No More Learning

To the other minds, however, although we are still conceptualizing them as well, we must neverthe- less transfer just these conditions or, rather, unconditionality of one's own 'I,' which has for us that utmost measure of reality that our self possesses with regard to its contents and from which we are certain that it holds also for those other minds with regard to their contents. Under these circumstances the question--How is society possible? --has a completely different methodological significance from that of, How is nature possible? For the latter is answered by forms of cognition by which the subject effects the synthesis of the factual elements of 'nature,' whereas the former is answered by the a priori conditions found in the elements themselves, through which they actually combine to form the synthesis, 'society. ' In a certain sense the entire contents of this book, as developed on the basis of the principles presented above, is the initial attempt at an answer to this question. For it seeks the processes, ultimately occurring in individuals, that give rise to their being a society--not as transient prior causes of this result but as processes sharing in the synthesis, the whole of which we call society. However, the question is to be understood in a more fundamental sense. I said that the function of effecting synthetic unity that, vis-a`-vis nature, lies in the observing subject would, vis-a`-vis society, pass over to the elements of society itself. The conscious construction of society is, to be sure, not present in the individual in abstracto, but for all that everybody knows the others as bound up with them; so much is this knowledge about others as social actors, this awareness of the whole complex as a society--so much is this knowledge and awareness given over only to achieving this with single concrete contents. But perhaps this is nothing other than the 'unity of awareness,' according to which we proceed, to be sure, in consciousness processes assigning a concrete content to the other, without however having a separate consciousness of the unity itself as something other than rare and after-the-fact abstractions. Now there is the question, What wholly universal and a priori ground is there? Which must actually be the presuppositons whereby individual concrete events would be actual socialization processes in
4 Here Simmel appears to be adopting a usage of Kant, where Schema appears in apposition to representation; Kant also speaks of Schemata of the individual cat- egory--ed.
? the problem of sociology 43
? individual consciousness? Which elements are contained in them that make it possible for their enactment, which is the production of a social unity out of individuals, to say it abstractly? The sociological a priori conditions will have the same double meaning as the those that 'render nature possible. ' They will on the one hand determine completely or incompletely the actual social interaction processes as functions or forces of mental developments; on the other hand they are the ideal logical presuppositions for the complete society, although society is possibly never perfectly realized in this completion. In the same way the law of causality on the one hand dwells and works in the actual cognitive processes; on the other hand it constructs the form of truth as the ideal system of completed knowledge, independent of the process, whether or not this is realized through that transient relatively random mental dynamic, and independently of the true reality, more or less consciously and effectively approximating the ideal.
It is a non-issue whether the research into these conditions of the social process should be epistemologically significant or not, because in fact the pic- ture arising from them and standardized by their forms is not knowledge but practical processes and states of being. However what I mean here and what should be examined as the general idea of social interaction in its conditions is something knowledge-like: consciousness of socializing or being associated. Perhaps it would be better to call it an awareness rather than a knowledge. Since in this case the subject does not stand over against an object from which it would gradually extract a conceptual construct, but the consciousness of social interaction is instantly a consciousness of its carriers or its inner meaning. It is a matter of the processes of interaction that, for the individual, mean the reality of being associated--not abstractly of course, but certainly capable of abstract expression. Which forms must remain as the basis, or which specific categories a person must, as it were, bring along while this consciousness develops, and which are thus the forms that must carry the resulting consciousness society as a reality of knowledge, this we can undoubtedly call the epistemology of society. I try in the following to sketch several of these a priori conditions or forms of social interaction--for sure not identifiable as, in a word, the Kantian categories--as an example of such research.
I.
The image of others that a person acquires from personal contact is occasioned
by real fluctuations that are not simple illusions in incomplete experience, faulty focus, and sympathetic or hostile biases, but important alterations in the character of real objects. And indeed these principally follow two dimensions. We see others generalized to some extent, perhaps because it is not given to us to be able to represent one fully to ourselves with our varying individuality. Every reproduction of a soul is shaped by the resemblance to it, and although this is by no means the only condition for mental knowledge--since on the one hand a simultaneous dissimilarity seems necessary for achieving distance and objectivity, and on the other hand there is an intellectual capacity to view oneself beyond the similarity or difference of being--so complete knowledge would still presuppose a complete similarity. It appears as though each person
44 chapter one
? has a mark of individuality deep down within, that can be copied internally by no one else, for whom this mark is always qualitatively different. And that this contention is still not logically compatible with that distance and objective judgment on which moreover the representation of others rests only plainly proves that the complete knowledge of the individuality of others is denied us; and all relationships among people are limited by the varying degree of this lacuna. Whatever its cause might be, its result is in any case a generalization of the mental picture of others, a blurring of the contours that a relationship to others superimposes on the uniqueness of this picture. We represent all people, with a particular consequence for our practical activity toward them, as the type 'human,' to which their individuality allows them to belong; we think of them, aside all their singularity, under a general category that certainly does not encompass them fully and that they do not completely match--with that condition the relationship between the general idea and the individuality proper to them is discerned. In order to take cognizance of people, we view them not according to their pure individuality but framed, highlighted, or even reduced by means of a general type by which we recognize them. Even when this distortion is so imperceptible that we are not aware of it more readily, even then when all the characterological general ideas common among people fail--moral or immoral, independent or dependent, master or slave, etc. --we still categorize people intrinsically after a wordless type with which their pure being-for-itself does not coincide.
And this leads to a further step. We form a picture directly from the total uniqueness of a personality that is not identical with its reality, but also still not a general type; rather the picture we get is what it would display if it were, so to speak, entirely itself, if it were to realize the ideal potential that is, for better or for worse, in every person. We are all fragments, not only of humanity in general but also of ourselves. We are amalgamations not only of the human type in general, not only of types of good and evil and the like, but we are also amalgamations of our own individuality and uniqueness--no longer distinguishable in principle--which envelops our visible reality as if drawn with ideal lines. However, the view of the other broadens these frag- ments into what we never actually are purely and wholly. The fragments that are actually there can scarcely not be seen only juxtaposed, but as we fill in the blind spot in our field of vision, completely unconsciously of course, we construct the fullness of its individuality from these fragments. The praxis of life pressures us to shape the picture of a person only from the bits of reality empirically known; but even that rests on these changes and amplifications, on the transformation of the actual fragments into the generality of a type and into the completion of the hypothetical personality.
This basic procedure, though seldom actually brought to completion, func- tions inside the already existing society as the a priori for further interactions arising among individuals. Within any given circle based, say, on a common vocation or mutual interest, every member sees every other member not purely empirically but through an a priori that the circle imposes on each participating consciousness. In the circle of officers, the church faithful, civil servants, the
the problem of sociology 45
? learned, family members, each sees the other under the obvious assumption that this is a member of my circle. Arising from the shared life-basis are cer- tain suppositions through which people view one another as through a veil. To be sure this does not simply cloak the uniqueness of the personality but while fusing its quite real individual existence with that of a unified construct, it gives it a new form. We see the other not merely as an individual but as a colleague or fellow worker or a fellow member of a political faction, in short as a fellow inhabitant of the same specific world, and this unavoidable presup- position, operating entirely automatically, is one of the means by which the other's personality and reality is brought to the proper level and form in the minds of others necessary for sociability.
