No More Learning

? the self-preservation of the group 453
a potentially unlimited time period gives it an importance that, ceteris paribus, is infinitely superior to that of any individual. The individual life is designed in accord with its destiny, its value, its power to end in a limited time, and, to a certain extent, every individual must start at the beginning. While the life of the group lacks such a time limit that is set a priori, and while its forms are actually designed as though it would live forever, it arrives at an accumulation of the achievements, strengths, and experiences through which it rises further above the repeatedly shattered courses of individual life. In England this was the source of the power of the urban corporations since the early Middle Ages. They always had the right "of perpetuating their existence by filling up vacancies as they occur. "7 Admittedly the ancient privileges read only, for the townspeople "and their heirs"; but this in fact came to be exercised as a right to take in new members, so that whatever fate the members and their physical descendents met, the corporation as such would always survive as a whole. Incumbents electing col- leagues8 is the immensely important principal form that here takes the place of the function of priestly ordination mentioned above. It keeps the character of the group thoroughly the same through an undefined period of time and forms a certain analogy with the life of an organism, which also takes on only the ingredients adequate for it and able to be assimilated by it. It represents a continuation of the longevity in that it still sets in place members selected for passing traits on as well as for the eventuality where a member may possibly withdraw later. Thus, historically, the right to elect suitable colleagues to vacant positions was often attached to representative bodies that obtained life-long tenure, e. g. , in the city councils of Basel, Freiburg, and Solothurn in the seven- teenth century. The election by incumbents allows, as it were, the life threads of the group to proceed not only continuously but also in the same direction in perpetuity. Admittedly, the administrative committee's unlimited right to replenish itself, especially in England after the fifteenth century, led to an ossifying of the urban communal character. And its advantages, precisely even in the best cases, must be paid for by the particular importance of individuals vanishing behind their role of being the bearers of the preservation of the group. The immortality of the group feeds on that individual whom its spirit grasps--be it through
7 Here Simmel uses the original English--ed. 8 Kooptation--ed.
? 454 chapter eight
simple tradition, through special consecration, or through election by incumbents--and the crucial factor is thus not what one is for oneself but one's social assimilability. The preservation of the group as such must suffer from the connection with the transient and irreplaceable personality. But conversely, the more impersonal and anonymous such a one is, the more suitable it is, without encroaching further on the place of another, for securing for the group the uninterrupted preservation of its self. This was the immense advantage by which the Commons repulsed the previous superior strength of the House of Lords in the War of the Roses: A battle that snatched up half the nobility of the land and also took away from the House of Lords half of its power, since that was bound to the persons, while the House of Commons was in principle preserved from such a decline. The latter stratum seized power in the end; it proved to be the most tenaciously permanent in its group existence through the equality9 of its members--that formal solidity was then also maintained by the reality that this stratum, "individually the poorest," was "collectively the richest. "10 This situation gives any group an advantage in competing with an individual: Concerning the Indian campaign, it was emphasized that dominance over India would have been won through no other means than the earlier example of the Great Mogul Conquest: Its advantage over the other usurpers in India would only have been that it could not be broken down.
Therefore wholly different arrangements now become necessary as soon as the life of the group is very intimately connected with that of a leading, ruling individual person. The history of all interregnums teaches us what dangers to the preservation of the group this social form contains--dangers that naturally grow in the same magnitude in which the ruler actually stands in the center of the functions by which the group protects its unity or, more correctly, creates it anew in every instant. Thus an interval of the reign may be rather unimportant where the prince serves only as a nominal ruler--re`gne, mais ne gouverne pas11--while conversely it is observed already in the bee colony that it turns into a complete anarchy as soon as its queen is removed from it. It is not only the mortality of the individual person that threatens the self-preservation of the group connected to that individual, but the
9 Simmel uses the French expression, nivellement--ed.
10 Simmel gives the words in quotation marks in English--ed.
11 French: He reigns, but he does not govern--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 455
character of the personality often opens up room at all for various sorts of attack. It was so in cases like the following: while the Merovingian era in many respects preserved the ancient Roman state entity intact, a fundamental difference appeared: the public power had become a personal, transferable, and divisible possession. However, this principle, which justified the power of kings, was turned against them because the barons who promoted the erection of the empire now demanded a personal share in the government too. The principle of personal power, after having been transferred to others, rebelled against the prince, who deemed it entirely his property. Precisely the oneness of the govern- ing personality produced another type of danger for social solidarity, since its separate authorities do not exist at the same levels of power. In England the Reformation gave the king supremacy in ecclesiastical matters, insofar as he took over the rights and duties belonging to the previously autonomous church. However, because he reigned absolutely in the domain of the church and in the worldly matters, on the other hand, was limited by the decisions of Parliament and the independence of the municipalities, this produced a discrepancy that the Stuarts then sought to resolve when they expanded the divine right-of kings to an absolute rule in worldly matters also, resulting in the inevitable contra- diction with the entire inherited constitution and administration, which severely shocked the stability of the form of the state.
In the political groups one seeks to counter all the dangers of the personality, especially those of the possible interval between personali- ties, through the principle that the king does not die. While in the early Middle Ages the tradition held that when the king dies his peace dies with him, the self-preservation of the group was, as it were, embodied in that principle. In England since the commencement of the reign of Edward I in 1272, an interregnum was no longer lawfully recognized. Meanwhile this form is already encountered in ethnological circum- stances, in fact in a variation reminiscent of priestly ordination. The idea was often prevalent, for example, on the west coast of Africa, that the realm is governed by a 'great spirit' that always dwells in the person of the ruler; The Tibetan Dalai-Lama also forms a continuing succession of rulers in this way. The personality and its origin do not matter, but only that the spirit actually goes from the dying ruler to the new one. It is obvious that this separation of the actual bearer of dominion from the person who forms its visible dwelling place only threatens the security of the latter all the more where inheriting does not add anything real to
456 chapter eight
that ideal continuity. In China, sovereigns were dethroned because the absence of people's well-being proved that the divinity left him or was drained out of him. The princes then were yet mere people, disown- ing of whom could not be a sin, since the divine had indeed already disowned them. A Chinese sage thus answered the question about the legitimacy of the fear of killing Emperor Zhou12 this way:
Whoever violates virtue is called a robber, whoever violates the law is called a tyrant; but a robber and a tyrant are always only private persons. I have heard that Zhou as a private person was killed, but I have not heard that he as a prince was murdered.
In England it was said in the thirteenth century: If the pope does an injustice, he does not do it as pope; just as little could the king do an injustice because he would be the minister of God; if he still does it, he just acts not as a king but as a minister of the devil. 13 At the same time the same form of thought is expressed there this way: The king would not be the bearer of the divine spirit but of the law; and thus the king does not exist at all in the kingdom ubi dominatur voluntas et non lex. 14 Even during the civil war under Charles I the opposition loyal to the constitution, which maintained the indestructibility of the monarchy but nevertheless did not deny the errors of the king, was aided by the fiction that "the king in Parliament is conducting the war against the king in the royalist camp. " In this way the idea of the indestructibility of the king turned into the next result that anyone who possessed the real power of gaining the crown must also be regarded the legitimate king. The person indeed became indifferent: whichever one ascends the throne always at that moment takes over the continuing kingship; thus in China, under the assumptions mentioned above, it was said that the victorious usurper simply has proved by his victory that the divine had already chosen him for its vessel. One would see precisely the fact that the Russian Czar was revered in a particularly radical way merely as the Czar, irrespective of his person, like an idol, as the underlying reason for the very frequent revolutions to which the Russian throne was exposed up into the nineteenth century. Still, with such a danger-
12 Emperor Zhou (1154-1122 B. C. E. ), usually reported as given over to drink and beauties, and known for killing innocents and torturing honest officials--ed.
