That which may be called the economic life of the plant is accomplished on and in it without its being itself anything but the theatre and will-less object of a natural process.[855] This element underlies the economy of the human body also, still unalterably vegetal and dreamy, pursuing its will-less (in this respect almost alien) existence in the shape of the circulatory organs. But when we come to the animal body freely mobile in space, being is not alone--it is accompanied by waking-being, the comprehending apprehension, and, therefore, the compulsion to _provide by independent_ thought for the preservation of life. Here begins life-anxiety, leading to touch and scent, sight and hearing with ever-sharper senses; and presently to movements in space for the purpose of searching, gathering, pursuing, tricking, stealing, which develop in many species of animals (such as beavers, ants, bees, numerous birds and beasts of prey) into a rudimentary economy-technique which presupposes a process of reflection and, therefore, a certain emancipation of understanding from sensation. Man is genuinely man inasmuch as his understanding has freed itself from sensation and, as thought, intervened creatively in the relations between microcosm and macrocosm.[856] Quite animal still is the trickery of woman towards man, and equally so the peasant’s shrewdness in obtaining small advantages--both differing in no wise from the slyness of the fox, both consisting in the ability to see into the secret of the victim at _one glance_. But on the top of this there supervenes, now, the economic _thought_ that sows a field, tames animals, changes and appreciates and exchanges things, and finds a thousand ways and means of better preserving life and transforming a dependence upon the environment into a mastery over it. That is the underlayer of all Cultures. Race makes use of an economic thought that can become so powerful as to detach itself from given purposes, build up castles of abstraction, and finally lose itself in Utopian expanses.

All higher economic life develops itself on and over a peasantry. Peasantry, _per se_, does not presuppose any basis but itself.[857] It is, so to say, race-in-itself, plantlike and historyless,[858] producing and using wholly for itself, with an outlook on the world that sweepingly regards every other economic existence as incidental and contemptible. To this _producing_ kind of economy there is presently opposed an _acquisitive_ kind, which makes use of the former as an object--as a source of nourishment, tribute, or plunder. Politics and trade are in their beginnings quite inseparable, both being masterful, personal, warlike, both with a hunger for power and booty that produces quite another outlook upon the world--an outlook not from an angle into it, but from above down on its tempting disorder, an outlook which is pretty candidly expressed in the choice of the lion and the bear, the hawk and the falcon, as armorial badges. Primitive war is always also booty-war, and primitive trade intimately related to plunder and piracy. The Icelandic sagas narrate how, often, the Vikings would agree with a town population for a market-peace of a fortnight, after which weapons were drawn and booty-making started.

Politics and trade in developed form--the art of achieving material successes over an opponent by means of intellectual superiority--are both a replacement of war by other means. Every kind of diplomacy is of a business nature, every business of a diplomatic, and both are based upon penetrative judgment of men and physiognomic tact. The adventure-spirit in great seafarers like the Phœnicians, Etruscans, Normans, Venetians, Hanseatics, the spirit of shrewd banking-lords like the Fugger and the Medici and of mighty financiers like Crassus and the mining and trust magnates of our own day, must possess the strategic talent of the _general_ if its operations are to succeed. Pride in the clan-house, the paternal heritage, the family tradition, develops and counts in the economic sphere as in the political; the great fortunes are like the kingdoms and have their history,[859] and Polycrates and Solon, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Jürgen Wullenweber are far from being the only examples of political ambitions developing out of commercial.

But the genuine prince and statesman wants to rule, and the genuine merchant only wants to be wealthy, and here the acquisitive economy divides to pursue aim and means separately.[860] One may aim at booty for the sake of power, or at power for the sake of booty. The great ruler, too, the Hwang-ti, the Tiberius, the Frederick II--has the will to wealth, the will to be “rich in land and subjects,” but it is with and under a sense of high responsibilities. A man may lay hands on the treasurers of the whole world with a good conscience, not to say as a matter of course: he may lead a life of radiant splendour or even dissipation--if only he feels himself (Napoleon, Cecil Rhodes, the Roman Senate of the third century) to be the engine of a mission. When he feels so, the idea of private property can scarcely be said to exist so far as he is concerned.

