No More Learning

It is quite obvious that this form of stratification, isolating ranks from one another, dam- ages not only the lowest but also the highest member of the hierarchy because the strengths flowing from the former up are overlooked by it. Thus for this reason the German kingdom in the Middle Ages was extraordinarily weakened, in that the ascending lesser aristocracy was duty bound only to the higher aristocracy because they were enfeoffed only by them. In the end the middle member of the higher aristocracy cut off the lesser entirely from the crown.
The outcome of this structure, with its divisions and unifications, for the lowest member by the way naturally depends on the tendency of the higher members to have the lowest at their disposal. In contrast to the heretofore noted phenomenon, the detachment by the middle members favorable to the lowest, the extension over them through modifications can be unfavorable for them. The first case occurred in England after Edward I, when the exercise of the judicial, financial, and police ministries gradually switched over officially to the moneyed classes organized in county and city units. They took over entirely the protection of the individual against absolute power. As the regional units concentrated in Parliament, they became that counterweight to the highest power, defending the vulnerable individuals against lawless and unjust infringements of state regimes. In the ancien re? gime of France the process ran in the reverse. Here the aristocracy was always bound closely to the regional circles in which they managed and governed
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? and whose interests they represented against the central government. The state forced itself into this relationship between aristocracy and peasant and gradually took from the former their governing functions: judicial as well as care of the poor, law enforcement as well as road construction. The aristocracy wanted to have nothing to do with this centralized regime, which was driven only by financial distress; they pulled back from their social responsibilities and turned the peasants over to the royal governors and officials, who were concerned only with the state's treasury or their own as well, and pushed the peasants fully from their original foothold with the aristocracy.
A particular form of subordination under a majority lies in the prin- ciple of the 'outvoting' of minorities by majorities. However, this takes root and it branches out into much broader interests of social formation, beyond its significance for the sociology of domination and subordina- tion, that it seems appropriate to treat in in a special excursus.
Excursus on Outvoting
The essence of the construction of society, from which the incomparability of its results as well as the insolubility of its internal problems consistently emerge, is this: that from self-contained unities--as human personalities more or less are --would come a new unity. One cannot, for sure, produce a painting out of paintings, no tree is made up of trees; the whole and the independent do not grow out of totalities, but out of dependent parts. But society turns whole and fully self-centered parts into an overarching whole. All the restless evolution of societal forms, large as well as small, is in the last analysis only the ever-renewed attempt to reconcile the inner-oriented unity and totality of the individual with its social role as a part and contribution toward saving the unity and totality of society from dissolution by the independence of its parts. Now since every conflict between the members of a whole makes its continued existence doubtful, it is the significance of voting, the results of which the minority also agrees to accept, that the unity of the whole over the antagonisms of the principles and interests under all circumstances should remain master. It is, in all its apparent simplicity, one of the most genial of means to bring the strife among individuals into an eventually unifying conclusion.
But this form, the including of the dissenters too, by which each partici- pant in the voting accepts its result in practice--unless someone leaves the group altogether with this result--this form has in no way always been as self-evident as it appears to us today. In part a mental inflexibility that does not understand the establishment of a social unity out of dissenting elements, and in part a strong individuality that might not obey any decision without its own full agreement have not admitted the majority principle into many kinds of communities but demanded unanimity for every decision. The decisions
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? of the Germanic Marches had to be unanimous; whatever could not achieve unanimity did not happen. Late into the Middle Ages the English aristocracy, who had dissented from or was not present at the approval of a tax, often refused to pay it. Wherever unanimity is demanded for the choice of a king or leader, that sense of individuality is in effect; of those who have not themselves chosen the ruler, it is also not expected or required that they obey the ruler. In the tribal council of the Iroquois as in the Polish parliament, no decision counted from which even only one voice had dissented. Nonetheless, the motive--that it would be fully contradictory to perform a collective action that an individual disagrees with--does not have such a requirement of unanimity as a logical consequence, since if a suggestion without full unity of voice is considered rejected, thus to be sure the coercion of the minority is prevented, but now in reverse the majority is thereby coerced. Also, those who refrain from a majority approved discipline tend to foster something quite positive, accompanied by perceptible results, and then this becomes the totality forced by the minority by dint of the principle of necessary unanimity. Apart from this outvoting of the majority, which in league with the unanimity principle negates in principle the individual freedom striven for, it results often enough in historical practice in the same result. For the Spanish kings there was no favorable situation for the suppression of the Aragonese Court just because of this 'freedom': until 1592 the Court could make no decision if only one member of the four classes objected--a paralysis of actions that required a substitute directly through a less crippling authority. Now when it is not possible, in lieu of some practical conclusion, to let a decision drop, and it must be obtained under any circumstance, as though by the verdict of a jury (which we meet, for example, in England and America), its requirement of unanimity rests on the more or less unconsciously operating assumption that the objective truth must be simply always subjectively convincing, and that, conversely, the confluence of the subjective persuasions is the sign of objective substance. A simple majority decision thus probably does not yet contain the whole truth; otherwise, it ought to have been successful at marshalling all the votes around it. In spite of its illusory clarity, the fundamentally mystical faith in the power of truth, in the final coalescence of the logically correct with the psychologically real, thus contributes here to the creation of the solution of those major conflicts between the individual persuasions and the requirement for a unified whole outcome. In its practical consequences this faith, no less than that individualistic foundation of consensus, turns its own underlying tendency around: where the jury remains sequestered until they come to a unanimous verdict, nearly unavoidable for a possible minority there arises the idea to try, against the minority's own persuasion which it cannot hope to carry through anyway, to side with the majority in order thereby to avoid the meaningless and eventually unbearable prolonging of the session.
