assembled states-general against the autocracy of a prince. Outside politics — that is, socially — the plebs, as a unit distinguished from nobility and priesthood, has no existence, but falls apart at once into special callings that are perfectly distinct in interests. It is a Party, and what it stands for as such is freedom in the urban sense of the word. The fact emerges still more distinctly from the success which the Roman land-nobility won immediately afterwards, in adding sixteen country tribes, designated by family names and unchallengeably controlled by themselves, to the four urban tribes that stood for bourgeoisie proper — namely, money and mind. Not until the great social conflict during the Samnite wars (contemporary with Alexander, and corresponding exactly to the French Revolution), which ended with the Lex Hortensia of 287, was the status-idea legally abolished and the history of the symbolic Estates closed. The Plebs became the Populus Romanus in the same way as in 1789 the "Tiers État" constituted itself the Nation. From this point on, in every Culture, it is something fundamentally different that happens under the label of social conflict.
The nobility of every Springtime had been the Estate in the most primary sense, history become flesh, race at highest potential. The priesthood was its counter-estate, saying no wherever nobility said yes and thus displaying the other side of life in a grand symbol.
The Third Estate, without proper inward unity, was the non-estate — the protest, in estate-form, against the existence of estates; not against this or that estate, but against the symbolic view of life in general. It rejects all differences not justified by reason or practically useful. And yet it does mean something itself, and means it very distinctly — the city-life as estate in contradistinction to that of the country, freedom as a condition in contrast to attachment. But, looked at from within its own field, it is by no means the unclassified residue that it appears in the eyes of the primary estates. The bourgeoisie has definite limits; it belongs to the Culture; it embraces, in the best sense, all who adhere to it, and under the name of people, populus, demos, rallies nobility and priesthood, money and mind, craftsman and wage-earner, as constituents of itself.
This is the idea that Civilization finds prevailing when it comes on the scene, and this is what it destroys by its notion of the Fourth Estate, the Mass, which rejects the Culture and its matured forms, lock, stock, and barrel. It is the absolute of formlessness, persecuting with its hate every sort of form, every distinction of rank, the orderliness of property, the orderliness of knowledge. It is the new nomadism of the Cosmopolis,[1] for which slaves and barbarians in the Classical world, Sudras in the Indian, and in general anything and everything that is merely human, provide an undifferentiated floating something that falls apart the moment it is born, that recognizes no past and possesses no future. Thus the Fourth Estate becomes the expression of the passing of a history over into the historyless. The mass is the end, the radical nullity.
- ↑ Pp. 102, et seq.
