to see not kept apart but simply bound together. – Then [there is] an estate of the unfree, which subsists in the difference of need and labor, and in the right and justice of possession and property; whose labor is directed at particularity, and thus does not involve the danger of death. To this must be reckoned the third estate, which, in the crudeness of its non-formative labor, has to do only with the earth as its element, and whose labor has before it the whole of need in the immediate object without intermediate links, and is thus itself a solid totality and indifference, like an element; and which, standing outside the differentiation belonging to the understanding of the second estate, thereby preserves its bodies and its spirit in the possibility of formal absolute ethical life, of courage and of a violent death, and is thus able to augment the first estate in respect of mass and elemental essence. These two estates relieve the first of the relation in which reality, partly in its resting and partly in its active relation, is fixed as possession and property and as labor – in the manner in which, among modern peoples, in a way for the time being confined to this, the acquiring class has gradually ceased to perform military service, and courage has formed itself, more purified, into a particular estate, which is relieved of that business of acquisition, and to which possession and property are at least something contingent. The constitution of that second estate, as to its matter, Plato determines thus: that the kingly art does not allow those who are drawn to brave and disciplined custom, and whom something else besides drives to virtue, to become partakers

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