No More Learning

Thus one is poor in a social sense only if receiving support. And probably this would be generally valid: viewed sociologically, poverty does not occur first and then support follows--rather this is only its destiny also according to one's personal form--but the one who enjoys support should also enjoy it according to one's sociological constellation, which is called poverty--even if by chance this does not happen.
It is entirely in this sense, when it had been emphasized by the Social Democrats, that the modern proletarian would admittedly be poor, but not any poorer. The poor person does not come about as a social type through a certain level of want and deprivation but through receiving support or should be receiving it according to social norms. Thus to this way of thinking, poverty in itself and for itself is not to be defined as a fixed quantitative condition but only in terms of a social reaction that appears after a certain condition, just as crime, which immediately is a very difficult concept to define, has been defined as "an action associated with a public penalty. "8 So now some no longer define the essence of ethics from the inner constitution of the subject but from the results of what the subject does: its subjective intent counts as valu- able only to the extent that it normally occasions a particular socially useful result. Thus the concept of personality is often not viewed as a characterization of one's being from within, which would qualify one for a specific social role, but on the contrary, the members of society who play a certain role in it are called personalities. The individual condition, as it is constituted from within itself, no more determines the idea in the first instance; rather the social teleology does this. The individual is established by the type, as the environing whole behaves around and toward the individual. Where this happens it is a continu- ation of a kind of modern idealism that does not seek to define a thing any more by its inherent nature but from the reaction that is given off
8 Simmel seems to have E? mile Durkheim's treatment of crime in mind; see Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, tr. George Simpson (New York: Macmillan, 1933), Ch. 2-- ed.
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? from it in the subject. The membership function that the poor person serves within the existing society is not already given by one's being poor; only when the society--the whole or the individual members of it--responds with support to the person, does the latter play a specific social role.
This social meaning of the 'poor,' as opposed to the individual one, first allows the poor to unite into a kind of status group or unified layer within society. As was said, one does not belong to a socially defined category by simply being poor. One is just a poor merchant, artist, worker etc. and remains such through the kind of one's activity or standing of one's particular rank. One may take up a gradually changed position within the society because of poverty, but the individuals who find themselves in the different statuses and occupations at this stage are in no way united into a special social unit outside the boundaries of their home stratum. The moment they are assisted--many times already if the whole constellation normally requires this, even without it actually happening--they enter into a circle characterized by pov- erty. Admittedly this group is not held together by interaction among its members but by the collective attitude that society as a whole takes up toward it. Still there has not also always been a lack of that direct creation by society; in the fourteenth century, for example, there was a guild of poor people in Norwich, a Poorman's Gild, in Germany the so called Elendengilden (guilds of the wretched)--just as some time later in the Italian cities one encounters a party of the wealthy people, the Optimates, as they called themselves, that found the basis of their unity only in the fact of the wealth of each member. Certainly such a union of the poor soon became impossible because, with the increasing dif- ferentiation of society, the individual differences of the members in suitable education and attitude, interests and backgrounds became too many and too strong for still allowing the strength for the society- creation of one community.
