No More Learning

Thus one can say: society arises from individuals, the indi- vidual arises from society. When the advanced culture more and more expands the social circle to which we belong with our whole personality, the individual is still in large measure on one's own and deprived of many supports and advantages of the tightly related group: thus there is now in every establishment of circles and social groups, in which people interested in the same thing can gather in whatever numbers, a compensation for that isolation of the personality that emerges from the break with the narrow confinement of earlier conditions.
The confinement of this association is to be measured by whether and to what degree such a circle has developed a particular 'honor,' of the type that the damage or the insult to the honor of one member is experienced by every other member as a diminishment of one's own honor, or that the community possesses a personal honor collectively, changes in which play out in the experience of honor of every member. With the establishment of this specific concept of honor (family honor, officers' honor, business honor, etc. ) such circles secure for themselves the purposeful behavior of their members, especially in the area of the specific difference by which they are distinguished from the widest social circle, and in such a way that with regard to the compulsory rules for such correct behavior the state's laws contain no regulations for them. 14 Thus through specific circles, which can mean even a single person, generating particular honors for themselves and the wider circle cultivating a more abstract, universal concept of honor that differs from the narrower one of the fixed special circles, but which neverthe- less still applies to the members of these latter--in this way the fine
14 Additional particulars about this in the chapter on self-preservation.
? 388 chapter six
? points of the norms of honor become symbols of the circles. There is a professional honor with a negative sign, a professional dishonor that subtracts a certain latitude from the behavior generally counting as humanly honorable or so in the whole surrounding society, just as the positive professional honor adds demands to it. Thus there were and are--for the many categories of businesspersons and again especially the speculator, but also the low penny-a-liner, the demimonde--certain things permitted and covered with a good conscience through profes- sional consciousness, practiced by them that do not otherwise generally count as honorable. 15 Next to this profession-related disrespectability the individual can, however, be thoroughly honorable in one's universally human relations in the conventional sense, in the same way incidentally as that the protection of the specific professional honor does not hinder the individual who would act thoroughly dishonorably according to general ideas. Thus various sides of the personality can be subject to various codes of honor as reflections of the various groups to which the person belongs simultaneously. The same requirement can, e. g. , thereby receive two quite different emphases. To not tolerate being insulted can be the maxim of someone who in private life, however, acts quite dif- ferently, such as in the capacity of a reserve officer or in an office. The attention to the honor of a wife as protection for one's own manliness will have a different accent in the family of a priest as opposed to a circle of young lieutenants, so that a member of the latter, who stems from the former, can feel in himself very clearly the conflict between these concepts of honor from his membership in two circles. In general this formation of professional codes of honor--which appear in the thousands quite rudimentarily dressed in simple nuances of feeling and action, in more personal or more material motives--reveals one of the most significant form-sociological developments. The narrow and strict attachment of earlier circumstances, in which the social group as a whole, with respect to its central authority, regulates all the behavior of the individual according to the most varied ways, limits its regula- tive power more and more to the essential interests of the totality; the freedom of the individual gains more and more domains for itself. These become filled by new group formations, but in such a way that
15 The expressions 'penny-a-liner' and 'demimonde' are given in English and French, respectively--ed.
? the intersection of social circles 389
? the interests of the individual determine which groups one will belong to; consequently, instead of external means of coercion, the sense of honor suffices to compel one to adhere to those norms necessary for the continued existence of the group. Moreover this process does not get its start only from the official power of coercion; in general where a group power originally dominates a number of individual life interests that stand materially outside a relation to its purposes? namely in the family, in the guild, in the religious community etc. --the dependence and association in relation to them are handed over to the specialized association in which participation is a matter of personal freedom, whereby then the task of creating society can be accomplished in a much fuller manner than through the earlier affiliation more negligent about individuality.
Furthermore, it happens that the undifferentiated domination of a social power over people, however comprehensive and strict it may be, nevertheless does not and cannot concern itself over the whole range of life's relationships, and that they will then leave to the purely individual will all those of less concern and pertinence; indeed greater coercion rules in the remaining relationships; thus the Greek and, even more so, the old Roman citizen had to subordinate himself unconditionally, certainly in everything having to do with politics only, anything then in connection to issues pertinent to the norms and purposes of his national community; however, for that reason, as lord of his house, he possessed an all-the-more unlimited domination; thus that narrowest social association, as we observed in the small groupings of indigenous peoples, gives the individual complete freedom to act in any way one desires towards all people standing outside one's tribe; thus tyranny finds in general its correlate and even its support in the most complete freedom and even lack of restraint of personalities with regard to the relationships not important for them. After this dysfunctional apportion- ment of collectivistic coercion and individualistic volition, one more appropriate and just appears, where the substantive content of the being and dispositions of persons are decisive regarding the associa- tive formation, because then collective supports for their heretofore entirely uncontrolled and individualistically determined operations are more easily found; for to the same degree to which the personality is set free as a whole, it also seeks out social affiliation for its various aspects and limits voluntarily the individualistic discretion as it finds another substitute for the undifferentiated bond to a collective power;
390 chapter six
? thus we see, e. g. , in countries with great political freedom an especially strongly cultivated unity,16 in religious communities without a strongly hierarchically exercised church authority a lively sect-formation, etc. In a word, freedom and obligation are apportioned with more balance if the social transactions, rather than the juggling of heterogeneous elements of the personality in a unitary circle, offer the possibility that the homogeneous is assembled from heterogeneous circles.
This is one of the most important ways the progressing development takes: the differentiation and division of labor are initially, so to speak, of a quantitative nature and apportion the spheres of activity in such a way certainly that for an individual or a group an other comes as one among others, but each of them includes a sum of qualitatively different relationships; however, this differentiation is later singled out and united from all these circles into one now qualitatively integrated sphere of activity. Public administration frequently develops in this manner, in such a way that the initially entirely undifferentiated center of administration sets aside an array of areas each of which is subor- dinate to an individual authority or personality. However, these areas are first of all of a local nature; thus, e. g. , a director on behalf of the French council of state is sent into a province to exercise there all the various functions that the council of state itself otherwise exercises over the entire country; it is a parceling out, depending on the quantity of work, in the form of a regional division. From that comes the later differentiation of division by functions, when, e. g. , from the council of state are formed the various ministries, each of whose activity reaches over the entire country but only in a qualitatively determined respect. The promotion of officials to the national level corresponds to this. It offers, in contrast to being restricted to the same local district, the greater possibility of always providing for the individual official the most appropriate and suitable position for one's abilities and merit, and furthermore promotes the closer functional tie of the provinces to one another. It is therefore appropriate that these promotions come only
16 Obviously this can also develop on another political basis; for example, where decidedly individualistic tendencies encounter extensive state patronization. Here the accent turns directly on the individualistic moment of the cultivation of unity, on the degree of freedom that it contains from official coercion and by which it directly grants individuality a formal support against it. As in the case cited in the text, socially borne feelings of freedom and feelings of bonding intersect even here; only here, in contrast, political groupings belong to the first and associational ones to the second. The same holds for the second example in the text [religious communities--ed. ].