This obviously also holds for the relationship of members of various circles to one another. The civilian who meets an officer cannot free himself at all from the reality that this individual is an officer. And, although being an officer may be pertinent to this personality, his image still prejudices toward the schematic type comparable to it in the representation of the other. This also holds for the Protestant in regard to the Catholic, the shopkeeper in regard to the civil servant, the layperson in regard to the priest, etc. The concealment of the lines of reality is present everywhere through social generalization, which essentially rules out its discovery inside a socially separated differentiated main society. Because the generalization is always at the same time more or less than the personality, the human being finds alterations, deletions, and extrapolations from all these a priori operating categories: from one's type as person, from the conception of a whole unique person, from the general public to which one belongs. Hovering above all this as a heuristic principle of knowledge is the idea of a person's real, absolutely individual indubitability; but while it appears at first as though the achievement of this would provide one with the completely correct foundational sense of self, those alterations and distortions are in fact what obstruct this ideal knowledge of the self even while being precisely the conditions by which the relationships that we know alone as social become possible--somewhat similar to the Kantian categories of understanding that form the immediately given data into wholly new objects, while alone making the given world knowable.
II.
Another category under which subjects see themselves and one another, so formed that they are able to produce empirical society, may be formulated with the seemingly trivial statement that every member of a group is not only a part of society but also something else besides. To the extent that the part of the individual not facing society or not absorbed in it is not simply disconnected from its socially significant part, i. e. entirely external to society, this functions as a social a priori to accommodate that external part, willingly or unwillingly; however, the fact that the individual is in certain respects not a member of society creates the positive condition for it being just such a member in other respects. What kind a person's socialized being is, is determined or co-deter- mined by the kind of one's unsocialized being. The following investigations will yield several kinds whose sociological significance is even established in
46 chapter one
? their core and essence, precisely because they are somehow excluded from the society for which their existence is important--as with the stranger, the enemy, the felon, even the poor. However this holds not only for such general characters but, with countless modifications, for every individual phenomenon. That every moment finds us enveloped by relationships with people and its content directly or indirectly determined by them does not at all suggest the contrary, but the social envelope as such pertains even to beings that are not fully enclosed in it. We know that the civil servant is not only a civil servant, the merchant is not only a merchant, the officer is not only an officer; and this extra-social being--its temperament and its fated outcome, its interests and the merit of its personality--may alter very little the essential operations of the civil servant, the merchant, the soldier, and yet it gives opposing aspects to every one of them, always a particular nuance and a social persona perme- ated by extra-social imponderables. All the social intercourse of people within social categories would be different if they confronted one another merely as categories, as bearers of the social roles falling to them just at that moment. Indeed individuals differentiate one another just as much by occupation as by social situation, according to whatever degree of that 'additive' they possess or permit, given its social content. At one pole of this continuum the person comes to be perhaps in love or in friendship; in this case what the individual keeps in reserve, beyond the developments and activities directed toward the other, can approach a threshold of nothing, quantitatively; there is only a single life that can be viewed or lived from two angles, at one time from the inside, from the terminus a quo of the subject, then however, while nothing has changed, from the perspective of the beloved, from the category of the subject's terminus ad quem, which absorbs it completely. In an entirely different direction, the Catholic priest demonstrates formally the same phenomenon, in that his ecclesiastical function completely envelopes and engulfs his individual being-for-himself. In the first of these extreme cases the 'additive' of social activity vanishes because its content is wholly absorbed in the turn toward the other; in the second, because the corresponding type is in principle absorbed by the content. The appearance of the modern culture, economically driven by money, now manifests the antithesis, wherein the person approximates the ideal of absolute objectivity as one producing, buying or selling, gener- ally doing anything. Leaving out of account high positions of leadership, the individual life, the tone of the whole personality, is absorbed in striving; people become only the bearers of settlements of performance and non-performance as determined by objective norms, and everything that does not pertain to this pure matter-of-factness is in fact likewise absorbed into it. The personal- ity with its special coloration, its irrationality, its inner life, has absorbed the 'additive' fully into itself, and only relinguished to those social activities the specific energies in pure detachment.
Social individuals always move between these extremes so that the energies and determinations directed toward the inner center manifest some meaning for the activities and convictions that are important to the other. Since, in the borderline case, even the consciousness of what the person is and signifies--this social activity or predisposition supposedly set apart from the other person
the problem of sociology 47
? and not even entering into a sociological relationship with the other--this very consciousness exerts a completely positive influence on the attitude that the subject assumes toward the other and the other toward the subject. The a priori for empirical social life is that life is not entirely social. We form our interrelations under the negative restraint that a part of our personality is not to enter into them, and yet this part has an effect on the social processes in the mind through general psychological connections overall, but furthermore just the formal fact that it stands outside the social processes determines what kind of influence. In addition, that societies are essentially patterns existing simultaneously inside and outside of society underlies one of the most impor- tant sociological formations: namely that between a society and its individuals a relationship can exist as between two parties, indeed perhaps always exists, actually or potentially. Thus society engenders perhaps the most conscious, at least the most universal form foundational for life itself: that the individual person can never stand within a union without also standing outside it, that one is inserted into no arrangement without also being found opposite it. This holds for the transcendent and most comprehensive associations as well as for the most singular and incidental. The religious person feels fully embraced by the divine essence, as though one were nothing more than a pulse beat of divine life; one's own substance is unconditionally abandoned to mystical undifferentiation in that of the absolute. And yet, for this absorption to have any meaning, one must preserve some sense of a self, a kind of personal counterpart, a distinct I, for which this dissolving into the divine All-Being is an eternal challenge, a process that would neither be metaphysically possible nor religiously sensible if it did not originate with a being-for-itself of the subject: the meaning of oneness-with-God is dependent on the otherness-of- God. Beyond this culmination in the transcendent the relationship with nature as a whole that the human spirit claims for itself throughout its entire history manifests the same form. On the one hand we know ourselves incorporated in nature as one of its products that stands next to the others, like among likes, a point through which its substance and energies come and go just as they circle through flowing water and blooming flowers. And yet the soul, apart from all these interweavings and incorporations, has the feeling of an independent being-for-itself, which we identify with the logically precarious idea of freedom. All this movement, whose element we ourselves indeed are, countering and parlaying, culminates in the radical statement that nature is only a representation in the human mind. However as nature at this point with all its inherent undeniable lawfulness and firm reality is included in the I, so, on the other hand, this I, with all its freedom and being-for-itself, its opposition to mere nature, is yet a member of it; it is precisely the overarching coherence of nature opposite it, that it encompasse, this independent, indeed frequently even hostile essence, so that what, in accord with its deepest sense of being alive, stands outside of nature must nevertheless be an element of it. Now this formulation holds no less for the relationship between the particular circles of the relational milieu and individuals, or, if one combines this with the concept or feeling of being associated in general, for the relationship among individuals absolutely. We know ourselves on the one hand as products
48 chapter one
? of society: the physiological succession of ancestors, their adaptations and establishments, the traditions of their work, their knowledge and faith, the entire spirit of the past crystallized in objective forms--these determine the arrangements and content of our life so that the question could arise whether the individual is therefore simply anything other than a receptacle into which previously existing elements mix in various amounts; for if these elements are also ultimately produced by individuals, with the contribution of each one being an increasingly faint amount and the factors being produced only through their species-like and social convergence, in the synthesis of which the vaunted individuality would then again consist. On the other hand we know ourselves as a member of society, with our life-process and its meaning and purpose just as interdependently woven in a proximity in society as in a progression in it. We have, as natural character, so little being-for-ourselves because the circulation of natural elements goes through us as through com- pletely selfless creatures, and the similarity to natural laws renders our whole existence a pure exemplar of their inevitability--so little do we dwell as social entities around an autonomous center, but moment by moment we are pieced together from interrelationships with others and are thus comparable to the organic substance that exists for us as though a sum of many sense impres- sions but not as an existence of a being-for-itself. Now, however, we feel that this social diffusion does not completely usurp our personality; it is not only a matter of the reserves already mentioned, of unique contents whose meaning and development at the outset lie only in the individual psyche and generally find no place in the social context; not only a matter of the formation of social contents, whose unity as an individual psyche, again, is not itself social essence any more than an artistic pattern, composed of patches of color on a canvass, is derived from the chemical constitution of the colors themselves. But above all, the entire content of life, as completely as it may be able to be explained by social antecedents and interrelationships, is still to be regarded concurrently under the category of individual life, as the experience of the individual and completely oriented to the individual. Both are only separate categories under which the same content appears, just as plants can be considered one time in terms of the conditions of their biological origin, another time in terms of their practical uses, a third time in terms of their aesthetic meaning. The standpoint from which the existence of the individual is ordered and concep- tualized can be taken from inside as well as outside it; the totality of life, with all its socially derivable contents, is to be grasped as the centripetal tendency of its carrier, just as it can, with all its parts reserved for the individual, still count as a product and element of social life.
