" So the secret organization
definitely
appears purely on the grounds of its secrecy as dangerously verging upon conspiracy against the existing powers.
SIMMEL-Georg-Sociology-Inquiries-Into-the-Construction-of-Social-Forms-2vol
Advanced Freemasonry emphasizes expressly, it is no secret association, it would have no cause to hide
18 Latin: Highest Teacher, substitute for Highest Teacher, Prior, Subprior, Teacher, etc. --ed.
19 Latin: Royal Knight, Knight of the Regular Party, Silent Royal Knight, etc. --ed.
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? membership in it, its intentions, and its activities; the vow of secrecy refers exclusively to the forms of Masonic ritual. Quite characteristically the student order of the Amicists at the end of the eighteenth century decrees in ? 1 of its statutes:
It is the most sacred duty of every member to maintain the deepest silence about such matters that pertain to the well-being of the order. To this belong: Symbols of the order and signs of recognition, brothers' names, ceremonies, etc.
Only later in the same statute is the purpose and nature of the order revealed and set forth in detail! In a less voluminous book that describes the constitution and the nature of the Carbonari, the enumeration of the formulae and customs for the reception of new members and meetings fills seventy-five pages! It is not necessary to give further examples; the role of ritual in secret societies is well enough known, from the religious-mystical groups of antiquity on the one hand to the Rosicrucians of the eighteenth century on the other, to the most insane criminal gangs. The social motivations of these associations are perhaps as follows.
The conspicuous thing in the treatment of ritual in secret societies is not only the stringency with which it is observed but above all the anxiousness with which it is kept as a secret--as if its disclosure would be just as destructive as that of the purposes and actions, or perhaps of the existence of the society at all. The purpose behind this is probably that only then through this inclusion of a whole complex of outward forms in the secretiveness does the entire scope of action and inter- est of the secret society become a completed unity. The secret society must seek to create a type of total life on its own terms; then around the content of its purpose, which it sharply emphasizes, it builds a formulaic system, like a body around the soul, and places both equally under the protection of secrecy because only then does it become a harmonious whole in which one part supports the other. That with this, the secretiveness of the externals is especially strongly emphasized is therefore necessary because it is not so self-evident here and not required by any immediate interest such as the substantive purpose of the association. This is no different than, for example, in the military and in the religious community. In both, the fact that formalism, the formulaic system, the fixing of conduct take in such a broad area is in general rather fully explained in that both claim the entire person, i. e. , that each of them projects the entire life onto a particular plane; each
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? allows a multiplicity of strengths and interests to merge together under a specific perspective into an enclosed unity. The secret society tends to strive just for this: among its essential features is that, even where it has a hold on the individual only according to partial interests, where it is inherently a purely purpose-driven association, it nevertheless lays claim to a greater extent to the whole person, unites personalities inside its total sphere with one another, and obligates them towards one another more than even the same substantive purpose would in an open society. While the symbolism of the rite stimulates a breadth of unstably limited feelings over all imaginable individual interests, the secret society interweaves these latter into a common claim on the individual. The special purpose of the secret society is expanded by the ritual form into a unity and totality that is closed, socially as well as subjectively. Furthermore, it happens that through such formalism as well as through hierarchy, the secret society develops into a kind of reverse image of the official world, against which it stands in contrast. It is the sociological norm emerging everywhere that structures that stand in opposition to and isolation from the larger ones surrounding them, nevertheless, repeat the forms of the latter in themselves. Only a structure that in some way can count as a totality is in a position to hold its elements tightly to itself; it borrows from that larger totality the type of organic enclosure by virtue of which its members are actu- ally circulated by a unifying life stream, a totality to whose forms its individuals were adapted and which can be defied best of all precisely through imitating it.
The same situation offers yet further in the secret society the follow- ing motive for the sociology of ritual. Every such society includes a measure of freedom that is actually not provided for in the structure of the whole surrounding group. Then should the secret society, such as the Vehme,20 desire to restore the inadequate juridical practice of the political sphere, or should it desire, like the conspiracy or criminal gang, to rebel against the law, or should it, like the mysteries, want to hold itself beyond the commands and prohibitions of the wider society--the withdrawal that characterizes the secret society always has the tone of freedom; with that withdrawal, it enters a region where the norms of the surrounding realm do not apply. The essence of the secret society
20 Vehme --secret tribunal in Westphalia, said to have been founded by Charlemagne-- ed.
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? as such is autonomy. But it is of such a type that approaches anarchy; stepping out of the bonding range of the society-at-large has as the consequence for the secret society a modest rootlessness, lacking a firm sense of vitality and normative supports. Now this deficit is what is helped by the certainty and detail of their ritual. It demonstrates even here how very much human beings require a definite balance between freedom and law, and where the determining measure of both does not come to them from one source, they try to supplement the given amount of one with a quantity of another obtained from some other source until that balance is reached. With ritual, the secret society vol- untarily takes on a formal constraint that its substantive detachment and being-for-itself need as a complement. It is notable that among the Freemasons it is precisely the Americans--who also enjoy the greatest political freedom--by whom the strongest uniformity in operations, the greatest regimentation of ritual is demanded in all the lodges; while in Germany--where the otherwise sufficiently strong degree of bondedness does not let it come so readily to a counter-demand in the sense of a limitation of freedom--a greater freedom of style is exercised in the operations of the individual lodge. The objectively, often completely meaningless, schematic constraint of ritual in the secret society is thus not at all a contradiction of its nearly anarchical freedom, its cutting loose from the norms of the sphere surrounding it, but on the contrary, how extensively secret societies are widespread is as a rule evidence of a lack of public freedom, of police-like regimentation, of political oppression, of a reaction of the demand for freedom--thus in reverse the internal ritual regimentation of these societies points to a measure of freedom and detachment for which the balance of human nature now demands that schematism as a normative counterpart.
These last considerations have already led to the methodological principle from which I want to analyze the still remaining traits of secret societies: how much they are generally expressed specifically as the typical traits of creating society through essentially quantitative changes. The reason for this kind of conceptualization of the secret society leads to a repeated observation of its position in the sociologi- cal complex of forms.
The secrecy pertinent to societies is a primary sociological fact, a definite type and color of association, a formal quality of relation- ship, determining the disposition of the group or its elements in direct or indirect interaction with other such factors. Regarded historically, however, the secret society is a secondary formation, i. e. , it originates
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? always only inside an already established society. Expressed differently: the secret society is in itself, even through its secrecy, characterized just as other societies--or even the secret society itself--by its domination and subordination or its purpose or its imitative character; but also its being able to develop as so characterized is possible only under the presumption of a society otherwise already constructed. It positions itself even as a narrower sphere inside of the wider one to which it is in opposition; this opposition, which would also be its purpose, is in any case intended in the sense of sealing off; even that secret society that desires only to offer fully selflessly a definite service to the totality and dissolve itself upon its fulfillment obviously maintains its temporary distinction from that totality as an unavoidable means to its purpose. Thus there is, of the many smaller groups that are encircled by larger ones, hardly one that would have to emphasize a formal self-sufficiency for itself as strongly through its sociological constellation. Its secrecy surrounds it like a border, beyond which there is then material or at least formal opposition, and which it therefore unites into itself for a complete unity. In the formations of every other kind of group the content of group life, the actions of the members in rights and duties, can so conform to their consciousness that the formal reality of constructing the society normally plays hardly a role therein; however, the secret society cannot at all allow its members to lose the clear and emphatic consciousness that just forms a society: compared with other ties, the ever palpable fervor needing oversight lends the form of association depending on it a significance predominant over against the content. Fully lacking in the secret society is the organic development, the instinctual character in accumulation, every dispassionate truism of belonging together and forming a unity. Through the conscious awareness of being a society, in its coming into existence and ongoingly accentu- ated in its life, the secret society is the opposite of all instinctive societies in which unity is more or less simply the expression of their rooted elements having coalesced: its social-psychological form is altogether that of the purpose-driven association. This constellation makes it understandable that the definiteness of the shape of the structure of the circle generally gains a specific intensification in the secret society, and that its essential sociological traits develop as a mere increase in quantity of rather universal relational types.