Where in contrast majority decsions are what count, the subordination of the minority can arise from two motives whose difference is of utmost socio- logical significance. The coercion of the minority can come, first precisely from the fact that the many are more powerful than the few. Although, or rather, because each individual counts the same as another in voting, the
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? majority would--whether through the ballot or the medium of a system of representation as such--have the physical power to coerce the minority. Voting serves the purpose of restricting the exercise of every immediate measure of power and mediating its eventual result through the vote count, thereby per- haps convincing the minority of the futility of a substantial resistance. There are thus in the group two parties standing as two opposing groups, between which the balance of power, represented by the vote, is decisive. The latter serves here the same methodological purpose as diplomatic or other negotia- tions between parties who want to avoid the ultima ratio of fighting. Finally, exceptions aside, each individual also gives in only when the opponent can make it clear that the real thing would bring at least even as great a loss for the individual. Voting is, just like negotiations, a projection of the real powers and their consideration onto the level of spirit, an anticipation in an abstract symbol of the way out of real fighting and coercion. For all that, this supports the actual balance of power and the forced subordination imposed on the minority. Sometimes, however, this is sublimated from the physical into the ethical form. When in the later Middle Ages the principle is often met-- the minority is supposed to follow the majority--evidently by that it is not only meant that the minority is for all practical purposes supposed to join in in whatever the majority decides, but it is also supposed to accept the will of the majority, to acknowledge that the majority wants what is right. Unanimity reigns here not as reality but as moral requirement; the resulting action, against the will of the minority, is supposed to be legitimated subsequently by unity of will. The old German tribes' real requirement for unanimity effervesces into an ideal requirement, in which indeed a whole new motive is discernible: from an internal right that goes beyond the predominance of the vote count and beyond the external superior strength, the majority might symbolized by this. The majority looks like the natural representative of the totality and plays a part in that meaning of the unity of the whole that, beyond the mere sum of individuals participating, does not entirely lack a trans-empirical, mystical tone. Later when Grotius claimed the majority has naturaliter jus integri,22 that internal claim is thereby attached to the minority; because a right not only must but should be acknowledged. That, however, the majority has the right of the whole 'from nature,' that is, by way of inner, rational necessity, this leads to the presently emergent nuance of the right to out vote, to its second significant main motive. The voice of the majority means now no longer the voice of the greater power inside the group, but the sign that the unitary will of the group has decided for the one side. The requirement of unanimity rests throughout on an individualistic basis. That was the original sociological perception of the German tribes: the unity of the community did not live beyond the individuals but entirely in them; for that reason the group will was not only not emphasized, but it did not exist at all as long as one single member dissented. But also where outvoting counts, it still has an indi- vidualistic foundation if its meaning is simply that the many are more power-
22 Latin: by nature the right of the whole--ed.
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? ful than the few and that the vote is supposed to arrive at the eventual outcome of the real measure of powers without this measure itself. Over against that now it is in principle a new direction when an objective group unity with its own one unified will is presupposed, if it were conscious, if it were such that the praxis unfolds as if such a being-for-itself group will existed. The will of the state, the community, the church, the special-interest group exists then beyond the differences of the inclusive individual wills, just as it exists beyond the temporal changes of its carriers. Since now it is only one, it must operate in a definite unified manner, and since the fact of the antagonistic wills of its bearers resists it, one must solve this contradiction by accepting the majority of these wills knowing or representing better than the minority. Here the subordination of the latter has thus an entirely different meaning than formerly because it is in principle not excluded but included, and the majority operates not in the name of its own greater power but in that of the ideal unity and totality, and only this, which speaks through the mouth of the majority, sub- ordinates the minority because the minority is a part of it from the outset. This is the internal principle of parliamentary votes, insofar as every member of parliament feels oneself as the representative of the entire people, in con- trast to special-interest representation, for which it in the end always operates based on the principle of individualism as the measure of power, and likewise with regional representation, which is based on the erroneous idea that the totality of regional interests would be the same as the totality of interests. The transition to this fundamental sociological principle is to be seen in the devel- opment of the English Lower House. Its members were counted from the outset not as the representatives of a definite number of citizens but also not as those of the people as a whole, but rather as appointees of specific regional political associations, villages and counties that simply had the right to par- ticipate in the formation of Parliament. This regional principle, so firmly held that for a long time every member of the Commons had to maintain residence in one's electoral district, was nonetheless still somehow of an ideal nature, in that it ascended over the mere sum of individual voters. Now all that remained was to bring the common interests of the proliferation and growing awareness of all these associations into the higher association to which they all belonged: to have the unity of the state gradually appear as the actual subject of their commissions. The individual districts that they represent cohere through the recognition of their essential solidarity with the state as a whole to such an extent that those districts then exercise only the function of designating the representatives for the representation of the whole. Wherever such a cohesive will of the group is axiomatic, elements of the minority dissent then, as it were, merely as individuals, not as members of the group. This alone can be the deeper meaning of the Lockean theory of the original contract on which the state is supposed to be founded. This must, because it forms the absolute basis of unification, be thoroughly settled unanimously. However, it now includes, for its part, the provision that everyone should look on the will of the majority as one's own. While individuals embrace the social contract, they are still absolutely free; they cannot then be subjugated by any outvoting. If they embrace it, though, they are then no longer free individuals but social
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? essence and, as such, merely a part of a unity whose will finds its decisive expression in the will of the majority. It is only a definitive formulation of this if Rousseau thus perceives no oppression in outvoting since only a misconcep- tion by the dissenter could elicit that; the dissenter would have taken the volunte? ge? ne? rale23 to be something it was not. This is also the basis of the belief that as an element of the group one could not want anything other that the will of the group, about which surely the individual but not the majority of individuals could be mistaken. For this reason Rousseau makes a very fine distinction between the formal reality of voting and the contents thereof, and explains that one indeed participates through it in and for oneself in the formation of the general will. One is duty bound thereby, so one could expli- cate the Rousseauean ideas, not to avoid the unity of this will, not to destroy it while one is setting one's own will against that of the majority. So the sub- ordination under the majority is simply the logical consequence of belonging to the social unity that one declared by voting. The practice is not entirely separate from this abstract theory. Their most knowledgeable experts say about the federation of the English trade unions that majority decisions in it would be able to be just and practical only in so far as the interests of the individual confederating associations were of the same type. 24 As soon, however, as the varying sentiments of the majority and the minority emerge from an actual difference in interests, every coercive act exercised as a result of outvoting would lead to an inevitable division of the participants. That is, thus, that a vote makes sense only when the existing interests can go together as a unity. Should the disjointedly ongoing efforts prevent this centralization, it then becomes fully contradictory to entrust the decision to a majority because the unity of will that they are otherwise supposed to be able to recognize, certainly better than the minority, does not objectively exist. There exists the apparent contradiction that, however, illuminates the relationship by its foundation: that just wherever a trans-individual unity exists or is presupposed, outvoting is possible; where it is missing, there is need of the unanimity that in practice and in principle replaces that unity by actual uniformity from case to case. It is entirely in this sense, when the town charter of Leiden in 1266 determines that, for the admission of foreigners into the city, the approval of eight town jurors is necessary; for court judgments, however, not unanimity but only a simple majority is required under this. The law, according to which the judges decide, is one for all times uniformly determined, and it has to do only with recognizing the relationship of the single case; what counts presumably more correctly for the majority than the minority. The acceptance of a new citizen, however, touches on all the various and widely dispersed interests inside the citizenry so that its approval can be granted not from the abstract unity of the citizens, but only from the sum of all individual interests; that is, by unanimity.
