No More Learning

The idea of the unified state seeks thus to preserve its domination by splitting up every territorial portion which, if it were spatially enclosed, could easily secede.
The prophylactic hindering of association now acts more pointedly of course when a direct striving for the latter exists. Under this schema belongs--indeed complicated with yet other motives--the phenomenon of employers in general adamantly refusing, in wage and other contested issues, to deal with intermediaries who do not belong to their own work force. 23 Thereby they impede not only the workers from strengthening their position through alliance with a personality who has nothing to fear or expect from the employers, but they hamper as well the unified action of the work force of a different enterprise which, for example, is working for thoroughgoing implementation of a single wage scale. While the intermediary is rejected who could concomitantly negoti- ate for several labor groups, the employer prevents the threatening prospect of unified workers; in relation to the existing efforts for such a possibility, this is sensed as so important for their position that busi- ness associations sometimes require of each of their members as a duty under their bylaws this isolation of their work forces in disputes and negotiations. In the history of the English union federations, principally in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, one sees an extraordinary development, as the exploitation of this 'divide'24 by the entrepreneurs was stopped by an impersonal authority. They began, namely, from both sides to attach a validity to the decisions of the impartial arbiter, called in for disputes, beyond the specific case. Consequently there was now, instead of many, just one universal rule over the, albeit still individu- ally led, negotiations of the employers with their own workers, and this is evidently an intermediate step towards the collective bargaining agreement inside the whole industry, inclusive of all interests, in which
23 The German is die Arbeiterschaft, which means "working class" or the "work force"; Simmel seems to be using it here in the sense of a particular craft or the workers associated with a specific industry--ed.
24 In English--ed.
? 118 chapter two
the practice of the 'divide' ceases to exist. Constitutional rulers attempt to go beyond that mere prophylaxis to prevent, by divisions of parlia- ment, the formation of troublesome majorities. I will mention only an example that is of interest principally because of its radicalism. Under George III, the English court engaged in the practice of declaring all party entities as such actually inadmissible and incompatible with the welfare of the state. And through the principle that only the individual person and that person's individual qualification could hold political office; while laws and general directives were described as the specific achievements of that multiplicity, 'men, not measures,' were required. 25 So the practical significance of individuality was played against the actions of majorities, and by somewhat contemptuously identifying the social plural with abstract generality, the dissolution of it into its atoms was sought as allegedly what is alone real and functional.
The division of elements takes on an active form rather than a pro- hibitive wherever the third establishes jealousy between them. By this what is not yet meant are the cases in which the third lets the other two annihilate each other in order establish a new order of things at their expense; rather here it is often a matter of conservative tendencies in that the third wants thereby to preserve already existing prerogatives; so a feared coalition of both the others is hindered by means of jealousy between them from the first signs of its emergence or minimal devel- opment. A special refinement of this technique appears to have been made in a case reported from ancient Peru. It was a general practice of the Incas to divide a newly conquered tribe into two roughly equal halves and to install a director into each of the two, and in fact with a small difference in rank between both. This was actually the most suitable means to elicit between these chieftains a rivalry that would not allow any united action against the rulers on the party of the subservient realms to develop. A position of complete equality as well as one of great difference would more likely result in a unification: the former because then an actual bisecting of the leadership rather than any other relationship would have led to eventual action, and because, where it nevertheless would have been required of the subordination, equal pairs most easily conform to that technical necessity; the latter because with the inequality the leadership of the one would have encountered no resistance. The slight difference in rank allows it least to come to
25 "Men, not measures" in English. Quotation marks added--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 119
an organic and gratifying relationship in the feared unification here because the one with more would have without doubt demanded absolute privilege, the one with less however not being great enough to suggest the same ambition.
The principle of unequal apportionment of anything of value in order to so arouse jealousy as a means of divide et impera is a commonly favored technique, against which certain social conditions once more offer in principle similar protection. The Australian aborigines were stirred up against one another through unequally apportioned offerings in order to govern them more easily. But this always failed because of the communism of the hordes who immediately distributed every gift, no matter who received it, among all the members. Next to jealousy it is mistrust above all that is used as a psychological means for the same purpose, and which, in contrast to the former, renders it possible to restrain even larger crowds from conspiratorial alliances. To its greatest effect, this was used by the Venetian government on the grandest scale through the staged demand to the citizens for denunciation somehow of anyone suspect. No one knew whether one's closest acquaintance was in the service of the state inquisition, and so revolutionary plans, which presuppose mutual trust on the part of a great number of people, were cut off at the root; consequently in later Venetian history open revolt is as good as non-existent.
The most blatant form of divide et impera, the unleashing of actual conflict between two elements, can have its objective in the relation- ship of the third to the two as well as to objectives lying outside them. The latter occurs, for example, where one of the three claimants to an office understands how to incite the other two against one another so that through the gossip and slander each of them puts into circulation about the other, they mutually destroy each other's chances. In all cases of this type the art of the third manifests itself in the magnitude of the distance the third knows to keep from the action being instigated. The more one steers the conflict by pulling on invisible strings, the more one knows how to apply the fire so that it burns further without one's additional involvement and oversight, the more, then, not only will the conflict of the two others be carried on more pointedly and directly to their mutual ruin, but the more also the prize at issue, that held between them, or the objects otherwise desired by the third seem to fall into the third's lap as if by themselves. The Venetians were also masters of this technique. In order to usurp the holdings of nobles on terra firma, they had the means to distribute noble titles to younger people or those
120 chapter two
not of noble birth. The indignation of the older ones and nobles over that always provided an occasion for brawls and breaches of the peace between both parties, whereupon the Venetian government would, all according to legal form, confiscate the holdings of the guilty persons. In precisely such cases, where the uniting together of the divided ele- ments against the common oppressor would be of the most obvious utility, it becomes patently clear that, as a general condition for divide et empera, hostilities do not in any manner require only the collision of real interests for their basis. If only some kind of need for hostility in general, an antagonism that seeks only its object, exists in the soul, it can easily succeed in substituting some other opponent entirely instead of that opponent against whom the animosity would have meaning and purpose. Divide et impera requires of its artist the evocation--through baiting, slander, flattery, arousal of expectations, etc. --of that general condition of excitation and combativeness in which the suggestion of an opponent, not at all really obvious as such, can suffice. In this way the form of conflict can be entirely disengaged from its content and rationale. The third, who would actually benefit from the hostility of the other two, can remain, as it were, invisible between them, so that the collision of the two does not impact the third but occurs recipro- cally between them themselves.