One of these traits has already been indicated: the character and solidarity of the circle through segregation from the social environment.
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? In this sense the often elaborate signs of recognition through which the individual member is legitimized as belonging to the society oper- ate--and they were certainly more necessary for precisely this purpose in times before the general spread of literacy than later--when their other sociological relevancies exceed that of mere legitimation. So long as initiation confirmations, notifications, descriptions were lacking, an association whose subdivisions were located in various locations would have no means at all for excluding someone unauthorized, for having their benefits and communications delivered only to the truly entitled, except through signs that would be revealed only to these latter, who were duty bound to keep them secret and through which they could be legitimated as a member in any given situation of association. The pur- pose of separation is very clearly represented precisely in the development that certain secret associations of indigenous peoples have undergone, especially in Africa and among the Indians. These associations are formed only by men and are pursued essentially with the intention of marking their segregation from women. The members appear, as soon as they go into action, in masks, and it is typically forbidden, with severe penalties, for women to go near them. Nevertheless, here and there women manage to get in on the secret that the frightful appearances are no ghosts but their husbands. Where this occurred, the associations often lost their entire meaning and came to be a harmless masquerade. The undifferentiated imagination of a member of a pre-literate culture21 cannot fully imagine the separation at all that one wishes to emphasize except as the one striving and authorized for it hiding oneself, making oneself invisible. That is the crudest and outwardly most radical type of concealment, in that not only a single action of the person but even the whole person is concealed: the association does not do something full of secrecy, but the totality of its bearer itself comes to be the secret. This form of the secret society is fully consistent with the pre-literate mental level in which the whole subject is yet fully absorbed in every particular activity, where this is not yet sufficiently objectified in order to allow it a character that the whole person does not identically share. Accordingly it is likewise understandable that as soon as the mask of secrecy is penetrated, the whole separation becomes invalid and the association loses its inner meaning along with its method and expression.
Here separation has the sense of a value-expression: one separates oneself because one does not want to demean oneself with the char-
21 Natur menschen--ed.
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? acter of the others since one wants to make one's own superiority felt over against them. Everywhere this motive leads to the formation of groups that are sharply distinguished from those obviously formed for practical purposes. In that those who want to stand out join together, an aristocracy originates that strengthens and, as it were, expands the position and the self-consciousness of the individual through the weight of their sum total. The fact that segregation and group formation are thus united by the aristocratizing motive produces in many instances from the very beginning the cachet of 'special,' in the sense of valu- ation: it is already noteworthy in school classes, comrades, uniting as intimate circles already by the merely formal fact of organizing a special group, viewing themselves as an elite over the unorganized others, and that these latter acknowledge such higher value involuntarily through their hostility and envy. In these instances secrecy and secretiveness are a superior maintenance of the wall against the outside and thereby a strengthening of the aristocratic character of groups.
This importance of the secret bond as an intensification of the socio- logical self-imposed segregation in general emerges strikingly in political aristocracies. Secrecy has belonged to the requisites of aristocratic rule from time immemorial. It exploits the psychological reality that the unknown as such appears ominous, powerful, and threatening, above all thereby seeking to hide the numerical insignificance of the ruling class. In Sparta the number of warriors was kept as secret as possible, and in Venice the same purpose was meant to be achieved by mandating a simple black uniform for all nobles: a conspicuous costume would not let the small number of rulers be so obvious to the people. This increased to the point of complete concealment of the circle of the highest rulers: the names of the three state inquisitors were not known to anyone except the Council of Ten, who chose them. In several Swiss aristocracies one of the most important offices was known forthrightly as the Hidden, and in Freiburg the aristocratic families became known as 'the hidden lineages. ' In contrast to that is that of the democratic view, bound up with publicity and, in the same vein, the tendency towards a common and constitutional law. This is because such tendencies are intended for an unlimited number of subjects and are therefore public by nature. Conversely the utilization of secrecy inside the aristocratic regime is only the most extreme intensification of that social segregation and exemption, on account of which aristocracy tends to work against a universal, fundamentally fixed legislation.
Where the concept of the aristocratic shifts from the politics of a group to the attitude of an individual, the relation of isolation and
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? secrecy acquires an apparently completely different level. Consummate nobility in a moral as well as in a spiritual sense disdains any conceal- ment because its inner certainty makes it indifferent towards what oth- ers know or do not know about us, whether they evaluate us as right or wrong, high or low; for it, secrecy is a concession to those on the outside, a behavioral dependence on regard for them. For this reason the 'mask,' which so many hold for the sign and the proof of one's aristocratic soul directed away from the masses, is precisely the proof of the importance the masses give it. The mask of the truly noble is in the many not understanding them indeed, not generally, so to speak, seeing them, even when they show themselves unveiled.
The separation from all those outside the circle, which, as a general sociological fact regarding form, serves secrecy as an intensifying tech- nique, acquires a specific color through the majority of ranks in which the initiation into the secret societies right up to their final mysteries tends to occur and which illuminated already earlier for us another sociological trait of the secret society. As a rule the solemn vow of secrecy is required of the novice for everything that the novice will learn even before the reception into only the first rank occurs. The absolute and formal separation that secrecy can achieve is effected with that. But then when the actual content or purpose of the society becomes available to the entrant at first little by little--be this the finished puri- fication and consecration of the soul through the initiations into the mysteries, be it the absolute dissolution of every moral boundary, as with the Assassins and other criminal societies--the separation is shaped differently in material respects: continually, relatively. The novice is in this manner still closer to the status of the non-participant; testing and education are required of one up until comprehension of the whole or center of the society. Through that, however, a protectiveness of that latter, an isolating in relation to the outside, is apparently achieved, that goes beyond what is won by the oath upon entry: care is taken--as was already occasionally demonstrated in the example of the Druids--that the one still unproven also has little to betray, while within the princi- pal secrecy that then surrounds the group as a whole the graduated secret-keeping creates as it were an elastic sphere of protection for its innermost and most essential matters.
The contrast between the exoteric and esoteric members, as is attributed to the Pythagoreans, is the most striking form of this pro- tective device. The sphere of those only partially initiated forms to a certain extent a buffer zone against those not initiated at all. Just as
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? it is everywhere the dual function of the 'middleperson' to connect and to separate, or rather, as that person plays only one role, which we identify, however, according to our categories of comprehension and according to the direction of our attention, now as binding, now as separating--so the unity here of the activities outwardly antithetical to one another is shown in the brightest light: precisely because the lower ranks of the society form a mediating passage to the actual core of the secrecy, they create the gradual consolidation of the sphere of repulsion around it that protects it more certainly than the coarseness of being radically entirely inside or entirely outside could do.
The sociological being-for-self presents itself in a practical turn as a group egoism: the group pursues its purposes with that lack of atten- tion towards the purposes of the structures outside itself, which with the individual is called simply egoism. Indeed, the group thereby tends to acquire a moral justification for the consciousness of the individual, in that the group's purposes in and for themselves take on a supra- individual objective character, that one often cannot name a single person who profited directly from the group-egoistic activity, indeed, that this activity often demands selflessness and sacrifice from its own representatives. Here, however, it is not a matter of ethical valuation but of the separation of the group from its environment that the group egoism effects or signifies. Now, however, with regard to a smaller circle that wishes to remain and develop inside a larger one, this will have a certain limit so long as it exists in plain sight. An open association, of course, may still contend as intensely against other units larger than itself or against the whole establishment of them--it will, however, always have to claim that the realization of its ultimate goals would work to the advantage of the whole, and the necessity of this extreme claim will in any case impose some kind of limit on the actual egoism of its action. With secret societies this necessity falls away, and there will be at least the possibility of that absolute animosity towards oth- ers or towards the whole that the open society cannot admit to and thus cannot also unconditionally exercise. Nothing so distinguishes the detached mood of the secret societies from their social surroundings, symbolized or even encouraged, as the omission of that hypocrisy or actual condescension that the open society by necessity puts into the teleology of the surrounding totality.