23 French: General will--trans.
24 Simmel probably has in mind the National Association of United Trades for the
Protection of Labour--ed.
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? This deeper foundation of outvoting, revealing now, if you will, the hypo- thetically already existing will of an authoritative unity, does not, for all that, quite remove the difficulty that attaches to the majority as sheer coercive advantage of power. Because the conflict over what would now be the contents of the will of that abstract unity will not often be easier to resolve than the immediate actual interests. The coercion of the minority is no small thing, even if it occurs in this roundabout way and under some other label. Minimally an entirely new dignity would have to be added then to the concept of the majority: since surely it might be plausible, albeit in no way certain from the outset, that the majority for its part is better informed. This will be especially doubtful where the responsibility for the knowledge and its resulting action are placed on the individual, as in the higher religions. The opposition of the individual conscience against the decisions and actions of majorities is alive through the entire history of Christianity. When in the second century the Christian churches of a regional gathering entered into debate over religious and external affairs, the resolutions of the assembly were not binding for the dissenting minority. But with this individualism the church's aspiration for unity was stuck with an irresolvable conflict. The Roman state wanted to affirm only a united church; the church itself sought to consolidate itself through imita- tion of the unity of the state; so the originally independent Christian churches were forced into a total institution whose councils decided the contents of the faith by majority vote. This was an unheard of coercion of the individuals or minimally the churches whose unity till then had consisted only in the similarity of ideals and hopes that each possessed for oneself. A submission in matters of faith was based on internal and personal foundations; that, however, the majority as such demanded submission and declared every dissenter a non- Christian--this is legitimated, then, as I pointed out, by the appropriation of a whole new meaning of majority: one has to accept that God is always with the majority! This motif, as unconsciously foundational sense formulated in one way or another, runs through the entire later development of forms of voting. That a belief, only for the reason that its carriers make up a greater number than those of another belief, should hit upon the sense of the trans- individual unity of all, is an entirely undemonstrable dogma; indeed, from the very start, with so little foundation, without the help of a more or less mystical relationship between unity and majority, it hangs in the air or rests on the pitiful foundation, which must nevertheless be dealt with somehow, that the majority as such knows what is right; furthermore, if one does not also already accept that the majority knows what is right, there is then also no good reason to accept this of the minority.
All these difficulties that the requirement of unanimity, like the subordination of the minority, threatens from various directions, are only the expression of the fundamental problematic of the entire situation: to extract a uniformity of voluntary action from a totality that consists of variously interested indi- viduals. This balance cannot be smoothly achieved, just as one can hardly, from black and white elements, construct a structure with the requirement that the structure is to be entirely black or white. Even in that most favorable case of a presumed group unity beyond the individuals for whose inclinations
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? the vote count is simply a means of knowledge to be accepted--it remains not only uncertain that the objectively necessary decision would be identical with the outcome of the vote, but then the elements of the minority only actually dissent as individuals, not as elements of that unified group, so they are still present as individuals, belong in any case to the group in the wider sense, and do not simply dissolve before the group. Somehow even as indi- viduals with their dissent they still rise up into the whole of the group. The division of human beings into a social being and as individuals of it is, to be sure, a necessary and useful fiction, with which, however, the reality and its demands are in no way exhausted. It characterizes the inadequacy and the sense of internal contradication of the voting methods that in some places, to the last in the Hungarian Parliament certainly still up into the third decade of the nineteenth century, the votes were not counted but weighed; this so that the leader could also make known the opinion of the minority as results of the vote! It seems ridiculous that a human being accepts an opinion as false merely because others think it is true--others, each of whom is, according to the presupposition of voting, equally justified and of equal worth by that fact; but the requirement of unanimity, with which one wants to confront this nonsense, has shown itself as no less full of contradiction and coercive. And this is no accidental dilemma and simply logical difficulty, but it is one of the symptoms of the deep and tragic ambiguity that fundamentally runs through every social formation, every formation of a unity from unities. The individual who lives from out of an inner foundation, who can be responsible for one's own actions, is supposed to, as if governing one's own convictions, adjust not only one's will to the goals of others--this remains, as morality, always an issue of one's own will and issues from the innermost part of the personality--but one is supposed to become, with one's acquiescent self, a part of the totality whose center lies outside one. This is not a matter of specific harmonies or collisions from both centers of command, but rather of our internally standing under two opposing alien norms; so the dynamic around one's own center, which is something altogether different from egoism, demands to be something just as definitive and the guiding sense of life as is demanded by the dynamic around the social center. Now in the vote over the action of the group the single person does not come as an individual, but in that member-like, trans-individual function. But the dissenting vote grafts onto these mere social bases yet a reflection, a secondary form of individuality and its particularity. And even this individuality, which demands nothing but the recognition and presentation of the will of the trans-individual group unit, is negated by the fact of being outvoted. Even here the minority, to belong to which everyone gets an unavoidable chance, must submit, and certainly not only in the simple sense in which even convictions and drives are, as a rule, negated by opposing forces and their influence extinguished, but in the, as it were, more cunning sense, so that the losers, because they are treated within the uniformity of the group, must participate positively in the action that is decided upon against their will and conviction, indeed, so that they, by the unanimity of the final decision, which does not contain a trace of their dis- sent, count also as bearers of it. In this way the outvoting goes from the mere,
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? active coercion of the one by the many to the most excessive expression of the dualism--albeit often in experience harmonizing, but in principle, however, irreconcilable and tragic--the dualism between the independent existence of the individual and that of the social whole.
