No More Learning

The extraordinary increase in the differences of needs among modern people simultaneously affects both forms--change of place and differ- entiation--but in other cases the two can substitute for each other so that societies that are spatially stable strongly differentiate internally; and wandering societies, in contrast, which have veiled their necessary feeling of differentiation from the outset, require a social leveling for the constitution of their nerves and for the simultaneous tendency of life in the opposite condition.
The stratagem of wandering is made the vehicle of this principal relationship. The members of a wandering band are especially closely dependent on one another; the common interests, in contrast to the settled groups, have more the form of the momentary and therefore obscure, with the peculiar energy of the present that so often triumphs over the objectively more essential, individual differences, in the double sense of the word: as qualitative or social variety and as strife and divi- sion among individuals. Impulses for spatial expansion and contraction stand in sharp contrast among nomadic tribes; conditions for nourish- ment lead the individuals as far apart from one another as possible (and
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? the spatial separation must also work towards a qualitative mental sepa- ration), while the need for protection nevertheless drives them together again and restrains differentiation. 14 Livingstone says of the divisions of African clans, which otherwise do not feel very connected, that they hold whole tribes very much together during wanderings and mutually support one another. From the Middle Ages, it is often reported that merchants who travel together had introduced a strongly communistic order among themselves, of which it is only a continuation that the merchant guilds or Hanses often established abroad, and that indeed characteristically right from the beginning of their development, they agree to a completely common life. Along the leveling moment of the travels, of course, there was no lack of the despotic in such cases. At least it is emphasized about the traits of the traveling merchants who traveled through the Roman Empire from Palmyra in the Euphrates region, that their leaders would have been the most noble men of quite old aristocracy, for whom the caravan participants would then often set up honorary pillars. It is thus assumed that their authority during the trip was a discrete one, under a relationship very analogous to that that of a ship captain during a voyage. Precisely because wandering individualizes and isolates in and of itself, because it places people on their own, it drives them to a close unity beyond the differences that exist otherwise. While it removes the support of the homeland from individuals, and at the same time removes the fixed levels among them, it directly brings to consciousness the travelers' fates, isolation, and rootlessness--to complement and augment a more than individual entity through the greatest possible commitment.
This essential sociological characteristic of wandering reveals itself as one that is in form always the same in phenomena that are in essence completely without any connection to what has been touched on until now. The travel acquaintance, as long as one is really only that and does not assume a character independent from that kind of association, often develops an intimacy and candor for which no genuine inner basis is to be found. Three causes appear to me to work in concert here: the liberation from the accustomed milieu, the mutuality of the momentary impressions and encounters, and the consciousness of the imminent and
14 The unbalanced proximity of these two necessities, which find a harmony, organi- zation, and complementary form in no higher viewpoint, both dominating, is perhaps the basis for the low and difficult development of the tribe at the stage of nomadism.
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? definitive separation that will happen again. The second of these factors is immediately clear in its effects on uniting and on a kind of spiritual communism, so long as even the identity of the experience lasts and the consciousness prevails; the other two, however, are only accessible to a more difficult sociological consideration. On the occasion of the first factor one must clarify how few people know from within, and through sure instincts, where the unalterable boundary of their private mental possession lies, and which reserves their individual being requires in order to keep themselves from being injured. Only through initiatives and reversals, through disappointments and adaptations do we gradu- ally tend to discover what we must reveal about ourselves to others without allowing feelings of tactlessness against ourselves and direct damages to develop from embarrassing situations. The fact that the mental sphere of one individual is not at all as clearly set off from that of others at the outset as is the body, the fact that this boundary, after it also overcame the vicissitudes of its first formation, never absolutely overcomes its relativity--this readily appears when we leave behind us the accustomed relationships in which we marked out a fairly solid space for ourselves with gradually increasing rights and responsibilities, by understanding and being understood by others, by testing our pow- ers and our emotional reactions, so that we certainly know here what we have to say and what to withhold and by what measure of both we create and sustain the accurate picture of our personality in others. Now since this relative measure of expression, set by the relationship to our environment, hardens for many people into an absolute in its own right, in an entirely new environment, one before entirely strange people, it generally loses any standard for self-revelation. On the one hand they are revealed under suggestions that they cannot resist in their actual state of being uprooted, and on the other hand in an inner uncertainty in which they can no more hold in check an intimacy or confession once they are prompted, but allow them to roll to the end as though they fell on a slanted plane. Now the third factor comes into play: we allow our accustomed reserve to drop so easily before those with whom we have nothing to do after this unique, mutual or one-sided revelation. All social interactions are influenced in the character of their form and content most decidedly by the idea of the duration for which one believes it is determined. This pertains to the sociological cognitions, the truth of which is admittedly unmistakably obvious for the grossest cases; for the finer ones, however, they are all the more frequently overlooked. That
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? the qualitative character of a bond between a man and a woman in a lifelong marriage is different from that in a fleeting relationship, that the professional soldier has a different relationship to the army than that of a one or two year service is admittedly self-evident for anyone; but the conclusion that these macroscopic effects of the quantity of time also must appear with a lesser proportionate starkness and, as it were, microscopically, seems to be applied nowhere. Whether a contract is completed in one or ten years, whether a get-together of colleagues is planned for a few hours in the evening or as something at a country outing for a whole day, or whether one gets together at the set dinner of a hotel that changes the guests every day or that of a pension that is intended for a longer stay, that is quite essential for the coloration of the process in otherwise wholly similar material, meaning, and personal character of the being together. Whichever way it works, the quantity of time is admittedly not looked at in itself but depends on the totality of the circumstances: the greater length of time will sometimes lead to something overlooked,15 as it were to a lingering trace of the gathered group, since one is certain of it and does not yet find it necessary to strengthen the still irrevocable bond with new efforts; sometimes, again the consciousness of this simple indissolubility will move us toward a mutual adaptation and a more or less resigned flexibility in order to make the pressure, once it is taken on, at least as bearable as possible. Shortness of time will occasionally lead to the same intensity of the utilization of the relationship as its length, among other characteristics that can admittedly endure only a superficial or 'half ' relationship over a short time but not over the long term. This reference to the effect that thought exerts on the duration of a relationship at any individual moment should show here only the sociological essence of the brief encounter belonging to a wider and principled context. The traveling acquaintance--from the feeling of being obligated to nothing, and of being really anonymous in relation to a person from whom one will be separated for ever in a few hours--often entices one to quite remarkable confidences, giving in unreservedly to the impulse to speak what only experience has taught, through their consequences, to control. Thus people have also attributed the erotic opportunities of the military to its not possessing the stationariness that most other sectors of society possess, to the relationship with the soldier possessing the coloration
15 einer ne? gligeance--ed.
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? of a fleeting dream on the part of the woman, a dream that not only involves no commitment but precisely by its brevity seduces one to the most superficial intensity in the exploitation of her and the devotion to him. Thus one has also explained the success of the mendicant friars by the fact that one often confessed with less embarrassment to those who had the right to hear confession anywhere and came today and left tomorrow, than to one's own pastor who had the penitent in sight for a long time. Here as often as the extremes appear to possess a certain uniform importance that is opposed to the middle sphere: one reveals oneself to the closest and the strangest persons while the layers that stand in between comprise the place of genuine reserve. Thus the following is also recognizable in these wide-ranging phenomena within the basic context: Peoples' peculiar lack of attachment as wanderers and toward wanderers, even by what I indicated above as an approach to spiritual communism, is a surrender beyond the other barriers of individualism; this sociological theme is alive in countless, difficult to recognize transformations, which promotes at a certain level a deper- sonalizing unity within the wandering group.