13 The thirteenth century saying is given in a mixture of English and German--ed.
14 Latin: where a will and not law governs--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 457
ously real discontinuity also of the 'Spirit' dwelling in the ruler that was precisely the bearer of the continuity, which threatened the monarchical form, this still thus included an immense advance on the side of self- preservation when one disregards the raw substantialization of 'Spirit. ' Because the principle, that the king does not die, makes it evident that the king is conceptualized already as existing in his spiritual person- hood. This allows for imagining much more readily of a continuation, for believing in an immortality, as the physical person, whose death is not even to be discussed. Thus the further one goes back in culture, the physical personality of the sovereign is all the more important and the dangers of instability are consequently all the greater as well. In the earlier German empire, it was still regarded a disgrace to the empire if the king lost an eye, and in the ancient Orient, defeated pretenders to the crown were often rendered forever incapable of governing by mutilating their ears. The body is more assailable than the spirit, and at the same time the identification of the state-idea with the king is all the more subjective an idea; the more distant the objectification, the more it is the corporality of the sovereign that would bear his sovereignty. There remains one of the most important sociologically foundational concepts concerning these primitive imperfections and insecurities: The king is king no more as a person but on the contrary, his person is only the vehicle, irrelevant in itself, for the abstract kinship, which is only as permanent as the group itself whose pinnacle it forms. By its objectifica- tion in the immortal office the principality attains a new psychological force for consolidation and cohesion within the group while, especially with the expansion of the group, it (the principality) obviously had to lose the old psychological force founded on mere personality.
Thus the concept of the unity of the sovereign power that corresponds to the unity of the group--the logical prerequisite of its self-preserva- tion--is set on a completely new foundation. As long as the highest sovereignty as something immortal has not yet superseded the mortality of the sovereign person, a certain absoluteness is bound to it in the sense that an organizational composite of sovereign power from separate ele- ments (e. g. , king and parliament) is actually impossible. For this always has an objective impersonal nature that is incompatible with the pure personalism of a power born and dying with its holder; that character of objectivity also contradicts the freedom with which a sovereign power that is always establishing itself anew gives itself its form. It is interesting to pursue this in the teachings of Bodin, who first derived indivisibility
458 chapter eight
from the nature of sovereignty as the highest power (1557). 15 Since he did not yet clearly separate sovereignty from the sovereign, a mixed form of the state seemed contradictory to him--for it would appear to him, in light of the personalistic concept, as a twosome independent of one another and thus equally high sovereignties within the same state. And as a result of the same logic, the constitutional limitation that the ruler imposes on himself, for example, does not hold for his successor, "since the latter would himself be sovereign. " Thus this means: the monarchy persisting under all the changes of persons is not capable of an act, but only the person who not only imputes to the kingship the physical conditions of the person, such as mortality and indivisibility, but also its psychological peculiarities, such as moodiness and perfidy. This is only in an apparent contrast with the Italian principality of the Renaissance honoring the precise principle that private persons would admittedly be bound to their word, but princes may make promises for reasons of state and then break them as they wish. Since the prin- cipality was conquered mostly by individuals without a legal basis, by the highest personality, it was the sovereign freedom of the individual who was only masked with the state's interest and thus rejected any objective norm as a limitation through factors beyond the personal sovereign power. The abstract unity of the group is actually developed only in the separation of the perennial kingship from the transient king; thus without its efficacy and continuity being broken, this unity only allows a plurality in the personal accomplishments and limitations of the sovereignty. Out of the same motive, the request was put to Cromwell to wear the crown precisely for the sake of preserving the state in its legitimacy and freedom. Only as king of England could he decisively succeed to the objectively fixed prerogatives of the crown and the legal form of governance; as 'Protector,' he would lack sovereignty in name, in reality he could prolong it to the extent of the power of his sword. The supra-personal nature of the kingship, by which the vicissitudes of its individual bearers are mastered, immediately appears here as the vehicle for the preservation of the group in the sameness and unity of its form. 16 And this separation of the personal from the political
15 Simmel is probably referring to the French historian Jean Bodin, known for his Six livres de la re? publique (1576)--ed.
16 The special phenomenon, which might almost be called loyalty here, is associated with this formation: the unconditional individual dedication to a person, not because of the person but because the person is the bearer of sovereignty. This is not completely
? the self-preservation of the group 459
extends even to the private sphere of the ruler. It may seem like the ceremonial that surrounds him should by no means, as it could appear, only glorify his person and strengthen its expression. It is rather the expression for the inapproachability of the person that one associates not with this person, but only with the king as king, just as much he is individually constituted, that is the meaning of the strict etiquette of the court. Experientially it is therefore a restraint not only for the subjects but even for the sovereign: as it binds them to a supra-person- ally regulated form of interaction with the person of the king, so it also forces him often into a form of expression independent of his personal inclinations and moods.
The first way in which the continuing existence of the group is represented in the survival of the sovereign and seeks to overcome the mentioned dangers to the principles of immortality is the heredity of the honor of being a king. The physiological linkage within the royal family reflects the same within the group. The continuity and self-evidence by which the existence of the group progresses through time cannot be expressed more accurately and suitably than in the replacement of the father by the one destined to succeed to the throne from the outset and the son prepared for it at any time--as accordingly, the fact that the Roman empire had not cultivated an orderly succession contributed greatly to the decadence of the Empire and government. The correlate
the general suggestiveness of the concept of sovereignty in general, which admittedly also characteristically produces devotion-phenomena. Rather it is only a matter of the ruler of the appropriate group. Bismarck once wrote, "I am loyal to my prince up into the Vendee, but I do not feel in any drop of my blood a trace of obligation toward any others to lift a finger for them. " This feeling also exists outside of fealty, which is valid purely from person to person, since patriotism in general, which is valid only by chance for this or that person, is rather a third thing valid for the whole of the most useful individual phenomenon that forms a unity from the characteristics of the two. It is associated with the social unity, at the same time as the temporal sequence of its existence, being projected in a personal form that, however, lives its life from the essence of the group, not outside the person by whom it is borne. This particular feeling applies to a social supra-personal reality that still lives in the form of a fully personal one--thereby still giving a nuance to the piety of the priest, in whom the personality fades more before the ecclesiastical-divine mission--but it also applies to a personality that is the actual object of such reverence not because it is this personality but because it marks, as it were, a finite segment of the life of the group, in itself infinite--like we view with reverence many passing and in themselves perhaps unimportant phenomena of the external nature, in which we have a premonition of the laws whose timeless validity is represented in the coincidences in it. The thought that the king does not die produces the classic case of this type of feeling, which is a new principle altogether from the feeling of the purely personal sovereign.
? 460 chapter eight
of heredity is the unqualified security of the monarch on the throne. Then, where this security is absent, he will be mistrustful of his family most of all and seek to render them harmless, as occurred especially in the orient through killing, blinding, and placement in a monastery; and even this will readily lead to a dying-out of the lineage. Inheritance of the reign unfolds its meaning first when that condition is met by which inheritance also becomes the symbol as well as the bearer of the secure continuation of the group's form. Thus it was correctly noted that while Anglo-Saxon royal succession was originally absolutely determined by the personal war making ability of the sovereign, a time of the 'boy kings' could also come about--but only as the Westsaxon kingship had been consolidated by three long, unbroken, outstanding dynasties. The lineage of the throne became quite secure through these regimes going beyond the individual, and this security was expressed by those who did not meet the once-necessary personal conditions not being able to obtain the throne by means of the principle of hereditary ruler.