? the intersection of social circles 391
? to the higher officials, while the subalterns as a rule persist for their entire lives in the same province. The greater significance of personal talent, which exists on their part in contrast to the general activity of the subaltern, is as much the cause as the effect of the sphere of one's substantive functions combining interchangeably with the characteristics and interests of multiple locations; over against the fixed locale this intersection of circles manifests the greater freedom that is the corre- late of individual life. Now a phenomenon is met that seems to negate directly the differentiation exhibited in the example from France, in reality, however, presenting yet a higher stage. In the Directorate, nearly independently, Rewbell led the Judiciary, Barras the police, Carnot the military, etc. A wholly different division of responsibilities existed, however, for appointing provincial officials: for Rewbell administered the East, Barras the South, Carnot the North, etc. The differentiation of substantive functions thus remains in force while crisscrossing all the separate locales. Now naming officials actually required expert knowl- edge only secondarily; in the first place, personal or local knowledge. Here thus was the form of local division, with its crisscrossing of all varieties of technical knowledge that would apply. The opposite of that is seen in the entirely noteworthy lack of differentiation of the Consejos, ministerial councils formed under Philip II in Spain. According to an Italian report, there were the following councils: dell' Indie, di Castiglia, d'Aragona, d'inquisizione, di camera, dell'ordini, di Guerra, di hazzienda, di giustizia, d'Italia, di stato. 17 Since all these seem to have been coordinated, the activities of the department ministers and the regional ministers must have continually collided with one another. Here there is, so to speak, only a division by function in general which is simply without principle because it allows the local and the substantive principle to function without separation.
If the specialization in the healing arts in ancient Egypt had already developed one physician for the arm and another for the leg, this was also a differentiation from the perspective of site, in contrast to which modern medicine consigns similar pathological conditions to which body members are subject to the same specialist, so that the functional simi- larity then prevails in place of grouping by accidental external features. This gets reversed then again--albeit in a different respect--with those
17 Italian: that of the Indies, Castille, Aragon, inquisition, parliament, warrants, war, finance (hazzienda, archaic Spanish), justice, Italy, state--ed.
? 392 chapter six
? specialists who do not treat only specific illnesses and only them, but all illnesses, but only with one particular method or one means. Thus, e. g. , the natural healers who cure everything ultimately with water. Here then evidently this one-dimensionality is the same as with those Egyptian physicians, only that it has a functional rather than site-related character, thanks to modern development--thereby proving that there is even within that character yet again the distinction between exter- nally mechanical and substantively adapted methods. That new form of apportionment, going beyond the older differentiation and grouping, is manifested further, for example, by the businesses that handle all the various materials for the production of complex objects, e. g. , the whole of railroad materials, all the articles for restaurateurs, dentists, shoe manufacturers, warehouses for house and kitchen equipment, etc. The integrating perspective, resulting after the combination of the objects stemming from the most varied spheres of production, is their connec- tion to an integrating purpose that they collectively serve, the terminus ad quem, while the division of labor takes place as a rule according to the integration of the terminus a quo, of the like kind of manufacture. These businesses, which have the latter certainly as a presupposition, represent a magnified division of labor in that, from entirely hetero- geneous branches that however already operate in themselves with a wide division of labor, they belong together from one point of view and, so to speak, include the divisions into a new keynote of harmony. Finally consumers' co-operatives represent yet another wholly different crisscrossing and collection of materials by a principle heterogeneous to them, especially those that are formed for specified occupational categories, for laborers, military officers, officials. In them the stocked articles are with few exceptions the same for the latter two professions; a purely formal moment of separation, fully independent of the material, allows each an existence for itself. What function this contains, however, is to be managed from this: the department store for German officials is a corporation that stands before its consumers like any merchant, that fulfills its purpose as such all the better the more that is purchased with it without the limitation to a particular clientele in and for itself being necessary for their business and one or another result. Accordingly, if it had been opened then simply as a consumers' co-operative that is immediately accessible or even only as an ordinary business that sells reliably at reasonable prices, the outcome would certainly have remained far behind what was actually achieved. Precisely this materially fully unnecessary personal restriction removes hindrances and uncertain-
the intersection of social circles 393
? ties that otherwise make business difficult and effects a strong appeal to all those included in this restriction, albeit if actually for no other reason than because it excludes everyone else. All these facts, as such, have--with perhaps the exception of the last one mentioned--evidently no social significance. They serve here only as analogies of sociological combinations and developments to show that in them universal forms and norms prevail that are operative widely over the sociological realm. The external-mechanical unity of things, their dismantling and the rational-substantive combination of elements, the manufacture of new aggregates from higher transcendent viewpoints--all these are in general typical forms of human mentality. As sociological forms are realized by an unlimited quantity of contents, so those forms themselves are arrangements of more deeply situated, more universally mental, basic functions. Everywhere form and content are only relative concepts, categories of knowledge for managing phenomena and their intellec- tual organization, so that in any relationship the very same thing that emerges as a form when seen from above, as it were, must be noted in another one as content when seen from below.
A coalescence into an integrated social consciousness that is especially interesting for the supra-individual distinctiveness by virtue of its height of abstraction is found in the solidarity of laborers as such. No matter what the individuals make, whether cannons or toys, the formal fact that they work for wages at all unites them with those located in the same situation; the common relationship to capital forms to some extent the identifying particularization18 that permits the distinction between what is in common from all the various types of jobs and creates an integration for all therein engaged. The immeasurable importance that the psychological differentiation of the concept of 'worker' in general had from that of the weaver, the mechanical engineer, the miner, etc. became definitely clear by the English reaction at the beginning of the nineteenth century; through the Corresponding Societies Act it was established that every written agreement of the labor unions among themselves and furthermore all societies that had been compounded from various branches were prohibited. There was apparently an awareness that if the merger of the general form of the relationship of
18 'Identifying particularization'--Simmel's term is Exponenten; he seems to have in mind 'exponent' as used in lingusitics to refer to a unit of discourse that concretizes another more abstract unit--ed.
? 394 chapter six
? worker with the specialty area were once dissolved, once the co-operative integration of a range of branches were shifted by an opposed paralysis of differences to an illumination of what they all have in common--the formula and the aegis of a new social circle would be thereby created and the circle's relationship to the earlier unpredictable complica- tions would yield. After the differentiation of labor forms its various branches, the more abstract consciousness finds again a common thread that ties together what these hold in common into a new social circle. The logical process manifests itself here in interaction with the socio- historical. It required the expansion of industry, hundreds or thousands of workers placed under exactly the same objectively personal condi- tions, and precisely with the advancing division of labor the different branches becoming all the more dependent on one another; it required the complete penetration of the money economy, which reduces the importance of personal ability entirely to its financial value; it required the heightening of the demands of life and their lack of fit to wages--to lend to the element of wage labor as such the decisive emphasis. In the universal concept of wage labor those social forces, relationships, circumstances collect as in a flash-point, to diffuse out from it again, as it were, in radiating effects that they would not have been able to find without this logico-formal recapitulation. And if the International had formed its sections, as mentioned, at first without regard for the trade differences, it later changed, however, and organized in trade unions--in that way, though, this was only a technical arrangement, with which they believed then to be serving the universal interest of labor; underly- ing even this, as starting and endpoint, was simply the concept of 'the worker. ' And this, in itself a concept neutralizing all the differentiations of labor, grew from a merely logical into a legal position: the right of worker safety, worker insurance, etc. generated a legal concept of the worker and filled it with a content whereby the mere fact that someone is a worker at all secures certain legal consequences. And next to the logical, ethical, legal meanings of this traversing of all the varieties of labor, the 'general strike' thereby becomes a distinct possibility--a strike that is not undertaken for the purposes of an individual trade but for pressing the political rights of the entire work force, like the Chartist strike of 1842 or the Belgian workers' strike of 1893. It is interesting how this concept, once it arose as an absolute generality, introduces the same character and its consequences even into smaller formations. In France since 1884 a law about professional associations exists, whereby twenty and more persons who practice the same or related profession
the intersection of social circles 395
? can establish themselves as a professional syndicate without authoriza- tion of the government. Thereupon, soon afterwards a syndicate of 'railroad workers' was founded, for whose members that similarity of activity does not actually exist. The common element of the blacksmiths and porters, switchmen and upholsterers, conductors and engineers is exclusively that they are all workers in support of the railroad. Of course the reason for forming syndicates is that by means of them the individual profession can exert pressure on management for which an isolated power is not enough. The meaning of 'workers in general' was narrowed here, under the same formal-logical modus procedendi, to that of 'railroad workers in general,' in which all distinctions of activity are eliminated, and became immediately practical to the extent of the narrowing. The form under which the same thing succeeds for that wider idea tends to be the coalition of coalitions. Here, where indeed the initial union of all personnel has been dismissed and only the pure concept of cabinetmaker or shoemaker, glass blower or weaver pre- vails, the concept of the worker, under the removal in principle of all distinctions of the work content, comes all the more easily and sharply to greater authority. To the mason as such it is of course immaterial whether the calico printer, who belongs to the same union federation, receives a higher or lower hourly wage. The acquisition of more favor- able working conditions is thus not the task of the cartel with regard to a single worker, but rather only to workers as a collective party.