2. Totally apart from this is the consideration of how the wandering of a section affects the form of the whole, otherwise sedentary group. I mention here only two of the many relevant phenomena, of which one would continue to have an effect on the side of the unification of the group, and the other precisely on the side of its duality. In order to dynamically hold elements together that are distant from one another in a spatially spread out group, highly developed epochs develop a system of various means, above all everything that is customary to the objective culture, which is accompanied by the consciousness that it would be just the same here as it is at every point in the same group: the sameness of speech, law, general way of life, the style of buildings and tools; moreover, the functional units: the centralized administration of state and church that extends itself everywhere at the same time, the more selective associations of entrepreneurs that nevertheless reach out across all local separations, such as industrial workers, commercial associations of wholesalers and retailers, the more ideal but still very effective association of scholars, military association, school teachers, university professors, collectivities of all sorts--in short, a tangle of threads with an absolute or partial center that holds together all parts of a highly cultivated state, admittedly with very differently distributed energy, since the substantive culture according to quantity and kind is neither sufficiently uniform, nor do the functional connections turn all
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? elements with the same interest and same force toward their center. At any rate, insofar as these unifications are effective, they require only the movement of peoples through large stretches of space in trifling segments and, as it were, accidentally; modern life succeeds in bring- ing about the consciousness of social unity, on the one hand through those factual regularities and the knowledge of the common points of contact, and on the other hand through the institutions that are fixed once and for all, and finally and thirdly, through written communica- tion. But as long as there is an absence of this objective organization and technology, it has another overriding significance as the secondary means of unification later: the wandering that, admittedly, because of its purely personal character, can never cover the breadth of the spatial territory as do those means and can never centralize the same circuit from the point of view of content. The merchant and the scholar, offi- cial and craftsperson, monk and artist, the highly prominent as well as the most depraved members of society were in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern era much more mobile than now. What we gain in consciousness of solidarity through letters and books, checking account and warehouses, mechanical reproduction of the same model and photography had to be done at that time through travel by persons, which was as lacking in success as it was wasteful in imple- mentation; for where it is a matter of merely factual communication, traveling is the most unhelpful and unspecialized means for a person since one must drag along, as heavy baggage, all that is external and internal to one's personality that has nothing directly to do with the business at hand. And if the byproduct of many personal and infor- mal relationships were also thereby gained, that still does not exactly serve the purpose now in question, i. e. , making the unity of the group perceptible and effective. Pertinent relationships that leave the personal completely aside--and thus can lead from any element to many other ones without limitation--succeed more thoroughly to make conscious a unity that transcends individuals; precisely, the informal relationship not only excludes all others in substantial matters, but it exhausts itself in its immediate narrowness so that its benefit for the consciousness of the unity of the group, to which both belong, is minimal. It is indicative of this subjective nature of the linkages and at the same time also of their importance that in the Middle Ages the maintenance of highways and bridges was regarded as a religious duty. That so many of today's objectively mediated relationships came about in earlier times only
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? through the wandering of personalities seems to me to be a basis for the relative weakness of the consciousness of unity in the extended groups of antiquity.
After all, the wanderings were often the only vehicle, often at least one of the comparatively strongest ones, for centralization, especially in a political sense. On the one hand the king took the individual parts of the realm into his possession personally in the form of a circuit, as is reported of the ancient Franks and as did the earlier kings of Sweden; on the other hand, the king traveled around in the realm either periodi- cally or continuously. The earliest Russian sovereigns did it periodically by visiting all the cities annually, and the German emperors of the old empire did it continuously. The Russian custom was supposed to have served the solidarity of the Empire, the German, which followed from the lack of an imperial capital, was thereby admittedly just the symbol of a dubious decentralization, but under these circumstances still the best that one could do for the unification of the separate parts of the empire in the person of the king. Precisely one of the causes of this traveling around on the part of the German princes--the fact that the taxes paid in kind to them had to be consumed on the spot for lack of a means of transportation--precisely this established a kind of entirely personal relationship between each place and the king. In England the arrangement of the itinerant justices through Henry II served an analogous purpose. With the imperfections of the centralization and communication, the administration of the counties was vulnerable from the outset to considerable abuse by county constables. The circuit judges first brought the highest state authority everywhere; with the distance that they had as strangers to each part of the realm, and with the sub- stantial similarity of their judgments, they first pulled all parts of the kingdom beyond their scattered condition into a unity centralized under the king by law and administration. As long as there is a lack of the supra-local means, working at a distance, to bring the local settlement authorities also into this unity, the riding circuit of the officials gives the most effective possibility of centralizing the outlying regions into the ideal political unity. The physical impression of persons also works just the same way; one knows about them that they come from that center of the whole and return back to it. In this immediacy and clarity lies an advantage of this organization, borne by mobile members, held together before the more abstract means, who occasionally balance its fortuitousness and isolation. A half-socialist English organization, the
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? English Land-Restoration League, used a red coach ('red van') for its propaganda among the rural workers, in which its speaker lived and which, driving from place to place, formed the center stage at meet- ings and center of excitement. Such a wagon, with all its mobility, by virtue of its characteristics, a spectacle recognized everywhere, is still a psychologically stationary element; with its coming and going it brings the scattered party comrades their connectedness throughout the area to a stronger consciousness than would perhaps occur under otherwise similar circumstances of a fixed branch of the party, with the result that other parties would readily imitate this wagon-propaganda. In addition to state and party unity, travel can also serve religious unity. The English Christians only began founding parish churches late. At least well into the seventh century bishops moved around the diocese with their assistants to carry out church business; and thus certainly the religious unity of the individual community obtained an incomparable solidity and clarity through the church structure; thus the latter could more quickly work towards a particularistic isolation of the community while the unity of the whole diocese, indeed the Church in general, must have come more strongly into consciousness through the traveling of its bearer. Even now the Baptists in North America proceed with their recruitment of adherents in the more remote regions by means of special wagons, 'gospel cars,' that would be furnished as chapels. This mobility of worship services must be especially favorable for propaganda since it makes it clear to the scattered adherents that they are not in isolated lost outposts, but belong to a unified whole that is held together by continuously functioning connections. And finally it is still the moral conduct of the group toward its wandering members that it must occasionally come to the places of meeting and fellowship. Besides the indispensability that travel had for the whole economic and cultural activity in the Middle Ages, combined with its dangers and difficulties, the poor that were thus as much an object of general charities also wandered almost continuously--it would happen that the Church recommended travelers to the daily prayers of the devout in the same breath with the sick and the imprisoned. And similarly the Koran specifies: the fifth portion of the spoils belongs to God, His emissaries, the orphans, the beggars, and the wanderers. Then the immediate provision of welfare for the traveler was differentiated, in accordance with a general historical development, into the objective relief of the traveler on the road, assurances, institutions of different kinds, and into
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? the subjective ones allowing the individuals their independence and self-reliance. That general religious obligation toward the traveler was the ethical reflection of the continuous social interaction and functional unity that the traveler produced. As the traveler, even if not poor at all, can still be especially easily caught up in situations of need, and all the more so the less developed the outer culture is, it is in turn particularly suggested to the poor that they travel, since the individual fields of the harvest of alms is exhausted. The fact that poverty and wandering are so often presented as a completely unified phenomenon--the persisting type of the beggar, the 'roaming poor,' is probably only recently begin- ning to disappear completely in Germany--is the basis of one of the greatest difficulties of the care for the poor with reference to the sinking poor: that one has absolutely no sure means of distinguishing between the worker seeking employment who is caught in the course of that in undeserved difficulty, and the professional idler who moves from one place to another in order to live at the cost of other people.