Where the purpose of the third does not lie in an object but in the direct domination over the other two elements, two sociological perspectives are fundamental. 1. Certain elements are formed in such a way that they can be combated successfully only through similarly formed ones. The desire for their subjection finds no immediately suitable point of attack; so it remains only to keep them, so to speak, divided among themselves and divisions involved in a struggle they can conduct with identical weapons until they are sufficiently weakened enough to fall prey to the third. Of England it was said, they could conquer India only through Indians, just as Xerxes had recognized that Greece is best fought through Greeks. Precisely those dependent on one another through the common identity of interests know best one another's weaknesses and points of vulnerability, so that the principle of the similia similibus26--the annihilation of some kind of condition by
26 Latin: "likes with likes," in the sense of "fighting fire with fire" or "it takes one to know one"--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 121
the stimulation of a similar one--can be repeated here to the greatest extent. While one best achieves mutual advancement and unification with a certain measure of qualitative differentiation, because through this there arises completion, coalescence, organically differentiated life--the mutual destruction seems best effected with qualitative similarity, of course apart from so great a quantitative preponderance of power on the part of the one party that the relationship of the qualities becomes of no overall consequence. The whole category of enmities that culmi- nate in sibling conflict derives its radically destructive character just as much from experience and knowledge as from the instincts originating in the root unity which make available to each the weapons that are most deadly against just this opponent. What forms the basis of the relationship of the similar to each other--the knowledge of the external situation and empathy with the inner--that is obviously likewise the means for the deepest injuries that exclude no attack possibility and leads, since it is in its essence mutual, to the most thorough annihila- tion. For this reason the combat of likes through likes, the division of the opponent into two qualitatively homogeneous parties, is one of the most thoroughgoing realizations of the divide et impera. 2. Where it is not possible for oppressors to get their business done exclusively through the sacrifice of the victims themselves, where they must themselves intervene in their struggle, the schema is very simple: they support the one just as long as needed to squash the other, whereupon they then have the other as an easy prey. This support will in any case be at its most functional for the one who is already the stronger. This can take the more negative form of the more powerful being spared by one ele- ment in an oppressing complex of them. So Rome in its subjugation of Greece indeed maintained the most obvious reserve against Athens and Sparta. This tactic must elicit resentment and jealousy on the part of one, arrogance and confidence on the part of the other, a split that makes the prey easygoing for the oppressor. This method of those with the will to rule: to sponsor the stronger of two actually equivalent interests facing them until they have ruined the weaker and then with an about face to confront and to subjugate the one now isolated--this method is no less favored in the founding of empires than in the fisticuffs of street youths, no different in the administration of political parties through a government than in the economic competition among, say, three elements: a very powerful financier or manufacturer and two less significant but troublesome and unequal competitors facing off against
122 chapter two
one another. In this case the first, in order to hinder a countervailing coalition of the other two, enters into a price or production arrange- ment with the stronger of them that secures a considerable advantage for that one and through which the weaker one is crushed. Once this is done, then the powerful one can dump the former confederate and drive the latter, who now has nothing left to fall back on, into the ground through predatory pricing or some other method.
I will proceed to an altogether different type of those sociological formations that are conditioned by the quantitative determination of their elements. In the configurations of two and three, it was a matter of the intra-group life with all its differentiations, syntheses, and antitheses, that unfolds with this minimum or maximum number of members. The question did not involve the group as a whole in its relationship to another or to a larger one of which it is a part, but the intrinsic reciprocal relationship of its components. But now, in contrast, we inquire as to the significance evident in the determination of quantity towards the outside, indeed its most essential function, in that it makes the distribution of a group into subgroups possible. The teleological sense of this is, as already highlighted above, the easier overseeing and directing of the entire group, often a first organization, more cor- rectly: its mechanization; considered purely formally, the possibility is thereby given to guard the formation, character, arrangements of divi- sions of the whole, independent of the quantitative development of the whole itself: The components with which the administration bargains remain qualitatively always the same sociologically, and the increase of the whole changes only their multiplier. This is, for example, the immense benefit of the numerical division of armies; their increase proceeds thereby with relative technical ease, in that it is effected as an ever repeated formation of the numerically and thus organizationally already fixed cadres. This advantage is evidently linked to a numerical determination in general, but not to specific numbers. Meanwhile in this regard one of the number groups already mentioned above became historically of especial importance for social distributions: ten and its derivatives. For this combination of ten members for communal tasks and responsibilities, which appears in many of the most ancient cultures, the number of fingers was without a doubt particularly decisive. With a total lack of arithmetical skill one has in the fingers a first principle of orientation for ascertaining a large number of units, for making their divisions and groupings clear. This general, often enough accentuated meaning of the principle of fives and tens is, however, still utilized espe-
the quantitative conditioning of the group 123
cially for social application: by the fingers having a relatively mutual independence and independent movement, but still being inseparably linked together (in France one says of two friends, ils sont unis comme deux doigts de la main)27 and obtaining their actual sense only in being together--they thereby offer a very apt picture of the social union of individuals. The unity and particular joint effectiveness of those small subgroups of the larger collectivities could not be any more clearly symbolized. Still most recently the Czech Omladina secret society was constituted according to the principle of five: the very leadership belonged to several "Hands," which consisted of one thumb each, i. e. the uppermost leader and four fingers. 28 How strongly one sensed precisely the number ten as consistently belonging together inside of a larger group is demonstrated perhaps also by the custom reaching back into early antiquity of the decimation of military divisions dur- ing insurgencies, desertions, etc. Precisely ten was simply considered a unity that for purposes of punishment could be represented by an individual; or experience roughly concurs that a ringleader tends to be found on average somewhere among ten. The division of a whole group into ten numerically similar parts, though obviously leading to a completely different result and wholly without a factually practical relation to the division into ten individuals, still seems to me to derive psychologically from this. As the Jews returned from the second exile, 42,360 Jews with their slaves, they were divided in such a way that a dwelling in Jerusalem took a one-in-ten drawn lot; the remaining nine tenths went to rural lands. These were decidedly too few for the capital city, which is why they also had to be equally concerned about an increase in the population of Jerusalem. The power of the principle of ten as a basis for social division seems here to have worked blindly against practical necessity.
27 French: They are united as two fingers of a hand--ed.
28 Seen from another and more general perspective, the division according to the
number of fingers belongs to the typical tendency to use phenomena of available, clearly natural rhythm for these social purposes, at least in name and symbol. A secret political society under Louis Philippe called itself the Seasons. Six members under the leader- ship of a seventh, called Sunday, formed a week, four weeks a month, three months a season, four seasons the highest unit standing under a commander-in-chief. With all the play-like character, this naming activity still probably had a feeling as though one hereby participated in a form of unity replicated from the different components indicated by nature itself. And the mystical coloring, to which secret societies are so inclined, will have favored this symbolic representation with which one could intend to link a power of cosmic design to the designated structure.
