[1] I may refer to _The Standard of Life_, by H. Bosanquet, essay on “_Klassenkampf_”.
Therefore, as Hegel saw, but in more ways than he saw, the system of Bourgeois Society--the economic and industrial world--is not a separate reality, but only an appearance within a larger system. The member of it is not so detached as he may seem, or think. He is within, and sustained by, the general life of the State, as the aims which are his motives in “business” or industry are within { 276} and inseparable from the whole structure of his intelligence.
Thus, the world of Bourgeois Society--a world, on the whole, of cash nexus and mere protection by the State--has a structure or tendency of its own which brings it back by necessary steps to connection with the State proper or explicit and determinate social unity. It is, we must observe, posterior to the State in time. It is only within the State proper, and resting on its solid power, that such a world as that of Bourgeois Society could arise or be conceivable. Its priority to the State is, like that of the family, the priority of comparative narrowness or simplicity, of dealing with fewer factors, and of representing human nature in a more special, though necessary, aspect. And for this very reason it could not exist by itself. It has not the many-sided vitality indispensable to anything which is to hold its own in the actual world.
The working of the Bourgeois Society, then, exhibits an inevitable connection with the State proper, and, so to speak, leads up to it.
In the first place, the economic world implies the administration of justice. In this, as involving a developed system of civilised law, there is an advance on the “letter of the law” in its crudest and most barbarous acceptation. The system of law of a modern State is, and still more ought to be, [1] a fairly reasonable and intelligible definition of the rights and relations of persons. By this determination the economic system of particular wants and services enters upon a first { 277} approximation, as it were, to a unity of principle. The law only professes, indeed, to _protect_ property and exchange, but in doing so it unavoidably recognises that the particular want has a general bearing; for the developed system of law only comes into existence to enable wants to be supplied, and takes its definite shape according to the system of wants. We may illustrate this first approximation to universality, which law confers upon the particulars of private interest, by a suggestive view which M. Durkheim has propounded. [2] He has pointed out that the current formula for social change, “from status to contract,” has a subtler significance than is apt to be recognised. For contract is not really indeterminate, as if it arose _in vacuo_ without a precedent. It runs in forms determined by social experience through law and custom; and thus the law, which professedly aims at protecting property and exchange, necessarily regulates them by the modes in which it chooses to protect them.