No More Learning

32 If one also examines the precepts of honor for their con- tent, they always appear as a means for maintaining a social group's solidarity, its reputation, its regularity, and the potential to promote its life processes. And in fact, that middle position of honor between law and morality in relation to executive action corresponds to a similar one in relation to the extension of their spheres. Law covers the entire scope of the group whose vital interests form a unity; the forces of morality circulate inside the individual; they are closely bound with the self-responsiveness of the personal conscience; the actions and omis- sions, however, that honor demands is revealed as what is useful to the particular groups that stand between the large group and the individual. Every honor is originally the honor of a status, i. e. a form of life useful to smaller groups that are involved with a larger group and, by virtue of the demands on their members to whom the idea of honor pertains, maintain their inner cohesion, their unifying character, and their clo- sure against even the other groups of the same larger association. Now what appears to us beyond this limitation as the general human or, put differently, as purely individual honor, is a more abstract idea made possible by breaking through the barriers between social ranks; indeed one can name no single act that would attack human honor as such, i. e. , every honor without exception: it is a matter of honor for ascetics to let themselves to be spat at; for the girls of certain African tribes it is especially honorable to have as many relationships as possible. So then those specific ideas of honor of circumscribed groups are essential: fam- ily honor, the honor of officers, honor in commerce, even the honor of scoundrels. While the individual belongs to different groups, he or she can participate in different honors independently of one another; that
32 In Chapter 2 the corresponding formal position was shown to exist for custom as well.
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already became important for us earlier as a manifestation of 'crossing' social boundaries: it can be that someone who lost family honor stead- fastly protects commercial honor or, as a researcher, protects scientific honor, and vice-versa; the robber can strictly maintain the precepts of his criminal honor, while having lost every other honor; a woman can have lost her sexual honor and still be the most honorable person in every other respect, etc. The phenomenon that already thereby arises, of honor demanding some things but permitting others, indicates the origin of honor in the teleology of the particular group, i. e. what the honor of one group unconditionally prohibits is completely compatible with the honor of a certain other circle and with indifference toward it. 33 The subtle honor that the officer corps cultivated allows some latitude for sexual behavior, which is not compatible with the honor of men in some other groups. The honor of merchants, most rigorous in many respects, allows such an exaggerated hyping of the products that a similar transgression of the limits of truthfulness would make an official or a scholar dishonorable; honor among scoundrels reveals this most unmistakably. Now it is precisely seen that the positive precepts of honor are always the conditions for the inner self-preservation of the group; what they tolerate is what each group, perhaps in contrast to every other group, holds to be compatible with the honor of its mem- bers; the groups relate their members' behavior to those who remain outside, so long as it does not somehow act back on the preservation of the group itself, the affairs of the personality as such, in which the more freedom is compatible with the concept of honor, the less it is tolerant with respect to the sociological requirements. Because it only depends on, and indeed only with respect to, a narrower group firmly circum- scribed within a larger one, honor allows for, indeed demands, various patterns of behavior that are forbidden by law on the one hand--the form of self-preservation of the large group--and by morality on the other hand--the inner self-preservation of the individual; dueling is the most glaring example of this.
What is easily deceptive about the sense of honor as a sociologi- cal expedient is precisely the circumstance with which this expedient celebrates its highest triumph: that it is successful in instilling in the individuals the protection of their honor as their most inward, deepest, the most personal self-interests. There is perhaps no point at which