Only where poverty brings with it a positive content that is common to many poor does an association of the poor as such come about. Thus the most extreme phenomenon of poverty--the lack of shelter--allows the persons affected by it to stream together in certain shelters in the large cities. When the first haystacks are erected in the vicinity of Berlin, the homeless, the Penner (bums), find one for themselves to make a suitable night lodging in the hay. A beginning of organization, nevertheless, exists under this, since the Penner of the one territory have a kind of leader, the
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? Oberpenner, who assigns the places in the night quarters to the members of the guild and settles disputes among them. The Penner see to it that no criminal sneaks in among them, and if this does happen they do him in, i. e. betray him to the police, for whom they generally perform occasional good services. The Oberpenner are well known personages whom the authorities always know how to find if they need information about the personal details of someone with a shady existence. Such specification of poverty, which they experience through its progression up to the point of homelessness, is necessary nowadays to win for them an associative momentum. By the way it is notable that the increased general well-being, the closer police supervision, above all the social consciousness that strangely mixes good and bad sensitivities, 'cannot bear' the sight of poverty--all this imposes on poverty the tendency to hide itself ever more. And this conceivably holds the poor further apart, allows them to feel much less like a coherent stratum than could be the case in the Middle Ages. The class of the poor, especially in modern society, is a most unique social synthesis. It has its importance and place- ment in the social body because of a great homogeneity that, however, as indicated, is absent from it in terms of the individual characteristics of its members. It is the common endpoint of destinies of the most different kinds; persons from the whole range of social variation flow into it. No change, development, intensification, or depression of social life passes by it without depositing a residue in the stratum of poverty as if in a reservoir. That is what is dreadful in this poverty--as distinct from merely being poor, which everyone has to sort out for themselves and which is only a coloration of an otherwise individually qualified situation--that there are people who are only poor in terms of their social position and nothing more. Incidentally this becomes especially certain and clear by virtue of an expansive and indiscriminate almsgiv- ing, as in the Christian Middle Ages and under the rule of the Koran. But precisely to the extent that one was content with an official and unalterable fact, it did not have the bitterness and actual opposition with which a class influences the developmental and turbulent tendency of modern times that establishes its unity on a purely passive element, i. e. on that basis on which the society behaves toward the class in a certain way and treats it in a certain way. If political rights are taken away from the recipients of alms, this is the adequate expression of their not being anything socially, except being poor. This absence of a positive qualification for oneself causes what was indicated above--the stratum
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? of the poor developing no socially unifying force from outside or within itself despite the similarity of their situation. Poverty thus presents the wholly unique social constellation of a number of individuals taking up a very specific organic membership inside the whole by means of a purely individual fate. But this position is still not determined by one's own fate and condition but by others--individuals, associations, whole societies--seeking just to correct this condition, so that, according to the sociological concept, it is not the personal deficiency that makes people poor but the people supported for the sake of the deficiency are primarily the poor.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SELF-PRESERVATION OF THE GROUP1
The conflictual character that immediate experience manifests in the life of the individual--the need for conquest given at every moment, for defense against attacks, for firmness against temptations, for regaining a continuously losing balance--persists, as it were, above and below the psychological existence of the individual. The physiological processes within our bodies offer the same picture of an unceasing struggle. The self-preservation of the physical life is also never a static persistence, but an exercise in overcoming resistance, a construction of antitoxins against the poisons generated in the body itself, a response to attacks that would immediately become destructive without resistance offered against it. And such are the general forms in which the supra-individual structures also lead their lives. Even if they 'preserve themselves'--and, in fact, not only against external attacks that threaten their entire exis- tence with one stroke as it were--we combine innumerable uninter- rupted processes that are made manifest inside these structures as punch and counterpunch, peril and prevention, repulsion and reengagement among the members. For many reasons it is understandable that we see the simple stasis, the continuity of undisturbed tranquility, much more than the adjustments in play back and forth, formations of ever new means against ever new dangers in the preservation of the state and guild, church and interest group, family and school. First because the individual experiences all the frailty of life, the endlessness of offense and defense only within the self, while the corresponding processes of the collective structures are divided up among many individuals and over many points quite separated by space, content and interests, and are, therefore, not readily present in the consciousness of the individual in their entirety, though probably in their result: the persistence of the whole. Furthermore, these processes frequently occur in substrata of major dimensions and thus more slowly and ponderously over such long periods of time, so that the transitions of their individual stages
1 We are indebted to Lutz Kaelber for his many suggestions for rendering Simmel's prose in this chapter--ed.
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are barely noticeable. Finally, the most difficult but perhaps the most effective factor: all those collective structures affect us not only as indi- vidual historical realities whose temporal life process carries its entire significance, but they possess something of the timelessness of the general concept, the universal law, the general form, whose meaning and validity are not identical with the single appearing and disappear- ing example or occurrence. Admittedly the concept of the individual is also independent of the forces of reality generating or destroying one or the other individual; nevertheless we feel that the individual state or church seemingly absorbed more from the general concept of the state or church, and that here the historical structure somehow shares in the supra-particular, in the timelessness of the universal or form drawn from all the vicissitudes of life. The basis of this feeling should be that such collective structures admittedly possess an eternity relative to their individual participants and that they are indifferent toward their distinctiveness and survive their coming and going (which will be spoken about below). They proceed from there into the category of law, which is valid independently of its individual applications, and form, whose ideal meaning remains unaffected by all the variety in its material fulfillments. But these structures achieve this affinity with general timelessness only from the standpoint of the individual from whose fluctuating and transient existence they face as something persisting and ever surviving. Viewed from this comparison, they are themselves involved in the coming into and passing out of existence; if it happens in what one must call a life process, in another tempo and rhythm than that of the members, the self-preservation over a span of time, which is not a rigid unquestionability and inner immobility but a sum of internal processes, they are the defense against an enduring threat, the re-establishment of an often lost balance, the conscious or unconscious preparation of means to an end never realized by self, in order to experience the next moment.