? 124 chapter two
The group of a hundred, derived from that principle, is primar- ily and essentially also a means of division, and admittedly the most important historically. I have already mentioned that it became the direct conceptual substitute for division in general, so that it remains the very name for the subgroup even when this contains many fewer or more members. The hundred appears--perhaps most decisively in the great role that it plays in the administration of Anglo-Saxon England--as it were, as the idea of the subgroup in general, whose internal meaning is not altered by its outward incompleteness. Conse- quently it is right to note that the group of a hundred in ancient Peru always with due diligence voluntarily paid their tribute to the Incas, even when they had been reduced to a fourth of their population. The basic sociological reality here is that these communal associations were experienced as entities apart from their members. But now since the tax obligation, it seems, did not apply to the association as such but to its hundred participants--so the assumption of this obligation by the remaining twenty-five shows all the more sharply how necessarily from nature the unity of a hundred was felt more than precisely one hundred. On the other hand it is unavoidable that the division into groups of a hundred penetrates many kinds of organic relationships of elements and aggregates of elements--of the familial, the neighbor, the friendship type--because it always remains a mechanical technical principle, teleologically, not naturally, driven. Occasionally then the decimal division comes close to being more organic: thus the medieval German imperial army is formed according to nationalities; neverthe- less we also hear of a division of the army by thousands, which then had to cut through and prevail over that more natural ordering deter- mined by a terminus a quo. 29 Yet the strong centripetal force that rules the formation into hundreds suggests its meaning is to be sought not only in its purpose of division, which is something external to it and with which it serves the larger encompassing group. Now apart from that, it is found as a matter of fact that the hundred-count of members, purely as such, lends a special significance and dignity to the group. The nobility among the Epizephyrian Locroi30 traced its descent back to noble women from the thusly named "hundred houses" that had been involved in the founding of the colony. By the same token the original
29 Latin: point of origin--ed.
30 An ancient people in the South of Italy--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 125
settlements by which Rome is supposed to have been founded included a hundred Latin people, a hundred Sabine, and a hundred brought together from various components. The hundred-count of members apparently lends the group a certain style, the precisely delimited strict outline, over against which each somewhat smaller or somewhat larger number appears rather vague and less complete in itself. It has an inner unity and system that make it especially suitable for that construction of myths of origin, a peculiar union of mystical symmetry and rational sense, while all other numbers of members of groups are felt as random, not as holding together from within in the same manner, furthermore not unalterable according to their own structure. The particularly adequate relationship with our categories of understanding, the easy survey of a hundred-count that makes it so suitable as a principle of division, appears here as a reflection of an objective feature of the group that comes directly from its numerical determination.
This qualification just mentioned arises completely from what was discussed up till now. With the combinations of two and three, quantity determined the particular inner life of the group, but it does not do it so much as a quantity; the group does not manifest all those phenomena because it had this size as a whole, but rather it was a matter of the determination of each single element through its interaction with one or with two other elements. It is entirely otherwise with all the derivatives of the finger count: here it was a matter of the basis for synthesis in the easier oversight, organization, manageability, in short, not actually in the group itself, but in the subject who has to deal with it theoretically or practically. A third meaning of the quantity of members is now finally pertinent, in that the group possesses, objectively and as a whole--thus without differentiation of individual positions of the elements--certain characteristics only below or only over a definite amount. Quite gen- erally this was treated already above in the distinction between the large and the small group; now however it is a question whether the characteristics of the whole group come from particular numbers of members--whereby obviously the patterns of interaction among the individuals constitute the real and decisive process; but now they do not constitute the object of inquiry in the singularity of the individuals but their being combined into a picture of the whole. The facts that point to this significance of the quantity of the group belong entirely to a single type: obligations having to meet legal prescriptions concerning the minimum or maximum size of associations that are required for certain functions or rights. The basis for this is evident. The specific qualities,
126 chapter two
the combinations, evolve on the basis of their membership number, and of course what the legal prescriptions about that require would always parallel what is associated with the same number, provided that there were no psychological differences among people and if the workings of a group followed from its size as closely as would the dynamic workings of a material mass in motion. The unavoidable individual differences of the members, however, renders all exact and prior determinations completely illusory: they can allow the same amount of power and rashness, of concentration or decentralization, of self-sufficiency or need for leadership to emerge that appear in circumstances determined by a group at one time, a second time to be sure by one much smaller, a third time by one much greater. However, the legal prescriptions that have those qualities of associations as a basis for regulation cannot technically cope with such oscillations and paralyzations through the random human material, but must specify membership counts as an average to which they link rights and duties of associations. Basically the assumption must be that a certain common spirit, a certain mood, power, tendency would arise among a number of associated people when and only when this number has reached a certain level. Depend- ing on whether this outcome is desired or abhorred, one will demand a minimum number or permit only a maximum. I will first cite some examples only for the latter. In the early Greek era there were legal specifications that the crew of boats should amount to no more than five men, in order to prevent their turning to piracy. Out of fear of the leagues of skilled workers the cities of the Rhineland in 1436 decided that no more than three skilled workers were allowed to go about dressed alike. Generally one most often encounters political prohibi- tions having this intent. Most frequently overall political prohibitions of this sense occur. In 1305 Philip the Fair prohibited all assemblies of more than five persons, whatever estate they were and whatever form they would take. Under the ancient re? gime twenty nobles were not even allowed to join in a discussion without the king specifically granting it. Napoleon III forbade all associations of more than twenty persons not specifically allowed. In England the conventicle act under Charles II made all religious meetings of more than five persons in a house subject to penalty, and the English reaction at the beginning of the nineteenth century forbade all meetings of over fifty persons without notice being given well in advance. During states of siege often no more than three or five people were allowed to gather in the street, and some years
the quantitative conditioning of the group 127
ago the Berlin supreme court decided that an 'assembly' in the legal sense, which would thus require police notification, would hold with the presence from eight persons. Purely in the economic realm this is borne, for example, in the English law of 1708--enacted under the influence of the Bank of England--that the legal associations inside the finance industry were permitted to include no more than six partners. The conviction must be widespread on the part of the governing that only inside of groups of a given size is found the courage or impru- dence, the spirit of venture or contagious impulse to certain actions that one simply prefers not to allow to rise. Most clearly this is the motive behind laws of morality: when the number of participants at a banquet, fellow riders in an elevator, etc. is limited, because experience has shown that in a larger mass the sensual impulses more easily win the upper hand, the infection from the bad example progresses there more rapidly, the feeling of individual responsibility is disabled. The opposite direction, on the same basis, is taken by the regulations that require precisely some minimum number of participants for a specific legal effect. Thus any collective business enterprise in England can be incorporated as soon as it has at least seven partners; thus everywhere the law requires a certain, though extraordinarily varying minimum, number of judges for making a valid judgment, so that for example in many places some panels of judges were simply called the seven. With regard to the former phenomenon, it is assumed that only with this number of partners would there be adequate guarantees and effective solidarities, without which laws of incorporation are a danger to the national economy. In the second example the prescribed minimum number seems then to function in such a way that the errors and extreme opinions of individuals balance one another and thereby the collective opinion would arrive at what is objectively correct. This mini- mum requirement emerges especially strongly in religious formation. The regular gatherings of Buddhist monks of a certain area required the presence of at least four monks for the purpose of religious inculcation and a kind of confession. 31 This number thus made up the synod, as it were, and then everyone had, as a member of the same, some kind of a significance other than an individual monk, which is what he simply
31 Beichte--"Confession" in the sense of the Catholic sacrament of Reconcilia- tion--ed.
? 128 chapter two
was, as long as only about three met. So Jews are always supposed to pray together with at least ten. So, according to the Lockean constitu- tion of North Carolina,32 any given church or religious community is supposed to have been permitted to start if it was comprised of at least seven members. The power, intensity, and stability of the spirit of the religious community is in these cases then anticipated only from a certain number of members reciprocally maintained and increased. Summarizing: where the law specifies a minimum number, trust works in support of the multiplicity and mistrust against the energies of iso- lated individuals; where a maximum number is set, just the opposite, mistrust works against the multiplicity, and is not directed against its individual components.