I come now finally to the third type of formation, in which subordina- tion occurs neither under an individual nor under a plurality, but under an impersonal, objective principle. In that an actual, at least direct, interaction is excluded here, this form of subordination seems to remove the element of freedom. Those who are subordinate to an objective law feel determined by it; they themselves have no effect on it; they have no possibility to react to the law itself in an effective way, as can even the poorest slave, in some measure, the master. Then those who do not obey the law somewhat are generally not really subordinate to it, and when they amend the law, they are not at all subject to the old law; however, to the new law they are again subordinate in that plainly unfree way. Nevertheless, for modern, objective people, who know to distinguish the realm of spontaneous reality from that of obedience, the subordination under a law that is executed by impersonal, uninfluenceable powers is a more respectable position. Otherwise, however, where the personality could guard its sense of self only by complete spontaneity, this is still always related, in the case of complete subordination, to the reactions between persons. For this reason, the princes of the sixteenth century in France, Germany, Scotland, the Netherlands often experienced sub- stantial opposition when they governed through trained substitutes or administrative bodies--that is, according to laws. The command was felt as something personal; they would consider obedience to it only as a matter of personal devotion which in all circumstances does have the form of free mutuality.
This passionate personalism of the subordinate relationship carried over almost into a caricature when, in Spain at the beginning of the modern era, it is reported that an impoverished aristocrat who became a cook or footman in a noble household did not thereby definitively lose nobility; it remained dormant, and a favorable change in fate would awaken it again. When such a nobleman, however, became at some point a tradesman, one's nobility was destroyed. The modern sensibility that separates the work and the person and therefore views personal worth as best safeguarded by focusing as objectively as possible on content, is directly contrary to this. An American girl, for instance, who would work in a factory without that feeling of disgrace would feel fully
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? downgraded as a cook in a family. And already in the thirteenth century in Florence the lower guilds contained the activities of direct service to persons--shoemaker, innkeeper, school teacher--while those indeed still serving the public, but viewed separately from the individual person, formed the higher guilds, such as clothmaker and shopkeeper. In Spain, however, where the traditions of knighthood, with their insertion of the person into all proceedings, still flourished, every functioning person- to-person relationship, to whatever exent, had to count as acceptable, however every subordination under more objective standards, every insertion into an impersonal relational context, because of the many and anonymous persons of service occupations, had to count as fully degrading. Further, in the legal theories of Althusius25 there lingers an aversion to the objectivity of law. With him, the summus magistratus26 does exercise law alien to the individual, but not as representative of the state, rather only because the magistrate is appointed by the people; that, instead of the appointment resulting from or provided by the people personally, the appointment could also be designated by the law of the sovereign to represent the state is an idea still foreign to him. To antiquity, on the other hand, subordination under the law had seemed especially agreeable precisely because of its lack of a personal nature. Aristotle extolled the law as ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , the moderate, neutral, free of passion, and Plato as well had recognized, in the same sense, rule by impersonal law as the best means to counteract self-interest. While this, however, was only a psychological motivation that does not get at the core of the question, the change from personalism to objectivism in the relationship of obedience, in principle not derived from utili- tarian considerations, occurs with Plato in yet another theory: in the ideal state the insight of the ruler stands above the law; as soon as the wellbeing of the whole seems to require it, the ruler has to be able to act even in opposition to the ruler's own laws. Only where there were no true statesmen, laws would be needed that would not under any circumstance permit violation. Thus law appears here as the lesser evil, but not because subordination under a person, in contrast to which all law-abidingness has something mechanical and passive, possessed an element of freer dignity, as with the German experience. But the rigidity of it, with which it confronts the changing and unforeseen demands of
25 Johannes Althusius (1557-1683), early modern Calvinist political thinker--ed.
26 Latin: highest magistrate--ed.
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? life clumsily and inadequately, is experienced as the absence of law--an evil that only the insight of a personal ruler, bound to no prejudice, escapes and which is only converted into a relative advantage where this insight is lacking. Here it thus remains always the content of the law and, as it were, its total state that determines its value or lack thereof over against the subordination under persons. That the relationship of obedience is in its inner principle and in the whole feel for life differ- ent for the obedient, depending on whether it comes from a law or a person, does not enter into these considerations. The entirely universal or formal relation between rule by law and rule by person is in the first place surely practically expressed: Where the law is not strong or extensive enough, persons are needed--and where the persons are not responsive, law is needed. But, far beyond that, it depends on the decisions of the latter undiscussed sociological sense of value whether one views the rule by human beings as the provisional arrangement for the rule of matured law or, on the contrary, the rule of law only as a stopgap or a faute de mieux27 for the rule of a personality absolutely qualified to rule.
Objective authority can become pivotal for the relationship between the ruling and the ruled in still another form: in that not a law or an ideal norm but a concrete state of affairs arranges the relationship of domination. Thus under the legal force of the principle of patrimony, according to which within serfdom, where "the air makes one its pos- session," most radically in Russian feudalims, the subjects as such are only jurisdictions of land areas; for its fearsome hardness gradually ended a personal enslavement that had also allowed the selling of slaves, and the kind of subservient relationships to the estate required that the serf could be sold only with it at the same time. Allowing for all the differences in contents and quantity, this form, though, is sometimes repeated in the context of modern factory workers who are shackled by their own interest to a factory by means of certain arrangements: if somehow it has become possible for them to purchase their own home, if they have to use up all their own money to participate in the welfare system, they leave the factory at their earliest convenience, etc. So they are shackled in a way purely by property, which makes them in a quite specific manner helpless in relation to the employer. Indeed, at bottom, it was the same form of rule that was established in the most
27 For want of something better--ed.
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? primitive patriarchal relationship by means not of a merely physical but by a living object: the children belonged to the father, not because he was their progenitor but because the mother belonged to him; just as the owner of a tree also owns its fruit, so also the children fathered by other men were no less his own. This type of rule tends to bring with it a degrading harshness and existence of absolute subjugation. Since, insofar as people are subjugated in this way they belong to things, they sink psychologically into the category of a mere thing. Where law estab- lishes rule--so one could say with the necessary reservations--since the dominant ones move onto the plane of objectivity, where it is a matter of acting as thing, so the same thing happens to the dominated. This situation tends to be more advantageous in the first case, less in the second, than in the many cases of purely personal subordination.