These three kinds of self-preservation are independent of one another to a relatively great extent: Physiological self-preservation often occurs with a success or failure that is wholly opposed to the simultaneous psychological results; and this again has the same random relationship to that of the social group. The individual's instinct for self-preservation requires wholly different actions and employs wholly different powers than the self-preservation of one's group, so that the self-preservation of individuals can sometimes exist thoroughly intact and successful while that of the group becomes weak and the group splinters. Conversely
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the latter can appear in full strength although that of the individual members is in decay. Above all, this phenomenon has led to the uni- fied group being considered as a structure with an independent reality, leading a life according to its own laws and its own powers, independent of all its individual bearers--in a close analogy to the construction of a 'life spirit' or a special personal 'life force' in the physiological indi- vidual. A substantial unity, as it were, that was maintained in itself seemed to be created by the existence of the subject, in which delayed knowledge blocks the persistence of life, and replaced the thousand-fold intermeshing interaction processes among the factors. Our task in this essay is the social parallel. When we see that the most diverse social interactions visibly manifest particularly effective powers for self-preser- vation, into what more primary processes is this manifestation allowed to be decomposed? Nevertheless the persistence of the group--once it has come about--seems to portend a particular vitality, as it were, a permanence stemming from a unitary source, but which is thus only the apparent result or, more accurately, the complex of a number of individual and varying processes of social nature. Thus we ask, what particular kinds of direct or indirect interaction are there, if one speaks of the self-preservation of a social group?
The most general case in which the self-preservation of the group becomes a problem is found in the fact that it maintains its identity during the departure and change of its members. We say that it would be the same state, the same organization, the same army existing now as the one that existed for one or another number of decades or cen- turies, even though not a single one of the members of this association is 'the same' any more as in the earlier point in time. Here one of the cases is offered in which the temporal order of the phenomenon manifests a decided analogy with its spatial one. As the social union is still formed out of the individuals existing next to one another--i. e. , still outside one another--as the unavoidable separation that creates space between people is nevertheless overcome through the psychological bonds among them so that the image of a united 'one' arises in one another, so also the temporal separation of individuals and generations does not hinder their forming in our thinking a solid and continuing whole. With the spatially separated entities, this unity is borne by the interaction among them that takes place through space: among com- plex entities unity means nothing but a cohesion of the members that is represented by mutually exercised forces. With temporally separated entities, their unity cannot occur in this way since the interaction is
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absent: an earlier one can probably affect a later one, but not the other way around. Therefore, precisely by the turnover of individuals, the maintenance of the social unity constitutes a special problem that is not yet solved at the same time with the coming into being of its unity at a given instant, as was explained.