Of course it is similarly the case when employers in different branches form coalitions; the employer in one industry has no interest as such in the relationship of the employer to the workers in another; the inten- tion of a coalition is only a matter of a strengthened position of the entrepreneur in general vis-a`-vis the worker in general. This universal concept of entrepreneur has to be generated as a correlate to that of the worker. Only, this logical synchronism does not immediately become a psychological and practical one. In essence this probably comes about from three causes: by the smaller number of entrepreneurs vis-a`-vis that of the workers (the more instances of a type come under consideration, the sooner its universal concept is formed); by the com- petition of employers among themselves, which does not exist among the workers; finally by the merging of entrepreneurial activity with its respective particular content--diminished only in the most recent period by sublimated capitalism. Modern industrial technology renders the worker much more indifferent to one's specific kind of work, just as it is correspondingly the case for the entrepreneur regarding one's
396 chapter six
? factory. Nevertheless in the end the solidarity of the worker at many points allows also the solidarity of the entrepreneurs to congeal into an effective universal of concept for the latter. There emerged not only coalitions of employers of the same branch but also coalitions of completely different coalitions. In the United States already in 1892, in view of the increasing number of strikes by workers, a federation of employers as such had been formed in order to place a party-like, united resistance against them. The earlier theoretical unity of the relationship between employers and employees, in spite of all disagree- ments, nevertheless rested on the merging of the content of the work with those formal positions. Through these correspondingly individu- ally determined relationships the differentiated universal concepts of the worker-in-general and the entrepreneur-in-general laid a diagonal line and acquired superiority over that unity. In their place came the correlation of two universal formal concepts, which are thus, as it were, determined essentially according to their logical opposition, and for which the individual worker and the individual employer, amid the withdrawal of the substantial link through the content of the work, had come to be merely incidental examples.
The rise of the business class as a partly real, partly ideal complex of persons--each one of which is just a business person in general, irrespective of what is sold--is related to the social origin of the work- ing class. However, the detachment of the universal from the specific is made easier here since the form of activity in the function of the individual merchant already possesses a great deal of independence from its content. For while the activity of the worker is thoroughly dependent on it, what the worker does then does not easily constitute itself as a pure concept of activity relative to it; the activity of the merchant is relatively independent from that with which the merchant deals, and includes, even in more primitive situations, an important diversity in the same functions of purchasing, transporting, delivering, not at all predetermined by a change in objects. So we hear originally of the 'merchant' purely and simply and find frequently even today in small German cities the business sign, Warenhandlung (Merchandise Dealer) without anything added regarding the type of goods handled. What the functional character of the individual business person reveals, the multiplicity of business people in the developed economy repeatedly is now ready to do. The variety of material contents, based on the division of labor, surrenders all the specialties of commercial business and permits then the commonality that was not in any case definitely
the intersection of social circles 397
? closely linked with a specialty to become the logical bond of the business class, whose differences in contents are traversed then by an inclusive concept of common interests. And likewise this concept marks also the dissolution of dividing lines between business people who are situated beyond the distinctiveness of the objects of their occupation. Up to the beginning of the modern era in the centers of large business exchange, individual foreign 'nations' had specific privileges that distinguished them from one another and from the local people and joined each to a particular group. But in the 16th century in Antwerp and Lyon when freedom of trade was granted, business people streamed there, unbound by those antitheses and syntheses; together and with the heretofore unheard-of concentration of trade, there arose then, from the individuals of the former 'nations' a universal 'entrepreneurship' whose rather homogeneous rights and customs were no more altered by the variety of their enterprises than their individual and national peculiarities. Once again one is able to note that the norms for trade among business people separate all the more cleanly from the special conditions necessary for a branch; accordingly economic production splits into more branches while, e. g. , in industrial cities that are essen- tially limited to one branch it is to be observed how the concept of the industrial still did not detach much from that of the iron, textile, and tool industries, and the customs even of the other kinds of industrial trade in general borrow their character principally from the branches shaping consciousness. The practical phenomena thoroughly follow even here the psychology of logic: were there only one single type of tree, the concept of tree in general would never have come to be formed. So too people who are in themselves strongly differentiated and vari- ously educated and occupied are more inclined towards cosmopolitan feelings and opinions than the one-dimensional natures to whom the universally human is represented only in that limited form because they are unable to put themselves in the shoes of other personalities and thus penetrate the experience of what is common to all. For that reason, as noted, the practical consequences of a development of a higher universality do not always appear chronologically, but give rise to the stimulus, also frequently interactively, that helps call forth the consciousness of the common ground of society. Thus, e. g. , one's soli- darity with the class of trades workers is evoked by the apprenticeship; if the work is cheapened and deteriorated by an excessive employment of apprentices, the checking of this malady in any given trade would only force the apprentices to flood another one, then only a common
398 chapter six
? action can help--a consequence, that is of course possible only through the multiplicity of trades, but the unity of all of them over their specific differences must be brought into consciousness.
Finally I will identify alongside the types of worker and business person a third as an example for the solution of an, as it were, more abstract group, whose universally conceptual qualities were until now firmly merged with the particular conditions of their elements, while these elements now identify the intersection of the newly arisen circle with relationships that it left behind as a yet more singular one. I mean the sociological evolution that the concept of 'woman' has undergone recently and that exhibits a number of otherwise not readily observable formal complications. 19 Something highly characteristic persisted in the social situation of the individual woman; quite specifically, of course, the most universal, where she is placed with all other women under one of the broadest concepts: that she is a woman and thereby fulfills the functions of her own gender; exactly this circumstance deprived her of the real formation of solidarity, of practical solidarity with other women, precisely because it bound her within the confines of the house, commanded devotion entirely to a single person, thwarted outreach beyond the given circle of relationship by marriage, family, conviviality, and if need be, by charity and religion. The parallelism among women in their being and acting has a content so constituted that it hinders the social exploitation of similarity because it means the total preoccupation of each inside one's own circle, excluding precisely the other women similarly situated. Her universal qualification as a woman is thereby a priori determined to be organically established in the interests of the circle of her house, in the most extreme sociologi- cal contrast, say, to the merchant, in whose individual activity, as we saw, the universal form stands out as though by itself in contrast to the particular contents. It appears as though in very primitive ethnological relationships the disassociation of women was negligible and they acted sometimes as a party closed off from the men. Probably in these cases the woman was not yet so completely absorbed by the interests of the household as in more developed epochs; with all the tyrannizing by the man, nevertheless, the simpler and less differentiated circumstances of family and household do not take them so far from the universal, with
19 'Woman' here translates Frau which in German, of course, is 'wife' and 'woman'--ed.
