The third estate is the product of the calcification of the former two. As stated before, out of the noble conception of property is derived the idea of having as conquest and having as spoil, the latter calcifies into trade, economics and money in the late period; out of the priestly rejection of property there comes a separation of the idea of learning and the pursuit of truth from the religious aspect at the same time. This corresponds with the rise of the city; economics and learning, detached from the old estates, flourish in these settlements. The product of this is a new opposition: money and intellect, which find themselves opposed as time and space. But more profoundly they find themselves opposed to the traditional ways of life.

In cities, the idea of “freedom” emerges. Irrespective of cultural norms, the growth of cities is always a harbinger of this idea. It’s an expression of the severance of man from the soil, within city walls he sees himself as opposed to the land and all its products. It is not a political force but a cultural one, but its political effects are almost always the move from feudal estates as the centre of power, to centralized government and stronger conceptions of a common nation, oriented around these centres of landscape. Freedom is a negative phenomenon; it is always a freedom from and in this case, it is from the land. The third estate is therefore always a negation and is never secure in itself.

With a sense of unity out of the cities comes the party. The powers of economy and science, labourers and artisans, oppose the old estates in their bid for freedom. The freedom to make money and the freedom to criticise unrestrained requires liberation from the old orders. When the third estate gets what it wants, we find an immediate struggle between the intellectuals and their ideal democracies and the money makers and their push for plutocracy. So, in place of the old symbolic friction of priesthood and nobility, we get mind versus money. But the outcome is the same and space always succumbs to time.

In the transition from old to new, city aristocracies rise up characterised by money and intellect and attach themselves to the pre-existing aristocracies of birth and soil. Great plebeian families were admitted to the senate in the 4^th century as “conscripti” and the old landed nobility formed the Nobiles, who held land and were entitled by office. The same process occurred in our empire, the American South formed a slave economy attempting to mimic old feudalism but was ultimately annihilated by the more economically and intellectually prone North. Spengler is careful to distinguish this process from merchant families like the Medici, who he aligns with the patriciate of Hellenic colonies in 800 BC, as he argues that these families had something originally aristocratic and racial about them that separated them from the later aristocracies of money that arose from the Baroque onwards, and in Rome emerged as Equites in the first Punic War.

It should be clear here that the third estate begins to make its moves in the late period and finishes the old estates by the end of the culture period. The third estate is the political embodiment of the death of the culture. Residing in cities, using abstract concepts like money and enlightenment science to liberate life from the soil. Though it is an estate, it is best to regard it as a non-estate as it readily denies anything symbolic in favour of the free city life. In the culture period, the bourgeoisie at least uphold the culture because they wish to be part of it in a way the old order does not. But entering into the civilisation period a new force arises: that of the fourth estate. It dissolves higher forms, provincially consumes all manners of life on a sentimental level, popularises and deconstructs art to mere fashion sense and degrades everything else to the lowest common denominator, because the fourth estate is the masses.

“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.” (2.10.5)