250. In its substantive family life and life of nature the agricultural class contains directly the concrete universal in which it lives. The universal class, again, has this universal as an independent end of its activity, and as its ground and basis. The middle or commercial class is essentially engaged with the particular, and hence its peculiar province is the corporation.
251. The work of the civic community spreads in different directions in obedience to the nature of its particularity. Since the implicit equality, contained in particularity, is here realized as the common purpose of an association, the particular and self-seeking end becomes something actively universal. Each member of the civic community is with his special talent a member of the corporation. The universal aim of the corporation is accordingly quite concrete, and has no wider application than what lies in trade and its distinctive interests.
252. In keeping with this view, the corporation, under the oversight of the public authority, has the right to look after its own clearly-defined interests, according to the objective qualifications of skill and rectitude to adopt members, whose number is determined by the general system, to make provision for its adherents against fortuitous occurrences, and to foster the capacity necessary in any one desiring to become a member. In general it must stand to its members as a second family, a position which remains more indefinite than the family relation, because the general civic community is at a farther remove from indi viduals and their special needs.
Note.— The tradesman is different from the day-labourer, as well as from him who is ready for any casual employment. The trader, be he employer or employee, is a member of an association, not for mere accidental gain but for the whole circuit of gain, or the universal involved in his particular maintenance. The privileges, which are rights of a corporate branch of the civic community, are not the same as special privileges in the etymological sense of the term. Special privileges are haphazard exceptions to a general law, but the other privileges are legal phases of the particularity of an essential branch of the community.
253. The corporation provides for the family a basis and steady means (§170), by securing for it a subsistence varying according to capacity. Moreover, both security and capacity are in the corporation publicly recognized. Hence, the member of a corporation does not need to certify his capacity or the reality of his regular income to any larger outside organization. It is also recognized that he belongs to and has active interest in a whole, whose aim is to promote the welfare of society in general. Thus, in his class he has honour.
Note.—The corporation, in making secure the means of the family, corresponds to agriculture and private property in another sphere (§203, note).—When it is complained that the luxury and extravagance of the commercial class give rise to paupers (§244), it must not be overlooked that these conditions have an ethical or social basis in such causes as the increasingly mechanical nature of work. If the individual is not a member of an authorized corporation, and no combination can be a corporation unless it is authorized, he has no class-honour. By limiting himself to the self-seeking side of trade and his own subsistence and enjoyments, he loses standing. He perhaps seeks, in that case, to obtain recognition by displaying his success in his trade; but his display ha s no limit, because he has no desire to live in a way becoming his class. Indeed, he has no class at all, since only what is of general purport really exists in a civic community, and can be established and recognized. As he has no class, he has not the more universal life characteristic of the class.—In the corporation the assistance received by poverty loses its lawless character, and the humiliation wrongly associated with it. The opulent, by performing their duty to their associates, lose their pride, and cease to stir up envy in others. Integrity receives its due honour and recognition.
254. The corporation sets a limit to the so-called natural right to make acquisitions by the exercise of any skill, only so far as the limit is a rational one. This right is thus freed from mere opinion and random influences, and from danger to itself and others. In this way it wins recognition and an assured place, and is exalted to the level of a conscious effort to attain a common purpose.
255. As the family was the first, so the corporation, grounded upon the civic community, constitutes the second ethical root or basis of the state. The family contains the elements of subjective particularity and objective universality in substantive unity. Then, in the civic community, these elements are in the first instance dissociated and become on the one side a particularity of want and satisfaction, which is turned back into itself, and on the other side abstract legal universality. The corporation joins these two in an internal way, so that particular wellbeing exists and is realized as a right.
Note.— Sanctity in the marriage tie and honour in the corporation are the points which the disorganizing forces of the civic community assail.
Addition.— In modern times the corporation has been superseded, with the intention that the individual should care for himself. Grant that the intention is wise, yet the obligation of the individual to procure his own livelihood is not by the corporation altered. In our modern states the citizens participate only slightly in the general business. It is, however, needful to provide the ethical man with a universal activity, one above his private ends. This universal, with which the modern state does not always supply him, is given by the corporation. We have already seen that the individual, while maintaining himself in the civic community, acts also for others. But this unconscious necessity is not enough. It is in the corporation that a conscious and reflective ethical reality is first reached. The superintendence cf the state is higher, it is true, and must be given an upper place; otherwise the corporation would become fossilized; it would waste itself upon itself, and be reduced to the level of a wretched club. But the corporation is not in its absolute nature a secret society, but rather the socializing of a trade, which without it would stand in isolation. It takes the trade up into a circle, in which it secures strength and honour.
256. The limited and finite end of the corporation has its truth in the absolutely universal end and the absolute actuality of this end. This actualized end is also the truth of the division involved in the external system of police, which is merely a relative identity of the divided elements. Thus, the sphere of the civic community passes into the state.
Note.— City and country are the two as yet ideal constituents, out of which the state proceeds. The city is the seat of the civic society, and of the reflection which goes into itself and causes separation. The country is the seat of the ethical, which rests upon nature. The one comprises the individuals, who gain their livelihood by virtue of their relation to other persons possessed of rights. The other comprises the family. The state is the true meaning and ground of both.
The development of simple ethical observance into the dismemberment marking the civic community, and then forward into the state, which is shown to be the true foundation of these more abstract phases, is the only scientific proof of the conception of the state.—Although in the course of the scientific exposition the state has the appearance of a result, it is in reality the true foundation and cause. This appearance and its process are provisional, and must now be replaced by the state in its direct existence. In actual fact the state is in general primary. Within it the family grows into the civic community, the idea of the state being that which sunders itself into these two elements. In the development of the civic community the ethical substance reaches its infinite form, which contains the following elements:—(1) infinite differentiation even to the point at which consciousness as it is in itself exists for itself, and (2) the form of universality, which in civilization is the form of thought, that form by which spirit is itself in its laws and institutions. They are its thought will, and it and they together become objective and real in an organic whole.