33 Indifference--Simmel uses the Greek Adiaphoron--ed.
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social and individual interest intertwine that way, where a matter that is comprehensible only from the former that has assumed an impera- tive form that only appears to spring up from the latter. So deeply anchored here is the requirement of the social group in the foundation of the life of its members that honor even takes on a note of isolation, indeed in many respects an almost offensive note. It even includes those patterns of behavior by which the advantage of the circle does not lie in the immediate self-dedication of the individual, in the circles' boundaries overlapping one another, in the indiscriminate uniting of their activities or being, but simply in that each one of them 'keeps to itself'; here it is the mutual independence of the parts that keeps the whole in its form. The social group's vested interests decorated with the name of honor are invested in a sphere around the individual into which no other may penetrate without meeting with repulsion, and these interests are thus secured in their realization by the individual without rival interests. As one can consider it the specific effect of reli- gion that it converts one's own salvation into a duty, so it is the effect of honor, mutatis mutandis,34 that it converts one's social duty into one's personal salvation. Thus the aspects of law and duty as they relate to honor change into each other: the protection of honor is so very much a duty that law presses one to the most enormous sacrifices for it--not only brought upon oneself but imposed on others and passes over oth- ers. It would be wholly incomprehensible why society actually would urge the individual with so strong a social and moral accent to protect this purely personal good of honor if it were not the shear form and technique whose content and goal is the preservation of the group. In this context--and because here it is just essentially a matter of maintain- ing, not actually of advancing and developing--it is conceivable that society provides the individual this good from the outset so that the individual need not acquire it but only to not lose it: the presumption is that everyone possesses it. Society can proceed seemingly so liber- ally because all actions necessary for not losing this personal possession has hardly any other content than what is social. That presumption goes so far that society allows even the libeler, the adulterer, and the slanderer dueling with identical weapons with the person innocently offended; for in so far as one is still 'honorable,' one presupposes the possibility that one perhaps had a right to one's action. But of course,
34 Latin: with the things changed also changing other things--ed.
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every social stratum, as the social bearer of honor, cherishes this favor- able presumption only for its members, while the members of another stratum, beyond those within it notoriously lacking suitable honor, are not 'capable of satisfying' anything. Honor forms in this way one of the most wondrous, instinctively developed means of preserving group existence, not despite but because of the purely personal form of its appearance and consciousness.
From such linkages of social self-preservation to an individual per- son, to an actual substance, and to an ideal concept we now come to the cases in which it depends on an organ arising out of a plurality of persons: the objective principle in which their unity is represented, even bears again its group character. Thus the religious community embodies its solidarity and its life motive in the priesthood, and the political community regards its solidarity internally in the civil service, externally in its military standing, the latter for its part in the officer corps, every enduring club in its board of directors, every fleeting association in its committee, every political party in its parliamentary representation. The formation of such organs is the result of the social division of labor. The interactions among individuals, in which every social formation consists and which determines a particular form of the character of the group as such, originally occur quite immediately among the individual members of society. Thus the unity of operation arises from direct agreement or mutual accommodation of interests; the unity of the religious community from the religious need of each pressing to join together; the military constitution of the group from the protection and trust interests of each man capable of bearing arms; the administration of justice from the immediate judgment of the com- munity; the organization for leaders and the led from the personal preferences of the individual before others; the economic coordination from the immediate exchange among the producers. 35
These functions performed by the interests themselves, the functions that effect social unity, come undone over particular subgroups. The interactions of members with one another are thus substituted so that all of these members enter into relationship with the newly established
35 I do not wish to claim that this logically simplest condition actually formed the historical starting point of further social development everywhere else. But in order to clarify the actual importance of the division of labor of social apparatus, one must presuppose it, even if it would only be a fiction, which certainly it is not in numerous cases.
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apparatus for themselves; put differently: While wherever no formation of an apparatus occurs, primarily the individual members alone have substantial existence, and their association is a purely functional one, this association now achieves its own separate existence for itself, not only apart from all group members to whom it generally refers, but also beyond the individual members who support it or enrich it. Thus the business class is a structure existing for itself that as such performs its function as a go-between among producers regardless of personnel changes. Thus still more clearly, the office exists as an objective appara- tus through which the individual officials only, as it were, pass through, and behind which their personalities often enough vanish--even more completely than with the individual ruler, whose individual position blends with its bearer so much more closely than a pluralistic govern- ment; thus the church is an impersonal organism whose functions are assumed and carried out by the individual priests but not produced by them. In summary, what one earlier thought incorrectly about living beings--that life, which is actually only just a kind of interaction among some physical atoms, is borne by a unique life spirit--is valid as a cor- rect simile for social existence: what is a direct interaction in its origin becomes in the end a special structure that exists for itself. But this special structure performs its function only as a supra-personal totality, i. e. the function of the total group; for the rest, its individual members remain individual members of the group and as such are subject to the conditions under which the effectiveness of any apparatus places all members of the totality: merchants must purchase the objects for their personal needs just as judges are subject to the law that they carry out, tax collectors must themselves pay taxes, and priests themselves must confess. Apart from all these personages these structures of the division of labor alone represent the idea or power that keeps the group together in the relationship under consideration, and these structures, as it were, solidify from the functional into a substantive reality.