In spite of the actual quantitative demarcation of every real society, there is nevertheless a considerable range of them whose inner tendency is this: whoever is not excluded is included. Within certain political,
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? religious, status peripheries anyone who satisfies certain external condi- tions, usually not given by volition but inherent to one's existence, is viewed without further ado as 'belonging. ' Whoever, e. g. , is born in the territory of the state, that person is, where special circumstances do not make one an exception, a member of the often complicated entity of the state; the member of a specific social class is, of course, included in the social conventions and binding forms of it if that member does not become a voluntary or involuntary outsider;22 the extreme is seen in the claim of a church to include actually the whole human race, so that only historical happenstance, sinful obduracy, or a definite divine will would exclude anybody from this religious association, ideally appropriate even for them. Here then are two distinct ways that appar- ently signify a principal differentiation of the sociological meaning of societies, however much praxis may blend them or diminish their distinctness: over against the principle, that whoever is not expressly excluded is included, stands the other, that whoever is not expressly included is excluded. Secret societies constitute the latter type in its most categorical purity. The unconditional nature of their separation, consciously maintained with every step of their development, has as a consequence as well as a cause, that those not expressly included are thereby simply expressly excluded. The Freemasons could not better support their recent strongly emphasized assertion that they are not a true 'secret society' than by their concurrently expressed ideal of including all people and representing humanity as a whole.
Here as everywhere the increase in insularity from the outside cor- responds to an identical integration within because these are simply the two sides or outward manifestations of one and the same sociological activity. A purpose that induces people to enter into a secret association with others excludes from membership, more often than not, from the very beginning, such a predominant portion of its general social circle that potential and actual participants take on a value of scarcity. The individual simply cannot have a falling out with them because it could be so much more difficult to replace them with others than it can in a legitimate organization ceteris paribus. Consequently every discord inside the secret society brings the danger of betrayal with it; avoiding it in this case tends to join the self-preservation of the individual to that of the whole. Ultimately a range of occasions for conflict are removed
22 The term outsider is in English in the original--ed.
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? through the detachment of the secret society from the surrounding social syntheses. Among all the ties of an individual, those through a secret socialization always assume a position of exemption which has, however, in contrast to the open interactions--familial and governmental, reli- gious and economic, social class and friendship, however varied be their content--a wholly different measure and type of levels of contact. At first the contrast with secret societies makes it clear that the demands of those lying in a plane, so to speak, cut across one another; and as they, as it were, lead to an open struggle of competition for the energy and the interest of the individual, so inside each single circle the individuals collide, because each person is claimed simultaneously for the interests of another circle elsewhere. These kinds of collisions are, in view of the sociological isolation of the secret society, very limited. Consistent with their purposes and their operation, competing interests from that dimension of open ties are left at the door. Surely because it tends to fill its dimension alone since an individual will hardly belong to several secret societies, every secret society exercises a kind of absolute domina- tion over its members, who do not come to conflict among themselves as readily as they do from the coordination of those others. The 'peace of the castle' that should actually prevail inside every organization is favored in secret societies by their singular and exceptional terms in a formally incomparable way. Indeed, it appears as though, yet wholly apart from this more realistic basis, even the mere form of secrecy as such keeps the participants freer from previous influences and distur- bances and thereby facilitates concord for them. An English politician had in the secrecy that surrounded the English cabinet the reason for its strength: anyone who had been active in public life would know that a small number of people would be all the more easily brought to agreement the more secret were the negotiations.
The particular measure of cohesion inside secret societies is in accord with the degree of centralization: they offer examples of an unconditional and blind obedience to the leadership, of course, just as it also admittedly occurs elsewhere, but is here especially remarkable in light of the frequently anarchic and law-contravening character of the society. The more criminal the purposes of the secret society are, the more unlimited the power of the leadership tends to be and the more fiercely it tends to be exercised. The Assassins in Arabia, the Chauffeurs (a particularly savage band of robbers from an organizational network in eighteenth-century France), the Gardunas in Spain (a criminal soci- ety that had connections to the Inquisition from the seventeenth to
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? the beginning of the nineteenth century)--all these, whose nature was lawlessness and rebellion, were under a leader whom they themselves played a part in installing and to whom they deferred uncritically and unconditionally. Moreover, not only is the correlation of the needs for freedom and for belonging operative, as is evident in the strictness of the ritual, and which here contains both extremes: the excess of freedom that such organizations possess against all otherwise valid norms had, for the sake of emotional equilibrium, to be balanced by a like excess of subservience and renunciation of one's own will. But quite possibly more essential was the necessity of centralization, which is the vital condition of the secret society; and most certainly when, as a criminal society, it lives off the surrounding circles, meddles in them with a wide variety of radiations and activities, and is severely threatened by betrayal as well as deflected interests as soon as the uncompromising adherence to a center does not prevail in it.
It is thus noted that the secret society is especially exposed to serious dangers if no strict unifying authority develops in it on some basis. The Waldensians were by nature definitely no secret society, but became such in the thirteenth century simply to keep themselves hidden because of external pressure. Thereby it became impossible for them to assemble regularly, and this in turn led to the loss of unity in their doctrine; it gave rise to a number of separately existing and developing branches that often stood in hostile opposition to one another. They lapsed into weakness because they lacked the necessary and complementary attri- bute of the secret association, continuously effective centralization. And that the significant power of the Freemason chapter is evidently not entirely relative to its extent and its means lies probably in the wide- ranging autonomy of its components, which possess neither a unified organization nor a central authority. While their common features extend only to principles and signs of recognition, they are such only for the identity and the relationship of person-to-person, and not for the centralization that holds the powers of the elements together and that is the correlate of the distinctiveness of the secret society.
It is nothing but an exaggeration of this formal theme that secret societies are often led by unknown superiors: the lower levels are not supposed to know whom they obey. This occurs, of course, above all for the protection of secrecy and increases intentionally, in Italy, to the point of forming a secret society at the beginning of the nine- teenth century, the Guelphic Knight, which worked for the liberation and unification of Italy: it had in its various positions accordingly a
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? supreme council of six persons who did not know one another, but communicated with each other only through a middle person known as 'the visible. ' However, this is in no way the only serviceable purpose of secret superiors. They signify rather the most extreme, abstract sub- limation of centralized dependence. The tension between the adherent and the leadership is at its highest when the latter moves out of sight; there remains simply the pure, so to speak, merciless, impersonally colorless reality of obedience, from which the one in command has disappeared as a subject. When obedience towards an impersonal authority, towards a mere office, towards the bearer of an objective law, already has the character of inflexible rigor, then this intensifies yet to an uncanny absoluteness when the commanding personality remains in principle hidden. For when, concurrently along with the visibility and recognition of the commander, the power of the personality is lacking from the relationship of command, indeed even the individual suggestion thereof, then removed from it are even the limitations, the merely relative and so to speak 'human' that adheres to the sensible, singular person; obedience in this case must be colored by the feeling of being subordinate to an unreachable power and one not at all defined by its boundaries, which one sees nowhere but can therefore suspect everywhere. The sociologically general cohesion of a group through the unity of the commanding authority has, in the secret society with an unknown superior, been transferred, as it were, to a focus imaginarius and has thereby won its purest, highest form.