? the intersection of social circles 399
? all the women divided, and they do not melt down into as specialized an obligatory sphere as the more cultivated household represents it.
In that now in the present the latter has been relaxed enough around the 'woman question' to allow a general issue of women as a total- ity to arise and to lead to all sorts of actions, changed circumstances, formations of community--this manifests a very characteristically sociological phenomenon. The isolation of women from one another by enclosing each one of them in an entirely individualized circle of interests rests on fully differentiating women from men. With the training of the mind and activity, with the claim of personality and relationship to the surrounding world, the man appears as a whole in the ongoing processes of our culture as the higher being, and beyond the question of status both genders appear so essentially different that they are destined to be only opposing complements; the feminine existence has its meaning exclusively in that which the man cannot be or desire to do; life's meaning for them hinges thus not on relationship to the same but to the different, and they are all but completely taken up with this. However, most recently now women have fixed their eyes on an equality in all respects and have come to some opportune beginnings: in personal position and economic independence, in mental forma- tion and consciousness of personality, in social freedom and the roles in public life--they place themselves now in direct comparison to men; a party-like difference towards men that emphasizes the solidarity of women's interests with one another is announced in the moment in which the diminishment--as a cause or as an effect of it--of that prin- ciple of being and acting differently, right and interest different from men; in caricatures of the movement--women striving in their whole essence and appearance for complete masculinity--there occurs quite often the most passionate antagonism towards men. This constellation is readily understandable. In the measure of equality of position, of value, of qualities, independence must be developed over against him with whom one until now stood in a relationship of the lower or at best the merely other and therefore relied on for one's being. This one- dimensional freedom, however, obviously allows what that being has in common with others to become more strongly visible and effective, and until now that did not occur on account of the subordinate and complementary relationship. So there exists here an extraordinarily pure case of the formation of a higher, conceptually universal circle, differentiated from the narrower circles that until now relegated every element to a singular relation. One should not get the idea that the
400 chapter six
? proletarian and the bourgeois women's movements are moving in dia- metrically opposed practical directions. The proletarian woman was given socio-economic freedom by industrial development--however miserable it may be for its individual women. The girl goes into the factory at an age that certainly would still require the more intimate atmosphere of the parental home; the married woman is removed by work outside the house from household duties towards husband and children. Here then the woman is actually freed from the singular bond in which she was entirely determined by the subordination under the man or by activity completely different from him. This social reality remains entirely untouched by the fact that it is undesired and injuri- ous, and that the desire of the proletarian woman is for a limitation of that 'freedom,' for the possibility of being again to a greater degree a familial being, wife and mother. Within the bourgeois stratum the same economic development removed countless housekeeping activities from the home, both mere functions and productive creations, and thereby deprived an enormous number of women the sufficient testing of their powers--while they nevertheless, certainly for the most part, remained harnessed within the boundaries of the home. Their longing, then, is for the freedom of economic or other activity; they feel themselves subjectively detached from the particular sphere of the household, just as the proletarian woman feels that way from the outside. From this difference of strata in which the detachment is complete, there follows the difference of practical desire: the one class of women wants back in the house, the other wants out of the house. However, apart from this, this difference still gives way to equivalences: the woman question with regard marriage law, property law, authority over children, etc. affects both classes equally--so the essentials remain in force that in the one as in the other form the sociological isolation of the woman, the result of her integration into the home, is pressured by modern industrialization toward dissolution. Whether this occurs in the form of too much or in that of too little, in both cases the independence won as well as that striven for shifts the accent to the fact that the woman is simply a woman who shares practical situations and needs with other women. With the dissolution of complete, particular occupation by the household, the universal concept of woman loses its purely abstract character and becomes the leading idea of a membership group that is now already revealed in embryo by purely female support associations, associations for attaining rights for women, female student unions, women's congresses, agitation by women for political and social inter-
the intersection of social circles 401
? ests. Corresponding to the extraordinary closeness of the historically existing ties of the concept, woman, to the specific life contents of the individuals--which is much greater than correspondingly in the case of the worker and the business person--indeed no one today can say what the actual direction and limit of the movement is; but what has been achieved is that very many individual women experience themselves as standing at the intersection of groupings that tie them on the one hand to the persons and contents of their personal lives, on the other to women in general.
Should the differentiation here bring about the construction of the superordinate sphere from that of the more individual, in which it for- merly lay only latent, then it now has, secondly, even more coordinated circles to free from one another. The guild, e. g. , exercised oversight over the whole personality in the sense that the interest of the craft had to regulate the entirety of one's activity. One who became an apprentice under a master became at the same time a member of the master's family etc. ; in brief, the specialized occupation became most firmly the center of all of life, often including the political and affec- tive life. Of the forces that led to the dissolution of these amalgama- tions, that lying in the division of labor is here under consideration. In every human being whose various life contents are guided by a circle of interest, the power of this latter will ceteris paribus be reduced to the same degree as it is reduced in itself in scope. Narrowness of consciousness causes a complex occupation, a multiplicity of concepts accompanying it, even the other unrelated ideas about the world, to be drawn into its insular spell. 20 Substantive relationships between the narrowness of consciousness and these elements need not exist at all; through the necessity, in an occupation not narrowed by the division of labor, to exchange ideas relatively quickly--with the symbolic man- ner of speaking to which one is bound in more complicated problems in thinking--such a measure of psychic energy is consumed that the cultivation of other interests suffers from it, and now those thus weak- ened come all the more likely into associative or other dependence on that central cognitive circle. Just as a person filled with a great passion places even the most remote content, every encounter with superfluous material that runs through one's consciousness, into some kind of
20 'Insular spell': Simmel uses the term Bann, which means both 'excommunication' and 'spell'--ed.
? 402 chapter six
? connection to that passion, just as one's whole mental life receives its light and its shadows from it--so a corresponding mental centraliza- tion is effected by every vocation that leaves only a relatively small amount of consciousness for life's other relationships. Herein lies one of the most important internal consequences of the division of labor; it is grounded in the psychological fact, already mentioned, that in a given time, all other things being equal, the more conceptual power is employed, the more frequently the consciousness of one concept must be exchanged for another. This exchange of ideas has the same result as the intensity of a passion does in its case. Therefore, an activity not subject to the division of labor, again all things being equal, becomes a central one sooner than does a specialized one; everything else is drawn into an absorbing place in the course of a person's life, and certainly especially in periods during which the rest of life's relation- ships still lack the variety and change-filled stimulations of the modern era. Furthermore, one-dimensional occupations tend to be of a more mechanical nature and therefore--wherever they by chance do not render mental energy entirely atrophied by the complete absorption of strength and time--allow more space in consciousness for other con- nections, with their value and their independence. This coordinating segregation of interests that were formerly merged into a central one is promoted also by yet another consequence of the division of labor that coheres with the above discussed detachment of the higher social concept from the more particularly determined circles. Associations between central and peripheral concepts and circles of interest, which were constructed merely from psychological and historical causes, are for the most part held substantively necessary for as long a time until experience shows us personalities that exhibit the very same center along with a different periphery or an equivalent periphery along with a different center. If then membership in a vocation would render the rest of life's interests dependent on it, this dependence would have to loosen with the increase of occupational branches because, in spite of their differentiation, many kinds of similarities come to light in all the rest of the interests.