Now, however, a prohibition may be linked to a maximum or a permission to a minimum--the legislators will have not doubted that the results they fear or desire are on average bound uncertainly and entirely to the established range; but the arbitrariness of the set limit is in any case here unavoidable and justified, just as in determining the age at which someone assumes the rights and duties of adulthood. Certainly the inner capacity for this appears in some earlier, in others later, in no one at the stroke of the minute set by law; however, actual practice can win the established standards that it needs only in so far as it carves a continuous series into two sections at one point for the purposes of the law. The completely different treatment of those sec- tions can find no precise justification in their objective nature. For this reason it is so extraordinarily instructive that in all determinations, for which the examples given above are chosen, the specific character of human beings, over whom the directive applies, enters not at all into consideration, even though it governs every individual case. But it is not something tangible, and only the number as such still holds. And, to express the deep feeling for it prevalent everywhere, it is essential that it would be the crucial factor, if somehow the individual differ- ences would not cancel out their effects, that these effects nevertheless be contained more certainly in the final total phenomenon.
32 The philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) assisted Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, in drawing up a constitution for the North American colonial province of Carolina, 1672-1673--ed.
? CHAPTER THREE DOMINATION AND SUBORDINATION
Broadly speaking, no one is particularly concerned that one's influence might affect the other, but rather that this influence, this affecting of the other, would react back on one, the determining one. For this reason, there is for sure a reciprocal action along with that abstract desire to dominate that is thereby satisfying--that the behavior or suffering, the positive or negative condition of the other, manifests itself to the sub- ject as the product of the subject's will. This so-to-say solipsistic exercise of a dominating power, whose significance for dominant people exists exclusively in the consciousness of one's effectiveness, is indeed primarily a rudimentary sociological form, and on the strength of it there is as little social interaction as between an artist and the artist's sculpture, which nevertheless also acts back on the artist with the consciousness of one's power of creation. Meanwhile the desire to dominate--even in this sublimated form whose practical significance is not actually the exploitation of the other but rather merely the consciousness of its possibility--in no way signifies the most extreme egoistical ruthlessness. Because the desire to dominate wants so very much to break the inner resistance of the subjugated while egoism is concerned only with the outward show of victory, it always has a kind of interest in the other person; the other is a value for that desire. Now where egoism is not immediately a desire to dominate, but instead the other is of absolute indifference for it and is a simple instrument over which one's own purposes takes precedence, even the last shred of mutuality in social interaction is eclipsed. That the absolute exclusion of every specific interest of one party invalidates the concept of society is seen, relatively speaking, in the determination by the lawyers of the late Roman period that the societas leonina is simply no longer to be understood as a social contract. 1 And in the same sense it has been said of the lower workers in the modern giant businesses whose jobs are eliminated by effective
1 Deriving from the fable of the lion entering into a hunting partnership with other animals but keeping the prey to itself, the societas leona was a partnership in which all profits would go to only one of the partners--ed.
? 130 chapter three
? competition in the struggle with other entrepreneurs: the difference in the strategic position between them and their employers is so over- whelming that the work contract simply ceases to be a 'contract' in the usual sense of the word because one is unconditionally at the mercy of the other. In this respect, the moral principle--to never use a person merely as a means--certainly appears as the formula for every social interaction. Where the significance of the one party sinks to a point at which one of the 'I's no longer enters the relationship with any salient influence, one can speak of society as nothing more meaningful than the relationship between the carpenter and the carpenter's bench.
Now the elimination of all spontaneity within a situation of subor- dination is in reality considerably less common than the freely offered popular expressions suggest with such notions as 'coercion,' 'having- no-choice,' 'absolute necessity. ' Even in the most oppressive and cruel relations of subjugation there always yet remains a substantial measure of personal freedom. We do not become conscious of it ourselves only because testing it in such cases requires a sacrifice that we commonly consider entirely unacceptable for us. The 'unlimited' coercion that the cruelest tyrant actually exercises over us is always altogether limited; that is to say, limited so that we want to avoid the threatened punishment or special consequences of the insubordination. Precisely viewed, the relationship of dominance and subordination annihilates the freedom of the subjugated only in the case of direct physical coercion; otherwise it tends simply to demand a price we are not typically inclined to pay for the realization of freedom. It can increasingly narrow the circle of external influences in which it realizes itself, but, except for the use of physical coercion, never to the point of completely disappearing. The moral aspect of this examination is not our concern here, but rather the sociological: social interaction--i. e. , action reciprocally determined and undertaken occurring only from personal positions exists even in those cases of dominance and subordination, and this generates therefore yet another sociological form, in which 'force,' as usually understood, is used by one party to rob the other of every spontaneity and thereby every true 'action' that would be one side of an interaction.
In view of the enormous role of relations of domination and sub- ordination, it is of the greatest importance for the analysis of social existence to be clear about this spontaneity and complicity on the part of the subordinate subject in view of the frequent concealment of them in the more superficial way of looking at things. What one, e. g. , calls 'authority' presupposes in large measure, as is typically recognized, a
domination and subordination 131
? freedom of those subject to the authority; it is, even where it seems to 'crush' them, not based on coercion and pure resignation alone. The peculiar creation of 'authority' that is significant for the life of the community in its varying degrees--rudimentary as well as fully devel- oped, passing as well as durable forms--seems to come about in two kinds of ways. A personality excelling in eminence and power earns, by way of its greater proximity or even greater distance, a faith and trust, a decisive gravity in its judgments, that bears the character of an objective authority; the personality has won a prerogative and axiom- atic trustworthiness for its decisions that towers over the ever variable, relative, critically vulnerable value of subjective personality, at least by comparison. As a person operates 'authoritatively,' the quantity of that person's importance is turned into a new quality, has taken on for its milieu, as it were, the aggregate condition of objectivity. The same thing can occur in reverse: a power transcending the individual--state, church, school, the organizations of family or military--by virtue of its nature invests a single personality with a prestige, a rank, a power of the final-say that would never develop by virtue of someone's own character. 'Authority'--the essence of which is that a person makes decisions with that reliability and command of recognition that befits logically only the transpersonal, objective axiom or deduction--has here devolved, as it were, from above onto a person, while in the former case it grew from the qualities of the person, as by generatio aequivoca. 2 At the point of this conversion and transfer the more-or-less volun- tary faith of those subject to the authority has now manifestly to be brought into action. Since that transformation from the transpersonal to the esteemed personality provides the latter with yet only minimal advantage over the verifiable and rational, it is completed by the ones faithful to authority themselves; it is a sociological event requiring also the spontaneous cooperation of the subjugated people. Indeed, that one experiences an authority as 'oppressive' is itself an indicator of the actually presupposed and never entirely eliminated independence of the other.