In addition to the unifying effect of travel on the fixed group that strives to overcome functionally its spatial distancing from itself through coming and going, there is another one that serves precisely the antago- nistic forces of the group. This occurs if one part of a group is princi- pally settled, another characterized by its mobility, and this difference in formal spatial behavior then becomes the vehicle, instrument, and growth-factor of an otherwise already existing latent or open opposi- tion. Here the most distinctive type is the vagabond and the adventurer, whose continuous roving about projects unrest, the rubato quality of their inner rhythm of life, onto territory. The difference between one settled by natural inclination and the wandering nature in itself already gives the structure and development of society infinitely possible varia- tions. Each of these two temperaments senses in the other a natural and irreconcilable enemy. Since where, perhaps, it does not succeed in procuring the born vagabonds an employment adequate to their talent through a fine differentiation of professions--which very rarely succeeds where already the time toward regular employment for them is all too related to the fixedness in space--there they will exist as a parasite on the settled members of the society. However, they do not persecute the vagabonds only out of hate, but they hate them also because they must persecute them for their self preservation. And just the same, what drove the vagabonds into this exposed and weakened position, their instinct for a continuous change of place, their ability and desire to
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? 'make themselves invisible' is still at the same time a protection against that persecution and ostracism; it is simultaneously an offensive and their defensive weapon. As the vagabonds' relationship with space is the adequate expression of their subjective interiority and erraticism, so is it the same for the relationships to their social groups.
Here it is exclusively a matter of unique elements that are forced by their restlessness and mobility, but are also capable of actually sustain- ing a conflict with the entire society. At least very rarely, compared to the interweaving of the social whole into the nature of the vagabond, unions among them are such that it is thus a matter not of wandering communities, in a sociological difference from nomads, but of a com- munity of wanderers. The whole life principle of the adventurer resists that because an organization can hardly avoid some kind of permanence. There are, after all, beginnings of that, which one could call flowing social formations, which can however obviously always include within themselves and regulate only a small part of the inner and outer life of their members. One such homeless fellowship was the itinerant people of the Middle Ages; it needed the entire spirit of fellowship of the time so that these itinerant people would create a kind of inner order for themselves. While this fellowship rose even to the establishment of a 'Meisterschaft'16 and other dignities, at least the formal edge of their opposition against the rest of the society became moderate. Now this happened even more decidedly in a different type of special move- ment as a bearer of a social antagonism: namely, where two parts of a group are set into a more active opposition by it. Here the traveling skilled worker, especially in the Middle Ages, is the best example. The organizations on which the skilled labor depended by their claims to support the cities and masters had travel as a prerequisite. Or looked at differently: both stood in an indissoluble interaction. The wandering would not have been technically possible without an arrangement that granted the skilled worker, who has migrated, an initial base of support; and inevitably comrades in the trade, who themselves came or will come into the same situation, would need to provide one. While the skilled crafts drew the work centers precisely to themselves, the skilled worker was actually a foreigner nowhere in Germany (and similarly in other lands); a network of information centers among the skilled work- ers provided relatively quickly for the balancing of demand and offer
16 Recognized free status of a guild--ed.
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? of work at the individual places, and thus it was at first a very obvious benefit for them that allowed one association of skilled workers to arise from the skilled workers stretched out throughout the whole empire. Travel caused the skilled worker guilds to stand in a more active mutual interaction than the guilds of the masters with the immobility of their residence, and caused a unity of law and custom to develop among them, which afforded the individual or the smaller parts extraordinarily strong support in their struggles over wages, life style, honor, and social standing. The wanderings of skilled workers had to promote the forma- tion of their specialized associations extraordinarily. The skilled worker born in one place was linked to the master through residence, piety, and a general relationship to things and persons. For the skilled workers, however, who had gathered together from everywhere, there was no other interest but the purely factual and technical; the personal bonds leading back to the master were dissolved, and there remained only the rationalist direction of interests and connections that are generally characteristic of the foreigner and made the foreigner everywhere, for example, the bearer of money transactions. Besides being reinforced by the socializing effect of the travels of its members, the struggling situation of the stratum of skilled workers was still intensified quite directly by their mobility; for this enabled it to execute work stoppages and boycotts in a way that the masters could not immediately counteract. Obviously this was only possible for the latter if they balanced the disadvantages of their being rooted in the soil with alliances that embraced the whole area for the travels of the skilled workers who came into question. Thus we hear of associations of cities and guilds in cohesive solidarity against the skilled workers, associations that tended to belong to the same geographically insulated zone that constituted a regular travel area for the skilled workers. Thus two different forms struggled with each other to dominate the same space: mobility, through which the group easily shifted here and there its elements for offense and defense, each time to the point of least resistance and most advantage, backed the ideal domination of the same space through the appointment of the others to defend through them the widely distributed groups. Through these, the inner differences of this group, out of which the mobility of the others drew their opportunities, would be eliminated; only after the regularity of the behavior and the strength for all elements of the master group were restored did the opportunity for the mobility of the opposing group become illusory. Accordingly, the state of the seventeenth and eighteenth century could also much sooner cope with the guilds
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? of masters, who, so to speak, had to hold still, than with the bands of skilled workers, because the skilled workers could withdraw from every territory and prevent immigration, thereby severely damaging business. Also, the states first aligned itself against the bands of skilled workers in the eighteenth century, at the same time as they were confronted by them in a large part of the imperial territory.
The character of social construction is formally determined to a high degree by how often their participants meet. Here this category is so peculiarly distributed between the masters and the skilled workers that frequently they are, of course, united by their settledness, and generally it is thus necessary to meet often, but actually only within the locally restricted group, in contrast to the others who admittedly meet less completely, more seldom, and occasionally, but in the broad circuits that include very many guild circles. Thus, while, for example, in the Middle Ages the skilled worker who broke a contract was generally penalized severely, it was conceded to the Berlin weaver in 1331 that at any instance the latter was allowed to demand payment and release if thinking of abandoning the city. It is an example of the contrary association that the multiple travels and wandering of the workers prevents a certain part of them from participating in a wage movement, and thereby places them in a disadvantage relative to the settled entrepreneurs; with the categories of workers who are generally mobilized according to their occupation, such as itinerant workers and sailors, the disadvantage of restlessness often increases up to the point of lawlessness because more often they cannot collect their witnesses against the entrepreneur in litigation over compensation and keep them together during the lengthy legal proceeding. Generally it seems as though the nearer to the present, the more favorable is the position of the settled against the opponent who is dependent on movement. And this is understandable given the decrease in the changing of places. Because it happens that people who are settled in principle can also still be transferred any time and anywhere, they can still enjoy more and more all the advantages of mobility along with the settled life, while for the unsettled, for the mobile in principle, the advantages of the settled life are not growing at the same rate.