The sociological character corresponding to this centralized subordi- nation to individual elements of the secret society is that of de-individu- alization. Where the society does not have the interests of its individuals immediately in mind, but operates, as it were, based on itself, since it uses its members as means for purposes and actions located outside theirs--here the secret society demonstrates anew a heightened degree of the dissolution of the self, of the leveling of individuality, which social being already undergoes in general and as such, and with which the secret society counterbalances the above emphasized individualizing and differentiating character of the secrecy as such. This begins with the secret societies of indigenous peoples, the appearance and enactment of which occurs almost everywhere by the use of masks, so that an expert determines directly that where one finds masks with an indig- enous people, this would allow one to at least suspect the existence of secret societies. It is, of course, in the nature of the secret society that its members hide their membership. But while the person in question
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? indeed appears and operates and not only acts entirely unambiguously as a member of the secret society, and whose individuality with this membership is identical to any other known individuality, the disappear- ance of the personality as such behind one's role in the secret society is that which is most strongly emphasized. In the Irish conspiracy that was organized in the 1870s in America under the name Clan na Gael, the individual members were never identified with their names but only with numbers. Certainly this also occurred normally for the practical purpose of maintaining secrecy, but it demonstrates how very much it suppresses individuality. With people who count only as numbers, who perhaps--as it at least occurs in analogous cases--are hardly known to the other members by their personal names, the leadership will oper- ate much more thoughtlessly, much more indifferently toward their individual wishes and abilities than if the association were to include each of its members as personal beings. Functioning no less in this sense are the extensive role and the rigor of the ritual. This is because such activity always means that the objective formation has become dominant over the personal aspect of contribution and participation. The hierarchical order allows for the individual only as bearer of a predetermined role; it reserves for every participant an, as it were, styl- ized garment in which one's personal contours disappear.
It is only another name for this elimination of the distinctive personal- ity when secret societies cultivate a largely relative equality among their members; the despotic character of their constitutions is violated so little by this that its correlate is found in the leveling of the dominated also in all other possible types of despotic groups. Inside the secret society there exists frequently among the members a fraternal equality that stands in sharp and tendentious contrast to their differences in all their other life situations. Significantly this is pronouncedly evident on the one hand in secret societies of a religious or ethical character--which greatly accentuate the reality of fraternity--on the other hand in those of an illegal nature. Bismarck speaks in his memoirs of a widely networked pederast association in Berlin that he came to know as a young court official, and emphasizes "the leveling effect of the common workings of the forbidden throughout all strata. "23 This depersonalization in which the secret society unilaterally sharpens a typical relationship between
23 Presumably, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, the first two volumes of which were pub- lished in 1901--ed.
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? an individual and society appears ultimately as the characteristic release from responsibility. Here, too, the mask is the most primitive phenom- enon. Most of the African secret societies are represented, as it were, by a man dressed as a forest spirit; this one commits any number of violations on those who encounter him by chance, up to robbery and murder. A responsibility for his foul deeds does not apply to him, and certainly evidently only because of his masking: that is the somewhat unhelpful form under which those societies let the personalities of their adherents disappear and without which these latter would undoubtedly be overtaken by revenge and punishment. But responsibility is simply so directly linked to the 'I'--also philosophically the issue of responsibility falls into the issue of the 'I'--that for this nai? ve awareness disguising the person removes all responsibility. Political refinement, however, is served no less by this connection. In the United States House of Representatives the actual decisions, which the full House almost always endorses, are taken in standing committees. Their negotiations, how- ever, are secret, and thus the most essential part of legislative activity is hidden from the public. Thereby the political responsibility of the individual representative appears for the most part to be extinguished since nobody can be held responsible for proceedings that are not subject to scrutiny. While the parts played by the individual person in the decisions remain hidden, they appear to be carried by a supra- individual authority; release from responsibility is here also the result or the symbol for that increased sociological de-individualization that corresponds to the secrecy of group action. For all boards, faculties, committees, trustees, etc. whose deliberations are secret, precisely the same thing holds: the individuals disappear as persons into the, so to speak, nameless circle of membership, and with them the responsibility, which belongs to such persons, cannot at all attach a tangible essence to their particular behaviors.
Ultimately this unilateral increase of general social characteristics is attested to by the danger from which the greater surrounding sphere believes itself, rightly or wrongly, threatened by the secret societies. Where strong centralization is striven for--especially with regard to the political--special unions of elements are abhorred purely as such, irrespective of their contents and purposes; as entities they comprise simply, as it were, competition for the principal center that wants to reserve for itself alone any combining into a form of unity. The con- cern of the central power before any 'special union' extends--which has already been repeatedly and importantly emphasized throughout
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? these explorations--throughout the history of the state. One charac- teristic type is indicated somewhat by the Swiss Convention of 1481, according to which no separate alliances were permitted between the ten confederated states; another one, the persecution of the journeymen associations by the despotism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries; a third, the tendency to deprive the communes of rights that the modern state frequently manifests. This danger of the separate associa- tion for the surrounding total society appears magnified when it comes to the secret society. Human beings seldom have a calm and rational attitude toward those known slightly or only vaguely. The recklessness that treats those unknown as non-existent and the fearful imagination that inflates them directly into enormous dangers and horrors tend to play roles in their behavior. Thus the secret society appears for sure as a dangerously secret one. As one cannot know for certain whether or not a special society will use its power, accumulated for legal purposes, sometime also for those undesired, and for that reason the principal distrust of the central powers arises towards subject groups, so there exists over against alliances that are in principle hidden all the more closely the suspicion that its secrecy hides dangers. The Orange Societies that were organized early in the nineteenth century in England for the suppression of Catholicism avoided all public discussion and worked only in secret through personal connections and correspondence. But precisely this secrecy allowed them to appear to be a public danger: it raised the suspicion "that men, who shrank from appealing to pub- lic opinion, meditated a resort to force.
" So the secret organization definitely appears purely on the grounds of its secrecy as dangerously verging upon conspiracy against the existing powers. How much this is only an increase of the general political dubiousness of the special association is demonstrated well by such phenomena as the following: The oldest German guilds offered their members an effective legal protection and thereby substituted for the protection of the state for them; for that reason, on the one side, the Danish kings saw in them safeguards of the public order and favored them. On the other side, however, they appeared for exactly the same reason directly as competitors of the state; the Franconian statutes, therefore, condemned them, and surely because they identified them as conspiracies. The secret association is deemed so much an enemy of the central power that, now conversely, every politically abhorrent club is labeled as such!
Sociology
Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms
Volume 2
Studies in International Institutional Dynamics
Editors
Richard Higgott, Centre for the Study of Globalization and Regionalization, University of Warwick
Karl Kaiser, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
S. Neil MacFarlane, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
John Odell, School of International Relations, University of Southern California
Louis Pauly, Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto
VOLUME 1
Sociology
Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms Volume 2
By
Georg Simmel
Translated and edited by
Anthony J. Blasi Anton K. Jacobs Mathew Kanjirathinkal
With an introduction by
Horst J. Helle
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? LEIDEN ? BOSTON 2009
Soziologie. Untersuchungen u? ber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, by Georg Simmel was originally published in 1908 in Leipzig by Verlag von Duncker & Humblot.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simmel, Georg, 1858-1918.
[Soziologie. English]
Sociology : inquiries into the construction of social forms / by Georg Simmel ;
translated and edited by Anthony J. Blasi , Anton K. Jacobs, Mathew Kanjirathinkal ; with an introduction by Horst J. Helle.
v. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17321-7 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Sociology. I. Blasi, Anthony J. II. Jacobs, Anton K. III. Kanjirathinkal,
Mathew J. IV. Title.
HM585. S52413 2009 301--dc22
2008048069
ISBN: 978 90 04 17459 7 (volume 2) ISBN: 978 90 04 17321 7 (set)
Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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printed in the netherlands
CONTENTS1
VOLUME 1
Foreword by Georg Simmel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi A Note on the Translation . . . . . . . . .