A sociological interest in the direct sense attaches itself now to the subordination under an objective principle in two essential cases. First, when that ideal, dominant principle is itself a sign of the psychological consolidation of a real social power, and secondly, when it establishes ties among the those same groups subordinated together under it. The first is, above all, to be taken into account in consideration of the moral imperatives. In moral consciousness we feel ourselves subordinated by a command that appears to be carried by no human, personal power. We hearken to the voice of conscience only in us when, equal in deciveness against all subjective egoism, it appears to be able to stem only from a suitable authority outside the subject. As we know, the attempt has been made to resolve this contradiction in such a way that one would derive the contents of morality from social commands: what is necessary to the species and the group, and what this therefore requires for its self-pres- ervation from the members, is to be cultivated in individuals gradually as instinct, so that it would appear in them as their own autonomous feeling, the actually personal, and thus often in contrast to the social commands. Thusly is explained the double character of the moral com- mand: that it, on the one hand, confronts us as an impersonal order, to which we simply have to submit, and that yet, on the other hand, is imposed on us from no external power, but rather only from our own most inner impulse. In any case here is one of the cases in which the individual reproduces inside one's own consciousness the relation- ships that exist between one as wholeness and the group. It is an old observation that the ideas of the individual soul in all its relationships of association and separation, of differentiation and unification, act in such a way as individuals act towards one another. From this there
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? forms a curious specification, that those internal psychological relations repeat, then, not only those between individuals in general, but between the individual and the surrounding circle. What society requires of its members: fitting in and being loyal, altruism and work, self-control and truthfulness--all this the individuals require of themselves.
With that, there are several rather significant motives mixed together. Society confronts individuals with regulations, to which they become accustomed until it is no longer necessary to use the coarser as well as more refined means by which the coercion was effected. Either one's nature becomes thereby so fashioned or refashioned that one acts, in a sense, instinctively, with consistently unmediated will, without even being conscious of a law; in this way the pre-Islamic Arabs lacked any concept of an objectively legal restraint; the final authority everywhere was the purely personal resolution; however, this was thoroughly steeped in and normed by the spirit of the clan and the requirements of clan life. Or the law dwells as imperative in the individual consciousness, carried by the authoritative weight of society, but independent of whether the society really stands behind itself with its power of coercion or only with its openly declared will. The individual interacts with society in such a way that that objective relationship--with all its oppressions, liberations, changing emphases--has come to be an interplay between the individual's social impulses and those of the 'I', in the narrower sense, whereby both are included in the 'I' in the wider sense. However, this is not yet the above-mentioned objectively real legality in which the socio-historical origin is lost to consciousness. On a certain higher level of morality the motive of action is no longer in a substantially human, albeit individual-transcendent, power; rather here the origin of moral necessities flows beyond the antitheses of individual and totality. They stem just as little from the latter as from the singular reality of individual life.
Only for the carriers in this place of reality is their conscience free for acting based on individual reason. Their obligating power stems from them themselves, from their inner, transpersonal authority, from an objective ideality that we have to recognize, whether we want to or not, as a reality whose validity is fully independent from its awareness in a consciousness. The content that fills these forms, however, is--not necessarily, but frequently--the societal requirement that now, as it were, no longer operates with its social impetus, but rather as in the metempsychosis into a norm that is supposed to be fulfilled for its own sake, not on my account and not on your account. It is a matter here of differences that are not only psychologically of the greatest weakness,
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? but whose boundaries are also in practice constantly blurring. But this mixing of motives in which the mental reality moves, makes its basic division that much more urgent. Whether society and the individual confront one another as power and power and the subordination of the latter is effected through a source, flowing as if without inter- ruption, always renewing the energy of the former, or whether this energy transforms itself into a psychological impulse in the souls of the individuals and this, feeling like social nature itself, fights against and represses the individual's own impulses directed by the 'egoistic' part, or whether the ought that human beings experience as an objective reality over them as real as Being itself, fills up with the contents of society's life demands--those are types that only exhaust the kinds of subordination of individuals under their group. The three powers that bring about societal life: the society, the individuals, objectivity-- one after another here become norm-giving, but in such a way that each of them takes into itself the social contents, the measure of domina- tion of the society over the individuals, and each of them forms and carries forward the power, the will, the necessities of society in its own specific manner.
Objectivity in the relationship of these three is not only valid as the absolute, a law towering over the other two in an ideal realm, but determinative, as it were, in a yet other dimension altogether. Society is often the third party that solves the conflicts between the individual and objectivity or fosters links between their discontinuities. In the field of the genealogy of knowledge, the concept of society freed us from the alternative of earlier times: that a cultural value either originated with an individual or had to be bestowed by an objective power--as was shown in the first chapter with several examples. In practice it is through the workings of social interaction that one can satisfy one's demands on the objective order. The fact that the cooperation of the many, the efforts of the society as a unity, side by side and one after another, coaxes out of nature not only a higher amount, but higher qualities and types, of need satisfactions that have to remain denied to individual effort--that is a symbol of the deeper basic reality that society stands between the individual person and the general law of nature--as a mental particular it approaches the former, as a universal the latter. Only, it is the universal that is not abstract. Indeed, every historical group exists as an individual case, as does a historical per- son; but what it is in relationship to other groups, in relationship to its members, is supra-individual. However, not in the way the concept
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? of its individual realizations, which combines what they have in com- mon, but in a particular type of generality, like the organic body--the generality of its members, or something like 'room furnishings'--the generality of table and chair, wardrobe and mirror. And this particular generality coincides with the specific objectivity that society possesses for its members as subjects. The individual does not stand in relation to this universality as to nature whose objectivity is altogether indif- ferent to whether a subject mentally participates in it or not, imagines it correctly or falsely or not at all; the being of that is and its laws hold, independently of the meaning that both may have for a subject. Society, however, also transcends the individual, lives its own lawful life, confronts the individual with historical and imperative steadfastness; however, this confrontation is simultaneously a being inside; the hard indifference towards it is simultaneously an interest; the social objectivity has need of, if indeed it is not determined by, individual subjectivity in general. Through such determinations society becomes a mid-level structure between the subject and every absolutely impersonal generality and objectivity. In this direction there lies something like the following observation. As long as the economy has not yet offered up actually objective prices, had not yet led knowledge and regulation to the idea of supply and demand, production costs, rewards for risk, profits, etc. , this commodity would just be so and so much value and must have this and this firm price--so long are the direct interventions of soci- ety, its organs and laws, much stronger and more rigorous in business enterprises with regard to price and stability. Sales taxes, oversight of quantity and quality of production, indeed, in additional ways, even luxury laws and consumer constraints are frequently introduced in the stage of the economy where the personal freedom of the business enterprise would strive for an unrelenting objectivity still without yet being able to get to a pure, abstract determination of prices. Here the concrete generality enters, the living objectivity of society, often inept, limiting, schematic, but always a transubjective power that provides the individual with a norm before receiving this from the structure of the thing itself and from its recognized lawlikeness. In the intellectual arena the very same formal development takes place to a much greater measure yet: from subordination under society to subordination under objectivity. The entirety of intellectual history shows how very much the intellect of the individual--before directly confronting the object in order to derive the content of its ideas of truth from its material- ity--fills up exclusively with traditional, authoritarian ways of thinking,