It is one of the most deeply ingrained and most characteristic facts in human nature that both individuals and groups draw considerable power and support from structures that they themselves first equipped with the energies and qualities necessary for them. The strengths of the subject that support its preservation and development are often indirectly expressed, so that they first construct an apparently objective structure, out of which these strengths then flow back onto the subject: thus we conduct ourselves like someone who is recruiting an ally into a war, but first allocates for himself all armed forces with which he
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might come to his assistance. I am reminded of the idea of gods that people first provided with all possible qualities, values and sublimities created from their own minds, in order then to obtain seemingly from them the moral law and the power to comply with it. I am reminded that we introduce our own feelings, profundity, and meaning into the landscape in order then to bring home from it solace, significance, and stimulation. I am reminded how often friends and wives seem to enrich us intellectually and with leisure, until we recognize that all these mental contents stem from ourselves and are only reflected back onto us by them. If a self-deception lies in all such processes, it is certainly not without a profound usefulness. Certainly many of our natural pow- ers need such an expansion, transformation, and projection in order to reach their greatest usefulness; we must place them at a certain distance from ourselves so that they work on ourselves with maximum strength--thereby the deception as to their actual source becomes manifestly very useful so as not to disturb this effect. The development of differentiated organs for individual social purposes often falls into this form type: the group forces are concentrated into a special structure that then approaches the group as a totality with its own existence and character; while it serves the group purposes, powers independent of it seem to extend out from it that are nothing like even the transformed powers of its members, on whom it now works back.
Meanwhile this transformation is something completely radical and creative. Admittedly we will recognize what high usefulness for the social processes the mere representation of collective behavior through the action of a smaller number of representatives already possesses; but behind or next to this significance of mere quantity stands a deeper and qualitative significance of transferring the functions of the whole group onto a smaller select subgroup. There is an analogy to this in global scientific recognition. No science can describe or formulate exhaustively the fullness of the actual processes in existence or those of the qualitative conditions affecting something. Thus if we use the concepts that condense in themselves what is unclear and, as it were, make them manageable, that is not only a representation of the whole through a part that is essentially identical to it; but the idea has a dif- ferent inner structure, a different epistemological, psychological, and metaphysical meaning as the whole of the thing that is subordinate to it; it projects this whole at a new level, expresses the extensive not only with a smaller extensity but in a fundamentally different form
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whose syntheses are no miniature picture of any immediate appear- ances of totality, but are autonomous structures derived from their material. Thus arise, as it manifests itself, completely new sociological phenomena, not only existing in a reduced measure when it raises the representing and leading organ above a group, as it were, as its extract or as the general concept over an immense area of many individual activities. That such organs are of such importance for the self-preser- vation of the group perhaps becomes clearest through a consideration of a counter example. The original federal constitution of Germany perished in part because the federation developed no such organs. It had representatives with individual powers, for sure, but these were of a purely individual nature; the precisely required function was given to an individual representative. But how a representative of this kind differs from an official is unmistakable from the legal as well as from the sociological standpoint, although it is often irrelevant for our pres- ent inquiry, and mixed cases and transitions also appear in history often enough. At this position it is essential that the representative has a greater relationship to the individuals and their sum, and to their individual interests; but the official has a greater relationship with the objective social unity beyond the individuals. 36 This latter relationship
36 It is relevant that, as a fact of greater form sociological importance, the 'rep- resentative' as a rule is only an individual from the group who is not, by virtue of the commissioning, singled out through this coordinating activity in principle, while the 'official' may be regarded as a private person unto himself even as he stands before all the individual persons of the group as an official. This results in an important association where for example, employers and employees negotiate wage agreements. The German commercial law stipulates that such negotiations must be conducted only by 'participants,' i. e. by managers and workers as representatives of their respec- tive groups. That may have a purely technical rationale in that one credits only the participants with the necessary expertise and interestedness. Sociologically, however, it has to do with the fact that the parties do not form the necessary and mostly not at all a 'legal staff' or anything like that at all. Especially on the employees' side the representatives are chosen as a rule at meetings of a wholly unchecked, fluctuating crowd; there is hardly any discussion about all of the people affected by the wage agreement sharing in the authority, and it lacks what would make this superfluous: the social unity, a totality outside of its members, of those who are by chance present or absent. Actually this is the typical situation of the 'representative,' i. e. of the member of a mass consisting of a sum of its members who is assigned by them and indeed, with suitable sociological logic, as a rule with an imperative mandate. In contrast the official, who acts out of a spirit of supra-personal group unity, possesses much greater freedom with regard to the complex of the actual members. Precisely in the differ- ence from the situation of the worker's representative it is remarkable that the general secretary of the English trade union organizations, which are of course structured