With that, then, the reality of social interaction brings the individual into the position of duality with which I began: that the individual is engaged in it and at the same time stands over against it, is a member of its organism and at the same time itself a complete organic whole, a being for it and a being for itself. However the essential nature and the meaning of the peculiar sociological a priori grounded in it, is this: that the interior and the exterior between individual and society are not two agents existing side by side--although they can develop incidentally in that way, even to the extent of a hostile antagonism--but that
the problem of sociology 49
? they identify the entirely integral position of the living social being. One's existence is not only, in a partition of its substance, partially social and par- tially individual; rather, it falls under the basic, formative, irreducible category of a unity that we can express only through the synthesis or the simultaneity of both determining positions, logically contrary to one another, as member and as being-for-oneself--as being produced by and occupied by society and as life from out of one's own center and for the sake of one's own center. Society does not exist as only previously emerged from beings that are in part not socialized, but from such beings as feel on the one hand like fully social entities and on the other, while retaining the same content, as fully personal ones. And these are not two unrelated juxtaposed standpoints, as when one examines the same body at one time in terms of its weight and at another in terms of its color, but both form the union that we call social existence, the synthetic category--as the concept of causality is an a priori union even though it includes both substantively altogether different elements of cause and effect. That this formation is available to us, this capacity of beings--every one of which can experience the self as the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of its developments, destinies, and qualities--to create precisely the operational concept of society and to know this then as the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of those vitalities and determinations of existence--this is an a priori of the empirical society that makes its form as we know it possible.
III.
Society is a construct of unlike parts. Since even where democratic or socialist tendencies anticipate or partially achieve an 'equality,' it is always a matter only of a similar evaluation of persons, achievements, and positions, whereas the issue of an equality of persons with regard to their natures, life-contents, and destinies cannot even be entertained. And whereas on the other hand an enslaved population makes up only a mass, as in the great oriental despotisms, this equality affects everyone always only with respect to certain facets of exis- tence, perhaps the political or economic, never however the entire selves, whose innate qualities, personal associations, and lived destinies will unavoidably have a kind of uniqueness and unmistakableness, not only for the interiority of life but also for its social interactions with other beings. Let us imagine society as a purely objective schema, so that it appears as an arrangement of contents and accomplishments--all related to one another in space, time, concepts, and values--and next to which one can in this respect disregard the personality, the I-form, that carries its dynamics. If that dissimilarity of elements now allows each accomplishment or quality inside this arrangement to appear as one characterized individually, unambiguously fixed in its place, society then looks like a cosmos whose multiplicity in being and movement is, to be sure, incalculable, but in which every point can be composed and developed only in that given manner if the structure of the whole is not to be changed. What has been generally said of the structure of the earth--that not a grain of sand could be shaped differently and placed elsewhere than it currently is without this presupposing and resulting in a change of all existence--is repeated in the structure of society, viewed as an interconnection of qualitatively distinct
50 chapter one
? phenomena. An analogous image of society in general, but in miniature, rather simplified in words, is found in a snapshot of the civil service, which as such is composed of a definite organization of 'positions' with a predetermined set of skill requirements that exist detached from their respective office hold- ers, offering up an idealized association. Inside of such an organization new entrants find unambiguously specific posts, just as though these positions were waiting for them and to which their energies must harmoniously conform. What here is a conscious, systematic arrangement of work roles is naturally a tangled confusing play of functions in the whole of society; the positions in society are not produced by a purposeful design but, understandably, just by the actual creative activity and experience of individuals. And in spite of this enormous difference, in spite of every irrationality and imperfection, however reprehensible from a standpoint of merit, that the historical society demonstrates, its phenomenological structure--the sum and relationship of the kind of existence and accomplishments offered objectively socially by every element--remains an arrangement of elements, of which each person takes an individually defined position, a coordination of objectively and, in its social significance, meaningfully, although not always valuable, functions and functional centers; in the process of this the purely personal, the inwardly productive, the impulses and reflexes of the real 'I' remain entirely outside consideration. Or expressed differently, the life of society proceeds--viewed not psychologically but phenomenologically purely in terms of its social contents--as though every element were predetermined for its place in the totality; with all this discrepancy from the ideal claims, it simply continues as if every one of its members were fully relationally integrated, each one dependent on all others and all others on the one, just because each one is individually a part of it.
At this point conspicuously obvious is the a priori which we need to discuss now and which offers the 'possibility' of belonging to society. That every indi- vidual is directed according to one's own rank in a definite position inside of one's social milieu: that this appropriate position is hypothetically available to one, actually throughout the social whole for that matter--that is the presump- tion under which the individual lives out a social life and which one can point to as the universal value of individuality. Whether it is elaborated into clear conceptual consciousness is independent of whether it also finds its realiza- tion in the actual course of life--just as the a priori status of causal laws as a formative presupposition of knowledge is independent of whether conscious- ness formulates it in separate concepts and whether or not the psychological reality always proceeds in accord with it. Our knowledge of life rests on the presumption of a pre-established harmony between our mental energies, albeit individual ones, and external objective existence; thus this always remains the expression of the immediate phenomenon, whether or not one were to attribute it metaphysically or psychologically to the production of existence through the intellect alone. If social life as such depends on the presupposition of a fundamental harmony between the individual an d the social whole, it does little to hinder the sharp clash of the ethical with the pleasurable life.
the problem of sociology 51
? Had social reality been shaped by this principal presumption without restraint and without fail, we would have the perfect society--again not in the ethical sense or eudaemonistic perfection but conceptually: i. e. , not the perfect society but the perfect society. As this a priori of one's social existence goes, so goes the individual: the thoroughgoing correlation of individual beings with their environing circles, the necessity for the life of the whole integrating them by way of the particularity of their subjectivity--in so far as the whole does not realize this a priori or find it realized, it is simply not socialized and society is not the unbroken interconnected reality that the concept of it suggests.