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? 'assumed by all. ' A tenet and norm of the mind that desires to know is not at first the object, the immediate observation and interpreta- tion of which it is not able to handle at all, but the common opinion about the object. This mediates a theoretical idea of it, from the most stupid superstition up to the most refined prejudice almost completely disguising non-independence of accepting and unobjectivity of content. It is as if the human being cannot so lightly bear standing before the object eyeball to eyeball, had grown up neither to the severity of its lawlikeness nor to the freedom which it, the object, gives the person, in contrast to the coercion coming from all of humankind. Bending under the authority of the many or their representatives, under the hand-me- down opinion, under the socially accepted viewpoint is a mediator: it is, after all, more modifiable than the law of matter; the mediation of the mental is perceptible in it; it delivers, as it were, an already digested mental product--and, on the other hand, it gives a dependence, a reduction of responsibility that is the compensation for the lack of that self-reliance that the pure, situated relationship between the 'I' and matter gives us. No less than the concept of truth, the individual finds that of justice in the objective sense of its mediation leading up to this stage in the manifest behavior of society. In the realm of punishments as in the specific regulations of life the correlation of guilt and sin, merit and debt, accomplishment and failure is evidently at first a mat- ter of social expediency or social impulsivity. Perhaps the equivalence of action and reaction, in which justice exists, is never one analytically resulting directly from these elements--but always requires a third: an ideal, a goal, a final authority, by which it first establishes or produces its synthesized self-correspondence. Originally the interests and forms of the community life that surrounds the individuals, the subjects of the realization of justice, are the third factors. This community life creates the measures and implements them, in which the justice or injustice of their relationship, not detectable in those elements in isolation, is brought forth. Because of that and first mediated by it, the inner necessity of their 'just' self-consistency arises as the materially and historically later stage, appearing in the counterpressures of those very elements. The higher norm, which perhaps also in this case still determines weight and counterweght according to its degree of relationship, has now fully entered into the elements, has been transformed from it into a powerful functioning value in itself. Justice appears now--from the inner meaning of sin and of pain, of good deed and of happiness, of performance and of reciprocation--as itself an objective essential relationship; it
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? is even supposed to be realized for its own sake: fiat justitia, perat mun- dus--while to the earlier standpoint precisely the preservation of the world made up the legal argument of justice. 28 No matter which of the hypothetical meanings of justice is not discussed here--historically and psychologically objective law, in which it is embodied purely for its own sake and which requires fulfillment for its own sake, is a later stage of development that precedes, preparing and mediating the way for, the demand of justice from social objectivity alone.
Finally this same development occurs inside morality in the nar- rower sense. The first given content of morality is of an altruistically social nature; not as though it had in and for itself an independent essence, which this content only appropriated, but the devotion of the I to a You (in the singular or the multiple) appears as the concept of the moral itself, as its definition. Over against this are presented the philosophical moral teachings in which a gradually objective ought is detached from the question of the I and the You, a much later stage. If for Plato it is a matter of the idea of the good becoming realized, for Kant, that the principle of individual action is adaptable to universal law, for Nietzsche, that the human being is to go beyond the current level of development--so these norms may cover also appropriately the for-one-another of subjects; on some fundamental level, however, it does not now depend on this but also the subjectivity of beings for whom action eventually becomes relevant. Since seen from this per- spective the relationship is also for the societal complex of subjects only the incidental fulfillment of a much generalized norm and basis of obligation that can offer legitimation to the socially and altruistically directed action, but can also withhold it. The ethical obedience to the demands of You and society is, in the development of the individual as well as the married, the first dissolving of naive egoism prior to the ethical state; at this stage numberlessness remains standing: in principle, however, it is preparation and transition for the subordination under an objective law that even stands beyond the You and the I and by itself first offers the interests of one or the other as moral contents.
What now concerns the second sociological question in relation to the subordination under an impersonal ideal principle: how this func- tions based on the reciprocal relationship of the jointly subordinated,
28 Latin: fiat justitia, perat mundus, Let justice be done (even if ) the world be des- troyed--ed.
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? so also to be grasped here is that in many cases that subordination by abstract ideal is preceded by a real one. Frequently we see a personal- ity or class exercising its domination in the name of an ideal principle by which they too would be subordinated. So this last appears then logically to precede, and the real organization of rule under people appears to develop, in consequence of this dependence on an abstract ideal. Historically, however, the path into rules is reversed: from very real personal relationships of power arises dominations and subordinations, out of which gradually, through spiritualization of the dominating power or through enlargement and depersonalization of the whole relationship, an ideal, objective power grows, as if then the dominant exercises its power only as its nearest agent. The development of the position of the pater familias by the Aryans shows this clearly. 29 Originally--as this type was presented--its power was unlimited and thoroughly subjective, that is, his momentary wish, his personal advantage is decisive over all arrangements. However, this arbitrary power moved gadually under a feeling of responsibility; the unit of the family, somewhat embodied in the spiritus familiaris,30 came to be felt as the power of the abstract ideal, in relation to which also the master of the whole was experienced as a mere executor, abiding by the law. In this sense it happens that custom and habit, instead of subjective desire, determine his actions, his deci- sions, and judgments, so that he no longer acts as unlimited master of the family estate, but more as its custodian in the interests of the whole, so that his position bears more the character of an office than of despotic law. So the relationship between dominant and subordinate is placed on a whole new basis: while in the first arena the latter, as it were, constituted only a personal jurisdiction of the former, now the objective idea of the family is created, which stands over all indi- viduals, and of which the leading patriarch is as subordinate as every other member, whom he now is able to command only in the name of the ideal of unity. Here arises the most extremely important type of this form: that the commanding themselves are subordinate to the law that they have given. Their will receives in that moment, in which it becomes law, the nature of objectivity and thereby separates from its subjective-personal origin. As soon the master gives the law as law, it is documented thusly as the organ of a spiritual necessity, revealing