space and the spatial ordering of society 601 Excursus on the Stranger
If travel as the loosening from any given point in space is the conceptual opposite of permanence somewhere, the sociological form of the 'stranger' nevertheless represents the union, so to speak, of the two conditions--admit- tedly here also representing the fact that the relationship to space is only the condition of the relationship to people on the one hand and the symbol of it on the other. Thus the stranger is not understood here as wanderer, the sense in which the term was used many times up to now, one who arrives today and leaves tomorrow, but as one who comes today and stays tomorrow--the potential wanderer, so to speak, who has not completely overcome the loosening of coming and going, though not moving on. The stranger is fixed within a certain spatial area--or one whose delimitation is analogous to being spatially limited--but the position of the stranger is thereby essentially determined by not belonging in it from the outset, and by introducing qualities that do not and cannot originate from the stranger. The union of the near and the far that every relation among people contains is achieved here in a configuration that formulates it most briefly in this way: The distance within the relationship means that the near is far away, but being a stranger means that the distant is near. Since, of course, being a stranger is an entirely positive relationship, a special form of interaction, the inhabitants of the star Sirius are not actually strangers to us--at least not in the sense of the word that comes into socio- logical consideration--but they do not exist at all for us, they stand outside of far and near. The stranger is a member of the group itself, not different from the poor and the various 'inner enemies'--an element whose immanent pres- ence and membership include at the same time an externality and opposition. Now the pattern wherein repelling and distancing moments here comprise a form of togetherness and interacting unity may be outlined with the following statements, which are in no way intended to be exhaustive.
In the whole history of business, the stranger appears everywhere as a dealer, and the dealer, respectively, as stranger. As long as one's own need essentially dominates the economy, or a spatially narrow group exchanges its products, it needs no 'middleman' within it; a dealer comes into question only for those products that are produced outside the group. Insofar as almost no persons travel to the stranger in order to purchase these necessities--in which case, then, precisely they are 'foreign' merchants in this other area--the dealer must be a foreigner; no opportunity exists for another. This position of the stranger is intensified in consciousness when the stranger becomes fixed permanently in the place instead of again leaving the place of the business activity. For in countless cases, even this becomes possible even for the strangers only if they can live off the middle man. An economic circle that is in some way closed by parceled out earth and soil and handcrafts to satisfy demand will also grant an existence to the dealer; and because trade alone makes unlimited combinations possible, intellect always nevertheless finds expansion and new openings in trade, which is difficult for the producers to attain with their limited
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? mobility and their dependence on a circle of customers that can only expand gradually. Business can still always attract more people than can primary production, and it is the sphere indicated for the stranger who, so to speak, enters as a supernumerary into a group in which the economic positions are actually already taken. The history of the European Jews provides the classic example. The stranger is just not a landowner by nature, where 'land' is not understood in the physical sense only, but also in the figurative sense of a life substance that, if not fixed in a spatial position, is fixed in an ideal position in the social setting. Even in more intimate relationships of person to person, the stranger may also open up all manner of attraction and importance; but as long as they are found to be strangers, they are not 'land owners' among others. Now that dependence on the intermediate trade and many times, as in a sublimation of that, on purely financial business produces the specific quality of mobility in the stranger. While it happens within a circumscribed group, the synthesis of near and far resides in this, which constitutes the formal position of the stranger: The quintessentially movable comes to the stranger casually with each element in contact, but is bound up organically with no individual with familial, local, or occupational permanence.
Another expression of this configuration lies in the objectivity of the stranger. By not being radically committed to individual components or one-sided tendencies of the group, the stranger faces all of them with the special attitude of the 'objective' person, which does not mean, perhaps, a mere aloofness or disengagement but a particular form of the far and near, indifference and engagement. I refer to the analysis in Chapter 3, "Domina- tion and Subordination," of the dominant positions of outsiders, as of that type which the practice of the Italian cities appears to be: appointing their judges from outside because no native was free of the bias of family interests and factions. The phenomenon mentioned a little while ago, which admit- tedly applies principally but nevertheless not exclusively to someone who is moving on, is also connected to the objectivity of the stranger: the fact that the most surprising openness and admissions are brought up to him, almost approaching the nature of a confession, which one carefully withholds from anyone who is close. Objectivity is by no means disengagement--since that generally exists outside of subjective and objective behavior--but an especially positive kind of participation--as the objectivity of a theoretical observation absolutely does not mean that the mind would be a passive tabula rasa onto which things inscribe their qualities, but the full activity of the mind working according to its own laws, only in such a way that it arranges the accidental displacements and accentuations, whose individual-subjective differences would provide completely different pictures of the same object. Objectivity can also be called freedom: The objective person is bound by no commitments that could prejudice the grasp, the understanding, and the evaluation of data. This freedom, which allows the stranger to experience and handle even the close relationship as from a bird's eye view, admittedly entails all manner of dangerous possibilities. Concerning rebellions of any kind it has always been claimed by the affected party that an incitement had taken place from outside through foreign emissaries and agitators. To the extent that this is correct, it
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? is an exaggeration of the specific role of the stranger: In practice and theory, the stranger has more freedom, observes circumstances with less prejudice, measures them against more general and more objective deals and is not bound in action by residence, loyalty, or precedents. 17
Finally, the proportion of proximity and distance that gives the stranger the characteristic of objectivity nevertheless achieves a practical expression in the more abstract nature of the relationship to the person, i. e. one has only certain more general qualities in common with the stranger, while a relationship with those organically bound together is based on the similarity of specific differences from the merely general. All relationships that are personal in some way generally develop according to this pattern in manifold arrangements. About these it is not only determined that certain commonalities among the members exist, along with individual differences that either influence the relationship or are maintained outside of it; rather that commonality itself is therefore essentially determined in its effect on the relationship, whether it exists only among just these elements and is therefore indeed common within, but specific and incomparable without--or whether it is only common for the perception of their elements themselves, if it is common at all, to a group, or a type or humanity. In the latter case a dilution of the effectiveness of the general occurs in proportion to the size of the group bearing the same characteristic; admittedly it functions as a unifying basis for the members, but it does point these members directly to one another; also, this similarity could even associate each member with all possible others. This is also obviously a type in which a relationship includes the near and far at the same time: To the degree to which the similar factors have the same nature, the warmth of the relationship that they establish, an element of coolness, a feeling of the coincidence added to this relationship, and the connecting forces have lost their specific, centripetal character. Now in relation to the stranger, this configuration appears to me an extraordinary principled preponderance over the individuals, only to pos- sess the commonalities of the elements proper to the relationship in question. The stranger is near us insofar as we feel similarities of a national or social, occupational or of generally human kind between the stranger and us; the stranger is far from us insofar as these similarities reach over both of us and bind us together only because they bind very many people generally. In this sense a strain of strangeness enters into even the closest relationships. At the stage of first passion, erotic relationships very decisively dismiss that generalized thought: a love like this has not yet existed at all; there would be nothing to compare either with the beloved or with our experience of the beloved. An estrangement--whether as a cause or as a result is difficult to decide--tends
17 But where this is falsely claimed on the part of those affected, it originates from the tendency of the upper strata to exculpate the lower strata who were in unified closer relationship with them beforehand. Because while they present the fiction that the rebels were actually not guilty, that they were only incited, that the rebellion would not come about from them--they exculpate themselves, deny any real reason for the rebellion in the first place.