With the category of vocation, this attitude is sharply intensified. Certainly antiquity did not know of this concept in the sense of a personal distinctive- ness and a society structured by a division of labor. But what is fundamental to it--that socially functional activity is consistently the expression of inner capacity, that the wholeness and durability of subjectivity practically objectivizes itself by way of its function in society--that also existed in antiquity. Insofar as this connection was effected on a more generally uniform content, its principle appears in the Aristotelian saying, that some people were meant by their nature ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (to serve), others ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (to rule). With a further development of the idea it indicates the peculiar structure: that on the one hand society produces and provides a 'position' in itself that is indeed distinct from others in content and outline, but in principle it can be fulfilled by many and is so to speak somewhat anonymous; and that now, despite its general character, this position is then taken up by the individual on the basis of an inner 'call' a qualification felt as wholly personal. For there to be a 'calling' at all, there must exist a harmony, however derived, between the structure and life process of society on the one hand and the individual make up and predispositions on the other. On that harmony as a prevalent assumption ultimately rests the idea that there exists a position-and-performance in society for each person, to which one is 'called,' and an imperative to search for it until one finds it.
Empirical society becomes 'possible' only through this a priori, climaxing in the concept of vocation, which is indeed to be identified not as heretofore with a simple slogan, as the Kantian categories would have it. The processes of consciousness in which socialization takes place--the unity out of many, the reciprocal recognition of individuals, the changing significance of individuals for the totality of others and of this totality for individuals--all this proceeds, in principle, completely outside abstract conscious but self-revealing in the reality of praxis, under this assumption: that the individuality of the person finds a place in the structure of the collective, indeed that this structure is positioned beforehand to a certain extent, despite its unpredictability, for the individual and its activity. The causal connection that involves every social element in the being and action of every other one and thus brings the external network of society into existence is transformed into a teleological one as soon as one considers from the perspective of the individual carriers, from its creators, who experience themselves each as an 'I' and whose activity develops on the basis of a being-for-itself, self-determining personality. That this phenomenal totality should align itself with that person's goal, as though personalities came
52 chapter one
? from outside, and offers it from its internally regulated life process the place where its unique nature will be that of playing a necessary part in the life of the whole--this gives, as a fundamental category, the consciousness of the individual the form that characterizes it as a social element.
It is a fairly idle question whether the inquiries into the epistemology of society that are supposed to be exemplified in these sketches belong in social philosophy or perhaps sociology after all. There may be a bound- ary zone for both methods--the soundness of the sociological problem, as heretofore delineated, and the demarcation from philosophical issues suffer as little from it as the clarity of the ideas of day and night suffer on account of the existence of twilight, or the ideas of human and animal because perhaps intermediate stages are found sometimes that unify the characteristics of both in a way not conceptually separable for us. While the sociological question arises in the abstraction from the complex phenomenon that we call social life, which is actually only society, i. e. social interaction; while it eliminates in the purity of the concept everything that will be realized at all only historically within society but which does not constitute society as such as a unique and autonomous form of existence--a completely unambiguous core of tasks is created. It may be that the periphery of the problem area pro- visionally or permanently adjoins other areas that become definitions of doubtful boundaries. The center remains no less fixed in its place on that account.
I move on to demonstrate the fruitfulness of this central idea and problem in specific inquiries. Far from claiming to offer the number of forms of interaction that make up society or to do them justice at a distance, they only show the way that could lead to the scientific analysis of the full perimeter of 'society' from the totality of life--they mean to show this, in that they themselves are the first steps toward it.
? CHAPTER TWO
THE QUANTITATIVE CONDITIONING OF THE GROUP
A series of forms of collective life, of alliances and reciprocal influences of individuals, shall be examined first in terms of the importance that the shear number of individuals interacting in these forms has for them. One will grant from the beginning and from everyday experiences that a group of a certain magnitude must take measures for its maintenance and development, and design forms and organs that it did not previ- ously need; and that on the other hand smaller groups exhibit qualities and patterns of interaction that they inevitably lose with an enlarge- ment of their size. Quantitative determination has a double importance: the negative, in that certain formations, which are necessary or possible from the content or other conditions of life, can materialize on this side or that side of a numerical border of participants; the positive, in that other formations are required directly by specific purely quantita- tive modifications of the group. Obviously they do not appear in every case but depend for their part on other determinants of the group; however, it is decisive that the formations under investigation stand out from the other factors only under the condition of a definitive numer- ical expansion. So let it be noted, for example, that completely or approximate socialistic arrangements until now were feasible only in rather small groups, but are ever frustrated in large ones. The inherent tendency to share fairly in burdens and pleasures can be readily real- ized in a small group and, what is clearly just as important, be reviewed and monitored by individuals. What each would endure for the whole and how the whole compensates each are implicit in one another, so that agreements and settlements are readily produced. In a large group, especially, the inevitable differentiation within it of persons, their func- tions and their demands hinders this. A very large number of people can form a unity only by a definitive division of labor; not only by virtue of the economic technology at hand but principally because it generates the interlocking and interdependence that connects everyone throughout with each other through countless third persons, and with- out that a widely scattered group would break apart at every opportu- nity. An ever tighter unity of the group is required; therefore, the
54 chapter two
specialization of the individuals must be all the more definite, all the more unconditional, thus relating the individuals to the whole and the whole to the individuals. The socialism of a large group would thus require the sharpest differentiation of personalities, which naturally would have to extend over their work to their feelings and desires. However, this complicates to the extreme the comparison among them of achievements, of remunerations, the adjustments among both, on which for small and therefore undifferentiated groups the possibility of an approximation of socialism rests. What logically limits such groups of advanced culture, as they are called, to numerical insignificance is their dependence on goods that generally cannot be offered under their own group's conditions of production. To my knowledge there is in contemporary Europe only one case approaching a socialist form of organization:1 the Familistere de Guise, a large ironworks factory that was founded in 1880 by a follower of Fourier2 on the principle of complete sustenance for each worker and his family, guaranteeing a minimum subsistence, care and education of children at no cost, and collective provision of the necessities for life. The cooperative employed about 2,000 people in the 1890s and seemed viable. This reveals, how- ever, that it can cover, from among the totality of all the existing living conditions around it, only the satisfaction of needs unavoidably remain- ing in under its own control. Because human needs are not likewise to
1 The historical material, by which this research is assisted, is in its content-reliability limited by two factors: the service to be performed here must be selected on the one hand from so many and various fields of historical-social life that the limited labor power of an individual is left essentially with secondary sources for its compilation, and these could be verified only seldom through one's own fact-checking. On the other hand the extension of this collection through a long stretch of years will make it conceivable that not every fact can be confronted right before publication of the book with the latest state of the research. The communication of any particular social fact, which is only an incidental goal of this book, would not be allowed because of the latitude indicated here for unproven and mistaken things. However, with this attempt to obtain the possibility of a new scientific abstraction for social reality, the essential endeavor can simply be to complete this abstraction with some kind of examples and to prove it to be meaningful. If I am permitted, for the sake of methodological clarity, to exaggerate something, it will simply depend on the possibility that the examples are real rather than the actuality that they are. Because their truth is not supposed to--or only in a few cases--prove the truth of a general claim, but even where the expres- sion could allow it to appear so, they are still only for analysis of objects, irrelevant in themselves, and the correct and fruitful kind, as this is done, not the truth about the reality of its object, is that which is here either achieved or missed. In principle the investigation is to have led also to object lessons and deferred their significant reality to the relative factual knowledge of the reader.