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is especially favored and it makes it clear that as a rule it is a matter of an office, an organization of more or several of them that form an even supra-personal unity, one including the individual only by chance. It did not come to that in the early German period. The unity of the group remained limited to the immediate interaction of the member persons. It condensed again on the whole into the idea of the objective state, for which every momentary existence for the individual would be, as it were, only a sample or representative, even as it thus solidified into the individual organs from which each one undertook a special social function and relieved the whole community of it. The threats to the self-preservation of the group that arose from this insufficiency lend themselves somewhat to being subsumed under the following three main concepts:
1. The mechanism for the division of labor enables an easier mobility of the social body. As soon as the whole group must take action for a particular purpose--for political decisions, legal finding, administrative rules, etc. --it will suffer from an enormous unwieldiness, and indeed on two sides. First on the physical or local side: in order for the group to be able to work as a whole, generally it must first assemble in a place. The difficulty and the languor, indeed often the impossibility, of bringing them all together generally thwarts numerous undertak- ings and puts others on hold so long until it is too late. In this respect a wholly instinctive functionality creates a difference between groups, in which the difficulty of coming together exists and in those where it does not exist. Compare the constitution of Athens and that of the Achaean League: in Athens an assembly of the people was held three times a month, and thus the people could rule directly since everyone could be present easily; the office holders had only to carry out their commands. In contrast, the Achaean League was so spread out that only a small fraction of the people could come to the meeting--two times a year. Thus, although in principle the League was as democratic as Athens, the office holders had to be vested with greater power and freer discretion; they were 'officials' to a greater degree, in the sense of being bearers of the group's unity that existed beyond its temporary members. But if this external difficulty of gathering is overcome, the
absolutely democratically, possesses a quite extraordinary power because he attends to the business of the association as a permanent officer--and not as a 'participant,' and that he actually exercises a personal dictatorship in the union organization where he is the only permanent officer.
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psychological difficulty of coming together arises: achieving unanim- ity in a large crowd. Every broadly viewed action of a crowd carries a ballast of misgivings, reconsiderations, side interests, and especially lack of individuals' interest in it, from which a social apparatus is dis- connected to the extent that it is intended exclusively to serve this one tangible purpose, and it consists of relatively few persons. Such group apparatuses thus serve their self-preservation through an increased flex- ibility and precision of the collective action, in contrast to which the movements of total groups have a rigid and sluggish character. 37 The deficiencies of mass action are openly attributed to these physical and psychological difficulties where the representatives are not appointed because of special qualifications and factual knowledge expertise. Thus at the end of the fifteenth century an ordinance from the district of [Bad] Du? rkheimer in the Palatinate speaks of matters "that would be too much and too difficult for a whole community to deal with; so they chose eight able people from the community who promised to represent all that a whole community had to do. " So in innumerable cases of the simple representation of the many by the few, the concern is about this superficial moment: an organization of the few, even without specific privileges, clearly has the advantage, over a crowd with many lead- ers, of easier mobility, shorter meetings, and more specific decisions. Thus one could call this a principle of the unspecialized apparatus: what
37 The greater mobility of the task-differentiated organ does not completely impede its having a conservative character, especially if it serves those interests that are quite central to the group. Indeed, this must be so insofar as it is intended to maintain group unity, around which the singular, individually determined goings-on in and among the group members swing with unpredictable scope and with a randomness unconcerned about unity. The principle of the group that was otherwise realized by its immediacy is transferred to the official, although perhaps not with the same consciousness and the same technical perfection. The moral regulation within Christianity offers a very clear example, where in the early period every community member was held to the same strict morality as the presbyter or the bishop. With the enormous expansion of Christianity, however, this became impractical; the members of the community fell back into the moral praxis accepted in the land. But it was expected of the officials of the church--and with success--that they preserve the special morality bound up with the nature of this religion. What was once the requirement for anyone to be received into Christianity now became the requirement for ordination. In this kind of phenomenon the conservatism of the officialdom rests on the deep social foundation, so that the societal function or rule is transferred on to it, those that were otherwise the responsibility of the whole group but could not be sustained by it in its development in breadth and variety, but requires a differentiated, specially designated apparatus. Thus the conservatism does not appear as a mere accident of officialdom but--admittedly making room for many regulations that are judged the same and contrarily--as the expression of its sociological meaning.