The first and most immediate temporal element that confers this continuity on the unity of the group is the persistence of the locality, the soil and earth on which it lives. The state, still more the city, but also numerous other associations, have their unity first in the terri- tory that forms the enduring substrate under all the changes in its content. In classical Greece it was above all the maintenance of the landownership to which the continuity of the family group was linked. This was carried in two opposite directions: its reduction by sale was typically regarded as an offense not only against the children but also the ancestors, since that broke the thread of the family's existence lead- ing up from them; and its increase was only possible with difficulty, depending on circumstances. Thus Greece experienced landownership from above and below, as it were, to be suited to leading the family through all the vicissitudes of its individual existence as, in principle, something indestructible. Most remarkable, but also conceivable, is this importance of landownership for the continuation of the family in view of the fact that territory and land nevertheless did not possess its later importance for the Greek concept of state. As one always spoke of foreign state 'territories' as only the sum of their inhabitants--? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 2--so for the Greeks the affiliation to one's state is never predicated on the land but only on the community of citizens. Where banished citizens are gathered in sufficient numbers elsewhere, they continue there without the state entity being further disturbed by the enemy; their continuity of life is thus manifest in the persons of the participants, but it does not seem to be bound to the land. In contrast, during the feudal and patrimonial era, the model principle by which the bond mediated by territory becomes effective in a definitely different manner. The inhabitants of the land are subject to the state government only as entities that come within its territory. Here the state as a specific formation of human materials actually has its conti- nuity only in the permanence of the soil. While acquisition and loss of the domicile in the land means acquisition and loss of citizenship, the
2 Greek: 'the Egyptians, the Persians'--ed.
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specific ground and soil is the genuine object of rule, continuation of which carries the state through all the changes of its material. To the extent that the idea of the state in its ideal unity and indestructibility rose above the idea of the privately governed kind, the indivisibility of its territory also becomes a principle; its territory is no longer an indivisible thing, but a conceptual unity that is the correlate of state unity in general. While this crosses over from the abstract sphere into that of feeling, it constructs in the latter an emotion of patriotism that is infinitely important for political self-preservation. Consequently, as the modern person feels it, the persistence of the emotional sphere is wholly indispensable for it; the fatherland is very much a part of its effectiveness for holding the political group together. In the same way it is the sociological characteristics of the circumstances, which would be somewhat similar in every other respect, that considerably differ in their actual manifestation by their varying duration. One does not tend to clarify how much every factor of a human relationship that seems completely and exclusively distinct from its factual content, from its idea and feeling, what is actually present and is effective in it, and what appears definite, although at the same time, it depends on the conscious and unconscious thoughts over the duration of these factual contents; how every relationship is inevitably influenced by one esti- mating one's survival for a longer or shorter time, by one foreseeing one's end or seeing it as unlimited, by limitness appearing only as an actual non-ending or the impossibility of an end in principle. Examples of the last mentioned cases are marriage, the relationship to God, and that to the fatherland. These temporal determinants need not change the immediate and individual content of the relationships; they are a formal, though for their course an extremely influential coloration of themselves. Thus patriotism is not at all only a feeling and an ethical bond of individuals to their political group, but it needs the collabora- tive notion that the relationship to them is not dissolvable, and in fact is not dissolvable at all despite the freedom of movement of modern people. The clarity of the patriotic basis and ground as the unalter- able and irreducible reason for that relationship becomes a vehicle of patriotism and a symbol of its limitlessness in time, and with this formal emphasis also gives its first individual moment the full solidifying force of the whole.
Now the continuation of the locality by itself admittedly does not mean the continuation of the social unit since if almost the whole population of a state is expelled or enslaved by a conquering group,
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we still speak of the displaced national group despite the continuation of the territory. The unity whose continuation is at issue is in addition a psychological one, which in turn makes the territorial basis a unify- ing basis: this inner meaning of place for consciousness can completely replace the outer one. But one, though anecdotal case, reveals in an interesting way how even this kind of unity remains linked to its par- ticular land by spiritual threads by a complete internalization of the social unity in its continuity. During the Spanish-American War in the summer of 1898 as the Spanish fleet seemed to threaten the American east coast, a Bostonian away from home was asked what he would think about his city possibly being bombarded.
"Bombard Boston! " was the response. "You talk as though Boston were a locality. Boston is not a place; Boston is a state of mind. You can no more shoot it with a gun than you could shoot wisdom, or justice, or magnanimity. "3
But once a territory has now taken on the mental bond and is des- ignated as belonging to it, this, again, on the other hand is thus an essential vehicle for the further existence of the latter. Admittedly only one vehicle, since there are enough group formations that do not need a local basis: on the one hand all small groups such as the family that can stay exactly the same during changes of residence, on the other hand all large ones--such as the ideal community of 'the republic of scholars' or the other international cultural communities of literary and artistic interests, or the global trading groups--whose essence exists precisely in the denial and superseding of every linkage to a particular locality.