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? to enter at the moment in which the sense of uniqueness disappears from the relationship; a skepticism concerning its value in itself and for us connects directly with the thought that one would ultimately consummate with some- one only a general human destiny, experience what has been experienced a thousand times before, and that if one had not met by chance just this person any other one would have had the same importance for us. And something of that sort may be absent in no relationship, however close, because that which is common to the two together is perhaps never merely common to them but belongs to a general idea that still includes many others, many possibilities of the same; as little as they may be realized, as often as we may forget them, they still propel themselves here and there, like shadows between people, like a mist lifting up from words indicating to everyone what would have to coagulate into a more solid embodiment in order to mean jealousy. Perhaps what in some cases is the more general, at least the more insurmountable foreignness than what is produced by differences and incomprehensibilities--that admittedly a similarity, harmony, and closeness exist, but with the feeling that this is actu- ally no exclusive property of just this relationship but of a more general one that is sustained potentially between us and an uncertain number of others and thus no inner and exclusive necessity is allowed to be due to that real- ized relationship alone. On the other hand, there is a kind of 'foreignness' in which the commonality is directly excluded on the grounds of something more common that encompasses the parties: The relationship of the Greeks to the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (barbarian) is, perhaps, typical of this; all the cases in which the general qualities that one deems purely authentically and merely human are directly denied to the other. But here 'stranger' has no positive meaning; the relationship to the stranger is a non-relationship; this stranger is not what is being discussed here--a member of the group itself.
As such, rather, the stranger is near and far at the same time, as is the ground- ing of the relationship on only a general human similarity. A special tension arises between those two elements, however, when the consciousness of having only something very general in common nevertheless gives special emphasis to what is not directly common. But in the case of national, local, racial, and other strangers it is again nothing individual, but a foreign origin that is or can be common to many strangers. Thus strangers are also not really considered as individuals but as strangers of a particular type in general; the moment of distance is no less general for them than that of nearness. This form is at the basis, for example, of so special a case as the Medieval Jewish taxes, like those in Frankfurt, which were nevertheless still demanded. While the Beede paid by the Christian citizens changed with the level of ability at each time, the tax for each individual Jew was one fixed for all time. This fixedness was based on the Jew having a social position as Jew, not as a bearer of particular mate- rial contents. In tax matters, every other citizen was an owner of a particular fortune, and the tax could follow the changes in that. As a taxpayer the Jew, however, was in the first instance a Jew and therefore had a tax standing that was an invariant; this becomes most evident, of course, as soon as even these individual regulations, whose individuality was bounded by stiff irrevocability,
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? are repealed, and the strangers (not only Jews)18 pay an altogether similar head tax. With all this being an organically unrelated add-on, the stranger is still an organic member of the group whose unified life includes the particular condi- tions of this element; only we do not know how to describe the unique unity of this position other than as its being composed of a certain measure of the near and a certain measure of the far, which, characterizing each relationship in whatever quantities, produce the specific formal relationship to the 'stranger' in a particular proportion and mutual tension.
While the sociological interest related to the phenomena only dealt with up to now from the point where the effectiveness of a particular spatial configuration began, the sociological importance lies, from another viewpoint, in the on-going process in the influence that the spatial determinants of a group experience through its actual social formations and forces.
In the following examples the trend toward solidarity, even if not completely separable from other traits, as little as it was from them, will still appear decisive.
A. The transition from an original organization of a group, based on blood and tribe relationship, into a more mechanical, rational, more political one is often marked by the division of the group that follows according to spatial principles. It is above all national unity that prevails in this. The danger to the state of clan-organization lies precisely in the indifference of its principle against spatial relationship. Solidarity based on kin relationships is entirely supra-spatial according to its motive and thus holds territorially based national unity as something incomprehen- sible. A political organization that is set up on the clan principle must disintegrate after any sizeable growth because each of its subdivisions has within itself too solid, too organic a solidarity all too independent of the common land. The interest of state unity requires, rather, that its subgroups, insofar as they are politically effective, are formed in accord with a principle of non-difference that is thus simply less exclusive than that of family ties. Since it is thereby raised to the same height over all its members, the distance between them, especially as far as they are supra-personal, must be limited in some way; the absoluteness of the mutual exclusion that is proper to the family relationship principle is not compatible with the relatedness of the position of all members of the
18 The phrase, 'not only Jews,' is inserted for clarification--ed.
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? state to one another, whom the state faces simply as a single absolute. Now, the organization of the state according to spatially delimited sectors corresponds most excellently with these requirements. Resistance against the interests of the community, which derives from the particularistic instinct of the self-preservation of groups unified through kinship, is not to be expected from them; they make it possible or necessary for the elements of genetically and qualitatively different kinds, if they are only locally based, still to be politically unified. In short, space as a basis of organization possesses that impartiality and regularity of behavior that makes it a correlate of governmental power with its characteristic behavior just as suitable to all its subjects. The most important example is the reform under Kleisthenes; it succeeded in breaking up the par- ticularistic influence of the aristocratic families in that it divided the whole Attic nation into spatially demarcated phylae and demes as bases of self-administration. Without such conscious intent and hence only in rudimentary arrangements this principle appeared in Israelite society after the invasion of Canaan. While the original constitution was still an aristocratic one despite many economic, social, and religious simi- larities, and while prominent individual clans and leading lineages still dominated the others, now membership by place became important at the expense of family membership. Local communities were formed from the individual families that each settled in a village, and elements that were foreign but belonged to the locality, especially the Canaanites who were to be found; city elders appeared along side family elders. And parallel to this development of the locality principle a series of phenomena indicated how the diffusing quality of the herding way of life gives way to a centralizing tendency: larger cities arose, surrounded by areas and villages that saw their focal point and protection in those cities. Now in the councils of elders the fame of the family is no longer decisive but the ownership of fortunes, which always suggests a political association, especially if the ownership of money begins to predominate, since commerce and the possession of money can achieve extensive power only in a moderately uniformly ordered community. Finally the kingdom appeared, which admittedly did not intervene deeply in the social conditions at first, but in any case centralized tax and military entities and, significant in the present context, divided the land into governorships19 that did not coincide with the old tribal divisions. In
19 Simmel uses the French word gouvernements--ed.
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? an entirely different guise the same theme nevertheless applies at a stage of the development of the English Hundreds. As is well known, these were an ancient Germanic arrangement of military drafts, with physiological units admittedly equalized according to a formula, but in any case of greater psychological closeness and having a greater esprit de corps, units that, it seems to me, had to be first based superficially and schematically as the idea of the population devolved upon the district that had to place one hundred men obligated to serve in the military, in accordance with the settlement. This tendency reached its conclusion at the climax of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, with its efforts at centraliza- tion: now the Hundreds are a geographically separate sub-district, the shires! The central monarchical, organizationally unified character of the Christian Church also appeared in contrast to the particularistic character of paganism in this form: The Christian saints, who performed the function of the old clan deities, no longer protected the familial enti- ties but local communities! The process mentioned above--the linking of inhabitants of flat country to cities--generally makes the form in question available for the development process. For while rural life favors a particular aristocratic existence and hence organization according to family relationships, the city is more inclined to the rationalist and mechanistic form of life. So the crystallization around a city thus suggests mechanical-localizing instead of physiological motives for organization on the one hand, and on the other hand it is obviously of a centralist nature and facilitates the gathering of social forces into unified action. At the beginning of modernity, the Swiss made the transition from the familial constitution to a parochial one with their dependence on efficient cities, while Dithmarchen20 achieved this transition only very imperfectly with many similarities of relationships, and probably lost its freedom around the middle of the sixteenth century on account of the backwardness of its constitution. As with the organization according to the principles of numbers, a mechanizing of social elements expresses itself among those who are internally related according to the principles of space, in contrast to the familial constitutions by which the individual groups have something of an autonomous unity of the living entity. But that characteristic of the parts is the condition for assembling into an extended whole and for the technique of governance that their higher unity exercises over its members.