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is qualitatively more that the representatives accomplish in contrast to immediate group action rests expressly on its being quantitatively smaller. The Roman state was originally the whole of its citizenry organized in the popular assembly; and the later jurists say that only the difficulties of bringing the much increased populus into one place for the purpose of making laws made a senatum vice populi consuli38 advis- able. The unspecified character of the representing or leading apparatus is brought to expression most radically when it is not even elected, but the position is simply rotated. No examples of this are necessary here; this modality is particularly notable only somewhat in the case of the first English unions, the 'trade clubs' that needed a committee around 1800; its members, without special election, "named it in the order in which the names appears in the book. " Since the qualification of any one person for representation was most doubtful according to the mental standard of the worker, the mechanical rotation here clearly represents fully the overwhelming usefulness of the quantitative factor: that few act for the many.
Besides, the difficulty of locality is not only expressed in cases of a needed assembly of the total group; it also appears in economic exchange. As long as purchase and exchange occur only in immedi- ate meetings of producers and consumers, both are evidently very clumsy and inadequate and must often be extraordinarily hindered by the difficulty of this local condition. Meanwhile, as soon as the dealer steps in between, ultimately a class of dealers systematizes the commerce and makes available every possible connection between the economic interests and an incomparably closer and stronger cohe- sion of the group becomes evident. The insertion of a new apparatus that intervenes between the principal participants causes not a separation, as the sea often does between lands, but a bond. The unity of the group that consists in the bond of each member with the other mediated in some manner must become a much closer and more energetic one on the basis of the activity of the business class. Through the lasting effect of the business class, a system of regularly functioning, reciprocally balanced powers and relationship finally arises as a general form, in which the individual production and consumption fit only as an acci- dental factor, and which rises above this, like the state does over the individual citizen or the church over the individual believer. What is
38 Latin: people. . . senate as a consul of the people--ed.
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especially important for the preservation of the life form of the group in this and similar cases is this: that the member appointed to the work of the organization not be able to abandon the duty immediately when there is nothing to do--while the form of interaction contingent on the immediate interchanges of the members is paralyzed in many radical ways if that member stops once and thereby finds much greater dif- ficulties in resuming it. It also applies to the moments of strength of a monarchy: The monarch is always there, and in action, while the rule by the many wastes energy on the one hand and manifests complete lacunae in its active presence on the other. If the population was not gathered on the Pnyx39 or in Ding,40 the state activity slept and had to first be awakened, while the prince is always, so to speak, awake. As soon as the interaction has created an apparatus to support it, the potential for a resumption is embodied in it, even during every interruption of the interaction; and because of the primary immediacy of interaction, there arises a gap that perhaps no longer fills up, the bridge now remains yet to be walked over, it maintains unbroken the continuity of form and the chance in order to actualize it again at any moment. Finally, the following also applies to the social psychological motives that link the formation of social apparatus directly to the quantitative expansion of the group: as the sweep of what is common to all members is all the smaller, the more members there are whom it concerns, because, of course, the subjective as well as the objective diversity and distance among the individuals thereby increase. The common denominator in a very large group thus occupies a relatively unimportant place in the individual; its blending into the whole personality does not cover very much, and it is thus relatively easily dispensed with and turned over to structures beyond the sum of individuals.
2. Where the whole group of similarly oriented and similarly placed members must be mobilized for a particular purpose, there internal opposition inevitably arises, of whom each has a priori the same weight and for which each lacks the decisive authority. An adequate expres- sion of this situation then occurs when the majority never decides, but every dissenter either thwarts the solution generally or at least is not personally committed to a resolution. This danger confronts the development of the social apparatus on at least two sides, not only with