29 Latin: pater familias, father of the family, i. e. , patriarch--ed.
30 Latin: spiritus familaris, family spirit--ed.
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? thereby only a norm that is valid merely because of its inner sense and that of the situation, whether or not it is actually just then given by the lord. Indeed, when instead of this more-or-less clearly conceived legitimation, the will of masters itself actually becomes law, they cannot at all avoid therefore stepping out of the sphere of the subjective; they carry that transpersonal legitimation in themselves, as it were, a priori. Accompanying the inner structure of the law is the lawgiver, insofar as there is such, thereby being as a person even as subordinate as all other persons. So is it clearly expressed in the privileges of medieval Flemish cities; the jurors were supposed to offer every person an impartial judgment, even against the counts themselves, who grant the privilege, and such a sovereign ruler as the great Elector introduces, without seeking collective approval, a poll tax--but then he has not only his court pay it, but pays it himself!
The most recent period offers an example of the development of an objective superiority, to which the original and also continuing com- mand has to submit along with the subordinates under it, similar in form to that of the history of the family insofar as its mode of production allows objective and technical factors to dominate the personal. Many kinds of domination and subordination that earlier bore a personal character, so much so that in the relationship in question the one was plainly dominant, the other just as clearly subordinate, have now so changed that both are in like measure subject to an objective purpose, and only inside this common relationship to the higher principle does the subordination of the one continue under the other as a techni- cal necessity. As long as the relationship of hired labor is viewed as a contractual agreement--the working person is leased--so long does it contain essentially a factor of subordination of the worker under the contractor. This factor is, however, dismissed as soon as one views the labor contract not as leasing the person, but as purchasing the commod- ity labor. Then the subordination that it requires of the worker--so it has been expressed--is effected only "under the cooperative process that is as necessary for the entrepreneur executing some kind of activity as it is for the worker. " The worker is now no longer subject as a person, but functions only as a servant of an objective economic process, inside of which the element of contractor or manager is superior to the worker, thus not at all personally but solely objectively required.
The feeling of equality of the modern worker must be in part based on this foundation, which points as well to its purely sociological nature, in that it continues frequently entirely without influence on the materal
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? well-being of the worker. While workers yet sell only a quantitatively circumscribed ability--be it more or less than that required of them before in the personal formation--they are liberated as human beings from the relationship of subordination, which they view now as only an additional factor of the processes of production, in so far as these are coordinated by the head of production. This technical objectiv- ity has its symbol in the legitimation of the contractual relationship: once the contract is concluded, it stands then as objective norm over both parties. In the Middle Ages this identifies the turning point of the relationship of association that originally means complete personal submission to the master; in general journeywork was serfdom. The association of journeymen of a particular position coalesced around the attempt to change the personal relationship of service into a rela- tionship of contract. Of highest significance is the appearance, as soon as the organization of the serfs succeeded, of the title 'journeyman. ' The contractual formation, whatever be its materal content, correlates relative equality instead of absolute subordination. It strengthens its objectivity yet further when the contract, instead of being made between two individual persons, consists of collective determinations between a group of workers on the one side and a group of employers on the other, as was done particularly through the English trade unions. The trade unions and the employer federations in specifically widely progressive industries conclude contracts over pay rates, work hours, overtime, time off, etc. , from which no concluded contract between individuals of these categories was permitted to deviate. Hereby the impersonality of the labor relationship is obviously extraordinarily heightened; its objectivity finds its suitable carrier and expression in the individual-transcending collectivity. All things considered, this character is especially guaranteeed when the work contracts are concluded for the shortest possible time. The English trade unions have always pressed for that, in spite of the consequentially greater insecurity of employment. By the right to leave one's workplace, so it has been explained, the laborer is distinguished from the slave; when the workers, however, give up this right for a lengthy period, they are for that entire extended period then subject to all conditions that the employer imposes on them, with the exception of those explicitly stipulated, and have lost the protection that that right of dissolving the relationship gives them. Instead of the breadth of the bond, with which earlier the whole personality was bound, with much longer contract periods the duration of the bond becomes the concern. What the objectivity with short contracts more decisively safeguards is
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? nothing positive, but only this: to set boundaries so that the objectively determined relationship of production would be transformed into a subjectively determined choice, whereas with long contracts there is not sufficient protection. The fact that inside the domestic-servant relationship, at least as it is constituted in middle Europe at the time, the whole person, as it were, still enters into subordination, and this did not yet develop into the objectivity of a materially circumscribed performance--explains the basic unwholesomeness of this arrangement. Actually it comes nearer to a more complete form where it is taken over by the services of persons who only have to perform distinct material functions inside the house and in so far as they are coordinated by the 'housewife,' while the respectively earlier prevailing relationship engages them as whole personalities and they are responsible, as the concept of 'all-around maid' shows most clearly, for 'unbounded services'; precisely through this lack of objective determination they become subordinated to the housewife as a person. In pronounced patriarchal circumstances, in contrast to the present, the 'house' counted as an objective end and value in itself, towards which the housewife and the domestic servants worked together. Even with a full personal subordination, this creates a certain equalization carried by the interest that the servant, bound firmly and permanently to the house, tends to experience. The 'Du,' the domestic servant, expressed in one respect one's subordination as person; in another respect, however, it put the servant on a level closer to the children of the house and inserted the servant that much more intimately into the organization. Thus this relationship of obedience is oddly in force at just the opposite pole of its development into some measurable kind of objective conception: with complete patriarchal subordination, whereby the household still has, as it were, absolute value, which the work of the housewife serves likewise just like that of the domestice servant, albeit in a higher position; and then with com- plete differentiation, where work and service for trade are objectively predetermined, and personal attachment, which is the correlate of subordination of indeterminate measure, does not come into play. The current position of the domestic servant as member of the household, especially in the major cities, has lost the one objectivity, but not yet won the other; the whole personality is no longer subjectively engaged in the objective ideal of the 'house,' though without being able to actually withdraw from this because of the demand for a kind of complete service. Finally the relationship between officers and common soldiers may exemplify this type of form. Here the tension between the
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? subordination inside the organism of the group and the equalization that arises through service is shared under the concept of the defense of the fatherland that is imaginably the broadest and understandably manifests this breadth most noticeably in the field, where on the one hand discipline is most unmerciful, on the other hand, however, com- radely relationship between officers and the rank and file is required, in part, by unique situations, in part, by the morale of the whole. In peacetime, where the military is in the position of being prohibited from the methods of its purpose, its technical structure unavoidably develops psychologically into the end purpose, so that the domination and sub- ordination on which the technicalities of the organization rest stand in the foreground of consciousness, and that peculiar sociological hybrid of equalization through common subordination only comes under an objective concept when the situation changes calling this concept as the actual purpose of the military into consciousness.