18 Latin: Highest Teacher, substitute for Highest Teacher, Prior, Subprior, Teacher, etc. --ed.
19 Latin: Royal Knight, Knight of the Regular Party, Silent Royal Knight, etc. --ed.
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? membership in it, its intentions, and its activities; the vow of secrecy refers exclusively to the forms of Masonic ritual. Quite characteristically the student order of the Amicists at the end of the eighteenth century decrees in ? 1 of its statutes:
It is the most sacred duty of every member to maintain the deepest silence about such matters that pertain to the well-being of the order. To this belong: Symbols of the order and signs of recognition, brothers' names, ceremonies, etc.
Only later in the same statute is the purpose and nature of the order revealed and set forth in detail! In a less voluminous book that describes the constitution and the nature of the Carbonari, the enumeration of the formulae and customs for the reception of new members and meetings fills seventy-five pages! It is not necessary to give further examples; the role of ritual in secret societies is well enough known, from the religious-mystical groups of antiquity on the one hand to the Rosicrucians of the eighteenth century on the other, to the most insane criminal gangs. The social motivations of these associations are perhaps as follows.
The conspicuous thing in the treatment of ritual in secret societies is not only the stringency with which it is observed but above all the anxiousness with which it is kept as a secret--as if its disclosure would be just as destructive as that of the purposes and actions, or perhaps of the existence of the society at all. The purpose behind this is probably that only then through this inclusion of a whole complex of outward forms in the secretiveness does the entire scope of action and inter- est of the secret society become a completed unity. The secret society must seek to create a type of total life on its own terms; then around the content of its purpose, which it sharply emphasizes, it builds a formulaic system, like a body around the soul, and places both equally under the protection of secrecy because only then does it become a harmonious whole in which one part supports the other. That with this, the secretiveness of the externals is especially strongly emphasized is therefore necessary because it is not so self-evident here and not required by any immediate interest such as the substantive purpose of the association. This is no different than, for example, in the military and in the religious community. In both, the fact that formalism, the formulaic system, the fixing of conduct take in such a broad area is in general rather fully explained in that both claim the entire person, i. e. , that each of them projects the entire life onto a particular plane; each
the secret and the secret society 349
? allows a multiplicity of strengths and interests to merge together under a specific perspective into an enclosed unity. The secret society tends to strive just for this: among its essential features is that, even where it has a hold on the individual only according to partial interests, where it is inherently a purely purpose-driven association, it nevertheless lays claim to a greater extent to the whole person, unites personalities inside its total sphere with one another, and obligates them towards one another more than even the same substantive purpose would in an open society. While the symbolism of the rite stimulates a breadth of unstably limited feelings over all imaginable individual interests, the secret society interweaves these latter into a common claim on the individual. The special purpose of the secret society is expanded by the ritual form into a unity and totality that is closed, socially as well as subjectively. Furthermore, it happens that through such formalism as well as through hierarchy, the secret society develops into a kind of reverse image of the official world, against which it stands in contrast. It is the sociological norm emerging everywhere that structures that stand in opposition to and isolation from the larger ones surrounding them, nevertheless, repeat the forms of the latter in themselves. Only a structure that in some way can count as a totality is in a position to hold its elements tightly to itself; it borrows from that larger totality the type of organic enclosure by virtue of which its members are actu- ally circulated by a unifying life stream, a totality to whose forms its individuals were adapted and which can be defied best of all precisely through imitating it.
The same situation offers yet further in the secret society the follow- ing motive for the sociology of ritual. Every such society includes a measure of freedom that is actually not provided for in the structure of the whole surrounding group. Then should the secret society, such as the Vehme,20 desire to restore the inadequate juridical practice of the political sphere, or should it desire, like the conspiracy or criminal gang, to rebel against the law, or should it, like the mysteries, want to hold itself beyond the commands and prohibitions of the wider society--the withdrawal that characterizes the secret society always has the tone of freedom; with that withdrawal, it enters a region where the norms of the surrounding realm do not apply. The essence of the secret society
20 Vehme --secret tribunal in Westphalia, said to have been founded by Charlemagne-- ed.
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? as such is autonomy. But it is of such a type that approaches anarchy; stepping out of the bonding range of the society-at-large has as the consequence for the secret society a modest rootlessness, lacking a firm sense of vitality and normative supports. Now this deficit is what is helped by the certainty and detail of their ritual. It demonstrates even here how very much human beings require a definite balance between freedom and law, and where the determining measure of both does not come to them from one source, they try to supplement the given amount of one with a quantity of another obtained from some other source until that balance is reached. With ritual, the secret society vol- untarily takes on a formal constraint that its substantive detachment and being-for-itself need as a complement. It is notable that among the Freemasons it is precisely the Americans--who also enjoy the greatest political freedom--by whom the strongest uniformity in operations, the greatest regimentation of ritual is demanded in all the lodges; while in Germany--where the otherwise sufficiently strong degree of bondedness does not let it come so readily to a counter-demand in the sense of a limitation of freedom--a greater freedom of style is exercised in the operations of the individual lodge. The objectively, often completely meaningless, schematic constraint of ritual in the secret society is thus not at all a contradiction of its nearly anarchical freedom, its cutting loose from the norms of the sphere surrounding it, but on the contrary, how extensively secret societies are widespread is as a rule evidence of a lack of public freedom, of police-like regimentation, of political oppression, of a reaction of the demand for freedom--thus in reverse the internal ritual regimentation of these societies points to a measure of freedom and detachment for which the balance of human nature now demands that schematism as a normative counterpart.
These last considerations have already led to the methodological principle from which I want to analyze the still remaining traits of secret societies: how much they are generally expressed specifically as the typical traits of creating society through essentially quantitative changes. The reason for this kind of conceptualization of the secret society leads to a repeated observation of its position in the sociologi- cal complex of forms.
The secrecy pertinent to societies is a primary sociological fact, a definite type and color of association, a formal quality of relation- ship, determining the disposition of the group or its elements in direct or indirect interaction with other such factors. Regarded historically, however, the secret society is a secondary formation, i. e. , it originates
the secret and the secret society 351
? always only inside an already established society. Expressed differently: the secret society is in itself, even through its secrecy, characterized just as other societies--or even the secret society itself--by its domination and subordination or its purpose or its imitative character; but also its being able to develop as so characterized is possible only under the presumption of a society otherwise already constructed. It positions itself even as a narrower sphere inside of the wider one to which it is in opposition; this opposition, which would also be its purpose, is in any case intended in the sense of sealing off; even that secret society that desires only to offer fully selflessly a definite service to the totality and dissolve itself upon its fulfillment obviously maintains its temporary distinction from that totality as an unavoidable means to its purpose. Thus there is, of the many smaller groups that are encircled by larger ones, hardly one that would have to emphasize a formal self-sufficiency for itself as strongly through its sociological constellation. Its secrecy surrounds it like a border, beyond which there is then material or at least formal opposition, and which it therefore unites into itself for a complete unity. In the formations of every other kind of group the content of group life, the actions of the members in rights and duties, can so conform to their consciousness that the formal reality of constructing the society normally plays hardly a role therein; however, the secret society cannot at all allow its members to lose the clear and emphatic consciousness that just forms a society: compared with other ties, the ever palpable fervor needing oversight lends the form of association depending on it a significance predominant over against the content. Fully lacking in the secret society is the organic development, the instinctual character in accumulation, every dispassionate truism of belonging together and forming a unity. Through the conscious awareness of being a society, in its coming into existence and ongoingly accentu- ated in its life, the secret society is the opposite of all instinctive societies in which unity is more or less simply the expression of their rooted elements having coalesced: its social-psychological form is altogether that of the purpose-driven association. This constellation makes it understandable that the definiteness of the shape of the structure of the circle generally gains a specific intensification in the secret society, and that its essential sociological traits develop as a mere increase in quantity of rather universal relational types.