This form of development becomes most important for the inner and outer circumstances of people. A certain element in us is bound to another one that represents a universal character in a particular pattern shared with many others; and the bond takes up this second one originally in the unbroken coherence of its universality as well as its particular type. Now a process of dissolution occurs in this way:
the intersection of social circles 403
? the first element binds somewhere with a third that offers for sure the universal of the second but in an entirely other particularity. This experience can have two rather opposed consequences, depending on how both parts of the second element are blended. Should this be the case in a very close type, the bond of the elements from which we began is altogether severed. This will frequently occur, e. g. , with the connection of the moral life to the religious. For the individual person, one's religion as a rule is the religion; any other is not at all consid- ered. If that person has grounded morality on the particular concepts of this religion and then has the convincing experience that another morality, just as good, just as correct and valuable, is derived for other individuals fully from other religious ideas, then probably only in very rare instances will one conclude: morality is then in general linked to the religious sentiment only by that which is common to all religions. Rather one is more likely to draw the sweeping conclusion: morality actually has nothing to do with religion; one will then acquire from that the autonomy of morality, and not the likewise at least logically justi- fied idea of connecting it to the sustaining universality of religion. It is different, e. g. , where people acquire the feeling of having fulfilled one's duty only from an altruism that is ongoingly bound up for them with a painful conquest of the 'I,' with an ascetic self-mortification. Should one then notice in other people that the same calm and satisfaction of conscience has its source in an easily and freely exercised altruism, in a life obviously serene for others, it is then not so easily concluded that the sought-for inner peace and the feeling, to be something valu- able, would have had nothing at all to do with the dedication to the non-ego, but only that the particularly ascetic development of altruism is not required for it, that this, even in an entirely different form and color, has the same result, even though its universality is still preserved. The aforementioned issue of the detachment of occupational interest from the rest of life's interests by means of the multiplicity of occupa- tions, though only an inclination in the earlier phenomenon, becomes a certain intermediate phenomenon as a primary consequence. That a person has an occupation at all will always be connected to the total- ity of one's life; this entirely formal universal will always function as a center toward which many other points of life's periphery are oriented. However, this remains itself a formal, functional accomplishment of the occupation and is compatible with the increasing loosening of all occupational contents from the truly personal in life.
The growing differentiation of occupations had to show the individual
404 chapter six
? how the very same orientation of different life contents can be linked with different occupations and thus must be independent from one's occupation to an increasingly greater extent. And the differentiation of those other life contents similarly advancing with the cultural move- ment lead to the same result. The diversity of occupation along with a homogeneity of the rest of the interests and the diversity of these along with a homogeneity of occupation had to lead, in the same way, to their psychological and actual detachment from one another. Should we look at the progress of the differentiation and concentration, from schematic points of view external to those of greater intimacy, there is manifest then a definite analogy in the theoretical realm: it was earlier believed that one could, by the collection of larger groups of life forms according to the characteristics of an external affinity, resolve the most important tasks of understanding them; but one obtained a yet deeper and more correct insight only by discovering morphological and physiological similarities in apparently very different things that one had brought under correspondingly different conceptual types, and thus one came to laws of organic life that were realized at widely separated points in the array of organic beings, and the knowledge of them brought about unification of what one earlier had distributed according to external criteria in conceptual types of completely independent origin. Here the collecting of materially homogeneous from heterogeneous circles marks the higher level of development.
A circle expanding around a new rational center in place of a more mechanical-superficial one does not always need to assemble its material from various constructs; i. e. , it need not always mean the creation of new groups. Rather, it happens that the exact same circle is transformed from one to another form, that by way of the already existing synthesis a higher, more organic concept displaces the cruder and more random from its root-like, collating function. To an extent the twelfth century development followed in Rouen and other northern French cities in the so-called iurati communiae follows this schema. 21 These formed a com- munity obligated by a mutual oath that generally coincided with the citizenry probably in essence but not completely and not in principle. Then we hear in the constitutions of the community about inhabitants who violate the iurati, as well as those who pretend falsely to belong to them. Now, however, even further: whoever lived a year and a day in the
21 Iurati communiae--Latin, 'oaths of community'--ed.
? the intersection of social circles 405
? city, as the law specified, is supposed to swear allegiance to a communia, and whoever wants to get out of it is supposed to leave the area of the city. This commune grew in strength everywhere to such an extent that in the end it drew into itself the entire population, not always entirely voluntarily. Here then was at first a purely local relatively accidental association of city dwellers as such. This will, however, gradually grow from an intentional, founded-on-principle, purpose-driven association until the entire complex, without being essentially modified in its mate- rial and in the fact of its solidarity, is the bearer of this new higher type of union. The rational form, intersected by an integrating idea from an organized circle, is not the more primitive, if you will, more natural, but only the, so to speak, more solemn, more spiritual form, in which the latter comes together as though it were new. In matters of the broadest scope, this evolution in form is repeated in the relational bond between colonies and their mother country. European coloniza- tion, since Columbus and Vasco de Gama, allowed areas that lay quite far from the mother country and drew as good as no advantage from belonging to it still to be obliged on that basis to pay tribute and be considered a mere property. This objectively unjustified mode of linkage led to the secession of most colonies. At first when the thought arose, which Greater Britain represented, that the colony is simply a province of the mother country having equal rights with every province within the same realm, the basis for secession was absent. Since the manner of linkage has now been changed from a crudely external welding to one conforming to a higher sense of belonging, whose unity is no longer a rigid one but rather elastic, self-administration of the colony is rela- tive independence of the member of an organic body. Instead of the simultaneity of the schematic and the rational synthesis, to which in the earlier examples the style of the new was driven by the old, here the same differentiation in form exists in a sequence.
If the triumph of the rationally objective principle over the superfi- cially schematic thus goes hand in hand with universal cultural progress, this connection nevertheless, because it is not an a priori, can be broken under certain circumstances. The solidarity of the family appears, certainly in contrast to the bond according to objective viewpoints, as a mechanically external principle, yet on the other hand as one objec- tively grounded, if one views it in contrast to one of a purely numeri- cal arrangement, as is seen in the grouping in tens and hundreds in ancient Peru, in China, and in a large part of ancient Europe. While the socio-political homogeneity of the family and its responsibility as
406 chapter six
? a whole for each member makes good sense and appears all the more rational the more one learns how the operation of heredity operates, the forging together of a continuously standardized number of persons to a group treated as a unity--with regard to structure, military duty, taxation, criminal responsibility, etc. --wholly lacks a rational root, and yet it acts, where we can follow it, as an ersatz of the kin principle and is of use to a higher stage of culture. The justification for it also lies not in the terminus a quo--with regard to this the family principle as a ground for differentiation and integration surpasses all others--but in the terminus ad quem; for the higher purpose of the state this is, precisely on account of its schematic character, an easily understood and easily organized division obviously more suitable than the older one. The military orders of ancient times were for the most part built on the principle of the clan- or family-like division. The Greeks of the heroic period fought according to phylae and phratries, the Germans accord- ing to tribes and lineages, the ancient Scots according to clans, each of which was recognizable in larger common undertakings by special insignia. This organic structure certainly had considerable purposeful- ness: a large capacity for holding the individual section together, a spur to ambition, a certain relieving of the high command for the concern with individuals and for the constituting of each cadre. However, these advantages were paid for by the frequent flare up of old prejudices and conflicts of the clans against one another and the hindering of the unity of the entire movement, the individual sections lacking altogether the organic bond and solidarity among themselves to the same degree to which each possessed these characteristics in itself. The totality was then certainly formed inorganically from its elements in spite of or because these elements were whole in themselves. And the mechani- cal construction of later armies without any kind of concern for the inner relationship among the elements of the division, seen from the standpoint of the whole, is internally much more organic when one understands under this concept the purposeful integrating regulation of every tiny part by a unifying idea, the reciprocal determination between each element and every other. This new ordering grasps the individual directly, and in that its divisions and groupings cut across all the others ruthlessly, it destroys organic bonds in favor of a mechanism, promoting though in an incomparably higher way the purpose from which that form, originally more organic in meaning, draws its value. Here discourse is generally about the concept of technique, certainly essential for more advanced times. Over against the more directionless,
the intersection of social circles 407
? more instinctively integrating constitution of life of primitive epochs, latter times succeed at achieving more cultural objectives with more mechanical means. So in the principles of a parliamentary election, in the way the precincts established for it cut through the pre-existing groups, this development stands out. Representation by categories--as, e. g. , the Estates-General under Philip the Fair were representatives of clergy, nobility, and cities--appear at first as the natural and organic over against the purely external division of electoral bodies--as the Netherlands' Estates-General under Philipp II were local representa- tives of the individual provinces. The spatial enclosure includes such manifold often irreconcilable interests that a concerted expression of will by a single representative as well as that representative's vote is disqualified; the representation of interests, however, a principle more rational than that mechanical-external one, seems precisely to succeed at this. In reality the case is quite plain with regard to the army divi- sion. The individual groups--the complex of interests with its repre- sentatives--are in the final case more organically construed, but they stand more inorganically next to one another. The territorial mode of election is certainly more mechanical, but the exclusively territorial election does not also need to mean a representation of the exclusively territorial interest; rather it is precisely the technique for the organic composition of the whole, in that the single Member of Parliament in principle represents the whole country. The emerging partisan division according to political tendencies, following its concept, then pertains only to the variety of convictions with regard to the means which are solely important for achieving the well-being of the whole. The representa- tion then of estates or of interests, as the case may be, with the logical strength of a higher concept, cuts across the superficiality of regional boundaries and in the process by this partial rationalism cheats the local-mechanical division as the technique for the much higher organic synthesis of the whole.