Authority is distinguished from that nuance of superiority known as prestige. With prestige, the factor of extra-subjective importance, the identification of a personality with an objective power or norm, is missing. The power of the individual is fully decisive for leadership;
2 Latin: spontaneous generation--ed.
? 132 chapter three
?
it remains as such not only consciously, but in contrast to the typical leader who always manifests a certain mixture of personal and addi- tional objective factors, prestige emanates just as much from the purely personal factors as does authority from the objectivity of norms and powers. Although this superiority finds its essence especially in 'enthu- siasm,' in the unquestioning devotion of individuals and masses--more so than in authority whose higher but cooler normative structure leaves room for a critique even by the obedient--it still appears nevertheless as a type of voluntary homage to the superior person. Perhaps, in fact, a deeper freedom of the subject lies in the acknowledgment of author- ity, as in the enchantment felt from the prestige of a prince or a priest, of a military or spiritual leader; nevertheless, for the feeling of the led it is different. We cannot often defend ourselves against authority; the e? lan, however, with which we follow the prestigious individual contains a persistent consciousness of spontaneity. Simply because the devo- tion here applies only to the wholly personal, it appears also to issue only from the ground of personality with its irrepressible memory of freedom. Certainly people endlessly deceive themselves regarding the degree of freedom present in any kind of action because, to be sure, the conscious idea with which we account for that inner reality feels so clear and certain to us; however one interprets freedom, one will be able to say that some degree of it, albeit not the amount believed, exists wherever the feeling and conviction of it exist. 3
Yet a more positive activity persists on the part of the ostensibly merely passive elements in relationships such as these: the speaker before the assembly, the teacher before the class--the one at the head of the group here appears solely to be dominant for the present; nevertheless those who find themselves in such a situation understand the influential and controlling feedback from this mass who appear merely docile and controlled by the leader. And this is not only with regard to moments of immediate opposition. All leaders are also led, just as in countless instances the master of the slave is led by the slaves. "I am their leader,
3 Here--and analogously in many other cases--it does not depend at all on defining the concept of prestige, but rather on establishing the existence of a certain variety of human social interaction, fully indifferently with regard to its label. The presentation merely starts in an expedient manner frequently with the concept that offers the best linguistic fit for the relationship to be uncovered in order generally just to point it out. This gives the appearance of a simple act of definition, not that the substance for a concept should here be found, but rather that an actual content should be described that sometimes has the chance of being covered by an already existing concept.
? domination and subordination 133
? therefore I must follow them," said one of the greatest German party leaders with regard to his following. At its crassest this shows itself with the journalist who offers content and direction for the opinions of a silent multitude, but who, at the same time must thoroughly hear, combine, surmise what then the actual tendencies of the multitude are--what it wishes to hear, what it wants confirmed, with regard to what it desires to be led. While the public is seemingly subject only to the suggestion of the journalist, the journalist is in reality likewise at the mercy of the public. A most complicated interaction, whose spontaneous powers on the two sides indeed possess very different forms, hides itself in this case behind the appearance of the pure superiority of one element over against the passive docility of the other. In personal relationships where the whole content and meaning is allocated exclusively by one party for service to the other party, the full extent of this submission is often tied to that other party itself submitting to the first party, albeit in another stratum of the relationship. Thus Bismarck states his view regarding his relationship to Wilhelm I:
A certain measure of submission is determined by the law, a greater by political conviction; where it goes beyond that, it requires a personal feeling of reciprocity. My attachment had its primary basis in a faithful commitment to royalty; but in the particularity of this case, it is indeed only possible under the influence of a certain reciprocity--between lord and servant.
Hypnotic suggestion, perhaps, offers the most characteristic instance of this type. A prominent hypnotist has emphasized that with every hyp- nosis there occurs an influence, not easy to specify, of the hypnotized on the hypnotist and that without this the effect would not be achieved. Whereas the phenomenon here proffers the unconditional influence by the one and the unconditional being influenced on the other side, this also involves an interaction, an exchange of influences, that turns the pure one-sidedness of dominance and subordination back into a sociological form.
I offer yet again from the legal field several instances of domina- tion and subordination whose seemingly purely one-sided relationship manifests without difficulty the actual presence of interaction. When with absolute despotism sovereigns attach the threat of punishment or the promise of reward to their commands, this means then that they themselves are willing to be bound by their decrees: subordinates shall have the right on their part to require something of them; despots bind themselves by that established punishment, however severe it may be,
134 chapter three
? to not inflict one even more severe. Whether afterwards they actually allow the promised reward or the limitations on punishment to operate or not is another question. The basic idea of the relationship is certainly that the dominating one fully controls the subordinate, yet a claim is guaranteed to the subordinate that the subordinate can assert or even renounce: so that even this most categorical form of relationship would definitely still include some kind of spontaneity for subordinates. In one peculiar permutation, the legitimation of the interaction inside an apparently purely one-sided and most passive subordination becomes effective in one medieval theory of the state: the state is so founded that people would be mutually obliged to submit to one common leader; the ruler--also obviously unlimited--is appointed on the basis of a contract of the vassals among themselves. Here the idea of reciprocity descends from the sovereign relationship--into which the equal sided theories are transferred from the contract between sovereign and people--to the ground of this relationship itself: the duty towards the prince is felt as the very formation, expression, technique of a relationship of mutuality among the individuals of the nation. And when, as with Hobbes, the sovereign, lacking any policy for conflict with the subjects, can be in breach of contract simply because the sovereign did not conclude any kind of contract with them, the counterpart to this is that the subjects, when they revolt against the sovereign, are thereby also not breaking any contract entered into with the sovereign; rather, the contract broken is that that the members of society have concluded among themselves to allow this sovereign to rule. The suppression of the element of mutuality accounts for the observation that the tyranny of the whole over its own members is worse than the tyranny of a prince. For this reason, and by no means only in the realm of politics, the fact that the whole is conscious of its member not as one in opposition to itself but rather as one of its own, included as a part of the whole, often results in a singular ruthlessness towards the member, a ruthlessness altogether different from the personal cruelty of a sovereign. Every formal opposition, even when it comes from substantial subjugation, is an interaction that always in principle includes some restriction on every member and departs from it only in individual exceptions. Where the domination manifests that particular ruthlessness, as in the case of the whole that has its member at its disposal, there is lacking then precisely that opposition whose form contains a spontaneity for both parties and thereby a limitation on both.