One of these traits has already been indicated: the character and solidarity of the circle through segregation from the social environment.
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? In this sense the often elaborate signs of recognition through which the individual member is legitimized as belonging to the society oper- ate--and they were certainly more necessary for precisely this purpose in times before the general spread of literacy than later--when their other sociological relevancies exceed that of mere legitimation. So long as initiation confirmations, notifications, descriptions were lacking, an association whose subdivisions were located in various locations would have no means at all for excluding someone unauthorized, for having their benefits and communications delivered only to the truly entitled, except through signs that would be revealed only to these latter, who were duty bound to keep them secret and through which they could be legitimated as a member in any given situation of association. The pur- pose of separation is very clearly represented precisely in the development that certain secret associations of indigenous peoples have undergone, especially in Africa and among the Indians. These associations are formed only by men and are pursued essentially with the intention of marking their segregation from women. The members appear, as soon as they go into action, in masks, and it is typically forbidden, with severe penalties, for women to go near them. Nevertheless, here and there women manage to get in on the secret that the frightful appearances are no ghosts but their husbands. Where this occurred, the associations often lost their entire meaning and came to be a harmless masquerade. The undifferentiated imagination of a member of a pre-literate culture21 cannot fully imagine the separation at all that one wishes to emphasize except as the one striving and authorized for it hiding oneself, making oneself invisible. That is the crudest and outwardly most radical type of concealment, in that not only a single action of the person but even the whole person is concealed: the association does not do something full of secrecy, but the totality of its bearer itself comes to be the secret. This form of the secret society is fully consistent with the pre-literate mental level in which the whole subject is yet fully absorbed in every particular activity, where this is not yet sufficiently objectified in order to allow it a character that the whole person does not identically share. Accordingly it is likewise understandable that as soon as the mask of secrecy is penetrated, the whole separation becomes invalid and the association loses its inner meaning along with its method and expression.
Here separation has the sense of a value-expression: one separates oneself because one does not want to demean oneself with the char-
21 Natur menschen--ed.
? the secret and the secret society 353
? acter of the others since one wants to make one's own superiority felt over against them. Everywhere this motive leads to the formation of groups that are sharply distinguished from those obviously formed for practical purposes. In that those who want to stand out join together, an aristocracy originates that strengthens and, as it were, expands the position and the self-consciousness of the individual through the weight of their sum total. The fact that segregation and group formation are thus united by the aristocratizing motive produces in many instances from the very beginning the cachet of 'special,' in the sense of valu- ation: it is already noteworthy in school classes, comrades, uniting as intimate circles already by the merely formal fact of organizing a special group, viewing themselves as an elite over the unorganized others, and that these latter acknowledge such higher value involuntarily through their hostility and envy. In these instances secrecy and secretiveness are a superior maintenance of the wall against the outside and thereby a strengthening of the aristocratic character of groups.
This importance of the secret bond as an intensification of the socio- logical self-imposed segregation in general emerges strikingly in political aristocracies. Secrecy has belonged to the requisites of aristocratic rule from time immemorial. It exploits the psychological reality that the unknown as such appears ominous, powerful, and threatening, above all thereby seeking to hide the numerical insignificance of the ruling class. In Sparta the number of warriors was kept as secret as possible, and in Venice the same purpose was meant to be achieved by mandating a simple black uniform for all nobles: a conspicuous costume would not let the small number of rulers be so obvious to the people. This increased to the point of complete concealment of the circle of the highest rulers: the names of the three state inquisitors were not known to anyone except the Council of Ten, who chose them. In several Swiss aristocracies one of the most important offices was known forthrightly as the Hidden, and in Freiburg the aristocratic families became known as 'the hidden lineages. ' In contrast to that is that of the democratic view, bound up with publicity and, in the same vein, the tendency towards a common and constitutional law. This is because such tendencies are intended for an unlimited number of subjects and are therefore public by nature. Conversely the utilization of secrecy inside the aristocratic regime is only the most extreme intensification of that social segregation and exemption, on account of which aristocracy tends to work against a universal, fundamentally fixed legislation.
Where the concept of the aristocratic shifts from the politics of a group to the attitude of an individual, the relation of isolation and
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? secrecy acquires an apparently completely different level. Consummate nobility in a moral as well as in a spiritual sense disdains any conceal- ment because its inner certainty makes it indifferent towards what oth- ers know or do not know about us, whether they evaluate us as right or wrong, high or low; for it, secrecy is a concession to those on the outside, a behavioral dependence on regard for them. For this reason the 'mask,' which so many hold for the sign and the proof of one's aristocratic soul directed away from the masses, is precisely the proof of the importance the masses give it. The mask of the truly noble is in the many not understanding them indeed, not generally, so to speak, seeing them, even when they show themselves unveiled.
The separation from all those outside the circle, which, as a general sociological fact regarding form, serves secrecy as an intensifying tech- nique, acquires a specific color through the majority of ranks in which the initiation into the secret societies right up to their final mysteries tends to occur and which illuminated already earlier for us another sociological trait of the secret society. As a rule the solemn vow of secrecy is required of the novice for everything that the novice will learn even before the reception into only the first rank occurs. The absolute and formal separation that secrecy can achieve is effected with that. But then when the actual content or purpose of the society becomes available to the entrant at first little by little--be this the finished puri- fication and consecration of the soul through the initiations into the mysteries, be it the absolute dissolution of every moral boundary, as with the Assassins and other criminal societies--the separation is shaped differently in material respects: continually, relatively. The novice is in this manner still closer to the status of the non-participant; testing and education are required of one up until comprehension of the whole or center of the society. Through that, however, a protectiveness of that latter, an isolating in relation to the outside, is apparently achieved, that goes beyond what is won by the oath upon entry: care is taken--as was already occasionally demonstrated in the example of the Druids--that the one still unproven also has little to betray, while within the princi- pal secrecy that then surrounds the group as a whole the graduated secret-keeping creates as it were an elastic sphere of protection for its innermost and most essential matters.
The contrast between the exoteric and esoteric members, as is attributed to the Pythagoreans, is the most striking form of this pro- tective device. The sphere of those only partially initiated forms to a certain extent a buffer zone against those not initiated at all. Just as
the secret and the secret society 355
? it is everywhere the dual function of the 'middleperson' to connect and to separate, or rather, as that person plays only one role, which we identify, however, according to our categories of comprehension and according to the direction of our attention, now as binding, now as separating--so the unity here of the activities outwardly antithetical to one another is shown in the brightest light: precisely because the lower ranks of the society form a mediating passage to the actual core of the secrecy, they create the gradual consolidation of the sphere of repulsion around it that protects it more certainly than the coarseness of being radically entirely inside or entirely outside could do.
The sociological being-for-self presents itself in a practical turn as a group egoism: the group pursues its purposes with that lack of atten- tion towards the purposes of the structures outside itself, which with the individual is called simply egoism. Indeed, the group thereby tends to acquire a moral justification for the consciousness of the individual, in that the group's purposes in and for themselves take on a supra- individual objective character, that one often cannot name a single person who profited directly from the group-egoistic activity, indeed, that this activity often demands selflessness and sacrifice from its own representatives. Here, however, it is not a matter of ethical valuation but of the separation of the group from its environment that the group egoism effects or signifies. Now, however, with regard to a smaller circle that wishes to remain and develop inside a larger one, this will have a certain limit so long as it exists in plain sight. An open association, of course, may still contend as intensely against other units larger than itself or against the whole establishment of them--it will, however, always have to claim that the realization of its ultimate goals would work to the advantage of the whole, and the necessity of this extreme claim will in any case impose some kind of limit on the actual egoism of its action. With secret societies this necessity falls away, and there will be at least the possibility of that absolute animosity towards oth- ers or towards the whole that the open society cannot admit to and thus cannot also unconditionally exercise. Nothing so distinguishes the detached mood of the secret societies from their social surroundings, symbolized or even encouraged, as the omission of that hypocrisy or actual condescension that the open society by necessity puts into the teleology of the surrounding totality.