He who is out for purely economic advantages--as the Carthaginians were in Roman times and, in a far greater degree still, the Americans in ours--is correspondingly incapable of purely political _thinking_. In the decisions of high politics he is ever deceived and made a tool of, as the case of Wilson shows--especially when the absence of statesmanlike instinct leaves a chair vacant for moral sentiments. This is why the great economic groupings of the present day (for example, employers’ and employees’ unions) pile one political failure on another, unless indeed they find a real political politician as leader, and he--makes use of them. Economic and political thinking, in spite of a high degree of consonance of form, are in direction (and therefore in all tactical details) basically different. Great business successes[861] awaken an unbridled sense of _public_ power--in the very word “capital” one catches an unmistakable undertone of this. But it is only in a few individuals that the colour and direction of their willing and their criteria of situations of things undergo change. Only when a man has really ceased to feel his enterprise as “his own business,” and its aim as the simple amassing of property, does it become possible for the captain of industry to become the statesman, the Cecil Rhodes. But, conversely, the men of the political world are exposed to the danger of their will and thought for historical tasks degenerating into mere provision for their private life-upkeep; then a nobility can become a robber-order, and we see emerging the familiar types of princes and ministers, demagogues and revolution-heroes, whose zeal exhausts itself in lazy comfortableness and the piling-up of immense riches--there is little to choose in this respect between Versailles and the Jacobin Club, business bosses and trade-union leaders, Russian governors and Bolshevists. And in the maturity of democracy the politics of those who have “got there” is identical, not merely with business, but with speculative business of the dirtiest great-city sort.

All this, however, is the very manifestation of the hidden course of a high Culture. In the beginning appear the primary orders, nobility and priesthood, with their symbolism of Time and Space. The political life, like the religious experience, has its fixed place, its ordained adepts, and its allotted aims for facts and truths alike, in a well-ordered society,[862] and down below, the economic life moves unconscious along a sure path. Then the stream of being becomes entangled in the stone structures of the town, and intellect and money thenceforward take over its historical guidance. The heroic and the saintly with their youthful symbolic force become rarer, and withdraw into narrower and narrower circles. Cool bourgeois clarity takes their place. At bottom, the concluding of a system and the concluding of a deal call for one and the same kind of professional intelligence. Scarcely differentiated now by any measure of symbolic force, political and economic life, religious and scientific experience make each other’s acquaintance, jostle one another, commingle. In the frictions of the city the stream of being loses its strict rich form. Elementary economic factors come to the surface and interplay with the remains of form-imbued politics, just as sovereign science at the same time adds religion to its stock of objects. Over a life of economics political self-satisfaction spreads a critical-edifying world-sentiment. But out of it all emerge, in place of the decayed Estates, the individual life-courses, big with true political or religious force, that are to become destiny for the whole.

And thus we begin to discern the morphology of economic history. First there is a _primitive economy_ of “man,” which--like that of plants and animals--follows a biological[863] time-scale in the development of its forms. It completely dominates the primitive age, and it continues to move on, infinitely slowly and confusedly, underneath and between the high Cultures. Animals and plants are brought into it and transformed by taming and breeding, selection and sowing; fire and metals are exploited, and the properties of inorganic nature made by technical processes serviceable for the conduct of life. All this is perfused with political-religious ethic and meaning, without its being possible distinctly to separate Totem and Taboo, hunger, soul-fear, sex-love, art, war, sacrificial rites, belief, and experience.

Wholly different from this, both in idea and in evolution, and sharply marked off in tempo and duration, are the _economic histories of the high Cultures_, each of which has its own economic style. To feudalism belongs the economy of the townless countryside. With the State ruled radially from cities appears the urban economy of money, and this rises, with the oncoming of the Civilization, into the dictature of money, simultaneously with the victory of world-city democracy. Every Culture has its own independently developed form-world. Bodily money of the Apollinian style (that is, the stamped coin) is as antithetical to relational money of the Faustian-dynamic style (that is, the booking of credit-units) as the Polis is to the State of Charles V. But the economic life, just like the social, forms itself pyramidally.[864] In the rustic underground a thoroughly primitive condition maintains itself almost unaffected by the Culture. The Late urban economy, which is already the activity of a resolute minority, looks down with steady contempt upon the pristine land-economy that continues all around it, while the latter in turn glares sulkily at the intellectualized style that prevails within the walls. Finally the cosmopolis brings in a Civilized world-economy, which radiates from very small nuclei within a few centres, and subjects the rest to itself as a provincial economy, while in the remoter landscapes thoroughly primitive (“patriarchal”) custom often prevails still. With the growth of the cities the way of life becomes ever more artificial, subtle and complex. The great-city worker of Cæsar’s Rome, of Haroun-al-Raschid’s Baghdad, and of the present-day Berlin feels as self-evidently necessary much that the richest yeoman deep in the country regards as silly luxury, but this self-evident standard is hard to reach and hard to maintain. In every Culture the quantum of work grows bigger and bigger till at the beginning of every Civilization we find an intensity of economic life, of which the tensions are even excessive and dangerous, and which it is impossible to maintain for a long period. In the end a rigid, permanent-set condition is reached, a strange hotch-potch of refined-intellectual and crude-primitive factors, such as the Greeks found in Egypt and we have found in modern India and China--unless, of course, the crust is being disintegrated from below by the pressure of a young Culture, like the Classical in Diocletian’s time.