20 Dithmarschen: a district in Schleswig-Holstein--ed.
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? However, it is not only the political but also the economic organization whose completion often falls apart by divisions by a spatial principle, just as these in other cases are very representative of the lower stages with respect to qualitative and dynamic principles. The differentiation of production in space appears in two typical forms. First, as the elimina- tion of migrant commerce. Not only did merchants wander since the most ancient times, but later the arms smiths and goldsmiths too, then in Germany also the masons, who understood originally foreign stone building here; before the invention of photography, portraitists in the nineteenth century often wandered from city to city in a similar manner. At this stage the demands that a specialized craftsperson from a fixed residential place could satisfy still thus formed no temporal continuity, but the craftsperson had to collect them independently of their spatial locations in order to take sufficient advantage of the craftwork. With the concentration of the population or with the growth of their needs, only the qualitative appeared in place of this, against the spatially bound, driven by need, localized, undifferentiated division of labor: the craftsperson, artist, or merchant sits in a shop or store and from there controls a sphere of customers from a certain radius as much as possible so that the producers of a certain area do not encroach on their preserves. Or the local differentiation occurs, for example already in ancient India, in a way that the representatives of the same craft settle together in a certain city quarter or in villages of craftspeople. Compared to the inorganic and accidental character of the wandering trades, here differentiation by spatial perspective serves the rational organic solidarity of the economy, and indeed as much at its primitive as its developed stages. The second economic form of local differentiation is only found at the latter stages, which sets about with the systematic dividing up of the markets among themselves as a somewhat large-scale cartel. Here it is especially the case that the place of the cartel members bears no necessary spatial relation to their respective market areas. For example, in international cartels customs or currency conditions could very well cause a particular market not to be partitioned for the one nearest to the area, but for producers living very far away. Thus the local division reached the peak of rationalization. For while the place of residence is relatively indifferent for the subjects themselves, in any event not decisive by itself for the configuration, it is now determined by the highest and ultimate point of the whole series of purposes and means, by the ultimate sale to the consumer. Where all preconditions within the teleological sequence have become fully compliant to their final goal, without allowing a determinant of one's own to occur, the
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? structure is so fully rationalized as to be logically imbued with the unity of the goal-oriented thinking. The way the organization achieved this is a local one, determined according to spatial market areas; but now even this spatial differentiation in its turn proceeds according to a purely rational perspective, independent of space.
B. The exercise of governance over people often documents its uniqueness in the special relationship to their spatial territory. We see the sovereignty of territory as an expression of sovereignty over people. The state governs over its territory because it governs all of its inhabitants. Seemingly one can certainly say more exhaustively that, on the contrary, the latter would be the case because the former holds true; since there is no more exceptionless encirclement of a population than those who are within the space itself--as geometrical theorems, just because they apply to space, must be applicable to all objects in space--sovereignty over territory seems to be the first and only adequate cause for the sovereignty over the people within it. Still this territorial sovereignty is an abstraction, a subsequent or anticipatory formula of personal governance in that it means, in addition to governance over the given people of the given places and at whatever places in the ter- ritory these or other people are to be found, they will always be subject in the same way. The idea of territorial sovereignty makes a continuum out of this endlessness of, so to speak, isolated possibilities; it anticipates with the unbroken form of space what can be realized here and there as concrete content. For the function of the state can only always be governing people, and governance over territory in itself would be non- sense. Seen conceptually, this is only the expression and, as a juridical fact, the result of the lack of exceptions by which the state governs the real and possible subjects within its borders. Of course there have been enough historical formations in which a political or individual power owned the ground and thereby derived governance over its inhabitants: as in feudal and patrimonial circumstances in which people are only elements of the land so that the sale of the latter under private law also makes them subjects of the new owner. Thus the Russian baronies in which the so and so many 'souls' belonged to the manor as such; the same theme carries over to a particular field, where the saying cujus regio, ejus religio holds. 21 But in reality governance over people still never
21 Cuius region, eius religio--Latin, "whose territory, that person's religion. " This was the formula for settling what religion would prevail after post-Reformation wars in Europe. It held in effect that the ruler's religion would also be that of the subjects--ed.
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? follows upon the ownership of an area in the same sense as the use of the products of the earth follows from its possession. Rather the asso- ciation between the two must always be first created by special norms or the exercises of powers, i. e. governance over persons must always be a particular purpose, an express intent, not a self-evident jurisdic- tion. But if that is the case, sovereignty over the land as a region of its people is unavoidably something secondary, a technique or a summary expression for personal governance about which alone it is immediately concerned, in contrast to the command over the land for the sake of its produce or other use. In the latter case, the ownership of the land is what is immediately essential, since the fructification obviously fol- lows it. Only the confounding of these two meanings of governance of a district can allow the misjudgment that here the sociological forma- tion determines the notion of space that would determine subservient relations within a group. Thus where, as in feudalism, the utilization of ground under private law is not in the foreground of consciousness, we also find the king described in no way as the king of the land but only of its inhabitants, e. g. in the ancient Semitic kingdom.
Not only the general fact of governance, however, but also its special formations flow into a spatial expression. As a result of the functional centralization that formed the essence of the Roman state, as well as later that of the French and English ones, the Roman Empire up to its end as a territory independent of the city could regard Paris and London in France and England the fixed seats of that centralizing power. The sociological form achieved the most consistent expression in spatiality in the Tibetan theocracy: The capital Lhassa has a large cloister in its city center, to which all the country roads lead and where the seat of government is located. Now on the other hand, the German state could no longer have an actual spatial center at all as the reorganization into a federated kingdom was decided upon after the Carolingians, but only a delicate and personal center. The absence of a fixed capital and the continuous moving about of the king was the spatially logical result of that political structure. The formal character of this association will be emphasized still more strongly with a change of political relationships, simply because it is a change that results in the relocation of the capital. The old condition, be it administrative or merely psychological, is so tightly associated with the capital that the new, more expedient way requires a relocation, and indeed it would not matter, except that it must be some place other than in the former place. Thus the capital was often relocated in the Scandinavian kingdoms as Christianity was
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? introduced, and in the Orient the accession of a new ruler often led to a consequent change in the capital: the spatial projection of the func- tional change. This is precisely the most indicative at the smallest scale because a spatially small relocation does not really amount to the least, but only marks the fact of change in general. Among African tribes, the headquarters is often the only settlement similar to a city, and in order to make the dependence of this structure on the person of the ruler quite perceptible, it is transferred a few kilometers if the ruler is changed. In these cases the city of the ruler seems like a garment that surrounds the ruler's person and only moves along in the same direction as an expansion of his personality itself as a radiation of its importance; the destiny of this city must thus follow that of the ruler. That this localizing of the sovereign power is a relative one, i. e. that it has its meaning in its relationship to the subjects' place of residence, is expressed quite well in a somewhat paradoxical phenomenon that is mentioned in reports on the Bechuana: If the families are dissatisfied with their chieftain, they do not drive him off but for their part leave the village so that it comes about that one morning the chieftain is found completely alone in the village--a negative form of spatial forma- tion that follows from the relationship of governance. In the way that space is concentrated or distributed, how the spatial points are fixed or changed, the sociological forms of relationship of governance congeals, as it were, into clear formations.
