It is because we misunderstand these elements, or refuse them the place and the consideration they deserve, that we remain in, or relapse into, chaos.
A society may be tortured, perhaps destroyed; but you cannot force it to assume a form and mode of existence foreign to its nature, either by disregarding the essential elements of which it is constituted, or by doing violence to them.
Let us first advert to that civil order which forms the basis of French society, as of every other society.
Family; property of all kinds, whether land, capital, or wages; labour, under all its forms, individual or collective, intellectual or manual; the situations in which men are placed, or the relations which are introduced among them by the incidents of family, property, and labour;—such are the constituents of civil society.
The essential and characteristic fact in French civil society is, unity of laws and equality of rights. All families, property of every kind, labour of every description, are governed by the same laws, and possess or confer the same civil rights. There are no privileges; that is, no laws or rights peculiar to particular families, or to property or labour of particular sorts.
This is a new and mighty fact in the history of human societies.
But notwithstanding this fact, notwithstanding this civil unity and equality, there are evidently numerous and great diversities and inequalities, which unity of laws and equality of rights can neither prevent nor remove.
As to property, whether in immoveables or moveables, land or capital, there are rich and poor; there are large, middling, and small properties.
The great proprietors may be less numerous and less wealthy, and the middling and small proprietors may be more numerous and more powerful, than they were formerly, or than they are in other countries; but this does not prevent the inequality amongst them from being real and great enough to occasion a radical difference and inequality of social position.
From diversities of position founded on property, I pass on to those founded upon labour, of every kind and degree, from the highest intellectual, to the lowest manual labour. Here too I meet with the same fact. Here too diversity and inequality arise and subsist, in spite of identical laws and equal rights.