2 Charles Fourier, nineteenth century French utopian socialist--ed.
?
the quantitative conditioning of the group 55
be rationalized as production would, they often appear to have a chance and unpredictability that allows coverage only for a price that borders the incalculably irrational and inappropriate. A group that avoids this and is set for full systematizing and uninterrupted practicality in its operations will always only be able to be a small one, because it can procure only by a large inclusive one what would be required for the satisfaction of possibilities of life in any higher culture. Further there is a kind of collective church formation whose sociological structure does not allow for large memberships: hence the Waldensian, Men- nonite, and Moravian sects. Wherever the dogma in them forbids oaths, military service, and uniforms; where wholly personal matters belong to the community, such as employment, organization of the day, even marriage; where a special attire distinguishes the faithful from all oth- ers and identifies them as members; where the subjective experience of an immediate relationship to Jesus holds the community together-- from all this it is obvious that an expansion into a large group would rupture the bond that holds the group together, a bond that depends in important respects on its exceptionality and opposition to a larger group. At least in this sociological perspective the claim of these sects to represent the original Christianity is not unwarranted. Since, in exhibiting an undifferentiated unity of dogma and lifestyle, they were possible only in those small communities within larger surrounding ones that served them precisely as an external complement necessary for their vitality, a contrast by which they became conscious of their own uniqueness. Thus the expansion of Christianity to the whole state must have altered its sociological character no less fully than its spiritual contents. What's more, in that an aristocratic corporate entity can have only a relatively small area is contained in its very concept. Neverthe- less, over this patent obviousness, as a result of the position of sover- eignty vis-a`-vis the masses, there appears here, albeit in widely fluctuating borders, to be yet an absolute numerical limitation of this type. But beyond this natural fact, a numerical limit, though varying within wide boundaries but still absolute in its way, seems to exist, fol- lowing from governance over the masses. That is, I mean that there is no certain proportion that would allow the ruling aristocracy unlimited growth commensurate with a growing number of subjects; rather there is an absolute limit for it beyond which the aristocratic form of group can no longer be held in place. This limit is determined by partly external, partly psychological circumstances: an aristocratic group that is supposed to function as a totality must still be wholly visible to the
56 chapter two
individual participant; each must still be able to be personally acquainted with each other; blood relationships and relationships by marriage must branch out and be traced throughout the whole corporate entity. If the historical aristocracies, from Sparta to Venice, have the tendency to shrink to the smallest possible number, this is then not simply an ego- istical aversion to participating in governance but the instinctual sense that the circumstances of life of an aristocracy can be fulfilled with a not only relatively but with an absolutely small number of its members. The unlimited right of the first born, which is the essence of aristocracy, comprises the means for limiting expansion; only under its presumption was the ancient Theban law possible that would not permit the num- ber of country estates to increase, just as the Corinthian law that the number of families would have to always remain the same. It is for that reason thoroughly characteristic that Plato once, when speaking of the ruling ? ? ? ? ? ? [few], identifies them also directly as the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? [not the many]. When an aristocratic corporate entity leaves room for the appearance of democratic-centrifugal tendencies, which tend to appear in the transition to very large communities, it develops into as deadly an opposition to their life principle, as it did for the nobility of the undivided Poland. In the more fortunate case any such contradic- tion dissolves through alterations into a unified democratic social form. For example, the ancient independent German farm community with its completely personal equality of members was thoroughly aristocratic and thus became in its continuation in the urban communities the original source of democracy. If this numerical density is to be avoided, there is simply nothing left than to draw at some definite point a hard line for growth and to set this quantitative density of formations in opposition to all individuals beyond this level of crowding and perhaps even to those qualified for entry; and often at the first appearance of an aristocratic nature, it is conscious of this inherent resistance to the demand for expansion. Thus the old genteel constitution seems to have been repeatedly turned into a genuine aristocracy because a new population, foreign to the genteel communities, was forced on it, too numerous to be absorbed gradually into the kinship groups. Before this increase of the whole group, the genteel communities, quantitatively limited by their whole nature, could be just maintained only as an aristocracy. Accordingly the Richerzeche Security Guild of Cologne consisted originally of the totality of free citizens; in that the masses, however, were increasing the population, it became an aristocratic society closed off to all intruders. Certainly the tendency of political
the quantitative conditioning of the group 57
aristocracies to get fixated on becoming "not many" leads regularly not to the conservation of the existing membership but decline and extinc- tion. Not only due to physiological causes but small groups closed in on themselves are generally distinguished from larger ones because fortune itself, which often strengthens and renews the larger ones, destroys the small ones. A disastrous war that ruins a small city-state can regenerate a large state. In fact even this is not only because of the immediately obvious external reasons but because the ratio of the power reserves to the actual level of energy is different in both cases. Small and centripetally organized groups tend to call up fully and utilize completely the powers present within them; in large ones, in contrast, there remains not only absolutely but also relatively much more in latent reserve. The demand of the whole is not made on every member continuously and completely, but it can allow a lot of energy to remain socially unexploited, which can then be drawn on and actu- alized in an emergency. Therefore, where such dangers that require a quantum of unused social energy are excluded by the circumstances, even measures of numerical diminution, which still exceed the inbreed- ing, can be thoroughly practical. In the mountains of Tibet polyandry prevails, and indeed, as even the missionaries recognize, to the benefit of society. The soil there is so barren that a rapid growth of the population would result in the greatest distress; to avoid this, however, polyandry is an advantageous method. When we hear that families among the Bushmen must even divide up from time to time because of the sterility of the soil, the measure that shrinks the family to a size compatible with the possibilities of nutrition appears precisely in the interest of its unity and its most highly noted foundational social sig- nificance. The dangers of quantitative shrinkage for its inner structure are here guarded against by the external life conditions of the group and their consequences.
Where the small group involves personalities to a large extent in its unity--especially in political groups--it exerts pressure precisely on account of its unity towards a hardness of position vis-a`-vis persons, objective roles, and other groups; the large one, with its multiplicity and diversity of individuals, requires or tolerates it much less. The history of the Greek and Italian cities, as well as that of the Swiss cantons, shows that small communities situated very near to one another, where they are not moving towards federation, tend to live more in open or latent enmity for one another. Warfare and the conventions of war are often more bitter and particularly ruthless between them than between large
58 chapter two
states. It is precisely that lack of agencies, reserves, less established and transitional individuals that hampers modification and adjustment for them and thus confronts them more frequently, through their external situations as well as on the basis of their fundamental sociological con- figuration, with the issue of existence or non-existence.
Next to such traits of small groups, I highlight with the same unavoid- ably arbitrary selection from countless cases the following sociological characterization of large groups. I assume that these, compared to the smaller, seem to manifest a smaller measure of radicalism and rigidity of opinion. This requires, however, a qualification. As soon as great masses are set into motion--politically, socially, or religiously--they display a thoughtless radicalism, a triumph of extremist parties over moderate ones. Underlying this, first of all, is that large masses can be satisfied and governed only by simple ideas: what is common to many must also be accessible to the lowest, most primitive mind among them, and even higher and more sophisticated personalities will never in great numbers concur in the complicated and highly developed, but rather in the relatively simple, commonly human images and impulses. Now, however, given that the realities, in which the ideas of the mass are sup- posed to become practical, are continually very diversely articulated and composed from a great number of highly divergent elements--simple ideas can function only quite one-sidedly, thoughtlessly, and radically. This will still come to a climax in which the behavior of an actually converging crowd is in question. Here the ebb and flow of countless suggestions produce an extraordinarily strong nervous excitement that often carries the individuals along unconsciously; every impulse swells up avalanche-like, and allows the crowd to become the prey of the ever most passionate personality in it. Thus it was declared that an essential means for tempering democracy was to have the votes of the Roman people be taken according to set groups--tributim et centuriatim descriptis ordinibus, classibus, aetatibus etc. 3--while the Greek democracies would vote as units under the immediate spell of orators. This fusion of masses into an emotion in which all individuality and reservations of personalities are suspended is of course so thoroughly radical in content, far from every negotiation and deliberation, that it would lead to noisy impracticability and destruction if it did not end up for the most part in inner weariness and set-backs, the consequences of that one-sided
3 Latin: by tribe and by hundreds according to rank, class, age, etc. --ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 59
exaggeration. For all that, it still happens that the masses--in the sense in question here--have little to lose, yet believe on the contrary to be able to win everything; this is the situation in which most of the restraints on radicalism tend to fall away. Also groups forget more frequently than the individual that their power simply has limits; and indeed they overlook this more easily in the mass in which the mem- bers are unknown to one another, as is typical for a larger multitude assembling by chance.