In contrast to this more formal condition, the physiological con- nection of the generations, the whole network of relationships among relatives, is of incomparably greater importance for the preservation of the group. Admittedly, affinity to the tribe alone is not always enough to guarantee the unity of the connections over a long time; rather in many cases it must involve local unity. The social unity of the Jews loosened seriously despite their anthropological and confes- sional unity since their diaspora; it closed more tightly again where a group of them lived on the same territory for a long time, and the efforts of modern Zionism to re-establish their comprehensive group
3 Here Simmel quotes the man in English--ed.
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unity linked them to their settling in the same location again. But on the other hand, where other connections fail, the physiological is the ultimate refuge on which the self-preservation of the group falls back. The more the German guild system ossified and withered internally and the weaker the actual strength of its cohesion became, the more vigorously each guild sealed itself off physiologically, i. e. , made family and marriage the requirement for admission. The history of the guild system is characterized by preference being shown the masters' sons. The guild was, in the main and with certain interruptions, an associa- tion handed down to the children. Nevertheless not only were material advantage and family egoism always clearly the motives here, but also the objective social ideal of the permanence and continuity of the guild structure as such. The thought that the self-isolation of the guild intro- duces--that one master should have 'the same food' as another--is no purely individualistic one, but guarantees an inner homogeneity that would keep the unity of the group from fragmenting. But of course a numerical limitation corresponded to this exclusion of the competi- tion, for which the favoring of the master's son, i. e. the exclusion of one not physiologically belonging to the group, was the most obvious technique. Everywhere the tightness of a privileged social stratum, the strict distancing of the 'parvenu,' is the expression or means of main- taining its continuity; and this tight unity--admittedly not exclusively but most simply and plausibly--is borne on the tradition of privileges in the physiological line; it blocks at the earliest the fragmentation of the structure in a multiplicity of directions, interest-based associations, and characteristics. Augustus, who placed the greatest value on the continual preservation of the senatorial stratum as such, provided for its close unity by prohibiting its members from marrying emancipated persons, actors, and the children of these. For that stratum, however, he favored in every way the inheritance of dignity by senators' sons. Blood-relationship seemed to him as the cement that alone could hold the ordo senatorius4 together: its unity, as it were, its contraction within the latitudinal dimension, was thus bound to its expansion in the lon- gitudinal dimension of time. And in modern family life--as it presents itself as loosened, atomized, broken into a thousand ways by inner alienations and antagonistic autonomies--what still characterizes the family as one in the replacement of generations is actually the unique
4 Latin: senatorial order--ed.
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physiological connection and perhaps the succession by inheritance that is bound very closely with it. Out of all the bonds that earlier bore, the continuity of the family solidarity--occupational, religious, traditional, social standing mediated by reverence--one after the other, becomes less able to support the supra-individual unity of the family. Only the bond of the physiological, and what directly depends on it, still seems to succeed to some extent.
Therefore the genealogical linkage of generations succeeding one another is of such incomparable importance for the preservation of the uniform self of larger groups, because the replacement of one generation by the next, the succession of the one to the position of the other, does not happen all at once. The continuity is thereby created that takes into the next moment the vast majority of individuals who live in a given moment; the changeover, the separation and new entry of persons, in two contiguous moments always affects only an extremely small num- ber in relation to the ones that endure. It is a fundamental factor that humans are not bound like animals to a specific mating season, but that children are born at any time. It can thus never be actually said within a group that a new generation begins at a given moment. The exit of the old and the entry of the new members takes place in it so gradually and continuously that it appears just like a united self, like an organic body in the change of its atoms. If the replacement of members happens all at once, with a sudden removal affecting the whole group, one would hardly be able to say that the group maintains its unified self despite the loss of members. The fact that at any time those who already belonged to the group in the earlier moment comprise the vast majority against the ones that follow saves the identity of the group despite the fact that moments that are spread out far from one another may not have a single member left in common. The gradualness of the change obviously has its importance not only in the function of saving the collective identity throughout the turnover of the individuals who maintain it, but also where the changeover affects other relevant circumstances. Moreover where the political forms, law, customs, the whole culture of a group changes, whereby after a certain time it actu- ally presents a completely different picture, still the right to call it the same identical one depends on the change not affecting the totality of the life forms of the group at the same time. If it did that, it would be doubtful whether one should still call the group actually the 'same' one that it was before the critical moment; only the circumstance that the change affects only a minority of the collective life of the group at any
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given moment makes it possible for it to maintain its self completely. It can be expressed schematically this way: If the totality of the individuals or other life circumstances of the group could be described as a b c d e in one moment, but in a later moment as m n o p q, one will still speak of a preservation of its unified self, provided the development maintains the following course: a b c d e--m b c d e--m n c d e--m n o d e--m n o p e-- m n o p q, so that each step is only separated from the neighboring ones by one member and each moment shares the same main features with its neighboring moments.