C. That social associations are transformed into certain spatial structures is exemplified in everyday life in the family and the club, the regiment and the university, the labor union and the religious community having their fixed locality, their 'house. ' All associations that own a house, as distinctive as their contents may be throughout the world, thereby manifest a common sociological qualitative differ- ence from such, so to speak, free-floating liaisons as friendships or support groups, groups temporarily working together or formed for illegal purposes, political parties and all the social formations seldom spilling over into praxis, that exist in the mere consciousness of com- mon convictions and parallel endeavors. Those larger structures, which admittedly are not as such firmly domiciled, form a third qualitative type within the same sociological category, whose individual elements nevertheless always possess a house: the general army of corps that each has barracks; the church as a union of all like-minded believers, which is subdivided into parishes; families in the broad sense as opposed to their individual households, and countless others. This is certainly
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? only one among many influences under which the physical state of a social interaction is expressed and which in turn helps embody it. But it is important that it be made clear not only that the central solidarity is expressed in so many peripheral points, but that the importance of that solidarity and of these points continually merge into one another: The actual structure of a social formation is in no way determined only by its chief social motive but by a great number of threads and knots within them, by stabilizations and fluctuations that show only gradual differences in effectiveness, that show everything in relationship to the socially decisive: the formation of a oneness from a many.
The community's 'house' is now understood not in the sense of mere property, in the way, as a legal person, it can also possess a second one or a piece of land, but as the locality that is the spatial expression of its social energy, as a place of dwelling or meeting. In this sense it does not actually have the house because it does not come into consideration here as an economically valued object, but that the house represents the thought of the society in that the latter is localized in it. Speech usage indicates that, if a house is named after a family, when church has the meaning as much of the building as the ideal community, when the university, club, or whatever, it manifests the same ambiguity. Along with the term sib, however, the ancient Indian (Sanskrit) word sabha, which originally meant the assembly of the village community, pertained to the community house in which these assemblages took place. The close connection between the union itself and its house appears most decisively in the communities of the unmarried men who appear to represent one of the earliest categorical organizations and are still found now in Micronesia and Melanesia and among some Native Americans and Inuit. 22 That is a community life prior to any family life that in fact excludes no individual activities of individual persons but provides one a common place for eating and sleeping, for play and romance adventures, and even their unmarried ones have their point of contact to form a social unity--to which higher relationships bear hardly any analogy. From this communalization it is obvious that the lodge, the 'manor,' the absolutely indispensable embodiment, this kind of class formation in general cannot occur if it does not achieve its basis, its point of crystallization and visible expression in a common house. Although the comparison of earlier and more developed eras
22 Indianern und Eskimos, as Simmel put it in the terminology of his day--ed.
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? in this respect meets with insurmountable difficulties, it seems to me as though the earlier era with its naive sensuality could have had a more active need compared to the abstract foreign kind to make the solidarity of such communities and their closure against the surround- ing structures explicit through the close unity of a lodge. The common lodge is the means and the material representation of that supra-local contact without which primitive epochs could not conceive of them- selves as having any internal solidarity at all. The common cemetery lies in the same formal setting. While the closest family includes such in its highest interest, the medieval worker associations always asked the Church authorities with whom they were associated for a common cemetery, and ultimately the worship center belonged where the person continually meets with God under the same rubric. The temple is still not only the gathering place of the faithful and hence the result and vehicle of their solidarity, but it is also the safeguard and extension of the fact that the Godhead has a spatial community with the faithful. Therefore, it has also been emphasized for good reason that the cult of pillars and stones that people fixed up is admittedly less poetic and obviously cruder than the worship of a spring or a tree, but that in reality the former includes a more intimate closeness between God and believer. For the deity dwells in the natural object, so to speak, on its own and without regard to the human person, who approaches the deity only subsequently and by chance; but if the deity consents to living in the work of the human hand, an entirely new relationship of the two is established; the human and the divine have each found a common place that needs both factors alike; the sociological relation- ship of the deity and the worshiper, and precisely only this, is invested in a spatial structure.
This sociological unity that generally leads to its localization in a fixed place and structure even appears through a purely gradual increase in its power and closeness to bring it about that those who are part of it are now not permitted to leave this locality. In reality it is reversed: precisely because the group still does not feel that its unity and its inner force over every member is adequately established, it attains an only external bonding. At least the relationship to the locality, as well as its opposite, can arise from two entirely opposed social forces: the liberality by which the modern state allows its citizens to move around, whether in order to distance themselves from it completely or to enjoy the rights of membership even at a distance, demonstrates the height and strength with which its being-for-itself was established over its individual
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? members; in contrast the local diffusion of the family, as opposed to its being permanently centered in the home location, is nevertheless the symptom of the gradual weakening of the family principle. Now by virtue of coercive rules that would bring about the cohesion of the group through the binding of individuals to the environing location as the external vehicle of the group's unity, it is essential that one would create no rule that is not observed on the spot. That is a quite general feature of earlier circumstances, especially in pre-monetary economies, since the capacity for social abstraction, which makes the balance of rights and duties independent of spatial proximity, is still lacking; and the money economy is the effect as well as the cause of that capacity. Insofar as I am referring to the earlier consideration of these same facts from the viewpoint of spatial 'fixedness,' I will give only two instructive examples. The Charter of St. Quentin that Philip Augustus23 granted to that commune in 1195 reveals considerably many urban freedoms, unconditional legislative and taxation rights of the commune, local court, etc. However the citizens are expressly obligated to a regular stay in the city and may stay outside it for only certain specified seasons. And the other: as long as the guilds in Frankfurt were in essence independent of the council, a civil law was not necessary for guild membership. Indeed, whoever left the city could still retain guild privileges. Only since 1377, as the guilds were subject to the Council, could no one be accepted into a guild who had not already been a citizen and whoever surrendered citizenship rights lost at the same time any guild membership. Thus the former case is characteristic since it clearly contrasts the freedom of the commune against the freedom of individuals. While the totality already obtained self determination and internal freedom of movement, one did not know the continuance of this totality apart from securing the bonding of the members to its locality. The second example reveals the power of locality still more strongly as the embodiment of the unity of the group. The unity of the guild, maintained by a mere material motive, is relatively indifferent toward communal unity and thus toward the question of the places of residence of their individual members. But as soon as the more formal-functional, not the social character of the city, is established on a particular individual content over someone, it is immediately crystallized into the requirement of the local connection. The technical-content point of view of the guild is supra-local in itself
23 Philip Augustus II, King of France 1180-1223--ed.
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? and thus in proportion to its governance gives the individual greater freedom of movement than the purely social freedom of city govern- ment; this does not come about as easily as with an abstract unity, but requires the spatial-concrete unity that it realizes through the force of place. From here it is a transitional phenomenon, when the 1192 city law of Brabant indeed demands of the citizens that they swear fidelity to the duke and the city, but allows them to leave unhindered after a stay of a year and a day. Although the actual relationships are not dif- ferent than in the previous type, through this explicit emphasis a new point of view comes into effect: for rights, honor, or protection, which one enjoys by virtue of membership in the community, the individual would owe service in return that is waived in this case through a cer- tain length of residence. The whole as such thereby faces its elements with obligations and grants, as between two parties; the city as a unity achieves a being-for-itself, and to this extent the distance from the indi- viduals becomes greater and the physical-local bond, with which alone the earlier stage realizes its sociological unity, becomes dispensable. And this spatial expression of the relationship between the individual and the group remains the same in meaning when different life conditions of the group as a whole clothe it with the exact opposite appearance. Among nomadic peoples, some Arabs, and the Rekabites who were close to the Israelites, it was legally forbidden to own fields or to build a house. Here just the local establishment of the interests of the individual led to the loss of the association with the migratory nation. Here the life form of spatial disconnection thus expresses the sociological unity, just as the opposite of that does so if it is locally established.