In spite of the actual quantitative demarcation of every real society, there is nevertheless a considerable range of them whose inner tendency is this: whoever is not excluded is included. Within certain political,
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? religious, status peripheries anyone who satisfies certain external condi- tions, usually not given by volition but inherent to one's existence, is viewed without further ado as 'belonging. ' Whoever, e. g. , is born in the territory of the state, that person is, where special circumstances do not make one an exception, a member of the often complicated entity of the state; the member of a specific social class is, of course, included in the social conventions and binding forms of it if that member does not become a voluntary or involuntary outsider;22 the extreme is seen in the claim of a church to include actually the whole human race, so that only historical happenstance, sinful obduracy, or a definite divine will would exclude anybody from this religious association, ideally appropriate even for them. Here then are two distinct ways that appar- ently signify a principal differentiation of the sociological meaning of societies, however much praxis may blend them or diminish their distinctness: over against the principle, that whoever is not expressly excluded is included, stands the other, that whoever is not expressly included is excluded. Secret societies constitute the latter type in its most categorical purity. The unconditional nature of their separation, consciously maintained with every step of their development, has as a consequence as well as a cause, that those not expressly included are thereby simply expressly excluded. The Freemasons could not better support their recent strongly emphasized assertion that they are not a true 'secret society' than by their concurrently expressed ideal of including all people and representing humanity as a whole.
Here as everywhere the increase in insularity from the outside cor- responds to an identical integration within because these are simply the two sides or outward manifestations of one and the same sociological activity. A purpose that induces people to enter into a secret association with others excludes from membership, more often than not, from the very beginning, such a predominant portion of its general social circle that potential and actual participants take on a value of scarcity. The individual simply cannot have a falling out with them because it could be so much more difficult to replace them with others than it can in a legitimate organization ceteris paribus. Consequently every discord inside the secret society brings the danger of betrayal with it; avoiding it in this case tends to join the self-preservation of the individual to that of the whole. Ultimately a range of occasions for conflict are removed
22 The term outsider is in English in the original--ed.
? the secret and the secret society 357
? through the detachment of the secret society from the surrounding social syntheses. Among all the ties of an individual, those through a secret socialization always assume a position of exemption which has, however, in contrast to the open interactions--familial and governmental, reli- gious and economic, social class and friendship, however varied be their content--a wholly different measure and type of levels of contact. At first the contrast with secret societies makes it clear that the demands of those lying in a plane, so to speak, cut across one another; and as they, as it were, lead to an open struggle of competition for the energy and the interest of the individual, so inside each single circle the individuals collide, because each person is claimed simultaneously for the interests of another circle elsewhere. These kinds of collisions are, in view of the sociological isolation of the secret society, very limited. Consistent with their purposes and their operation, competing interests from that dimension of open ties are left at the door. Surely because it tends to fill its dimension alone since an individual will hardly belong to several secret societies, every secret society exercises a kind of absolute domina- tion over its members, who do not come to conflict among themselves as readily as they do from the coordination of those others. The 'peace of the castle' that should actually prevail inside every organization is favored in secret societies by their singular and exceptional terms in a formally incomparable way. Indeed, it appears as though, yet wholly apart from this more realistic basis, even the mere form of secrecy as such keeps the participants freer from previous influences and distur- bances and thereby facilitates concord for them. An English politician had in the secrecy that surrounded the English cabinet the reason for its strength: anyone who had been active in public life would know that a small number of people would be all the more easily brought to agreement the more secret were the negotiations.
The particular measure of cohesion inside secret societies is in accord with the degree of centralization: they offer examples of an unconditional and blind obedience to the leadership, of course, just as it also admittedly occurs elsewhere, but is here especially remarkable in light of the frequently anarchic and law-contravening character of the society. The more criminal the purposes of the secret society are, the more unlimited the power of the leadership tends to be and the more fiercely it tends to be exercised. The Assassins in Arabia, the Chauffeurs (a particularly savage band of robbers from an organizational network in eighteenth-century France), the Gardunas in Spain (a criminal soci- ety that had connections to the Inquisition from the seventeenth to
358 chapter five
? the beginning of the nineteenth century)--all these, whose nature was lawlessness and rebellion, were under a leader whom they themselves played a part in installing and to whom they deferred uncritically and unconditionally. Moreover, not only is the correlation of the needs for freedom and for belonging operative, as is evident in the strictness of the ritual, and which here contains both extremes: the excess of freedom that such organizations possess against all otherwise valid norms had, for the sake of emotional equilibrium, to be balanced by a like excess of subservience and renunciation of one's own will. But quite possibly more essential was the necessity of centralization, which is the vital condition of the secret society; and most certainly when, as a criminal society, it lives off the surrounding circles, meddles in them with a wide variety of radiations and activities, and is severely threatened by betrayal as well as deflected interests as soon as the uncompromising adherence to a center does not prevail in it.
It is thus noted that the secret society is especially exposed to serious dangers if no strict unifying authority develops in it on some basis. The Waldensians were by nature definitely no secret society, but became such in the thirteenth century simply to keep themselves hidden because of external pressure. Thereby it became impossible for them to assemble regularly, and this in turn led to the loss of unity in their doctrine; it gave rise to a number of separately existing and developing branches that often stood in hostile opposition to one another. They lapsed into weakness because they lacked the necessary and complementary attri- bute of the secret association, continuously effective centralization. And that the significant power of the Freemason chapter is evidently not entirely relative to its extent and its means lies probably in the wide- ranging autonomy of its components, which possess neither a unified organization nor a central authority. While their common features extend only to principles and signs of recognition, they are such only for the identity and the relationship of person-to-person, and not for the centralization that holds the powers of the elements together and that is the correlate of the distinctiveness of the secret society.
It is nothing but an exaggeration of this formal theme that secret societies are often led by unknown superiors: the lower levels are not supposed to know whom they obey. This occurs, of course, above all for the protection of secrecy and increases intentionally, in Italy, to the point of forming a secret society at the beginning of the nine- teenth century, the Guelphic Knight, which worked for the liberation and unification of Italy: it had in its various positions accordingly a
the secret and the secret society 359
? supreme council of six persons who did not know one another, but communicated with each other only through a middle person known as 'the visible. ' However, this is in no way the only serviceable purpose of secret superiors. They signify rather the most extreme, abstract sub- limation of centralized dependence. The tension between the adherent and the leadership is at its highest when the latter moves out of sight; there remains simply the pure, so to speak, merciless, impersonally colorless reality of obedience, from which the one in command has disappeared as a subject. When obedience towards an impersonal authority, towards a mere office, towards the bearer of an objective law, already has the character of inflexible rigor, then this intensifies yet to an uncanny absoluteness when the commanding personality remains in principle hidden. For when, concurrently along with the visibility and recognition of the commander, the power of the personality is lacking from the relationship of command, indeed even the individual suggestion thereof, then removed from it are even the limitations, the merely relative and so to speak 'human' that adheres to the sensible, singular person; obedience in this case must be colored by the feeling of being subordinate to an unreachable power and one not at all defined by its boundaries, which one sees nowhere but can therefore suspect everywhere. The sociologically general cohesion of a group through the unity of the commanding authority has, in the secret society with an unknown superior, been transferred, as it were, to a focus imaginarius and has thereby won its purest, highest form.