Beyond that radicalism, which is encountered through its purely emo- tional character indeed directly in large cooperating groups, it simply remains to be observed that small parties are generally more radical than large ones--of course within the limits that the ideas the party stands for allow. The radicalism referred to here is plainly a sociological one, i. e. it is borne by the unrestricted surrender of the individual to the cur- rent of the group, because of the sharp boundary vis-a`-vis neighboring structures necessary for group self-preservation, because of the impos- sibility in the extremely narrow limits to establish a pluralism of widely projecting aspirations and ideas; the actual contents of radicalism are in good measure independent of the multitude. It has been observed that the conservative-reactionary elements in contemporary Germany are compelled just by their numerical strength to contain the ruthlessness of their efforts; they are made up of so very many and different social strata that they can pursue none of their movement's aims straight to the end without always stirring up a scandal among a portion of their following. Likewise the Social Democratic Party has been forced by its quantitative growth to temper its qualitative radicalism, grant some latitude to dogmatic deviations, to grant their inconsistency, if not explicitly, albeit with an act of compromise here and there. The unconditional cohesiveness of the elements, on which the potential for radicalism is sociologically based, is less able to survive the greater the diversity of individual elements that the numerical increase brings in. Thus professional workers' alliances, whose goal is the improvement of the details of working conditions, know very well that with grow- ing coverage they lose in inner cohesion. Here, though, the numerical expansion on the other hand has the enormous significance that every additional member frees the coalition from a competitor who might undercut and thereby threaten them in their existence. There occurs, of course, obviously quite specific life conditions for a group that forms inside of a larger one under the idea, also achieving its meaning pri- marily through it, of uniting all the elements in itself that fall under
60 chapter two
its presumptions. In such cases there is a tendency to have the cachet: whoever is not for me is against me. And the personality outside the group, to whom the demand of this, as it were, ideal is directed, inflicts one very real injury on it through the mere indifference of those not on board; be it, as in the case of the labor coalitions, through competi- tion, be it through the documentation for outsiders of the limits of the group's power, be it, in that it accomplishes anything only with inclu- sion of all relevant elements, as with many industrial cartels. When the question of the integrity of a group thus arises (certainly not applicable to all), the question is whether all the elements, to which its principle extends, are also really contained in it--because the consequences of this integrity of them who have its size must still be carefully differentiated. Certainly it will be greater when it is whole than when it is incomplete. However, it is not this size as a quantity, but the first problem deriving from it, whether it thereby fully delineates a border that can become so important for the group that, as in the case of the labor coalitions, the disadvantages to cohesion and unity simply resulting from growth stand directly in antagonistic and countervailing relationship to the advantages of increasing wholeness.
In general one can to some essential extent explain the structures that are so characteristic of the large group, in that it creates with them a substitute for personal and immediate solidarity that is inherent in the small group. It is a matter of authorities who for that purpose manage and facilitate the interplay among the elements and thus function as an independent carrier of social unity, because this establishes itself no longer as a matter of relationship from person to person. To this end offices and agents emerge, regulations and symbols of group life, organizations and general social conceptions. This book treats the form- ing and functioning of these in so many passages that here only their relevance with respect to quantity is to be emphasized: they all develop substantially pure and mature only in large groups as the abstract form of group relationships that can no longer exist tangibly at a given expanse: their suitability, reflected in thousands of social qualities, rests ultimately on quantitative preconditions. The character of the supra- personal and objective, with which such embodiments of the powers of the group confront the individual, arise directly from the multiplicity of the more-or-less effective individual elements. Then the individual is paralyzed by them on account of their multiplicity, and the universal ascends to such a distance from one that it appears as something existing entirely of itself, something not needing individuals, indeed often enough
the quantitative conditioning of the group 61
something antagonistic to the individual--somewhat like the concept that recapitulates the collective in singular and separate manifestations, the higher it stands over each one of them, the more it realizes in itself; so that even the universal concepts that rule the largest circle of individuals--the abstractions with which metaphysics reckons--attain a separate life whose norms and developments are alien or inimical to those of the tangible individual. The large group thus achieves its unity--as it develops itself in its organs and in its law, in its political concepts and in its ideals--only at the price of a great distance of all these structures from individuals, their views and their needs, which find immediate effectiveness and consideration in the social life of a small group. From this relationship there emerges the frequent difficulties of organizations in which a tier of smaller assemblages is contained in a larger one: in that the circumstances are accurately seen only close-up and treated with interest and care; that on the other hand only from the distance that the central office has, a correct and orderly relationship of all the particulars to one another is to be established--a discrepancy that continually shows up, for example, in the policy toward poverty, in the trade union, in the educational administration. The person-to- person relationships that comprise the life principle of the small group do not survive the distance and coldness of the objective abstract norms without which the large group cannot exist. 4
The structural difference that the mere differences in group size produce will be clearer still in the role of certain more prominent and effective individuals. It applies namely not only to the obvious reality
4 A typical difficulty of human relations presents itself here. We are continually led by our theoretical as well as by our practical attitudes in relation to all possible circles to stand inside them and likewise outside them. For example, those who speak against smoking, on the one hand, must themselves smoke; on the other hand, they are simply not permitted to do so--because they themselves do not smoke, they lack the knowledge of its attraction which they condemn; if they smoke, however, one will not judge it legitimate that they repudiate themselves. For one to give an opinion about women "in the plural," will require the experience of close relations with them, just as being free and distant from them is needed to change the emotional judgment. Only when we become well acquainted with, stand within, be on a par with, do we have knowledge and understanding; only when distance breaks off the immediate contact in every sense do we have the objectivity and perspective that are just as necessary for judgment. This dualism of near and far, which is necessary for the uniformly proper action, belongs to some extent to the basic forms of our life and its problematic. That one and the same matter can be dealt with properly on the one hand only within a narrow formation, on the other hand only within a large one, is a formal sociological contradiction that constitutes a special case of those that are universally human.