domination and subordination 135
? The original Roman concept of law expressed this is quite splendidly. Law demands, according to its pure meaning, a submission that leaves subjects without any kind of room for spontaneity or counteraction. That this was somewhat involved in legislation, indeed, that it yielded to the law currently in force is, for all that, of no importance; in this case it simply disassembled itself into the subject and object of legislation, and the rule of law going from subject to object is not thereby changed in its meaning, so that both co-exist at the same time in one physical person. Nevertheless, the Romans in their concept of law directly indicated an interaction. Law, to wit, means originally contract, though with the meaning that its conditions are established by the proponent, and the other party can accept or reject them only in their entirety. So the lex publica populi romani4 initially states that the king proposed it, the people accepted it. With that, the concept, which appears most definitively to exclude the reality of social interaction, nevertheless indicates it by its linguistic expression. This drives a wedge, as it were, in the preroga- tive of the Roman king that only he is to be permitted to speak to the people. Such a prerogative means to be sure the jealously exclusive unity of his sovereignty--as analogously in Greek antiquity complete democracy marked the right of everyone to speak to the people--but it implies, after all, the recognition of the importance that speech has for the people and that the people themselves thus have. It implies that the people, despite receiving only that one-sided operation, were yet a party to the contract, were indeed kept in reserve as the only party with whom to contract.
With these preliminary remarks only the actual sociological, socially constructing character of domination and subordination would have been shown, especially for the instances in which, instead of a social, there seemed to be a merely mechanical relationship: the position of the subordinated as one of no spontaneity whatsoever, a servicing object or instrument for the one dominating. Surely in several ways these remarks have succeeded at least in making visible, under the one-sided picture of influence, sociologically decisive social interaction.
The types of domination can be categorized, for the present purely superficially, for the sake of discussion, according to a threefold schema: by an individual, by a group, by an objective power, be it social or
4 Latin: public law of the Roman people--ed.
? 136 chapter three
? imaginary. I will now discuss several of the sociological implications of these possibilities.
The subordination of a group under one person leads above all to a very pronounced unification of the group and, to be sure, near uniformity in both of the characteristic forms of this subordination: first, namely, when the group forms with its head an actual inner unity, when the sovereign mobilizes the group's energies in their character- istic orientation, integrating them so that domination means actually only that the will of the group has acquired a unified voice or body. But, second, also when the group feels itself in opposition to its head, forming itself into a society in opposition. With regard to the former case, every survey across the fields of sociology shows immediately the immeasurable advantage of a single head for the concentration and energy-efficient management of the group's powers. I want to cite two substantively very heterogeneous manifestations of common subordination in which it is immediately obvious how indispensable it is for the unity of the whole. It is for this reason that the sociology of religions in principle distinguishes between whether a unification of the individuals of a group occurs in such a way that the shared God as the symbol and the consecration of its collective self, as it were, grows out of this--as is the case in many primitive religions--or whether it is the conception of God in its turn that brings together the otherwise disunited or barely cohering elements into a unity. The extent to which Christendom realized this latter form requires no explanation, not even as individual sects find their special and especially strong bond in the absolutely subjective and mystical relationship to the person of Jesus, which every individual possesses as an individual and, for that matter, fully independently from every other person and from the community. Moreover the claim was made by the Jews: in contrast to the religions developing at the same time, where the relationship is first of all of every companion with every other one and only then is the whole united with the divine principle, the common covenant relationship to the Lord--i. e. , directly concerning everyone--would be perceived there as the actual strength and meaning of the national solidarity. Medieval feudalism frequently had opportunity to duplicate this formal struc- ture based on the immensely interwoven personal dependencies and 'servanthood'--most markedly perhaps in the associations of vassals, bound court and house servants, who stood in a narrow, purely personal relationship to the prince. The associations that these formed had no more substantive basis than the serfs coming from village communities
domination and subordination 137
? on neighboring land; the persons were used for a variety of services, had variously appropriate property, and formed nevertheless narrowly closed associations without the consent of which no one could enter them or could be dismissed from them. They had developed their own family and property law, even possessed among themselves freedom of contract and trade, penalties exacted for violations of the domestic peace--and for this tight unity they had absolutely no other foundation than the identity of the lord whom they served, who represented them outside the land and acted on their behalf in common law proceedings. Just as in the case of religion, subordination is here under an individual power and not, as in many particularly political instances, the result or the expression of an existing organic community or community of interest; rather the domination of one lord is the cause in this case of an arranged solidarity, otherwise not achievable through some special relationship. It is by the way not only the similarity, but also the very dissimilarity in relationship of inferiors to the dominating leader that gives such a characteristic social form its stability. The variation in distance or nearness to that ruling head creates an arrangement that is for that reason no less firm and structured on account of the inner surface of these distances often being jealousy, repulsion, arrogance. The social level of each Indian caste is established according to its relationship to the Brahmin. Would the Brahmin accept a gift from one of their followers? a glass of water from the follower's hand without hesitation? with difficulties? would it be rejected in disgust? That the distinctive rigidity of the caste system binds itself in this manner is thus noteworthy for the present question of form because the mere fact of an absolute head here is determinative as a purely ideal factor for each member and thereby of the totality of their relational structure. That that highest plateau is occupied by a great many individual persons is entirely irrelevant because the sociological form of its impact is here exactly the same as that of the individual person: the relationship to 'the Brahmin' is decisive. So the formal characteristics of subordination under a single person can operate as well with a multiplicity of superior individuals. The specific sociological meaning of this multiplicity will reveal other phenomena to us.
Now that unifying consequence of subordination under one ruling power manifests itself no less when the group finds itself in opposi- tion. In the political group as in the factory, in the school classroom as in the church fellowship, it is to be observed how the culmination of organization up to an apex helps bring about the unity of the whole
138 chapter three
? in the case of harmony as well as in opposition, how perhaps in the latter the group is compelled even more 'to pull itself together. ' When the collective antagonism is at one of the most powerful points, where a majority of individuals or groups is moved to coalesce, this opposition is especially intense when the common opponent is at the same time the common sovereign. Certainly not in obvious and effective but in latent form, this combination is found probably everywhere: in some measure or some kind of relationship the sovereign is almost always an adversary. The human being has an inner ambivalent relationship to the principle of subordination. On the one hand, there is for sure the desire to be governed; the majority of people cannot only not exist without leadership, but they sense it too; they seek the higher power that absolves them of responsibility for themselves and a restraining, regulating strictness that protects them not only from the outside but also from themselves. No less, however, they need the opposition to the leading power that acquires only then, as it were through thrust and counter-thrust, the proper place in the inner system of life of those who are to obey. Indeed, one might say that obedience and opposition are simply the two sides or components, oriented in various direc- tions and appearing as autonomous drives, of one human attitude, in itself wholly consistent. The simplest case is the political, in which the totality may consist of parties striving apart from one another and against one another but nevertheless sharing the common inter- est of confining the jurisdiction of the crown within limits--alongside the absolute practical necessity of this crown, in truth, also of all the intuitive attachment to it. In England centuries after the Magna Carta the awareness remained alive that certain constitutional rights must be adhered to and augmented for all classes, that the aristocracy could not lay claim to its freedoms without at the same time freedom for the poorer classes and that a common law for aristocracy, citizen, and farmer would be the correlate for the check on personal authority; and it has often been emphasized that, as long as this latter objective remains the goal, the aristocracy consistently has the people and the clergy on its side. And even where it does not come to this type of unification by way of single-party rule, at the very least a common field of struggle over it is created for its subjects: between those who stand with the ruler and those against. There is scarcely ever a social realm, subject to a supreme leader, in which this pro and contra struggle does not bring the members to a vitality of interactions and interweavings that, in spite of all the setbacks, clashes, and war costs, is in the end
domination and subordination 139
? still far superior at centralizing power than is some peaceful but indif- ferent neighborliness.