This is a principal developmental, by all means also sociological, schema of the culture: that meaningful, deeply significant institutions and patterns of action are replaced by those that appear in and of themselves completely mechanical, external, soulless; only the higher purpose, lying beyond that earlier stage, gives its combined efforts or its subsequent result a cultural significance, which each individual ele- ment must itself do without; this character is carried by the modern soldier in contrast to the knight of the Middle Ages, machine work in contrast to handicrafts, the modern uniformity and leveling of so many
408 chapter six
? circumstances of life that were earlier left up to the free self-education of the individual; now the enterprise is on the one hand too large and too complex to express a, so to speak, complete concept in any one of its elements; each of these can instead have only a mechanical and, for its own part, meaningless character and contribute its part to the realization of a concept only as a member of a totality. On the other hand there is often operative a differentiation that releases the mental element of activity, so that the mechanical and the mental obtain a separate existence, as, e. g. , the worker at the embroidery machine exer- cises a much more mindless activity than the embroiderer has objecti- fied in it while the spirit of this activity, so to speak, was transferred to the machine. Thus social institutions, hierarchies, assemblages can become more mechanical and superficial and yet serve the advance of culture, the inner unity of a totality, when a higher social purpose arises, to which they have to subordinate themselves and which no longer allows them to preserve for themselves the spirit and meaning with which an earlier situation completed the teleological set; and thus that exchange of the tribal principle for the principle of social division by tens is explained, although this actually appears as an integration of the objectively heterogeneous in contrast to the natural homogeneity of the family.
CHAPTER SEVEN THE POOR PERSON
Insofar as the human individual is social in nature, to each person's duty there corresponds another's right. Perhaps even more profound is the view that there are only rights in the first instance, that every individual has claims--those of human beings in general and those arising from their special situations--which as such become duties for the other. But since everyone who is thus entitled is also somehow obli- gated, a network of rights and duties back and forth arises in which it is the right that is the primary, leading factor; duty is admittedly only its unavoidable correlate situated in the same activity. One can look at society in general as a reciprocity of moral, legal, and conventional relationships, and as a reality justified under many other categories; that this implies a duty for others is only, so to speak, a logical or technical consequence, and if the unthinkable were to happen, that satisfying every claim in a way other than in the form of fulfilling the obligation were to be sufficient, society would not require the category of duty. With a radicalism that admittedly does not correspond to psychological reality, in the sense that an ethical-ideal construction would be feasible, all of love and sympathy, magnanimity and religious impulse could be regarded as the rights of the one receiving them. Ethical rigorism has already made the assertion about those motivations, that at the most what a person could accomplish at all would be the fulfillment of a duty, and that this already demand of itself what appears from a lax or self-flattering attitude as meritorious beyond duty; and from here it is only a step behind every duty on the part of one who is obligated, to establish the right of the entitled person. Indeed, this actually appears as the ultimately attainable and rational basis upon which one's actions toward another are demanded.
Now here appears a basic contrast between the sociological and ethical categories. While all relational acts are derived from a right--in the broadest sense that includes legal right as a component--the rela- tionship of one person to another has penetrated the moral values of the individual completely and by itself determines their direction. But opposed to the unquestionable idealism of this standpoint stands the
410 chapter seven
? no less profound refusal of any inter-individual origin of duty: our duties would be duties toward ourselves, and there would be no others at all. They may have action directed toward the other as content, but their form and motivation could not come to us as a duty from that, but would arise as pure autonomy from the 'I' and from its sheer inte- rior, completely independent of anything outside itself. Only for right would the other be the terminus a quo of the motivation in our ethical behavior; in contrast, for morality as such the other is unconditionally the terminus ad quem. Ultimately, we are responsible for the morality of our actions only to ourselves, to the better 'I' in us, to the respect we have for ourselves, or as one may put the enigmatic point, what the soul finds within itself as its ultimate authority and from which it freely decides in what way the rights of the other are duties for it.