The group form was now maintained, so to speak, by its own power and thus only needed the ruler that belonged to it, but not his individual qualities. In another respect the English kingship developed an especially solid foundation for inheritance: through the medieval concept of chief royal dominion17 over all lands and the demesne of the king--an interweaving of the royal family in which this property is inherited with the most enduring element of practical life--to which the German Empire has never brought its monarchy. The old English jurist thus treated succession to the throne in accordance with the principle of primogeniture, like inheritance in real estate. To the circumstance that the immortality of the group is oriented to the indestructibility of the land, as I explained, there arose an expression and means that is made clear in the immortality of the king and the in-principle inde- structibility of his family.
Thus it was assumed for quite early times that large landholdings became one of the foundations for the origin of hereditary monarchy. In any case, outstanding wealth procured for the owner a position of leadership in the group. As long as it consists almost only of herds, however, it would be very precarious and could easily die off; only if it is less movable in nature, the chance exists for it to remain in hand for a long time, e. g. in a family. The stability characteristic of land,
17 Simmel uses the expression ko? nigliches Obereigentum--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 461
though only in the hand of the leader, thus favors the stability of the form of the constitution. It lends the inheritance principle an adequate, as it were, foundation that is the same in form. The permanence of the state thinking is ultimately represented in the 'iron cattle' maintained on the domains. While inheritance of the sovereign office makes it independent of the qualities of the person (admittedly where its doubt- fulness also exists), it clearly shows that the solidarity of the group had the combination of its functions in the unity, that it has become objective, and that it attained a continued existence and duration for itself that had nothing to do with the vicissitudes of the personality that represented it. Precisely the circumstance (on account of which the inheritance principle was so often called meaningless and dangerous) that it is purely formal in nature and thus can bring the completely inappropriate personality just as likely as the most appropriate into the position of governing--precisely this has a very deep meaning. For it documents precisely that the form of the group, the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, has become something purely factual and fixed. As long as the existence of the group is still uncertain and shaky, the highest, unifying apex can perform its function only by virtue of quite specific personal qualities. In general, social expediency also cares for this contest and for the selection process preceding the winning of governance in groups that are still unstable; as long as the group is still unsuitably organized, the leading personality must be so much the more 'suitable. ' But where the form in which the group is preserved has already become firm and certain, there the personal fac- tor can withdraw before the formal one and that type of government can gain preference which best brings to expression the continuity and the in-principle perpetuity of the group life so formed; however, it is the hereditary governance that represents in the most adequate and tangible form the principle that the king does not die.
Excursus on Hereditary Office
One of the major practical problems that are present in the nature of every social organization arises from the fact that the structure and interests of a society allow leading positions to emerge with exactly defined demands, objectively established functions--and the fact that only those individuals with the incalculable diversity and the fortuitousness of their talents, with personal happenstance hardly assuring their adequacy or inadequacy, are available to fulfill them. The fact that humanity fashioned society as its life form placed
462 chapter eight
into its foundation the deep contradiction between the objective demands, the supra-personal attitudes and norms that logical legalism develops purely from the reality of the situation--and the subjectivity of the personalities who must comply with that and not fit the whole of life, which is by nature vibrant and irrational, into the prescribed firmly constructed mold. It is not only a matter of the content of the one being agreeable to the content of the other, by an always happy coincidence; but it is a matter of something much deeper, that both are in their whole form and inner meaning foreign to one another, that the fluctuations of the individual existence, the personal life-processes as such, strive against the objectivity and steady intransigence of the demands from the social formation. An immeasurable portion of the history of our kind passes with the consequences of this contradiction and the attempts to avoid them.
Now there is a definiteness of personal life that is approached by being socially formed in this supra-individual established character: the reality of descent and inheritance; and in fact in a double sense, that the descendent is qualitatively similar to the father and grows in this natural similarity through education and tradition, and that a real community of interest, the feeling of inner and outer belongingness, the family unity, places the ancestors and descendents in a row that makes them the steps of a scale, without a qualita- tive similarity. In both ways, the fact of parentage and childhood reaches out over the fluctuations and happenstance of personal life. The inherited as the uncultivated similarity allows anticipating a substance that endures through the father and the son and, as stable in itself, is modified only somewhat dif- ferently by these different subjects. The functional solidarity of the family in turn becomes a counter-structure against the wider group; it stabilizes the isolated and wavering individual, but always as this individual, insofar as it carries that supra-personal association and is carried by the individual. While the transition of a social function from the father to the son or its persistence is generally fixed in one and the same family, this typical phenomenon mani- fests itself in its ultimate, instinctive suitability as an attempt to moderate the principal discrepancy between the objective social form and requirement and the subjectivity of the individual complying with it.
Perhaps this becomes clearest in the actual inheritance of sovereignty. Lead- ership in a group is originally won through usurpation on the part of an out- standing or powerful personage or through the selection of someone who seems suitable. The apparently irrational mode of inheritance replaces this subjective one; it can bring to the throne children, imbeciles, people unsuitable in every way. But each conflict or each evaluation, prior to the elevation of the subject based only on personal qualities, entails so many dangers and disruptions; all the contingencies and irrationalities of the mere individual are immediately pursued in this procedure so that this, at least in stable circumstances, prevails over all the evil chances of heredity. The supra-personhood of the group, its firmness in principle against the vicissitudes of a shear life process, is mirrored in the similar supra-personhood of its leadership, in which the son succeeds the father as he is created just as much a subject. And this objective firmness is so great that it outlives another form, wherein one often wants to unite the
the self-preservation of the group 463
advantage of inheritance with that of personal selection: namely, the ruler is selected, but only from the members of the ruling house. This was often the ancient Germanic custom, just as the caliphs in Spain selected their succes- sors from their always very numerous descendents. Herodotus reports of the Chaonern in Epirus that they always elected their highest magistrate from one family, and the Athenian Archons were for a long time chosen from the royal house. Until the Jagellonian line died out in 1572, the Poles also chose their king without any regard to personal inheritance, but still from the royal house. The motive behind this procedure appears very clearly in a report about some Australian aboriginal tribes. There the chieftain is chosen from the sons of the deceased chieftain, and in fact the general view would be that the second son would be superior to the oldest in ability. If the choice should befall him or an even younger son, the oldest can challenge him in combat and, if he prevails, win the honor: he thereby simply proves that he is the more able one. The intent in this type also lies in the rationale that where the princely rank is abolished and dissolved into a number of individual offices; they are then monopolized, however, by the former princely family. Thus it happened often in the seventh and eighth centuries in Greece, where after the fall of the kingship, the Bakchiades family ruled Corinth, the Penteleides ruled Mytilene, the Basileides ruled Ephesus, etc.