Because, for the present here, it is not a matter of constructing dog- matically a one-sided picture but rather of demonstrating fundamental processes whose endlessly different quantities and combinations often allow superficial appearances to work completely against each other, it must be emphasized that the common subordination under a rul- ing power in no way always leads to centralization but, depending on certain tendencies, also to the opposite result. English legislation was erected against Non-Conformists--thus uniformly against Presbyterians, Catholics, Jews--a combination of punishment and exclusion that was relevant to military service as well as voting or holding office, property as well as civil service. The state-church official used his prerogatives to give uniform expression of his hatred for all of them. 5 However, the oppressed were not thereby, as one might expect, united into a commonality of any kind, but the hatred for the established believers was still exceeded by that that the Presbyterians harbored towards the Catholics and vice versa. Here a psychological 'threshold phenomenon' appears to be in evidence. There is a degree of opposition between social elements that becomes inoperative under burdens experienced jointly and makes room for outer and even inner unity. Should that original aversion, though, cross over a certain threshold, the oppres- sion common to them has the opposite effect. Not only because, with an already strongly dominant embitterment of everyone towards one party flowing from other sources, the general irritation increases and, contrary to all rational grounds, also flows typically into that already deeply dug bed; but above all, because the common suffering presses the social elements still closer to one another, it is of course precisely to this forced nearness that their wholly inner dissociation and irrecon- cilability wholly capitulates only under compulsion. Wherever a unity, however produced, is not capable of overcoming an antagonism, then it does not allow the antagonism to continue under the status quo ante but rather intensifies it just as the difference in all areas becomes sharper and more conscious to the extent that the parties move nearer to one another. The development of shared domination among subjects by way of jealousy brings about another more obvious type of repulsion.
5 'State-church official' is a rendering of Staatskirchler, which is a generic term for an official connected to both the state and the church--ed.
? 140 chapter three
? It engenders the negative correspondence mentioned above: that common hatred is an even stronger bond when the mutually hated is simultaneously the shared ruler: the common love, which through jealousy turns its subjects into enemies, does this even more decisively when the commonly loved is at the same time the common sovereign. A specialist in relationships among the Muslims of the Near East6 reports that the children in a harem who had different mothers always behave with hostility toward one another. The reason for this may be the jealousy with which the mothers monitored the expressions of love by the father to the children who were not their own. The particular nuance of jealousy, as soon as it refers to that power superior to both parties, is this: whoever understands how to win the love of the con- tested personality for oneself has indeed then in an unusual sense and with quite especially powerful results triumphed over the rival. The sublime attraction: to become sovereign over the rival; in so far as one becomes sovereign over the latter, it has to lead, through the reciprocity in which the commonality of the sovereign generates this attraction, to a highest magnification of the jealousy.
As I return from these dissociating consequences of subordination under an individual power to their unifying consequences, I emphasize yet again how much easier discordances between parties are balanced when they are subordinate to one and the same higher power than when each is fully independent. How many of the conflicts, on which the Greek as well as the Italian city-states likely perished, would not have displayed these destructive consequences if only a central power had commonly dominated them with some kind of higher authority! Where such a power is missing, the conflict of some elements has the disastrous tendency to offer resolution only through a direct clash of quantum power. Quite generally it has to do with the idea of the 'higher authority,' whose effectiveness applies in various formations through almost all human collectives. It is a formal sociological characteristic of the first order whether there exists in or for a society a 'higher author- ity' or not. This need not be a ruler in the usual or official sense of the word. For example, the regime of intellectuals, their individual contents, or respective representatives is always a higher authority over attachments
6 Simmel: Ein Kenner tu? rkischer Verha? ltnisse . . . ; literally, 'A specialist in Turkish relation- ships. . . . ' Simmel was writing before World War I when the Ottoman Empire still stood, and it was common for Western thinkers to use 'Turks' and 'Turkish' generically for Muslims of the Near East--ed.
? domination and subordination 141
? and controversies that are grounded in interests, instincts, emotions. It may decide prejudicially and inadequately; its decision may or may not find agreement. Just as logic remains the higher authority over the conflicting contents of its own proceedings, even though we may think illogically, so the most intelligent remains the higher authority inside a multiple-member group, but in some instances it may frequently be by ones having a strong will or warm feeling for a personage that a dispute among colleagues is settled. The very specific nature of the 'higher authority' to which one appeals for arbitration or to whose intervention one joins oneself with the feeling of legitimacy, however, typically lies only on the side of intellectuality. Another means of unify- ing diverging parties that the presence of a ruling authority especially facilitates, is this. Where it does not appear possible to unify factions on the basis of their given characteristics when the factions are either fighting or coexisting indifferently as strangers, then it is sometimes accomplished when both are reconstituted in new circumstances that then make unity possible; or also: they are equipped with new qualities on the basis of which this can occur. The removal of ill feelings, the generation of mutual interests, the establishment of a wide-ranging mutuality is often accomplished--from children at play to religious and political parties--through some kind of new thing being added to the previously diverging or indifferent aims and resolutions of the factions, something that qualifies as a suitable point of convergence and thereby also exposes the hitherto diverging parties as unifiable. Also natures that cannot converge directly often allow an indirect reconciliation wherein it leads beyond their prior development, or through the addition of a new element it rests on new and now connecting foundations. So, for example, the homogeneity of the Gallic provinces was therefore most urgently required so that everybody was Latinized by Rome in the end. It goes without saying how very much this mode of unification requires precisely the 'higher authority,' how relatively easily a power, transcending the parties and somehow dominating them, will be able to lead each of them with both interests and aims, place both on a common footing that they perhaps would have never found on their own or that their willfulness, pride, and prejudice in antagonism would have kept from developing. When one speaks in praise of the Christian religion, that it leads souls to 'peaceableness,' the sociological reason for that then is surely the feeling of common subordination of all beings under the divine principle. The Christian faithful is convinced that over the Christian and any given adversary--whether or not the
142 chapter three
? adversary is devout--stands that highest authority, and this moves one some distance away from the temptation to the violent testing of one's powers. The Christian God can be a bond for such wide circles that are engaged in his 'peace' from the outset precisely because He stands so immeasurably high over every individual, and the individual has in Him a 'higher authority' at every moment and in common with all the others.
