olitical affairs to the rank of popular affairs, which constituted
the political State as a general concern, that is as a real State,
necessarily shattered all Estates, corporations, guilds, privileges,
which were just so many expressions of the separation of the people
from their community. The political revolution thereby abolished the
political character of civic society.

It dissolved civic society into its elemental parts, on the one hand,
into the individuals, on the other hand, into the material and
spiritual elements, which formed the vital content, the civic
situation of these individuals. It released the political spirit,
which was imprisoned in fragments in the various blind alleys of the
feudal society; it collected all these dispersed parts of it,
liberated it from its entanglement with the civic life, and
constituted it as the sphere of the community, of the general popular
concerns in ideal independence from its particular elements of civic
life. The specific life activity and the specific life situation
settled into a merely general significance. They no longer formed the
general relation of the individual to the political whole. The public
business as such became rather the general business of every
individual and the political function became his general function.

But the completion of the idealism of the State was at the same time
the completion of the materialism of civic society.

The throwing off of the political yoke was at the same time the
throwing off of the bond which had curbed the egoistic spirit of civic
society. The political emancipation was at the same time the
emancipation of civic society from politics, from even the semblance
of a general content.

Feudal society was resolved into its basic elements, its individual
members. But into the individuals who really formed its basis, that
is, the egoistic individual.

This individual, the member of civic society, is now the basis, the
assumption of the political State. He is recognized as such in the
rights of man.

The liberty of the egoistic individual and the recognition of this
liberty are, however, tantamount to the recognition of the unbridled
movement of the intellectual and material elements which inform him.

The individual was therefore not liberated from religion; he received
religious freedom. He was not freed from property; he received freedom
of property. He was not freed from the egoism of industry; he received
indus