? 62 chapter two
that a given number of such individuals in a large group has a different meaning than in a small one; but their effectiveness changes with the quantitative change in the groups whether their own quantity rises or falls in exact proportion with that of the group. When a millionaire lives in a city of 10,000 inhabitants in economic intermediate position, that person's role in the life of the city and the overall physiognomy that the city gains through this citizen has a completely different meaning than each one of fifty millionaires, as the case may be, for a city of 500,000 inhabitants--although the numerical relation between the millionaire and the millionaire's fellow citizens, which however solely determined that meaning, remained unchanged. If there are four members in a party of twenty persons in a parliament critical of the party program or secessionist, their role in the trends and proceedings of the party will be a different one than if the party is fifty people strong and has ten rebels in its midst: in general, despite the identically remaining proportion, its significance of those ten will be greater in the larger party. Finally, it has been emphasized that a military tyranny, ceteris paribus, would be all the more durable the greater its domain, because if the army includes about one percent of the population, a population of ten mil- lion is more readily held in check with an army of 100,000 than a city of 100,000 with 100 soldiers or a village of 100 with one of its own. The peculiarity here is that the absolute number of the whole group and that of its influential members make the relations within the group noticeably different, even though their numerical proportion remains the same. Those arbitrarily augmented examples show that the relation- ship of sociological elements depends not only on the relative but also the absolute numerical quantity of these elements. Once such elements are described as a party within a group, the relationship of this party to the whole is then not only shifted when it rises or falls numerically while the latter remains constant, but also, when this change affects the whole and the part in fully the same measure; thereby the sociological meaning of the largeness or smallness of the whole group itself vis-a`-vis the numerical relations of the elements is shown, where at first glance the meaning of the numbers for the inner relationships of the group alone appear to bind.
The difference in form in the group-related activity of individuals, which is determined by the size of the group, extends beyond its mere factual existence to the category of norm, that which should be done, perhaps most clearly as the difference between custom and law. It
the quantitative conditioning of the group 63
seems as though, among the Aryan peoples, the primary bonds of indi- viduals to a supra-individual order of life might start from an entirely universal instinct or concept that the rules, the proper, the obligatory would generally represent; it is perhaps the dharma of the Hindus, the ? ? ? ? ? [law] of the Greeks, the fas [divine will] of the Latins that reveal this undifferentiated "general normativity. " The particular rules in the fields of religion, morality, convention and law are branches that still remain undivorced from it; it is their original unity, before subsequent abstraction. Contrary to the opinion now that morality, custom, and law developed, as it is were, as counterparts from that seed condition, it seems to me rather that they still live on in that which we call custom, and these represent the undifferentiated condition that releases from itself the form of law and of morality in various directions. Morality is pertinent for us here only in so far as it results in the conduct of the individual toward other individuals or toward the whole, thus having the same kind of content as custom and law. Only that the second subject, by whose opposition the behavioral form of morality develops in the individual, is situated in itself; with the same division by which the 'I' speaks to itself, 'I am'--while it places itself over against itself, as a knowing subject, over against itself as a known object--it also says to itself, 'I should. ' The relationship of two subjects that emerges as imperative repeats itself by virtue of the fundamental capacity of our psyche to confront itself and to view and treat itself as an other inside the individual soul itself; meanwhile I leave it open whether this is a transfer of the empirically previously ongoing inter-individual relation- ship to the elements of the individual soul or originates more purely from its spontaneity. Now on the other hand once the normative forms have taken on definite contents, then these get free of their original sociological carriers and ascend to an inner and independent necessity that must be identified as ideal; these contents--ways of acting or states of the subject--are now valuable in and for themselves, they ought, and their being social in nature or somehow having social significance now no longer determines their imperative tone, which flows rather from their objective-ideal meaning and value. But neither that personal Gestalt of the moral nor this development of the three normativizations towards the aspect of objective and supra-social meaning prevents their contents from being considered here as social adaptations and the three forms as guarantees for their being realized by the individual. There are actually forms of the internal and external relation of the individual
64 chapter two
to a social group; because the identical content of this relation has assumed now one and now the other of these motivations or forma- tions: what at one time or in one place was custom has been elsewhere or later state law or was left to personal morality; what was upheld by the force of law became merely good custom; what was entrusted to the conscience of the individual was often enough later enforced by the state, etc. The extremities of this spectrum are law and morality, between which custom, from which both developed, stands virtually in the middle. Law has its differentiated organs in the legislative and the executive powers by which it can, first, define its focal content quite precisely and, second, enforce it externally; but it is thereby functionally limited to the completely indispensable preconditions of group life; what the general public of individuals can demand absolutely is only that that they must demand absolutely. On the other hand the unrestricted morality of the individual possesses no statute other than that given over to it autonomously from within, and no executive other than the conscience; thus its purview admittedly embraces in principle all activity, but in practice apparently has specific, random and fluctuating boundaries according to the context in every individual case. 5
5 That law and morality alike arise from, as it were, one turn in social development is reflected in the teleological significance of both, mutually referencing each other more than a first appearance betrays. When the narrow behavior of the individual, which includes a life everywhere regulated by custom, loses ground to the legal norm, which is much more remote from all individuals--then the freedom attained thereby is not permitted, in the interest of society, to be left up to the self: the legal imperatives are supplemented by moral imperatives, and plug the gaps in the normative rule of life produced by the discontinuation of general regulation by custom. In contrast to cus- tom, the normative regulation through both of them is relocated simultaneously much higher over the individual and much deeper into the self. Whatever the personal and metaphysical values both the conscience and autonomous morality may represent--their social ones, which alone are in question here, lie in their immense prophylactic func- tion. Law and custom grasp onto the external and material reality of voluntary action, functioning thus purely preventively through fear; to render this motive unnecessary, mostly they just need additional absorption--albeit not always--into personal morality. However this lies at the root of action; it molds the innermost being of the subject until the correct deed is discharged by the self entirely from the self without requiring the support of those relatively external forces. But society has no interest in the purely moral perfection of the subject; it is only important to it, is only bred by it, insofar as it provides a conceivably broad guarantee of socially useful behavior now on the part of the subject. In individual morality, society itself creates an organ that is actually not only more effective than law and custom but in addition spares the expenses and formalities of those institutions; as is the tendency of society then, in order to provide its necessities as cheaply as possible, to nurture the 'good conscience,' whereby the individual rewards oneself for good behavior that would otherwise probably have to be guaranteed somehow by law or custom.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 65
Now it is through custom that a circle secures for itself the proper behavior of its members when the force of law is inadmissible and individual morality unreliable. As today custom functions as a supple- ment to both of these orders, so was it at one time the sole rule for life when those differentiated forms of normativeness did not at all yet exist or only embryonically. The sociological location of custom is indicated thusly: it lies between the largest circle, each member of which is subordinate as an individual to law, and absolute individuality, which is the sole bearer of free morality. Thus it belongs to the smaller circles--the middle structures between them. Almost every custom is a status- or class-custom; its manners of expression in external behavior, in fashion, and in honor always govern only a subsection of the largest circle, which is shared with law, and have there again different content in neighboring sections. 6 To violations of beneficial customs only those of the smaller circle who are thereby somehow affected or are witnesses to them react, whereas a violation of the legal order calls for a reaction of the whole. Since custom has for its executive authority only public opinion and certain directly consequential reactions of individuals to it, it is out of the question that a large circle as such would govern it. The know-how requiring no design--that which commercial custom as such would offer or require compared to that of the aristocracy, that of a religious circle compared to that of a literary one, etc. --suggests that, for guaranteeing the same content of custom made up from specific conditions that a smaller circle required, neither the coercion of state law nor entirely dependable autonomous moral impulses are available. What is common to these and the primitive groups with which our social history begins is nothing other than being numerically incon- sequential. The forms of life that at that time sufficed entirely for the solidarity of the circle withdrew upon its enlargement to its subsections. Because now these contain those possibilities of personal relationship that approximate equality of levels of membership, those common interests, and ideals, one can leave to them the social regulation of one of the more precarious and elastic types of normative regulation, such as custom. With an increasing number of elements and thus their inevitable increase of independence, these conditions cease to exist for the circle. The characteristic binding power of custom becomes too
6 Compare here the discussion of the sociological form of honor in the chapter on the self-preservation of the group and the intersection of circles.