Since the inheritance of office finds its meaning in the conjuncture of two motives--in the functioning of the person on whose individual power the performance is ultimately incumbent, and in the abolition of the excesses of individuality, as it were, its coordination to a supra-personal level--the most manifold combinations and accidents of a positive and negative kind are thus brought to awareness. Some princes have directly patronized the inheritance of office: thus Frederick II, the Hohenstaufen who limited the highest judicial positions to two families in which the study of law was hereditary; so also Louis XIV, who for a long time took his highest councilors from only two families, the Le Tellier and Colbert families. 18 In the latter case it was held as a motive that the king wanted to share state secrets with only two families; however, it was still the case that the individual member seemed to him to be suitable for the function through a family-limitation of it. Here this rose above one's purely personal responsibility as a family member; this uniting of the confidants entailed a seal against all outsiders, a seal that raised an inner defense against individual unreliability and temptation, which erected an inner protection against individual unreliability and vulnerability to being seduced. From this motive Sully19 even arranged for the sale of the inheritance of judgeships; for if the office were fixed in a family, it would thereby be removed from the influence of the court and precisely that of the dominant party. While the individual receives the position of his father with certainty
18 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, 1220-1250; Louis XIV, King of France, 1643-1715--ed.
19 Maximilien de Be? thune, duc de Sully (1561-1641), minister to Henri IV of France--ed.
? 464 chapter eight
and had to protect it for his son, he is on the one hand more independent than an individual selected from some place or other for the office; on the other hand, he carries a greater responsibility than if he had to arrange his administration on his own, beginning and ending with the limits of his own person. This latter motive becomes important in some selections for office that traditionally remain in certain families, as encountered in early English history and from where extremely favorable successions were noticed: neither the man who had to fear a not unforeseen and perhaps invincible competi- tion nor one, who on the contrary, by mere birth, without any merit of his own, who is sure of honor and position, will establish his power so decisively and intensely, as the one who knows that inability in fact excludes him from election or re-election, however, ability procures it for him with certainty. This inconspicuous historical fact also covers one of the rules of life that are deepest and radiating out conspicuously in many social formations. Our life is arranged in such a way that we find ourselves in each moment in an in- between status of certainty and uncertainty about the results of our actions. To have absolute knowledge about this result would be to change our entire inner as well as outer existence in such a completely unpredictable way, as the absolute ignorance about it. Each of our actions takes a definite step on the scale of these mixtures; an infinite multitude of situations, decisions, and tests of power can grow out of the same content of our deeds, according to the share with which the knowledge and lack of knowledge blend in the expectation of its results. The example just cited only seems to show that the winning of dignity and power is not established through inheritance without any such regard for individuality, but by the meeting of subjective sufficiency with objective certainty--those elements precisely so mixed as to elicit a maximum of effort and ability.
Where, however, heredity attains a maximum of certainty and is thus no longer affected at all by the subjective quality of the incumbent, in many cases the office had to lose its importance. The major Castillian offices, e. g. the Admiral and the Constable of Castles, were originally of the greatest importance, but became hereditary in certain noble houses after Henry III20 and quickly fell to merely honorary titles. Entirely the same occurred with the court offices of the Norman kings in England. As soon as the offices became hereditary, the real duties that were associated with them fell to a newly-existent category of officials. Only those offices that escaped being made hereditary still retained an importance for the constitution. It must be remarked concerning unconditional heredity, however, that the only thing that can be inherited with certainty is only the externality of the office, the title, honor, so to speak, the mere 'possibility' of function, which inevitably turns into an empty form since it is no longer borne by a selected individuality and infused with fresh blood. The deeper sociological meaning of the inheriting of offices appears to be that the objectivity of social formation interweaves with the subjectivity of
20 Henry III of Castille reigned 1390-1404--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 465
personal performance. In the cases just mentioned, however, the latter factor sank to a minimal importance, whereby the whole meaning of this particular socio-historical construct, built from the interaction of both factors, then vanishes. This and other obvious dangers of the inheriting of offices gave a special importance to ecclesiastical honors that celibacy prevented from being inherited. While the major governmental offices in the German Middle Ages became hereditary in individual families, the king could still always move persons, through the bishopric and into the governmental service, who were commendable purely on account of their individual qualities. And in the era of the Norman rule in England and simultaneously in France even the highest political offices were often filled from the clergy, from whom alone it could not be feared that they were forming a monopoly of their power among their descendents. With this strong tendency toward inheritance in the Middle Ages it was from the start an advantage to the crown for no son to be available for a bishopric, who might have raised a claim to the dignity--which William Rufus,21 for example, admittedly used to leave the bishoprics unfilled for a long time and take in their earnings for himself.
The solution that the inheriting of a function offers to the conflict between personal and supra-personal being is the information about a relatively primi- tive, little differentiated social condition. Certainly the official whom the family honor and family interest engage outside his personal relationship, who is educated in advance by the tradition of the predecessors for his occupation, is often the more capable and more reliable for the state; but obviously, this presupposes that the state places more weight on the general qualities of its functionaries, on what can be inherited and instilled, than on the characteris- tics of purely personal talents or suitability for very specialized tasks. Thus it is a matter of the cultural constitution of a public being not very differenti- ated in itself, in which one need not properly train and rationally employ the special kind of individual just yet, but needs sooner to seek to smooth the sharp edges of individuality. On the contrary, from the side of personalities, those particular capabilities and knowledge, which service to the community demanded at the time, were not yet gained in a purely personal way but came about only or most certainly through the tradition of the family entity. Gen- erality and individuality had to meet in a certain state of disorganization and undifferentiation in order for the inheritance of an office to allow for a social purposefulness and to counterbalance its risks. These sociological conditions and results extend beyond the uniquely governmental offices. The gainful occupations are hereditary in many past social situations; the work not only actually passes down from father to son, but it is partly required by the public authority, and the taking up of another occupation is not at all permitted; it is also partly protected in that competition is kept away and patronages are tied to the familial engagement in the occupation. Here, the occupation also
21 Third son of William the Conqueror, William II of England, called Rufus, reigned 1087-1100--ed.
? 466 chapter eight
has the character of a public office. The free exercise of personal powers is not yet suitably formed in order to provide the community with the activi- ties needed by it, but it requires regulation and a certain pre-determination; the individual for his part does not yet find the possibilities of training and utilization of his work in the mere establishment of society but remains dependent on hereditary tradition and the collective force of the family for that. The refinement and strengthening of the public entity on the one hand and the greater independence of the individual on the other led beyond the inheritance of the occupation and even in fact near to where the character of the office first remained. Guild membership in its prime was regarded as a public office and was at the time completely non-hereditary, as the cit- ies began their great development with the decline of feudalism. This was generally the time in which the feudal relationship of official function to the possession of land--obviously the most decisive vehicle of inheritance--was loosened, when the more powerful and, so to speak, more abstract form of political entities gave offices more and more the character of public law.