This continuity amidst the change of the individuals who maintain the unity of the group is admittedly made most directly and drastically noticeable where it is based on reproduction. 5 But this could also occur in cases where this physical mediation is directly excluded, as within the Catholic clergy. Here the continuity is produced by having a sufficient number always remaining in office for instructing the new entrants. Celibacy showed here advantages over even physiological bonds for the strict uniform continuity of the group. It has been correctly noted that, given the great tendency in the Middle Ages toward the inheritance of occupations, without celibacy the clergy would have become a caste. Admittedly, this became the precise mechanism for the Russian secular clergy, which is obliged to marry, to achieve the maximum possible group continuity under this circumstance. Since the serfs could not become priests and the nobles did not want to, and since there was no actual middle class, the clergy had to replenish itself from within itself: the sons would also become priests, and they only married daughters of priests; exceptions required special permission. The Russian priesthood thereby became a caste limited to endogamy, whose lack of non-clerical family relationships conferred on them something of a freeman's sta- tus and inner continuity of the spirit of celibacy. It is remarkable that precisely this very sharp emphasis of physiological continuity in suc- cession bordered upon an equally sharp exclusiveness. Nevertheless the superiority of the other system is unmistakable. Especially in the vitality and inner diversity of West European life--in contrast to the earlier Russian--the physiologically mediated continuity would have subjected the church to a life process with all its fluctuations, rhythms, upswings and senescence, as manifest in the guilds. With heredity the clergy would
5 Simmel uses the expression, 'Proliferation. ' He may have in mind the term in plant biology, which refers to propagation by means of buds or offshoots--ed.
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have been exposed to the happenstances befalling the individual much more than now, where inclusion follows objective norms that include and exclude individuals with unbiased rigor. Here there are no undutiful sons who nevertheless remain in the family and in the class environment which thereby slackens them. Here continuity was really linked to the objective spirit with its timeless validity, and with that the transience of an only organic structure was avoided. But inevitably this requires a repressing of the individual. Thus already in the fourth century one began to prevent priests from leaving their status and membership in it, once it was accepted, and eliminated individual freedom. Only insofar as the timelessness of the collective idea was revealed in the life- long and indestructible nature of the vocation was the danger that the change of the persons brought to that continuity minimized. However this was symbolized by nothing so aptly, and maintained so effectively, as by the ordination of priests.
Here the 'spirit,' an ideal property of the church as a whole, is transferred from individual to individual, and none can attain it without this mediation. This is an ingenious means of leading the preservation of the group along an entirely unbroken line; here the sociological significance of physical propagation6 took on, through the transferal of the consecration from one to the other, a spiritual body, so to speak, that guarantees the temporal continuity of the whole structure in the purest and most undisturbed manner. This social form is duplicated in other ways too, without such crystallization to a consistent permanence of the metaphysical spirit. For example it also gives official hierarchies their permanence and allows the nature, the objective spirit itself, to be maintained throughout all the turnover of individuals (which was already also indicated then, analogous to the case of the priests, in the ancient Roman idea that the magistra- cies actually came from the gods and that the consecration to them could only be imparted to the successor by the incumbent): the mem- bers existing in a given moment are altogether eliminated only when they were united long enough with their successors in the group, i. e. , enough to fully assimilate the spirit, form, and tendency of the group. The immortality of the group depends on this change being slow and gradual enough.
The reality indicated by this expression is of the greatest impor- tance. The preservation of the consistent self of the group throughout
6 See note 5 above--ed.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.