System of Ethical Life

[p. 355]

|355| the rich man is immediately compelled [to diminish] the relation of lordship, and even the suspicion of it, by letting others share⁵⁾ more universally in it, and external inequality diminishes both externally and in that the infinite does not throw itself upon determinacy but exists as living activity, and thus the drive towards infinite wealth is itself rooted out.

5) Alongside and further down in the margin: Athenian law, of the defraying of the festivities by the richest man of the quarter.

This constitution belongs more to the nature of the estate itself and its organic essence, not to the government; to the latter belong the external limitations. But this is the particular: the care for the subsistence of the singular estates within this sphere, through resisting the infinite fluctuation in the value of things. But the government, as the universal, itself has universal needs; first, in general, for the first estate, withdrawn from property and acquisition, which is in constant and absolute universal neediness; then for the formally universal estate, namely for that which in the other estates is the organ of government and works merely in the universal; finally for the need of the universal, of the whole people as such, e.g. its dwellings etc., i.e. its temples, streets etc.

The government must acquire these needs for itself; its labour, however, can be none other than that it either immediately takes possession of the ripe fruits without labour, or itself labours and acquires. The latter, since it is contrary to the nature of the universal to be in the particular, as the government here is something formally universal, can only be a possessing and a letting out of this possession; so that immediate acquiring and labouring do not fall to it, but it comes to it in the form of benefit, of result, of the universal. [As concerns] the former, however, the taking possession of the ripe fruits, these ripe fruits are the finished labour, and, as universal, money, or the most universal needs; they are themselves a possession of singular individuals, and the sublating of this possession must have the form of formal universality, or of justice.

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