And then the personality of the office, in principle, corresponded to that, which excluded every inheritance. Thus all sociological development seems to follow a typical pattern: the more purely and widespread the spirit or center of a group is elaborated, the higher the capacity and latitude of the whole increases for the personalities who bear the whole to become individual that way. The enlargement of the social group goes hand in hand with the formation of the individual. 22 The expanding, the growing weight of the abstract governmental or societal concept that makes it independent of the narrower aggregates of familial or locally connected groupings thus designates the independent dif- ferentiated individual personality ever more for social functions. This higher social structure leaves only the still completely general rearing and equipping of the future official to the family, but it makes available for his proper education the means that have become objective and that belong to the public entity. It thereby purchases the right to a completely individual and unprejudiced selection, so that family inheritance establishes no legal right to the office any more--a process that obviously is still far from complete. Consequently not the particular individual families but the sociologically related groups of the class, stratum, and 'circles' nevertheless provide even today the particular categories of public officials. It reveals the immense socio-historical import of this development, so that it applies not only to the actual officials but to countless 'statuses' formed by social usefulness, which are seemingly filled through private involvement and personal happenstance. In reality, however, this tends to produce a much more circumscribed group; society has not yet achieved the purely individual designation process but counts on so much preparatory work of the family and the stratum on the person that a certain general inheritance of these 'offices' exists as an equivalent. What remains as the underlying motive is the proportion between the objective determination
22 The last chapter considers the explanation of this relationship.
? the self-preservation of the group 467
and performance of the social totality and the subjective uniqueness of the individual, which is only now pulled asunder in a definite measure: what the society does for its officials has become more; with that, the differentiating selection and the individual freedom to choose the occupation have become greater. But each of the two is not yet developed to the highest degree at which the mixed state and the heritability of the function would be wholly and absolutely superfluous and superseded. Some stages of the social development reveal the contradiction to be ripe for that polar separation, while inertia still keeps the state of inheritability in place. The guild lost that free constitution that I mentioned above, and to the degree that its form no longer sufficed at all for the economic demands it became an inherited property of its members, so that at the time of its worst ossification and exclusiveness it was generally accessible only to the sons, sons-in-law, and spouses of the widows of guild masters. That character of public office was lost at the same time as its being filled with the personality, and it remained only familial egoism, which through inheritance excluded any individual selection. For the present this problem is obviously the most burning one with regard to the aristocracy, whose nature and strength rest above all on the hereditary principle but which, perhaps, throughout the greatest part of history, militated against the principle of a higher centralization of the state. How its rights and duties are bound up with property, how its hereditary candidacy is justified by a certain state position, depends on whether upbringing, tradition, and education reproduce in it the proprieties for all of them, as the state still cannot do without it; because the state pays for its incompetence, which the required functionaries by themselves alone exemplify, it must be content with the relative renunciation of individual choice and the protection of a certain type of its officer materials as the bio- logical inheritance and the historical tradition produce it.
The not too frequent, seemingly isolated fact of the actual inheritance of office, as it results with all this, marks a specific stage of the large process between the individual and collective elements and tendencies of history. The liveliness of this process springs forth always anew from the double posture that replaces the social interest in the individual person: society comes from the fact that its element is an individually varied one, that it possesses certain qualities that distinguish that element from others; but it also depends on the fact that it would be the same or similar to others, that it does not stand out, but fits in a series of continuous quality. Individuals being similar to their parents and becoming similar to them through family tradition meets both requirements, insofar as they are fixed in their qualities and intended for specific courses of life and activities on the one hand, but on the other hand again this personal fixedness is still maintained at the level of one social arrangement. The inherit- ing of a social function or office expresses this subjective situation as it were, in an objective reflection. It also presupposes a personal peculiarity in order to be socially useful as a limitation of it to a general, traditionally regulated level. It thus demands and fixes a certain close relation between the individual and social factors, admittedly preparing the replacement of this by the higher form, in which both parts achieve higher rights: the individual, in that this can make personal activity a matter of choice and base it on qualities that are
468 chapter eight
independent of their relation to the individual's generational line, and to the extent that the society allows the individual freedom for them, it obtains on its part the full freedom of the choice of its functionaries. The equality of the relationship of both components, through this sociological form, corresponds to the equality of freedom, which evolves beyond itself.
The objectification of the solidarity of the group can also strip off the personal form so much that it links itself to an actual symbol that appears as much the cause as the effect of this solidarity. During the Amphictyonic League23 associated with the common maintenance of the Delphic Temple, the Panionion, the league temple of the Ionic city league, was erected as the symbol of the already existing alliance. So in the German Middle Ages the imperial jewelry appeared as the visible aspect, as it were, of the imperial thought and its continuity, so that the possession of the jewelry procured for a pretender to the crown a considerable advantage over the competitors, and this was one of the factors that visibly supported precisely the legitimate heirs in their can- didacy. It was a great help for Henry I that Conrad I sent the insignia of the crown to him, and for Kunigund that Henry II had later sent it to him. 24 Its delivery to the rightful new sovereign confirms the death, and reinforces the new ruler in his position. As military service became troublesome for the citizens of the larger cities in the Middle Ages and they encouraged journeymen with payment for it, they often retained in peacetime the organization that was once introduced by keeping the banner, since the banner conferred their community the character of being a guild. And it is notable that a violent rebellion of the Landau millers' and bakers' journeymen in 1432 began with their raising a banner on their lodge. Among the ancient Arabs each tribe led with a banner in war, but if several were united into a combat force, they
23 A league of ancient Greek nations connected to the temple of Demeter at Anthela and the temple of Apollo at Delphi. It was involved in four 'Sacred Wars,' circa 595 B. C. E. to 338 B. C. E. --ed.
24 Conrad I (d. 918) was elected king of Germany but was never elected emperor. Emperor Henry I, a Saxon called "the Fowler," reigned 918-936. Emperor Henry II, also from the Saxon dynasty, reigned 1002-1024. Kunigund is evidently Conrad II, who reigned as emperor 1027-1039, the first of the Franconian or Salian dynasty. Both Henry I and Conrad II marked new dynasties and thus needed recognition to assume the imperial throne--ed.
? ? the self-preservation of the group 469
led with only a single one that indicated their unity, and its bearer was the most prominent person in the war.
In view of the destructibility of a material object that nevertheless cannot compensate for it, as it can a person through the continuity of heritability, it is very dangerous for the group to seek such a support for its self-preservation. Some regiments lost their solidarity as soon as their flags were taken; various leagues dissolved upon the loss of their shields, their chest plates, and their Grail. Because the Hungarian crown kept this symbolic importance for an especially long time, it still stirred up violent unrest under Joseph II once, as it was transferred from Pressburg to Vienna; with the return of the crown these disturbances immediately abated. 25 In the Middle Ages it was especially the seal that symbolized the unity of a group and allowed it to appear to be an autonomous moral person. After an uprising against Emperor Charles IV in Frankfurt, his judge decided in 1366--after highly treacherous letters of the guilds were discovered, who affirmed under oath however that "they were sealed behind their back"--that "all seals of the guilds would be taken from them and not only smashed but also the possession and use of all association seals of the guilds together with those of all other associations" were to remain "forever prohibited. "26 In relation to this, the destruction of the shield of a community appears everywhere as a very real means to strike it, as it were, in the heart, to dissolve its unity. As the commune of Corbie was dissolved in 1308 due to debts and liabilities and its rights reverted to the king, the clapper was taken from the great bell as a sign that the commune had ceased to be. As the skilled workers' associations appeared to oppose the mercantile- despotic tendencies of the government under Frederick William I, the department head wrote to the king about the skilled workers: "these people conceive of themselves as though they formed a special corpus or statum in republica. 27 Thus he suggests "that the underworld plaques, journeymen's emblems and their other idols be destroyed cum ignominia quadam28 so that they constitute no particular corpus as they now think. " And a law of the English reaction specified in 1819 that the holding of
25 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor 1765-1790--ed.
26 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor 1347-1378--ed.
27 Latin: body or type of government. Frederick William I, King of Prussia 1786-
1797--ed.