Relatively to this economic movement, men are economically “in form” as an economic _class_, just as they are in form for world-history as a political Estate. Each individual has an economic position _within the economic order_ just as he has a grade of some sort in the _society_. Now, both these kinds of allegiances make claims upon the feelings, thoughts, and relations all at once. A life insists on being, and on meaning something as well, and the confusion of our ideas is made worse confounded by the fact that, to-day, as in Hellenistic times, political parties, in their desire to ameliorate the _upkeep_-standards of certain economic groups, have elevated these groups to the dignity of a political Estate, as Marx, for instance, elevated the class of factory-workers.

Confusion--for the first and genuine Estate is nobility. From it the officer and the judge and all concerned in the highest duties of government and administration are direct derivatives. They are Estate-like formations that _mean_ something. So, too, the body of scholars and scientists belongs to the priesthood[865] and has a very sharply definite kind of class-exclusiveness. But the grand symbolism of the Estates goes out with castle and cathedral. The _Tiers_, already, is the Non-Estate, the remainder, a miscellaneous and manifold congeries, which means very little as such save in the moments of political protest, so that the importance it creates _for itself_ is a party importance. The individual is conscious of himself not _as_ a bourgeois, but _because_ he is a “liberal” and thus part and parcel of a great thing, not indeed as representing it in his person, but as _adhering_ to it from conviction. In consequence of this weakness of its social “form,” the economic “form” of the bourgeoisie becomes all the more relatively conspicuous in its callings, guilds and unions. In the cities, at any rate, a man is primarily designated according to the way in which he makes his living.

Economically, the first (and anciently almost the only) mode of life is that of the peasant,[866] which is pure _production_, and therefore the pre-condition of every other mode. Even the primary Estates, too, in early times, base their way of life entirely upon hunting, stock-keeping, and agricultural landowning, and even in Late periods land is regarded by nobles and priests as the only truly honourable kind of property. In opposition to it stands trade, the mode of the acquisitive _middleman_ or intervener,[867] powerful out of all proportion to its numbers, already indispensable even in quite early conditions--a refined parasitism, completely unproductive and, therefore, land-alien and far-ranging, “free,” and unhampered spiritually, too, by the ethic and the practice of the countryside, a life sustaining itself on another life. Between the two, now, a third kind of economy, the _preparatory_ economy of technics, grows up in numberless crafts, industries, and callings, which creatively apply reflections upon nature and whose honour and conscience are bound up in achievement.[868] Its oldest guild, which reaches back into the sheer primitive and fills the picture of this primitive with its dark sagas and rites and notions, is the guild of the smiths, who--as the result of their proud aloofness from the peasantry and the fear that hangs about them, and leads to their being venerated and banned by turns--have often become true tribes with a race of their own, as in the case of the Abyssinian Falasha or “Black Jews.”[869]

In these three economics of production, preparation, and distribution, as in everything else belonging to politics and life at large, there are _the subjects and objects of leading_--in this case, whole groups that dispose, decide, organize, discover; and other whole groups whose function is simply to execute. The grading may be hard and definite or it may be scarcely perceptible,[870] promotion may be impossible or unimpeded, the relative dignity of the task may be almost equal throughout a long scale of slow transitions or different beyond comparison. Tradition and law, talent and possessions, population numbers, cultural level, and economic situation may effectively override this basic antithesis of subjects and objects--but it exists, it is as much a premiss as life itself, and it is unalterable. Nevertheless, economically _there is no worker-class_; that is an invention of theorists who have fixed their eyes on the position of factory-workers in England--an industrial, peasantless land in a transitional phase--and then extended the resultant scheme so confidently over all the Cultures and all the ages that the politicians have taken it up and used it as a means of building themselves parties. In actuality there is an almost uncountable number of purely serving activities in workshop and counting-houses, office and cargo-deck, roads, mine-shafts, fields, and meadows. This counting-up, portering, running of errands, hammering, serving, and minding often enough lacks that element which elevates life above mere upkeep and invests work with the dignity and the delight attaching, for example, to the status-duties of the officer and the savant, or the personal triumphs of the engineer, the manager, and the merchant--but, even apart from that, all these things are quite incapable of being compared amongst themselves. The brain or brawn of the work, its situation in village or in megalopolis, the duration and intensity of the doing of it, bring it to pass that farm-labourers, bank clerks, and tailors’ hands live in perfectly different economic worlds, and it is only, I repeat, the party politics of quite Late phases that lures them by means of catchwords into a protest-combination, with the intention of making use of its aggregate mass. The classical slave, on the contrary, is such chiefly in terms of constitutional law--that is, so far as the body-Polis was concerned, he simply did not exist[871]--but economically he might be land-worker or craftsman, or even director or wholesale merchant with a huge capital (_peculium_), with palaces and country villas and a host of subordinates--freemen included. And what he could become, over and above this, in late Roman times will appear in the sequel.