Unification by means of mutual subordination can present itself in two different forms: as leveling and as ranking. In that a number of people are equally subject to a single authority, to that extent they are equal. The correlation between despotism and equalizing has long been recognized. It runs not only from the despot's concern to level the subjugated--which will be discussed presently--but in the opposite direction: a decisive leveling easily leads in its turn to despotic forms. Nevertheless, this does not apply to just any type of 'leveling. ' When Alcibiades singles out the cities of Sicily as filled by dissimilar masses of peoples, he intends by that to identify them as easy prey for the conqueror. As a matter of fact, a homogeneous citizenship under tyranny7 affords a more successful resistance than one consisting of very divergent and therefore disjointed elements. The leveling most welcome to despotism pertains therefore only to differences in rank, not differences in character. A homogeneity based on character and predisposition, even in a society structured in different levels, will put up a strong resistance to the former, but only a trifling resistance will be found where many types of personality co-exist in an equality that is not organically structured. The principal motive of the sole ruler to level out the differences, then, is this, that very strong dominant and subordinate relationships among the subjugated come into competition with the ruler's own domination--both materially and psychologically. Not to mention here that for despotic rule too strong an oppression of some strata through others is just as dangerous as too great a feeling of power on the part of those oppressed. This is because a rebellion by them against these mid-level powers becomes easily directed against the highest power also, as roles continuing by the power of the inertia direct the movement against the highest power, even if they are not at the head of the movement but instead only assisting. Oriental rulers,
7 Simmel uses Tyrannis here which in German designates especially a tyranny of ancient Greece--ed.
? domination and subordination 143
? therefore, restrict the education of aristocrats; so the Near Eastern Sultan,8 in this manner, guards his radical, entirely non-negotiable superiority over all his subjects. So long as each existing power in the state had been derived in some way from him and then is returned to him upon the death of the occupant, no hereditary aristocracy develops. With that the absolute magnitude of sovereignty and the equal rank of the subjects was realized as correlative phenomena. This tendency is reflected in the phenomenon that despots cherish servants of only average ability, as it has been emphatically noted of Napoleon I. A German prince is supposed to have asked the minister, when the proposal was made for the transfer of a distinguished civil servant to another state office: "Is the man absolutely necessary for us? " "Fully, your highness. " "Then we want to let him go. I cannot need essential servants. " While despotism, though, does not in any way seek especially inferior servants, its inherent relationship to leveling becomes evident; so Tacitus, about this tendency of Tiberius to install mediocre officials, says: ex optimis periculum sibi, a pessimis dedecus publicum metuebat. 9 It is significant that, where the single-ruler sovereignty does not bear the character of despotism, this tendency immediately subsides, indeed, makes way for just the opposite, as Bismarck says of Wilhelm I, that he not only endured it, but even felt himself uplifted that he had a distinguished and powerful servant. Where rulers then do not, as in the case of the Sultan, hinder the growth of mid-level powers from the outset, they often seek to bring about a relative leveling by promoting the efforts of lower strata to acquire legal rights equal to those of the mid-level powers. Medieval and later history is full of examples of that. In England the royal power effected that correlation between its own omnipotence and the legal equality of the subjects most deliberately since the Norman era: William the Conqueror breaks the bond that existed beforehand, as on the continent, between the nobility immedi- ately enfeoffed under him and the subvassals by forcing every subvas- sal to swear fealty to him directly. The growth of great vassals of the crown would be thereby denied sovereignty on the one hand and on the other the basis for a unified legal structure for all classes would be put in place. The English crown of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
8 Simmel: tu? rkische Sultan--ed.
9 "From the best he feared danger to himself, from the worst, public disgrace. " Tacitus, Annales ab excessu divi Augusti, ed. Charles Dennis Fisher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), book I, chapter 80 (2. 91)--Ed.
? 144 chapter three
? based its extraordinary power on the uniformity with which the free possession of military, court, police, and tax duties were subjugated without exception. The same form appears in the Roman Empire. The Republic became incapable of continuing because the legal or actual dominance of the city of Rome over Italy and the provinces was no longer maintained. The Empire only established a domination while it made the Romans as devoid of rights as the peoples who were con- quered by them; consequently an impartial legislation would establish a legal leveling for all citizens, whose correlate was the unconditional height and unity of the sovereign. It hardly needs to be mentioned that here 'leveling' is to be understood throughout as a wholly rela- tive tendency very limited in its realization. A major science of the forms of society must propose concepts and conceptual frameworks with a purity and abstract construction as these never appear in the historical realization of their contents. The sociological imagination, however, which grasps the basic concept of interaction in its particular meanings and forms, is wont to analyze complex phenomena in their single factors in approaching patterns inductively--this can be done only with auxiliary constructs, so to speak absolute lines and figures that are always found in real social processes only as beginnings, frag- ments, continuously interrupted and modified partial realizations. In every single socio-historical configuration a probably never wholly clear number of interworkings of elements is at work, and we can as little disassemble its given form into its collected factors and reassemble them again as we can make some piece of material exactly conforming to the form of the ideal figure of our geometry, although the principle of both must be possible through distinguishing and combining the scientific constructs. For sociological comprehension, the historical phenomenon must be reconstructed in such a way that its unity is dismantled in a number of concepts and syntheses proceeding into a pure particular one-sidedness, with straight lines, so to speak. Under these concepts and syntheses its principal character is as a rule ascertained; through bending and modifying it projects the image of that form on the new level of abstraction with gradually increasing exactitude. The rule of the Sultan over subjects lacking rights; that of the English king over a people who rose up just 150 years later against King John; that of the Roman emperor, who was actually the presider over the more or less autonomous communities comprising the realm--all these governance- by-one are unique at the top as well as at the 'leveling' of the subjects that corresponds to it. And still the live motif of this correlation is com-
domination and subordination 145
? mon to them; the borderless distinctiveness of the immediate material phenomena still makes room for the same ideal line with which that correlation, admittedly a scientific abstract depiction in its purity and standardization, is drawn among them.
The same tendency of domination by means of leveling is clothed in phenomena of directly clashing surfaces. It is typical behavior when Philip the Good of Burgundy10 endeavored to suppress the freedom of the Dutch cities, but at the same time provided many individual corporations with very extensive privileges. Since these legal differences originated expressly from the free discretion on the part of the ruler, they mark all the more clearly the similarity of those being subjugated which the subjects face a priori. In the cited example, this is character- ized very well by the privileges being admittedly extensive in content but measured short in duration: the legal privilege was never lost to the source from which it flowed. This privilege, seemingly the opposite of leveling, is revealed as the heightened form of the latter that it assumes as a correlate of absolute personal control.
The rule by one is reproached for countless cases of absurdity that would reside in the purely quantitative disproportion between the singularity of the ruler and the multitude of those ruled over, that the unworthy and undeserving are set in a relationship of this party of one and of the other one in the relationship. Actually a very unique and consequential sociological causal formation resides in the solution of this contradiction.