28 Latin: with a certain ignominy--ed.
? 470 chapter eight
an assembly "with flags, banners or other emblems or ensigns"29 would be punished with several years of imprisonment. Where social solidar- ity is, in the mean time, lost on the way, one can well say that it must have already been greatly weakened internally and that in this case the loss of the external symbols representing group unity is itself only the symbol for it, that the social members have lost their coherence. Then, where that is not the case, there the loss of group symbols has not only no power to dissolve, but directly has a power to unite. In that the symbol forfeits its physical reality, it can work as mere thought, yearn- ing, ideal, something much more powerful, deeper, and indestructible. These two opposite effects of the destruction of group symbols for the solidity of the group at the same time allows one to observe what the destruction of the Jewish Temple by Titus had by way of consequences. The sociological importance of the Temple of Zion was that it gave the purely fluid solidarity of the Jews, who were obeying the Parthians or the Romans and speaking Aramaic or Greek, some tangible focus. What it indicated in itself was wholly indifferent for this; it was only the visible aspect of a functioning community, the possibility of binding together again the scattered and internally torn Jews at a point of, so to speak, real ideality. Now its destruction had the purpose of dissolving the Jewish priestly state that was a contradiction and danger for the political unity of the Roman Empire, compared to a number of Jews not many of whom had invested much in this centralization. In particular, it greatly furthered the loosening of the Pauline Christians from Judaism. For the Palestinian Jews, however, the break between Judaism and the rest of the world was thereby deepened, and its national-religious unity was raised into a despairing force by this destruction of their symbols. Thus the annihilation of group symbols affects the self-preservation of the group in two ways: destroying, where the solidifying interactions of the members are already weak in themselves, and strengthening where they are so strong in themselves that they can replace the lost tangible symbol with a spiritualized and idealized image.
The importance of a material symbol for the self-preservation of a society will now be much increased if beyond its symbolic meaning it also represents a real property, if the centralizing effect of the object thus depends on or is increased by the material interests of all members of the group being met within it. In this case it becomes especially impor-
29 Simmel quotes these words in English--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 471
tant for the maintenance of the group to secure the common property from destruction, somewhat as one would do with the personal center of the group through the immortality of the king. The most frequent means for this purpose is mortmain, the regulation that the assets of a corporation, which should be such in perpetuity, are inalienable. As the passing of the individual is mirrored in the corruptibility of posses- sions, so are the immortality of the association in the inalienability of its property and the unavailability of that property for sale. Especially the ownership of the church corporation was like the lion's den, into which all went in but from which none came back out again. But just as for the highly-placed persons the immortality in no way means the desire to prolong ordinary life, the longing for a mere quantity of life, but should symbolize a certain quality of the soul, a grandeur of its worth above earthly happenstance only expressed in that way--so the immortality of property did not at all only serve the greed of the church but was a symbol of the eternity of the principle with which it was associated. Mortmain created the union of an indestructible axis and center, an invaluable means for the self-preservation of the group. It supported this character of mortmain that its possession essentially consisted in land and soil. In contrast to all movable property, especially money, real estate manifests an immobility and permanence that makes it the most suitable matter for the mortmain form of property, and its local character and fixed opportunity cause those who share in it to have a fixed point to which they are always, as it were, oriented--be it directly or within their interests--and can invariably encounter themselves. Over and above the material advantage admittedly imparted by it, it is an ingenious means for the group as such to maintain and preserve its form.
However, precisely this fact often involves the group in a conflict of a typical sociological importance, and indeed because of that it is inclusive of political society since the group that is promoted in its self- preservation is only a part of an always greater one. Almost all human forming of society, having the same character as well as content, labors at consolidating each individual segment into social unities that culti- vate a tendency toward egoistic self-preservation in themselves. Their form and tendency replicate on a small scale those of the total group of which they are a part, but they also thereby simply place themselves in opposition against this group. The role that falls to them as a part and limb of an encompassing whole is not really compatible with the role that they themselves play as whole persons. I come back to the
472 chapter eight
principal side of this tragic relationship that recurs within every larger society and note only here how greatly it marks mortmain. While, as I explained above, it is of the highest importance for the existence of a self-contained total group that it possesses a land and soil as a solid foundation for its unity and demarcation, it can become alarming if a part of it simply demands the same thing for itself. The conflict of interests thusly established between the part and whole is manifest immediately in the fact that mortmain demanded and obtained freedom from taxation most of all, and indirectly, though significantly, that it was often a disadvantage to the national economy if such properties were removed from the flow of commerce. The modern suppression of the natural economy by the money economy admittedly not only allows the domination of the phenomena that are contrary to basing life generally on land ownership, but it led definitively to conditions changing over to the money economy that actually converted land ownership into a matter of possessing money. The Catholic congregations in France, for example, have largely converted their landholdings into money for decades because this directly promised them greater security: Money is allowed to be hidden more easily, attributed more readily to straw men, and more readily withdrawn from assessment and taxation than is real estate. While they mobilized their assets, they kept--by means of the safeguards of the modern legal environment that is replacing the substantial permanence that formerly real estate alone guaranteed-- the advantages of the earlier form of mortmain while avoiding all the disadvantages that ensued from its inflexibility and immobile bounds. For the state, however, the danger of these accumulations of property of mortmain did not thereby lessen; their property in France was esti- mated some years ago to be up to eight billion franks--a substantial amount, which with its consolidation could very well use its cards against the state. The solidity of the social continuation that springs from the indestructibility and indissolubility of property works as a thorn in the side as soon as it is a matter of a part of a larger group, and what is self-preservation for just this part of a group becomes, from the point of view of the interests of the encompassing group, a stiffening and constriction of an organic limb and directly opposes the self-preserva- tion of the whole. The noxiousness of mortmain was recognized very early. For example, the 1318 Frankfurt city peace settlement stipulated that within a year all the orders had to sell the properties that had been given to them; the same intent is revealed in the fifteenth century when the city ordinance of a Frisian town prohibited the clergy from build-
the self-preservation of the group 473
ing houses of stone without special permission of the city council. Such phenomena are typical in England from the Anglo-Saxon era since the clergy there was closely interwoven with the life of the community and had fully recognized the involvement of their land properties with communal responsibilities. Nevertheless already near the end of the Anglo-Saxon kingships the size of church properties in land was a dif- ficult hindrance to the administration of the state insofar as it denied the king the means of remunerating his warriors. And the same appre- hensions about mortmain for the whole state were also recognized in the structures indirectly or only minimally dependent on the church: in 1391 an English law was enacted that simply prohibited permanent corporations such as guilds and brotherhoods from acquiring lands! From the same point of view, the modern era struggles against the pleasure of the aristocracy pursue a quite parallel purpose: to create an objective organ that is free of the vicissitudes of individual fates for the unity and continuation of the family. Here too not only would there be the economic basis in the inalienable and indivisible property by which the continuity of the family is maintained under all circumstances, but at the same time a central point for family solidarity; the continuation of the family would be guaranteed not only in its material conditions but also in its sociological form. But here also--at least according to the opinion of many--this centripetal self-preservation of a small group is set in contrast to the self-preservation of the surrounding political totality, which, to be sure, wants to be an absolute entity and can therefore permit its parts just a fragile and relative existence--even while the absolute self-preservation of the parts makes that of the parts of the totality into a lose and endangered one.