The sociological character corresponding to this centralized subordi- nation to individual elements of the secret society is that of de-individu- alization. Where the society does not have the interests of its individuals immediately in mind, but operates, as it were, based on itself, since it uses its members as means for purposes and actions located outside theirs--here the secret society demonstrates anew a heightened degree of the dissolution of the self, of the leveling of individuality, which social being already undergoes in general and as such, and with which the secret society counterbalances the above emphasized individualizing and differentiating character of the secrecy as such. This begins with the secret societies of indigenous peoples, the appearance and enactment of which occurs almost everywhere by the use of masks, so that an expert determines directly that where one finds masks with an indig- enous people, this would allow one to at least suspect the existence of secret societies. It is, of course, in the nature of the secret society that its members hide their membership. But while the person in question
360 chapter five
? indeed appears and operates and not only acts entirely unambiguously as a member of the secret society, and whose individuality with this membership is identical to any other known individuality, the disappear- ance of the personality as such behind one's role in the secret society is that which is most strongly emphasized. In the Irish conspiracy that was organized in the 1870s in America under the name Clan na Gael, the individual members were never identified with their names but only with numbers. Certainly this also occurred normally for the practical purpose of maintaining secrecy, but it demonstrates how very much it suppresses individuality. With people who count only as numbers, who perhaps--as it at least occurs in analogous cases--are hardly known to the other members by their personal names, the leadership will oper- ate much more thoughtlessly, much more indifferently toward their individual wishes and abilities than if the association were to include each of its members as personal beings. Functioning no less in this sense are the extensive role and the rigor of the ritual. This is because such activity always means that the objective formation has become dominant over the personal aspect of contribution and participation. The hierarchical order allows for the individual only as bearer of a predetermined role; it reserves for every participant an, as it were, styl- ized garment in which one's personal contours disappear.
It is only another name for this elimination of the distinctive personal- ity when secret societies cultivate a largely relative equality among their members; the despotic character of their constitutions is violated so little by this that its correlate is found in the leveling of the dominated also in all other possible types of despotic groups. Inside the secret society there exists frequently among the members a fraternal equality that stands in sharp and tendentious contrast to their differences in all their other life situations. Significantly this is pronouncedly evident on the one hand in secret societies of a religious or ethical character--which greatly accentuate the reality of fraternity--on the other hand in those of an illegal nature. Bismarck speaks in his memoirs of a widely networked pederast association in Berlin that he came to know as a young court official, and emphasizes "the leveling effect of the common workings of the forbidden throughout all strata. "23 This depersonalization in which the secret society unilaterally sharpens a typical relationship between
23 Presumably, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, the first two volumes of which were pub- lished in 1901--ed.
? the secret and the secret society 361
? an individual and society appears ultimately as the characteristic release from responsibility. Here, too, the mask is the most primitive phenom- enon. Most of the African secret societies are represented, as it were, by a man dressed as a forest spirit; this one commits any number of violations on those who encounter him by chance, up to robbery and murder. A responsibility for his foul deeds does not apply to him, and certainly evidently only because of his masking: that is the somewhat unhelpful form under which those societies let the personalities of their adherents disappear and without which these latter would undoubtedly be overtaken by revenge and punishment. But responsibility is simply so directly linked to the 'I'--also philosophically the issue of responsibility falls into the issue of the 'I'--that for this nai? ve awareness disguising the person removes all responsibility. Political refinement, however, is served no less by this connection. In the United States House of Representatives the actual decisions, which the full House almost always endorses, are taken in standing committees. Their negotiations, how- ever, are secret, and thus the most essential part of legislative activity is hidden from the public. Thereby the political responsibility of the individual representative appears for the most part to be extinguished since nobody can be held responsible for proceedings that are not subject to scrutiny. While the parts played by the individual person in the decisions remain hidden, they appear to be carried by a supra- individual authority; release from responsibility is here also the result or the symbol for that increased sociological de-individualization that corresponds to the secrecy of group action. For all boards, faculties, committees, trustees, etc. whose deliberations are secret, precisely the same thing holds: the individuals disappear as persons into the, so to speak, nameless circle of membership, and with them the responsibility, which belongs to such persons, cannot at all attach a tangible essence to their particular behaviors.
Ultimately this unilateral increase of general social characteristics is attested to by the danger from which the greater surrounding sphere believes itself, rightly or wrongly, threatened by the secret societies. Where strong centralization is striven for--especially with regard to the political--special unions of elements are abhorred purely as such, irrespective of their contents and purposes; as entities they comprise simply, as it were, competition for the principal center that wants to reserve for itself alone any combining into a form of unity. The con- cern of the central power before any 'special union' extends--which has already been repeatedly and importantly emphasized throughout
362 chapter five
? these explorations--throughout the history of the state. One charac- teristic type is indicated somewhat by the Swiss Convention of 1481, according to which no separate alliances were permitted between the ten confederated states; another one, the persecution of the journeymen associations by the despotism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries; a third, the tendency to deprive the communes of rights that the modern state frequently manifests. This danger of the separate associa- tion for the surrounding total society appears magnified when it comes to the secret society. Human beings seldom have a calm and rational attitude toward those known slightly or only vaguely. The recklessness that treats those unknown as non-existent and the fearful imagination that inflates them directly into enormous dangers and horrors tend to play roles in their behavior. Thus the secret society appears for sure as a dangerously secret one. As one cannot know for certain whether or not a special society will use its power, accumulated for legal purposes, sometime also for those undesired, and for that reason the principal distrust of the central powers arises towards subject groups, so there exists over against alliances that are in principle hidden all the more closely the suspicion that its secrecy hides dangers. The Orange Societies that were organized early in the nineteenth century in England for the suppression of Catholicism avoided all public discussion and worked only in secret through personal connections and correspondence. But precisely this secrecy allowed them to appear to be a public danger: it raised the suspicion "that men, who shrank from appealing to pub- lic opinion, meditated a resort to force.
" So the secret organization definitely appears purely on the grounds of its secrecy as dangerously verging upon conspiracy against the existing powers. How much this is only an increase of the general political dubiousness of the special association is demonstrated well by such phenomena as the following: The oldest German guilds offered their members an effective legal protection and thereby substituted for the protection of the state for them; for that reason, on the one side, the Danish kings saw in them safeguards of the public order and favored them. On the other side, however, they appeared for exactly the same reason directly as competitors of the state; the Franconian statutes, therefore, condemned them, and surely because they identified them as conspiracies. The secret association is deemed so much an enemy of the central power that, now conversely, every politically abhorrent club is labeled as such!
Sociology
Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms
Volume 2
Studies in International Institutional Dynamics
Editors
Richard Higgott, Centre for the Study of Globalization and Regionalization, University of Warwick
Karl Kaiser, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
S. Neil MacFarlane, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
John Odell, School of International Relations, University of Southern California
Louis Pauly, Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto
VOLUME 1
Sociology
Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms Volume 2
By
Georg Simmel
Translated and edited by
Anthony J. Blasi Anton K. Jacobs Mathew Kanjirathinkal
With an introduction by
Horst J. Helle
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? LEIDEN ? BOSTON 2009
Soziologie. Untersuchungen u? ber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, by Georg Simmel was originally published in 1908 in Leipzig by Verlag von Duncker & Humblot.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simmel, Georg, 1858-1918.
[Soziologie. English]
Sociology : inquiries into the construction of social forms / by Georg Simmel ;
translated and edited by Anthony J. Blasi , Anton K. Jacobs, Mathew Kanjirathinkal ; with an introduction by Horst J. Helle.
v. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17321-7 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Sociology. I. Blasi, Anthony J. II. Jacobs, Anton K. III. Kanjirathinkal,
Mathew J. IV. Title.
HM585. S52413 2009 301--dc22
2008048069
ISBN: 978 90 04 17459 7 (volume 2) ISBN: 978 90 04 17321 7 (set)
Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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printed in the netherlands
CONTENTS1
VOLUME 1
Foreword by Georg Simmel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi A Note on the Translation . . . . . . . . .