This principal dualism in the basic feeling for the sense of moral action has an example or empirical symbol in the different conceptions about providing assistance to the poor. The duty to provide it can appear as a mere correlate of the claims of the poor person. Especially in countries where begging is a regular business, the beggar believes, more or less naively, in a right to the alms, the refusal of which the beggar reprimands as the evasion of an obligatory tribute. The basis for the claim for support from the membership group has a completely differ- ent character--within the same type. A social perspective, according to which the individual is but the product of the social milieu, accords the beggar the right to demand a compensation for every emergency and loss. But even where no such extreme absence of self-responsibility exists, one could place emphasis, from a social perspective, on the right of the needy as the basis of all poor relief. Only when one assumes such a right, at least as a socio-legal fiction, the conduct of poor relief appears to be removed from what is arbitrary, from the dependence on chance financial conditions and other insecurities; the reliability of a function is increased everywhere if right constructs its methodological starting point in the correlation-pair of right and duty underlying it: for a person is on average more quickly prepared to claim a right than to fulfill a duty. Add to that the humanitarian motive, which makes the application and acceptance of support inwardly easy for the poor, since they are simply realizing their proper right; the dejection, the shame, and the degradation from charity are neutralized for the recipient to the extent that it is not granted out of mercy, a sense of duty, or expediency, but to the extent that it can be demanded. Since this right obviously has limits that are to be separately determined in every individual instance,
the poor person 411
? the right to support will not change these motivations toward others in a substantially quantitative sense. Their inner meaning is only established by it and rises out of a principal opinion about the relationship of the individual to other individuals and to the whole. The right to support belongs in the same category as the right to work and the right to one's existence. The obscurity of the quantitative limit that is suitable for this and other 'human rights' admittedly reaches its maximum especially with those where the support is with money, whose purely quantitative and relative character makes the objective demarcation of the claims much more difficult than, perhaps, the support in kind--as soon as it does not concern very complicated or individualized cases in which the poor person will use monetary help for greater purpose and productiv- ity than one could achieve with support in kind with its providential character. Toward whom the right of the poor is in fact aimed is also in no way clear, and the decision about that marks deep sociological differences. The poor person, whose situation seems to be an injustice of the world order and who demands a remedy from, so to speak, the whole of existence, will easily make every individual who is found better situated by chance answerable to this demand out of solidarity. This creates a range: from criminal proletarians who see enemies in all well-dressed people, representatives of the class that 'disinherited' them, and who therefore rob them with a good conscience, to the humble beggars who implore for offerings "for the sake of God," i. e. as though each individual were obligated to fill the gaps in an order actually willed but not completely realized by God. Here the demand of the poor is aimed at the individual, but not at a particular one but only by virtue of the solidarity of humanity in general. Beyond this correlation, which allows precisely the whole of being, in view of the demand directed against it, to crystallize around any given individual as a representative, there are the richly shaded particular collectivi- ties to whom the demand of the poor person turns. State, municipal community, parish, professional organization, friendship circles, and families may have as wholes exceedingly different relationships with their membership; still each of these relationships seems to contain an element that is actualized as a right for support in case an individual becomes pauperized. This is also common among such sociological relationships where they are perhaps otherwise very heterogeneous in nature. The claims of the poor springing from such bonds combine in unique ways in primitive settings, in which tribal customs and religious duties dominate the individual as an undifferentiated unity. Among the
412 chapter seven
? ancient Semites the claim of the poor for participation in meals did not have a correlate in personal generosity but in social membership and religious custom. Where care of the poor has a sufficient basis in an organic linkage among the members, the right of the poor gener- ally possesses a stronger emphasis--whether it derives religiously from metaphysical unity or from biologically based tribal or familial unity. We will see that where, on the contrary, the care for the poor depends teleologically on one reaching a goal through it instead of causally on an existing and real unity of the association of a group, the claim of the poor as a right is reduced to complete nothingness.
In fact while right and duty only appear in the cases referred to as two sides of an absolute relational unity, wholly new changes come about as soon as the duty of the giver, instead of the right of the recipient, forms the point of departure. In the extreme case, the poor person vanishes completely as a deserving subject and point of interest; the motive for giving lies exclusively in the importance of the giving for the giver. As Jesus said to the rich young man: give your possession to the poor--obviously his concern was not at all for the poor but rather for the soul of the young man, for whose salvation the renunciation was a mere means or symbol of salvation. The later Christian alms-giving is of the same nature: it is nothing but a form of asceticism or 'good work' that improves the otherworldly fate of the giver. The excesses of begging in the Middle Ages, the meaninglessness in the use of offer- ings, the demoralization of the proletariat by indiscriminate offerings, the contributions that worked against all cultural activity--this is the revenge, as it were, of almsgiving for a motive that is purely subjectivistic and one that takes into consideration only the giver of the offering, but not the recipient. From such a restriction on the person that gives, the motivation goes away--without being devoted to the recipient--as soon as the welfare of the social whole necessitates the care of the poor. That happens, willingly or required by law, in order to not allow the poor person to become an active, dangerous enemy of society, in order to make the diminished power of the poor person once again productive for it, and in order to prevent the degeneration of the poor person's descendents. Therefore the poor person as a person, the reflection of the situation of the poor in the person's feelings, is just as indifferent as it is for those who give alms for the sake of the salvation of their own soul; the subjective egoism of the latter is indeed overcome, but not for the sake of the poor but for that of society: the poor person receiving the offering is not the goal but a mere means, as in the former
the poor person 413
? case. The dominance of the social point of view of alms is proven by the fact that, from that perspective, it can just as well be refused--and indeed often personal pity or the unpleasant situation of saying "No" would directly move us to give.
Thus the care for the poor as a public arrangement now points to a very unique sociological constellation. It is thoroughly personal in content; it does not do anything other than relieve individual difficul- ties. It thereby differs from all other arrangements of public welfare and protection. For these would benefit all citizens--the military and police, school and roads, court and church, parliament and research. In principle these are not directed toward people as distinct individuals but rather to their totality itself; the union of many or all is the object of these institutions. The care of the poor, in contrast, in its concrete effects is entirely concerned with individuals and their condition. And precisely this individual becomes the destination of the modern abstract form of welfare, but not completely its ultimate purpose, which rather lies in the protection and support of the community. Indeed, one can- not designate the poor as a means to this--which would still improve the person's position--since the social action does not serve them but only a certain objective means of a material and administrative kind in order to eliminate the dangers threatened by them and to do away with the detractions from the achievable public interest. For sure this formal constellation apparently holds simply not only for the general whole but also for smaller circles: there is even unlimited help within the family not only for the sake of the person who is supported but thereby it would be no disgrace for the family and the family would not lose its reputation through the mere fact of a member's poverty. The support granted by the English labor unions to their members during unemployment was meant not so much to bring about an alleviation of individual want as to prevent the unemployed from working too cheaply out of need and thus depress the wage rate of the whole work force. From this meaning of welfare it becomes clear that, while it takes from the prosperous and gives to the poor, it still in no way approaches an equalization of these individual positions and that its idea will not at all overcome the tendency for the differentiation of society into rich and poor. Rather, the structure of society, as it simply exists, relies basically on the sharpest difference from any socialist and communist efforts that would have overcome this very structure. Its intent is precisely to mitigate some of the extreme manifestations of social division enough so that every structure can rely on it further. If it depended on the interest
414 chapter seven
? in the individual poor person, there would in principle be no suitable limit where the provision of goods would have to stop, before it would achieve equality. But since it occurs instead of that, in the interest of the whole society--of political, familial, and any other socially defined circles--it has no basis for being sufficient in kind or quantity for the individual, since the preservation of the concerned totality in its status quo requires it.
Where this purely social, centralist teleology exists, the care of the poor offers perhaps the widest sociological tension between the imme- diate and remote end of an action. Emotionally, the alleviation of the subjective need is so categorical an end in itself that to dethrone it from its position of last resort and to make it a mere technique for the supra-subjective ends of a social unity, is a most extreme triumph of the social, a distancing of society from the individual that, with all its external inconspicuousness, is more fundamental and radical in its coolness and abstract character than the sacrifices of the individual for the whole, whereby means and end tend to be bound together in one emotional line.