Such double roles of the individual--one occupying a dominant or subordinate position inside the organization of the contents of one's unique life, this organization as a whole, however, standing under a ruling concept that every one of its members obtains an equal or nearly equal position in relation to everybody on the outside--these double roles let the purely form-sociological situation become one of peculiarly mixed feelings in the life of its carrier. An employee of a large business may have a leading position in it; however, as soon as that employee is in a position before the public and for that reason is acting ideally for the business as a whole, the employee will behave zealously and devotedly. In contrast, these elements in the frequent pride of the subordinate--the servant in the aristocratic household, the member of free-standing intellectual or social circles that at this level are still only peripheral--coalesce in order to represent the worth of the entire circle and its concept all the more energetically before all those standing outside, since they seek to obtain, in the negative way of differentiation from others, the fixed internal-external position, which is granted them only imperfectly by a kind of positive relation to the circle itself. The greatest formal multiplicity of this type is offered perhaps by the Catholic hierarchy. While every member is bound by a blind, unresisting obedience, the lowest member, nevertheless, also stands apart from every layperson in absolute height at which the idea of eternity rises over everything temporal--and at the same time its highest member is professed 'the servant of the servants'; the monk, who may be absolute dictator inside his order, clothes himself with the
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? deepest humility and servility before every begger; but the brother of the lowest order is with all unconditionality of church authority superior to the earthly prince.
Besides this cross-cut through the phenomena of domination and subordination, which orders them according to the question whether one or many, whether persons or objective structures bear the weight of governance, another is allowed to emerge in the sociological per- spective that alters the degrees of domination, especially as it relates to freedom and the conditions for it. This line will be pursued in the following investigations.
Where multiple and dynamic dominations and subordinations exist in a group--be it as a unified hierarchical construction, be it as a mul- tiplicity of dominant-subordinate relationships existing side by side--the group will as a whole derive its character essentially from subordination, as it is evident especially clearly in bureaucratically regulated states. For the strata extend downward in rapid proportion. Where thus domina- tion and subordination in general stand in the foreground of form- sociological consciousness, the quantitatively predominant sides of this correlation, that of subordination, will color the totality of the picture. Based on entirely unique combinations, the impression and the feeling of an overall domination of a group can also certainly ensue. The pride and the contempt for work of the Spanish originates from their having for a long time the oppressed Moors as their workers; when later they had exterminated and expelled them and the Jews, there remained to them indeed only the aura of the dominant, while there were no longer any subordinate people present who could form a complement to it. At the time of their highest glory it was particularly expressed among the Spanish that, because they wanted to take a position as a nation in the world, in the individual states the nobility would assume the positions of military officers and civil servants. Something similar, only on a more solid foundation, had already appeared in the Spartan warrior democracy. Because, while it oppressed the neighboring tribes, it did not enslave them but allowed them their land and treated them only as serfs, these developed together into a lower stratum that formed a gentry over against the totality of full citizenship--so they behaved very much among themselves democratically. This was not a simple aristocracy that from the beginning had arranged the more unlawful elements together into a group unity. But it was actually the entire original state that, in preserving the status quo through the substruc- ture of that stratum, made the totality of its membership, as it were,
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? into an aristocracy. Also in more characteristic respects the Spartans repeated the principle of universal domination: the Spartan army was so stratified that it consisted in large part of commanders.
At this point the peculiar sociological type of form crops up: an element's arrangements, which could arise only in their relationship to another and possess their content and meaning in relation to that other, becoming, nevertheless, autonomous from all interaction-dependent qualities of that element. That one is dominant presupposes an object of domination; the mental reality by itself can avoid this conceptual necessity up to a certain degree. The one internal motif involved points to Plato for sure. Among the endless variety of realms of sovereignty, by size and content, in respect to sovereignty as such, as function, there would be no difference: it would be the one and the same capacity to command, which the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? as well as the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? as well as the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? would have to possess. 31 For that reason the actual ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? is for him not necessarily the practitioner of the highest execu- tive power, but the one that possesses the 'science of command'--no matter whether or not one has something to command. This originated thus in the subjective ground of the relationship of sovereignty, which arises not only as the correlate of a real relationship of rule, but exists independently of its material existence. The 'born king' requires, if you will, no land, he is king, he does not need it to become one. If the Spartans formed no aristocracy, but felt themselves nevertheless noble, the Spaniards had the consciousness of lordliness, even as they no longer possessed servants--so this has that deeper meaning: that the interaction of the lordly relationship is the sociological expression or the actualization of the more internally determined qualities in the subject. Whoever adopts this is a ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , a ruler; one side is, so to speak, dropped out of the two-sided relationship, and exists only in ideal form, without which the other would thereby lose the importance that would be one's due within the relationship. While this then occurs for all the members of a larger group, it gives expression to the idea that they see themselves overall as manifesting 'equality,' without having to underscore by that name precisely wherein their equality lies. The fully enfranchised citizens of Sparta were called simply the '? ? ? ? ? ? . 32 The
31 ? ? ? ? ? ?