39 Meeting place of the Athenian assembly--ed.
40 Old Teutonic tribal assembly--ed.
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respect to the externally suitable action, but also for the inner form and unity of the group. First, an office, a commission, a delegation etc. , will have greater expertise than the generality of other persons; it will thus be those frictions and oppositions that originate from a shear lack of expertise that will be reduced from the outset. The consistency of action that everywhere originates from an objective knowledge of circumstances and from the exclusion of vacillating subjectivity will thus be all the more characteristic of groups, the more the management of its particular undertakings falls under an apparatus specifically desig- nated for them: thus expertise actually means already being unified in principle; while there are countless subjective errors, but with objectively correct presentation, all must arrive at the same result. Not so obvious is the meaning of the second one, with every related point. The lack of objectivity that so often hinders unity in the action of the collective is not always the result of a mere lack of know how, but often also of the very far-reaching sociological fact that the factions that split the group in some important area carry this division even into decisions that would not be a factional matter at all according to objectively tangible criteria. The formal reality of the division competes with objective insight as basis for decision. Among the daily and countless examples of this is a particularly consequential type, which the splitting of a group into centralist and particularistic tendencies brings with it. For there are, perhaps, few issues for which an importance would not be gained for those tendencies, quite beyond their inherent meaning and the objec- tive basis of reacting to them. In certain controversies about poverty, perhaps, this appears all the more blatantly as partisan politics should be removed from this area because of its social-ethical character. At the beginning of the new German Empire, however, it was dealt with as a matter of whether a highest authority for poverty should settle only inter-territorial disputes or also the cases inside each of the individual states--the objective usefulness of one or the other regulation did not come into the discussion so much as rather stating the stand of the parties on particularism or unity. And objective usefulness did not even remain the decisive factor, as a 'yes' or 'no'; the party acted on its conviction in principle wholly apart from any objective justification. But the party must still consider how this 'for' or 'against' relates to the growth of its power in the immediate situation, how this or that will affect a personality important in the party, etc. The latter, by which every inner linkage between the stand of the party and its actual activity is preserved, is, as it were, an irrelevance of the second order; it still
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rises in this way to one of the third order: the form of the party often generally makes the decision result no more out of a practical motive than out of an irrelevant motive, but in a question that does not affect the party problem as such the decision is 'yes' only because the oppo- nent decided for 'no,' and vice-versa. The line that divides the parties over a vital issue is drawn through all other issues possible, from the most general to the most specific in character, and indeed only because one may no longer be pulling in the same direction as the opponent on the main issue at all, and the bare fact that the opponent decided for one side of any one divide was already enough for oneself to seize upon the opposite side. Thus the Social Democrats in Germany voted against pro-labor rules simply because they were favored by the other party or by the government. Partisan polarization becomes, as it were, an a priori of praxis of that kind that every problem surfacing at all immediately divides into 'for' or 'against' along the existing party lines so that the divide, once it has taken place, grows into a formal necessity of remaining divided. I will mention only two examples for the different kinds. As the matter of spontaneous generation emerged in nineteenth century France, the Conservatives were passionately interested in its refutation and the Liberals for its affirmation. Similarly the different directions of literature correspond to the issue of popular aesthetic education in different places, among other things. And even if some remote relationship of the individual decision to the whole world view of a party were to be found, the level of the passion and intransigence for each individual would be given only because the other party simply represents the other position; and if a coincidence had committed the one party to a degree for the opposite position, the other one would have taken the corresponding reverse one, even if it were actually unsympathetic toward it. And now the other kind: As the German Liberal Party split into two groups in the Reichstag on May 6, 1893, because of the military bill, the state parliamentary factions remained together until July. In the October state parliamentary elections, the same people who had worked together up to then suddenly acted as opponents. In the newly opened parliament a difference of opinion was maintained by no side in any question to be determined by the parliament; but the separation nevertheless continued to be maintained. The pointlessness of such factional forms is especially manifest, but also especially often, when the contrasts within a small group appear due to circles based on personal interests and are then replicated in the largest group's issues over which admittedly the same people decide,
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but would make decisions from completely different points of view. In German agricultural districts, it was thus frequently observed that the farmers and the workers voted in parliamentary elections differently than the large landholder only because the latter is opposed to their preferences in local communal issues.
