Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 483]

|483| the knights, the free men, monasteries, the lords as well as those engaged in trade and crafts formed themselves, against this condition of disruption, into fellowships and corporations, which then wore away against one another until they found a tolerable existence side by side. Because the supreme power of the state, in whose impotence precisely the need of those corporations lay, was in this something so loose, these partial commonwealths developed their modes of association all the more firmly, more exactly, indeed even painfully, to a wholly constricting formalism and guild spirit, which through its aristocratism became obstructive and dangerous to the formation of the power of the state. After, in the most recent times, the formation of the higher powers of the state has perfected itself, those subordinate guild circles and communities have been dissolved, or at least deprived of their political place and relation to the inner right of the state. It would now, however, be time again, as one has hitherto organised chiefly in the spheres of the higher authorities of the state, to bring the lower spheres also back to a political order and honour, and, purified of privileges and wrongs, to fit them into the state as an organic formation. A living connection is only in an articulated whole whose parts themselves form particular, subordinate circles. To obtain such a whole, however, the French abstractions of mere number and quantum of property must at last be abandoned, at least no longer made the principal determination and set up primarily as the sole conditions of one of the most important political functions. Such atomistic principles are, in politics as in science, the deadening of all rational concept, articulation and liveliness.

It may also be recalled that the exercise of such a wholly isolated calling as that of being an elector easily loses its interest in a short time, and in general depends on contingent disposition and momentary pleasure.

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