The unique complication of duty and right that is found in modern government welfare is explained in this basic sociological conceptual- ization. In more than one instance, the principle confronts us that the duty to support the poor would exist on the part of the state, but no right on the part of the poor to be supported would correspond to it. As is expressly emphasized in England, for example, they have no cause for complaint or claim for damages for unlawfully denied support. In some ways the entire relationship of duties and rights transcends them. The right that corresponds to every duty of the state is not theirs but that of every individual citizen for the taxes levied for the poor to be raised to such a high level and be used in such a way that the public purposes of caring for the poor are actually served as well. Thus the poor would not have a legal cause for action if the care for the poor were neglected, but only the other members indirectly injured by this neglect. Thus if one could prove, for example, that a thief would have refrained from a robbery if the legally proper and requested poor relief had been granted him, in principle the person robbed could prosecute the welfare agency for damages. Support for the poor occupies the same place in legal teleology as the protection of animals. No one among us is punished for simply tormenting an animal, but only for having done it "publicly or in a way that causes scandal. " Thus not the abused ani- mal but the consideration for the witnesses of the abuse motivates the
the poor person 415
? punishment. This exclusion of the poor, which grants them no ultimate position in the teleological chain--indeed as we saw, not even really the status of being a means--is also revealed in the fact that in the modern relatively democratic states almost only here the persons having an essential interest in the administration are absolutely uninvolved in the administration of it. For a conception thusly noted, the care for the poor is just an expenditure of public resources for public purposes; and since its entire teleology thus lies outside of the poor themselves--which correspondingly is not the case with the interests of other administra- tive matters--it is only logical for the principle of self-administration otherwise acknowledged to some degree not to apply to the poor and the care of them. If the state is somehow obliged by a law to divert a torrent of water and thus manage to irrigate a certain district, the brook is somewhat in the situation of the support of the poor by the state: they are admittedly the objects of duty, but not the bearers of a right corresponding to it, which is what the lands adjacent to the brook are. But if the exclusively centralizing interest prevails at first, so can the right-duty relationship also be shifted in view of utilitarian considerations. The draft of the Prussian poor law of 1842 emphasized that the state must undertake the care of the poor in the interest of the public's common good. To that end it would order under public law that their agencies be bound to the support of needy individuals; it would not be about the latter themselves, who would possess no legal claim. This is indicated more pointedly where the state law imposes a duty on the better situated relatives to feed the poor. Here at first glance the poor person actually seems to have a claim on the prosperous relative, a claim that the state endeavors to secure and enforce. The inner sense is different, however. The political community provides for the poor for practical reasons, and in turn it creates on its part the backing for support on the relatives since the costs would otherwise be prohibitive to it or at least believed to be so. The immediate claim of one person on another that is in play, to an extent, between the poor and the rich brother and which is only a moral one, does not apply to the law at all; the law has exclusively the interests of the whole to look after and perceives it from both sides: the poor who are supported and the cost it exacts from their relatives. Such proceedings as the following show that this is the sociological structure of the sustenance law and that they would in no way give the force of law to what is only a moral duty: Certainly the moral responsibility for support among siblings is a most highly stringent one. However, as it was meant to be legally
416 chapter seven
? established in the first draft of the civil code, the motives recognized the extraordinary hardness of it without further comment, and the introduction thereby gave the justification that the public burden of the poor would otherwise be increased too much. The very same thing is proven by the fact that the legal obligation to support sometimes extends to deciding the amount that would be required from the indi- vidual-moral standpoint. The high court has decided against an old man in needy circumstances, ruling that he had to provide his only property, a few hundred marks, for the support of an unemployable son, even though he explained credibly that he would soon himself be unemployable and that the money was his only reserve. It is extremely doubtful whether one can still speak in this case of a moral right of the son; but the general society does not question this either but only about whether under general current norms it can be held harmless for its duty toward the poor person. Moreover, this inner meaning of the obligation to provide sustenance is rightly symbolized by the practical course: at first the poor person is supported adequately upon making a plea and then only is inquiry made into a son or father who eventu- ally, according to his financial status, will be sentenced to reimburse not the whole cost of the care, but perhaps a half or a third. The exclusively social meaning of the regulation is also discernible in that, according to the code of civil law, the obligation to support only has to enter in when it would not 'endanger' the 'living standard' of the person obligated. Whether support short of such endangerment would even be morally required in certain cases is at least doubtful. But the public cannot do without it in every instance since the descent of an individual in social standing does harm to the stability of society as a whole, which still seems to outweigh in social importance the material advantage to the individual gained by the extortion. Thus the duty to support does not contain a right of the poor to make a claim on their prosperous relatives; it is nothing other than the support duty obliging the state, which it passed on to the relatives and which required no corresponding claim at all on the part of the poor.
Now the above mentioned metaphor of the flowing stream was inex- act to the extent that the poor individual is not only a poor person but also a citizen. To the extent that the poor, admittedly, have their share in the entitlement that the law accords all citizens as a correlate of the duty of the state to support the poor, to maintain the parallel with the brook and the adjacent lands, they are both the brook and lands adjacent to it in the sense in which the richest citizen is too. Even though the state
the poor person 417
? services, formally standing at the same admittedly ideal distance over all citizens, gain a much different substantive importance for individual situations themselves, and if the poor person is therefore not involved in the welfare system as a goal-setting subject but only as a member of the encompassing teleological state organization, still the poor person's role, so to speak, in this state function is a different one from that of the prosperous person. Hence we have the sociological insight that the entire materially caused uniqueness in the situation of the supported poor that on the one hand makes an individual's well-being the end goal of assistance, and on the other places one in opposition to the general intention of the state as an object without rights and a material to be molded--that this does not quite prevent someone's belonging as a member of the body politic. Despite those two definitions by which welfare seems to place one outside the body politic, or more correctly, makes someone organically a part of the whole, the poor person belongs to the historical reality of the society that lives in him and above him, ever as much a form-sociological member as the official, the taxpayer, the teacher, or the mediator of some transaction. The poor person, who admittedly stands materially, so to speak, outside the group in which he or she dwells, behaves somewhat as a stranger to the group; but a whole structure simply exists that encompasses both the stranger and the indigenous parts of the group whose particular interactions with the stranger create a group in a wider sense and characterize the actual historically existing circle. Thus the poor person is admittedly put in a sense outside the group, but this being outside is only a particular kind of interaction with it that weaves one into a union with the whole in this widest sense.
The sociological antinomy of the poor, in which the social-ethical difficulties of caring for the poor are mirrored, is resolved by this conceptualization. The solipsistic tendency of the medieval type of alms, which I mentioned, went past the poor internally, so to speak, for whom the action pertains externally; it was the complete neglect of the principle: never treat the other person as a mere means but always as an end at the same time. If in principle now the recipient is also a donor, a causal ray returns from him the donor, and this just turns the gift into a reciprocal action, into a social occurrence. But as in any case, if the recipients are completely excluded from the intended process of giving, and they play no other role than that of a box into which a donation for a mass for the dead is placed, so is the interaction cut off, and the action of giving is not a social event but a purely individual
418 chapter seven
? one. Now, however, it seems the modern handling of welfare does not treat the poor person as an end; but it still remains to be said that the poor person, standing in this teleological line that reaches beyond, still belongs organically to the whole and on that given basis is an element woven into its purposive process. Admittedly, a person's response to the donation that was given concerns each individual here as little as in the medieval form; but it thereby makes someone's economic activity possible again; it preserves someone's physical strength from decay, and someone's impulses are diverted from violent enrichment; the totality of their social circle on its part actually experiences a reaction to what it had done about the poor person. A purely individual relationship will only have ethical sufficiency and sociological perfection if every person is really the reciprocal goal of every other person--of course not only a goal; however, this does not apply to the actions of a supra-personal collective entity. Such an action with its teleology may quietly reach way over the individual and without being, so to speak, stopped by the individual, come back on itself: while every individual belongs to this totality, each thereby also, from the outset, stands at the endpoint of action; one is not, as in the other case, left outside, but in the same immediate denial of one's nature as being one's own end, one has, as a member of the whole, a part in its quality of being an intrinsic end.
Long before the clarification of this centralist viewpoint about the nature of welfare, its organic role in community life was indicated by substantial symbols. In earliest England the care for the poor began with the monasteries and church societies, and in fact, as will be explicitly emphasized, this came about because only property under mortmain possessed the reliable duration which is necessary for the care for the poor. The many secular donations from booty and penances did not serve the purpose since they did not yet find any foothold in the state administrative apparatus and were consumed without any continuing effect. The care for the poor was thus linked tightly to the only really substantially fixed point in the social warp and woof, and this linkage is shown in a negative way in the indignation about the clergy sent to England by Rome: because they would neglect the care for the poor.