Modern associations occasionally seek to replace these basic ideas of mortmain and cross-generational inheritance, with their enormous importance for the preservation of the group, with other forms having the same purpose--the thought that the fortune of the group is removed from the individual's disposition and strengthened as an independent objective structure, surviving untouched all instances of change in the individual. So some clubs bind their members through this practice so that when a member leaves, the payment of dues to the organization is not refunded. 30 It is thus documented that the group with its interest is
30 How much groups facilitate and impede the entry and exit of individual members pertains to the quite essentially sociological characterizations and differentiations of the
? 474 chapter eight
placed completely beyond the individual member's sphere of interest, that it lives a life of its own, that it appropriates completely for itself the assets thereby gained for it, fully frees them from their individual owner and restores so little to them, as an organic body is capable of giving back to its possible previous bearer the nourishment that it once incorporated into its inner circulation. The old English labor unions that levied only low dues had the experience of their members joining and leaving with great ease. This changed with the increase of the dues. If a subdivision is dissatisfied with an activity of the whole union, it will think seriously before leaving since this entails the loss of its share of a considerable sum that accumulated over time. The continuous and intrinsically permanent preservation of the group is supported by not only this modus procedendi31 but especially also by the same modus having to make psychologically vibrant in each member the idea of a
social interaction. From this point of view one could set up a scale for all social creations. Groups for whom having many members matters because they draw their power from the shear volume of them, will generally facilitate entry and make exit burdensome. In contrast aristocratic groups will in general make entry difficult; but directly to the extent that they internally take much pride in themselves they will facilitate exit, so to speak, since these become the ones who do not want to take part in the prerogatives of the aristocracy, because they do not wish to stop those who do not want on any basis to assume the responsibilities of the group. Meanwhile within the nobility there emerges that formal relationship of the whole to the individual, the highest climax of which we already noted earlier with the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, of course, has always had the tendency to treat heretics or those suspected of secession, as well as unreliable types, as self-evidently belonging to it as long as possible, and to overlook what separated them from her, as though it was not said; but the moment when that is becomes no longer tolerable, it tends to eject the heretic and the dissident with absolute decisiveness and without any compromise or without any transitional appearances. This practice encompasses a great part of the power and cleverness of the Catholic Church: the enormous broad mindedness, so long as it is still possible to fend off dissidents from within, and conversely its radical repulsion of them as soon as that is no longer possible. It has thereby combined the advantages of a maximum extent with those of a clear boundary. With regard to belongingness, the relation of the individual to a group stands under the formula: "The first sets us free, with the second we are vassals"--at another time, however, also under the exact opposite; then again entrance and exit are equally easy or equally difficult. The difference of the means through which both ease and difficulty occur is to be further noted: whether they are economic or moral, whether they do this as external law, as egoistic advantage of the members, or work as the inner influence of these. All this would require a detailed examination, the matter of which would be all existing types of group and in which the latter form-problems of their life must cross and in fact it would require an exami- nation of two essential categories: the group life in its supra-personal being-for-itself and the relationship of the individual to this social union.
31 Latin: modality of proceeding--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 475
supra-individual existence of a group unity independent of all personal preferences. 'Irrevocability' is also the technique by which the principal unity of the group is expressly realized and made clear. So some com- munities have the principle that the decision, once it is legally taken, is not changeable at all. A Greek religious community that wanted to discuss anew a rule that had been accepted for years, began with the explicit explanation: it should be allowed to decide contrary to what was earlier established. What is once decided according to the rules of the community appears in such cases to be part of its life, a piece of its being and therefore unchangeable; its 'timelessness' is documented in this, that the earlier moment, in which the decision was made, is inseparable from every later moment. This social technique of self- preservation recurs with greater force in the rule of certain clubs that even upon its dissolution the club's assets should not be divided among the members, but donated to some organization having a similar purpose. Here self-preservation no longer involves, so to speak, the physical existence of the group but its idea, which is likewise embodied in any other group that inherits it, and whose continuity should be maintained and shown precisely in the transfer of the property to it. This relationship is appropriately recognized with clarity in many of the French worker-cooperatives of the 1840s. The regulation is found in their statutes that the union property must, under no circumstances, be divided out, and this idea is set forth there that the associations of the same trades often formed syndicates in which each union turned over its indivisible fund in order to create a group treasury in which the contributions of the individual associations thereby merged into a new and objective unity, as the contributions of the individual did in the funds of the individual associations. A variation, as it were, of the think- ing of these individual associations was thereby created; the syndicate was the embodied abstraction that turned into a self-subsisting entity of interests creating social entities that until then had existed only in a form of association that was characterized by more individual, more solitary contents. Thus the social motive of these associations was raised to a height at which, if no other forces had affected it destructively, it could have been maintained in complete security against all individual and material vicissitudes.
I come now to another type of means of social self-preservation that is detached from any reliance on an external connection and is secured purely mentally. Inside the ideal sphere there is nevertheless a
476 chapter eight
rich array of security that fundamentally differs in its importance ever so little from any substantial ones, though of course ultimately the lat- ter also have their mental importance according to their sociological effect. First in order are the feelings that are directed admittedly at a social object but still imply only subjective states: Patriotism for nation and city, dedication to the religious community, family feeling, and the like. All this is so immeasurably important for the preservation of the group that it still remains thusly interwoven into the life process of the subjects and differs from those socially oriented processes whose content has coagulated around a fixed, albeit only ideal structure or is derived from such a one, such as the moral imperative, honor, or law. Morality may yet be autonomous in that way; its power draws from the freedom and self-responsibility of the soul, its content from its individual uniqueness--these nevertheless stand as an objective structure before the soul as a norm for which the reality of its life possesses the various activities of conforming or not conforming to it. Law too--in what it means to us internally and beyond its concrete organs--stands before us as an ideal object, as a norm that binds us purely psychologically and yet as something supra-personal, since the compelling power of law (I am speaking here essentially of the field of criminal law) does not lie completely in our having to do or refrain from doing something; law can only force us to suffer the penalty for a failure to act or refrain from acting, but it has no physical power to impose these matters on the inside of the will itself. Between these two forms in which social self-preservation enjoins its commandments on us, there is a third whose pertinent meaning I want to examine as a type: honor.
If one were to bring these types of norm to their completely articu- lated expression, setting aside the overlapping and exchange of con- tent, law brings about outer purposes through outer means, morality effects inner purposes through inner means, and honor, outer purposes through inner means. They can be further arranged in the following order: morality, honor, law--thus each previous one covers the area of the following one, but not the other way around. Complete moral- ity encompasses in itself what honor and law require; complete honor encompasses what law requires; law has the narrowest scope. Because law only requires that which the self-preservation of the group abso- lutely cannot do without, it must establish an executive that enforces the laws externally. Morality wants to regulate the total behavior of the individual (only that relevant to the social group concerns us here), and no constraint similar to the constraint of the law is allowed to be
the self-preservation of the group 477
enforced within this area; it remains dependent on the good and bad conscience. Honor takes a middle position: an injury to it is threatened by penalties that neither pure inwardness of moral reproach nor the corporal force of the legal sphere possesses. While society establishes the precepts of honor and secures them with partly inwardly subjective and partly social and externally perceptible consequences for violations, it creates for itself a unique form of guarantee for the proper conduct of its members in those practical areas that law cannot encompass and for which the guarantees through moral conscience alone are too unreliable. 32 If one also examines the precepts of honor for their con- tent, they always appear as a means for maintaining a social group's solidarity, its reputation, its regularity, and the potential to promote its life processes. And in fact, that middle position of honor between law and morality in relation to executive action corresponds to a similar one in relation to the extension of their spheres. Law covers the entire scope of the group whose vital interests form a unity; the forces of morality circulate inside the individual; they are closely bound with the self-responsiveness of the personal conscience; the actions and omis- sions, however, that honor demands is revealed as what is useful to the particular groups that stand between the large group and the individual. Every honor is originally the honor of a status, i. e. a form of life useful to smaller groups that are involved with a larger group and, by virtue of the demands on their members to whom the idea of honor pertains, maintain their inner cohesion, their unifying character, and their clo- sure against even the other groups of the same larger association. Now what appears to us beyond this limitation as the general human or, put differently, as purely individual honor, is a more abstract idea made possible by breaking through the barriers between social ranks; indeed one can name no single act that would attack human honor as such, i. e. , every honor without exception: it is a matter of honor for ascetics to let themselves to be spat at; for the girls of certain African tribes it is especially honorable to have as many relationships as possible. So then those specific ideas of honor of circumscribed groups are essential: fam- ily honor, the honor of officers, honor in commerce, even the honor of scoundrels. While the individual belongs to different groups, he or she can participate in different honors independently of one another; that