D. Finally the empty space gains a significance as something more empty, in which particular sociological relationships of a negative as well as positive kind are expressed. Thus it is not a matter of the con- sequences of a given spatial interval for interaction in which the latter exists, but of such spatial determinations as consequences of other social conditions. In early times, peoples often had the need for their borders not also immediately being the borders of other peoples, but to have a desert region directly connected to it. Under Caesar Augustus one also sought to secure the imperial border by, for example, depopulating the regions between the Rhine and the limes (boundary forts): Such tribes as the Usipetes and Tenkteri had to resettle, partly, on the left shore and partly move more deeply into interior of the land. While the desert region was still imperial territory, from the time of Nero on there also had to be uninhabited land beyond the Roman boundaries. Thus the
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? Suevi already created earlier a desert around their territory, and the Isarnholt lay between the Danes and the Germans, the Sachsenwald between the Slaves and Germans, etc. Native American tribes too held that an extra stretch of land belonging to no one should lie between any two lands. The need for protection of individual groups is of course the cause of this, and hardly in any other relationship is space used as pure distance, as an expanse lacking in quality. As a rule a weakness or incapacity leads to taking these measures just as it occasionally drives the individual into loneliness. The sociological significance of this is that the defense thus attained will be paid for with the corresponding total relinquishment of the offense, and the idea of the whole being expressed in the saying, "Do nothing to me, I also do nothing to you. " This scheme prevails not only between persons who do not watch each other at all but also remains as a downright, positive, and conscious maxim for countless relationships among those who share all kinds of things with one another, directly occasioning provocations and begin- nings of various frictions. In external effects, this fits in with another general maxim, "As you do to me, I do to you," while internally it is exactly opposite in nature. The latter principle, although the action of the speaking party toward the other would be directed to the other, nevertheless manifests an aggressive quality, at least being prepared for any eventuality. The first principle, in contrast, although it takes the initiative, proves exactly the opposite of the offensive and the pre- paredness insofar as, through one's own laying down of weapons, one wants to allow oneself just the same stance that one allows the other. In multiple cases in which the Maxim, "Do me no harm, I also do you none," determines the conduct; there is nothing purer and clearer than deserted territory that places a border around a group; here the inner tendency is completely embodied in the spatial form.
The principle that is the opposite of the deserted border also rep- resents the opposite stance: quaeque terrae vacuae, eas publicas esse,24 as Tacitus expresses it; this was occasionally asserted by both the ancient Germans and recently by the American settlers with respect to the Native Americans. It openly manifests a fundamental difference in the forms of relationship of two groups, whether the empty area between them should belong to none or potentially to both, insofar as anyone who wants it can take hold of it and thus admittedly will often unleash
24 Latin: Whatever lands are empty are public--ed.
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? conflict, which the other mode wants precisely to avoid. Typically, this difference in form is important. An object's belonging from the outset to neither of the separate parties can be self-consistent as well as develop into a more legal settlement, so that neither should seize it and at the same time either first seizing it would respectively be justified. Purely personal relationships proceed in accordance with this difference already. There often exists between two people an object or area of theoretical or emotional interest that they do not touch as if by tacit agreement, be it because this touching would be painful or because they fear a conflict on account of it. This does in no way always originate from mere sensitivity in feelings, but also from cowardice and weakness. Here people leave a region between themselves, as it were, empty and deserted, while a forceful seizure that does not shun the first shock25 can develop that region for productiveness and new combinations. There- fore, there is an entirely different nuance, wherein it is mutually felt; and therefore a pre-eminence, respect, and a favorable productiveness of it follows the first encroachment upon the avoided territory as the wage of the courageous. In children's play it is likewise observed that any object that is a taboo for all, that rivalry or cooperation over it must not extend, so to speak, to non-public property, in contrast to the things that are held as public property, and the first one who wants, or who succeeds, can seize it. Economically inclined personalities sometimes leave some possibilities unrealized--in the exploitation of workers, the expansion of business lines, the attracting of customers--because they fear an all too violent clash, the increased strength of which they do not feel; while a stronger competitor, abandoning this foregone protec- tion, actualizes any already existing strengths and chances of their area and looks at everything previously not made use of as public property, in the sense that anyone who comes first should take as much from or do as much with it as possible. Finally in the realm of business in general, insofar as it is considered under the category of morality: Since a social organization never has adequate laws and forces at its disposal to constantly force morally wished-for behavior from its members, it relies on them to willingly refrain from exploiting gaps in its laws. A sphere of reserve against what is used by others surrounds the decent person, a sphere of refraining from egoistic practices that the unscru- pulous engage in without further ado, since indeed such practices can
25 Simmel uses the French, choc--ed.
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? be prohibited only through inner moral impulses. Hence the frequent defenselessness of the moral person; one simply does not want to fight with the same weapons and about the same rewards as the rogue who seizes upon all already existing advantages as soon as it can be done without obvious risk. Thus there is among people an ideal vacuum, so to speak, into which the immoral persons enter and from which they profit. The substantive as well as the sociological essence of the whole social sphere is determined according to the extent to which it pushes through the renunciation of egoistic opportunities between individu- als, securing each from the attacks of each, or whether the general behavior is governed according to the slogan: What is not forbidden is allowed. In the endless variety of all these phenomena, such a formal equality in difference within behavioral styles becomes palpable. The contrast between the principle of the border desert and the one that says that the terrain owned by no one would be open to occupation by anyone is thus stripped of its accidental and superficial character, in accordance with the basic idea. It appears as the clear embodiment, as the example realized in space of a typical functional mutuality of relationships between individuals or groups.
The neutrality of uninhabited territory gains an entirely different meaning when it enables the territory to serve a positive purpose: its function that had been up to now that of separation can also become that of connecting. Encounters of peoples that would be impractical on the territory of one or the other can sometimes still take place on the neutral territory, and the permanent form of that will be an unin- habited region belonging to no one, especially in primitive times. For where there are inhabitants, their impartiality and hence the security of each of the parties coming together is never permanently guar- anteed, and above all a mental framework that clings completely to what is physical and concrete cannot probably imagine the neutrality of a territory better than thinking that no one even lived there. From here, where it indicates a shear absence, there is a further way to the neutrality as a general, wholly positive manner of relationships--and thus it will directly cleave to pieces of space--that indeed produces a totally determined possibility of relationships but which are still wholly indifferent by themselves. Out of all the potentialities of life, space is generally the impartiality that has become visible; almost all other con- tents and forms of our environment, through their specific properties, somehow have other meanings and opportunities for one or the other person or party, and only space reveals itself to every existence without
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? any prejudice. Often, the uninhabited terrain belonging to no one, which is simply, so to speak, pure space and nothing more, generally nourishes this neutrality of space for practical utilizations. Thus this is the given place for the economic commerce of primitive groups who actually live in a constant, at best latent state of war and mistrust of one another. Economic commerce as exchange of objective values is indeed a principle of neutrality and of position beyond any factional- ism from the outset; even among Native American tribes who depend on war, the merchants can circulate freely from one to the other.