? 66 chapter two
little for the state and too much for the individual, its content however too much for the state and too little for the individual. The former requires greater guarantees, the latter greater freedom, and only in those respects in which every element still belongs to mid-sized circles is it socially ruled by custom.
That the large circle requires and allows for stringent and objec- tive normative regulation, crystallized as law, coincides with greater freedom, flexibility, and individuality on the part of its elements. If, therefore, on the one hand the socially necessary repressions must be fixed more precisely and guarded more rigorously, then this is, on the other hand, more tolerable for individuals because they have a greater latitude for freedom outside of these relentless pressures. So if on the one hand the socially necessary inhibitions must be set more narrowly and guarded more rigorously, still on the other this is more tolerable for individuals since they have so much greater latitude for freedom outside of these highly precise strictures. This is all the clearer the more the law or norm emerging from it is proscription or prohibition. Among the indigenous Brazilians it is generally forbidden to marry one's own sister or the daughter of one's brother. This applies all the more strongly the larger the tribe is, while in smaller more isolated hordes brother and sister often live together. The prohibitive char- acter of the norm--which is more suited to law than to custom--is indicated more in the larger circle since it offers the individual ampler positive compensation than the smaller. In that the expansion of the group favors the transformation of its norms into the form of law, it becomes apparent, on the other hand, that many a unification of small structures into one larger occurred at first or continually only for the sake of legal administration, and their unity stands only in the sign of uniformly enforced law. Thus the county of the New England states was originally only "an aggregation of towns for judicial purposes. " There are obvious exceptions to this connection linking the difference between the social form of custom and that of law to the quantitative difference of the circle. The original folk units of the Germanic tribes, over which the great Frankish, English, and Swedish empires arose, were often able to save their jurisdiction for a long time; frequently these particularly were nationalized relatively late. And, on the other hand, in modern international relations multiple customs that are not yet set in law prevail; inside the individual states some behavior is fixed as law that in the relationships towards the outside, thus inside the largest circle of
the quantitative conditioning of the group 67
all, must be left to the more relaxed form of custom. The solution to the contradiction is simple. The size of the group naturally calls for the legal form only to the degree in which the multiplicity of its elements is integrated into a unity. Where, instead of a definite centralization, only rather loose commonalities allow the circle to be identified as one at all, this identification reveals very obviously its generally relative character. Social unity is an incremental concept, and if a form of regulation is required by a specific quantity of the circle, then it can be the same with a different quantity and a different one with the same quantity, if the degree of unity that it bears and by which it is borne is a different one. The significance of the numerical relationships is thus not at all discernible if a large circle on account of its specific tasks can or must do just as well without the legal form of its norms, as is otherwise possible only to a small one. The very disconnected state structures of early Germanic times simply did not yet possess the cohesion of the elements that is as much the cause as the effect of legal constitutions among contemporary large groups; and certain norms in the pure form of custom are produced in collective relationships between modern states just as in individual ones because here there is lacking the unity over the parties that is the carrier of a legal order, and is replaced in a small as well as in a less formal group by the more direct interactions from element to element; however, custom directly corresponds to them as a form of regulation. Thus even the apparent exceptions confirm the correlation that obtains between custom and law on the one hand and measurements of the group on the other.
Now it is obvious that the concepts, large and small circle, are of extraordinary scientific coarseness, quite vague and obscuring and actually only useful generally for suggesting the dependence of the sociological character of the form of a group on its quantitative cir- cumstances--not, however, for indicating any more exactly the actual proportion that exists between the former and the latter. Nevertheless ascertaining this proportion more exactly is perhaps not ruled out in all cases. To be sure, to insert exact numerical values into the formations and relationships considered up to now would obviously be a completely fanciful venture in the foreseeable progression of our knowledge; but for the moment let us within more modest boundaries indicate character- istics of those social interactions that occur between a limited number of persons and are characterized by this limitation. As transitions from the fully numerical uncertainty to the fully numerical certainty I am
68 chapter two
noting several cases in which the latter in principle already has its own sociological significance, but without a determination of the same hav- ing occurred in the individual.
1. Number functions as the group's principle of classification, i. e. , it will treat similar parts, produced through enumeration, as relative unities. Later I will discuss the particular meanings of the individual numbers for this, and highlight here only the principle. That a whole group, which somehow feels itself as one, generally divides itself, and indeed not only from top to bottom by the criterion of the ruling and the ruled, but even among its coordinated members--that is one of the greatest advances of humanity; it is the anatomical structure by which the higher organic-social processes are established. Now the classification can proceed from ancestry or voluntary associations or the similarity of occupations or grouping by districts; the numerical principle is linked to those; it divides the quantities of existing people or families into a certain number and so acquires quantitatively corresponding subdivi- sions, to each of which the whole relates roughly as their individuals are related to them. Now this principle is surely so schematic that it must in practice be fashioned into something more concrete: the numerically similar subdivisions, somehow closely associated with one another--relatives, friends, neighbors--were comprised of components that are complementary either by being similar or dissimilar. However it is crucial that the numerical similarity constitutes the formative principle of the categorizing--although it is never decisive by itself but only plays a role that varies from the greatest to the smallest. Nomadic tribes, for example, often in the absence of the more stable life pursuits, generally have hardly any other possibility to organize themselves than according to the principle of number; its significance for such a group on the march is still evident today determining the structure of the military. It continues naturally enough that with the dividing up of a conquered land or the colonization of a newly discovered one--where for the time being there is as yet no organization by some objective scale--the principle of incorporating in equally-proportioned shares prevails; for example, the oldest constitution of Iceland is ordered in that way. In a rather pure manner the Cleisthenes reform,7 with this
7 Cleisthenes (6th century B. C. E. Athenian) replaced an oligarchical government with a more democratic division of power, based on equal proportions of inhabitants organized into new "tribes"--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 69
principle, brought about one of the greatest social-historical revolutions. When he established a council of five hundred members, fifty from each of the ten phyles, each demos received a corresponding number of council seats according to its headcount. 8 The rational idea, to create a representative body from the whole group purely by the principle of number, exceeds the typical "centuria" (about which more is to be said hereafter) as a higher state of development, and for the first time uses the method of purely numerical division to enable governmental entity to function as the symbol of the people.
2. While so far it is a matter of separate divisions of the same size, number can also be used to distinguish from a total group a unique and indeed leading circle of persons. Thus one often called the guild leader according to its number: in Frankfurt with the wool weavers they were called the Six, with the bakers the Eight; in medieval Barcelona the senate was the One Hundred, etc. It is most peculiar how, in itself least revealing, even the most prominent personalities are identified by number regardless of any other qualification. It seems to me that the presupposition behind this is that by a number such as six is meant not 6 individual elements existing in isolation from one another but a synthesis of them; six is not 1 and 1 and 1 etc. , but a new concept that results from the combination of these elements and is not realized pro rata in each of them for itself. In this book I identify the living functional interaction of elements often as their unity, which would rise above their mere sum and in sociological contrast to it. Here, however, by the identification of a directorship, a committee and so forth with the mere sum is meant in reality that functional combination, and as designation it is then even possible that the number signifies also even a unity from unities.