32 In Chapter 2 the corresponding formal position was shown to exist for custom as well.
? 478 chapter eight
already became important for us earlier as a manifestation of 'crossing' social boundaries: it can be that someone who lost family honor stead- fastly protects commercial honor or, as a researcher, protects scientific honor, and vice-versa; the robber can strictly maintain the precepts of his criminal honor, while having lost every other honor; a woman can have lost her sexual honor and still be the most honorable person in every other respect, etc. The phenomenon that already thereby arises, of honor demanding some things but permitting others, indicates the origin of honor in the teleology of the particular group, i. e. what the honor of one group unconditionally prohibits is completely compatible with the honor of a certain other circle and with indifference toward it. 33 The subtle honor that the officer corps cultivated allows some latitude for sexual behavior, which is not compatible with the honor of men in some other groups. The honor of merchants, most rigorous in many respects, allows such an exaggerated hyping of the products that a similar transgression of the limits of truthfulness would make an official or a scholar dishonorable; honor among scoundrels reveals this most unmistakably. Now it is precisely seen that the positive precepts of honor are always the conditions for the inner self-preservation of the group; what they tolerate is what each group, perhaps in contrast to every other group, holds to be compatible with the honor of its mem- bers; the groups relate their members' behavior to those who remain outside, so long as it does not somehow act back on the preservation of the group itself, the affairs of the personality as such, in which the more freedom is compatible with the concept of honor, the less it is tolerant with respect to the sociological requirements. Because it only depends on, and indeed only with respect to, a narrower group firmly circum- scribed within a larger one, honor allows for, indeed demands, various patterns of behavior that are forbidden by law on the one hand--the form of self-preservation of the large group--and by morality on the other hand--the inner self-preservation of the individual; dueling is the most glaring example of this.
What is easily deceptive about the sense of honor as a sociologi- cal expedient is precisely the circumstance with which this expedient celebrates its highest triumph: that it is successful in instilling in the individuals the protection of their honor as their most inward, deepest, the most personal self-interests. There is perhaps no point at which
33 Indifference--Simmel uses the Greek Adiaphoron--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 479
social and individual interest intertwine that way, where a matter that is comprehensible only from the former that has assumed an impera- tive form that only appears to spring up from the latter. So deeply anchored here is the requirement of the social group in the foundation of the life of its members that honor even takes on a note of isolation, indeed in many respects an almost offensive note. It even includes those patterns of behavior by which the advantage of the circle does not lie in the immediate self-dedication of the individual, in the circles' boundaries overlapping one another, in the indiscriminate uniting of their activities or being, but simply in that each one of them 'keeps to itself'; here it is the mutual independence of the parts that keeps the whole in its form. The social group's vested interests decorated with the name of honor are invested in a sphere around the individual into which no other may penetrate without meeting with repulsion, and these interests are thus secured in their realization by the individual without rival interests. As one can consider it the specific effect of reli- gion that it converts one's own salvation into a duty, so it is the effect of honor, mutatis mutandis,34 that it converts one's social duty into one's personal salvation. Thus the aspects of law and duty as they relate to honor change into each other: the protection of honor is so very much a duty that law presses one to the most enormous sacrifices for it--not only brought upon oneself but imposed on others and passes over oth- ers. It would be wholly incomprehensible why society actually would urge the individual with so strong a social and moral accent to protect this purely personal good of honor if it were not the shear form and technique whose content and goal is the preservation of the group. In this context--and because here it is just essentially a matter of maintain- ing, not actually of advancing and developing--it is conceivable that society provides the individual this good from the outset so that the individual need not acquire it but only to not lose it: the presumption is that everyone possesses it. Society can proceed seemingly so liber- ally because all actions necessary for not losing this personal possession has hardly any other content than what is social. That presumption goes so far that society allows even the libeler, the adulterer, and the slanderer dueling with identical weapons with the person innocently offended; for in so far as one is still 'honorable,' one presupposes the possibility that one perhaps had a right to one's action. But of course,
34 Latin: with the things changed also changing other things--ed.
? 480 chapter eight
every social stratum, as the social bearer of honor, cherishes this favor- able presumption only for its members, while the members of another stratum, beyond those within it notoriously lacking suitable honor, are not 'capable of satisfying' anything. Honor forms in this way one of the most wondrous, instinctively developed means of preserving group existence, not despite but because of the purely personal form of its appearance and consciousness.
From such linkages of social self-preservation to an individual per- son, to an actual substance, and to an ideal concept we now come to the cases in which it depends on an organ arising out of a plurality of persons: the objective principle in which their unity is represented, even bears again its group character. Thus the religious community embodies its solidarity and its life motive in the priesthood, and the political community regards its solidarity internally in the civil service, externally in its military standing, the latter for its part in the officer corps, every enduring club in its board of directors, every fleeting association in its committee, every political party in its parliamentary representation. The formation of such organs is the result of the social division of labor. The interactions among individuals, in which every social formation consists and which determines a particular form of the character of the group as such, originally occur quite immediately among the individual members of society. Thus the unity of operation arises from direct agreement or mutual accommodation of interests; the unity of the religious community from the religious need of each pressing to join together; the military constitution of the group from the protection and trust interests of each man capable of bearing arms; the administration of justice from the immediate judgment of the com- munity; the organization for leaders and the led from the personal preferences of the individual before others; the economic coordination from the immediate exchange among the producers. 35
These functions performed by the interests themselves, the functions that effect social unity, come undone over particular subgroups. The interactions of members with one another are thus substituted so that all of these members enter into relationship with the newly established
35 I do not wish to claim that this logically simplest condition actually formed the historical starting point of further social development everywhere else. But in order to clarify the actual importance of the division of labor of social apparatus, one must presuppose it, even if it would only be a fiction, which certainly it is not in numerous cases.
? the self-preservation of the group 481
apparatus for themselves; put differently: While wherever no formation of an apparatus occurs, primarily the individual members alone have substantial existence, and their association is a purely functional one, this association now achieves its own separate existence for itself, not only apart from all group members to whom it generally refers, but also beyond the individual members who support it or enrich it. Thus the business class is a structure existing for itself that as such performs its function as a go-between among producers regardless of personnel changes. Thus still more clearly, the office exists as an objective appara- tus through which the individual officials only, as it were, pass through, and behind which their personalities often enough vanish--even more completely than with the individual ruler, whose individual position blends with its bearer so much more closely than a pluralistic govern- ment; thus the church is an impersonal organism whose functions are assumed and carried out by the individual priests but not produced by them.