IV. The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life In the Present and the Future

The third of the core issues of the social question is the economic question itself. This finds its regulation when this economic life, realistically wedged between the two boundaries just described, is regulated within these boundaries by purely economic forces, the forces of the professional classes, by the forces of production and consumption through cooperatives and the like, in a completely independent manner from the legal and intellectual life. There is no more time today to go into detail - that can be done in the next lecture - about how the emancipated economic life can then bring about what prosperity will depend on labor law, and also on property law, but in a healthy dependence on it and, above all, in a morally necessary dependence, as it is on the other side in a natural dependence. In detail, however, it will be necessary for the other two areas of the social organism, the spiritual and the legal-state, to supply their strengths to economic life. But they will supply them precisely when they develop in the right way on their own ground.