In addition to all that, what sets parties sharply against each other comes in and takes effect everywhere that a larger mass of people-- which is precisely not seized by a momentary impulse--must resort to the rules. For inevitably factions will be formed in it whose power is not overcome by objective facts and is revealed at least in delaying tactics and annoyances, exaggerations and obfuscations. This power of the party as a pure form that appears in a continuous progression through the most heterogeneous areas of interest is one of the greatest obstacles to unity, indeed to realizing the actions of a group action at all. The transfer to special apparatus of group issues that are too prominent should remedy the disruption and obstruction. While these issues are constructed from the outset from the point of view of an objectively defined purpose, this is immediately further removed psychologically from the other interests and opinions of people. These groups as such simply exists only ad hoc, and it frees in the consciousness of the indi- vidual the hoc; the objective very sharply from all matters, from what is irrelevant, makes it more difficult for the amalgamations, either deliber- ate or nai? ve, to come with objectively irrelevant provisions. The activity of the apparatus thereby becomes much more unified, vigorous, and purposeful; the group achieves self-preservation to the extent that the waste of energy ceases, that lies in those intermixtures and the mutual paralysis of energies following from them and that is unavoidable in the immediate undifferentiated management of group issues throughout the group. Obviously this advantage is not without a downside. Admit- tedly, it is likely that officials, acting so to speak not on their own but on the basis of the idea of the group, will act out of duty, but also that they will act only out of duty. With the same objectivity that controls their undertaking and decisions, they will also limit the amount of their expenditure of energy and their subjective personhood, as they must not allow these to influence their actions in official matters nor use their reserve of energy more widely since it is objectively standardized. And the more thoughtful aspects of the personality also become more valuable; the warm-heartedness, the unconditional devotedness, and the gener- osity in not distinguishing between one's own interests and those of strangers will be turned off by the objectification of the apparatus. As
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objectivity is everywhere the correlate of the division of labor, so what is praised as the objectivity of the official as such is simply the result of the differentiation with which officialdom grew up around objectively specialized purposive view points freed from the amalgamation, and therefore the divisions, of collective life.
3. If these advantages that are produced by the construction of an apparatus for the action of the total group for its own self-preservation, the, as it were, tempo and rhythm of the group-sustaining processes, they are thus extended further onto their qualitative features. Now here at first that psychological pattern is decisive, which has already become so often important for us: The collective action of the crowd will always stand, in an intellectual sense, at a relatively low level; for the point on which a great number of individuals unites must lie very close to the level of the one that stands lowest among them; and, moreover, since every high standing one can climb downward but not every low standing one can climb up, the latter and not the former determines the point at which both can meet: what is common to all can only be the possession of the one that possesses the least. This rule, which is of the highest importance for all collective behavior--from a street mob to scholarly associations--of course possesses no mechanically uniform validity. The level of the persons of high standing is not simply a more of the same qualities of which the low standing one has less, so that under all circumstances the former would possess what the latter possesses, but the latter does not possess what the former possesses. Rather, the superior person is distinguished in kind so much from the subordinate one in some respects that the former cannot at all negotiate on this point, either in reality or understanding: If the valet does not under- stand the hero, so also the hero does not understand the valet. Only the metaphorical spatial expression of high and low standing permits a belief in a purely quantitative difference, so that the higher person would need only to subtract the surplus in order to be on a par with the lower person. Also at the same time with the existence of so general a difference, which cannot pass into a unity through the suppression and paralysis of a quantitative majority, no really collective action can occur. It is possible here to go through something of that externally with another, but that happens only with energies or portions of the personality that are not those of the real personality. If a majority should actually act in unison, it will only happen along those lines that makes a descent from a higher level to a lower level possible. Thus it is already to err on the side of optimism for one to describe such a social level
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as the 'average'; the character of a group action must gravitate toward not the average and not toward the midpoint between the highest and lowest elements, but toward the lowest. This is an experience affirmed at all times--from Solon on, who said of the Athenians, individually each one would be a sly fox but in the Pnyx41 they are a herd of sheep, to Frederick the Great, who declared his generals to be the most rea- sonable of people if he spoke with each of them alone, but were sheep heads when gathered into a council of war; then Schiller summarized this in the epigram: passably clever and intelligent people in corpore42 turn into one fool. That is not only the result of that fatal leveling downward to what the cooperation of a crowd causes. There is also the fact that the leadership will shut off the most spirited, radical, most vocal members in an assembled crowed, but not the most intellectually important, who often lack passionate subjectivity and the suggestive power to make them go along.
"Now because the intelligent withdraw and are silent," says Dio Chrysostom43 to the Alexandrians, "the eternal strife, the unbridled talk, and suspicions arise among you. " Where it is a matter of excitement and expression of emotions, this norm does not apply since a certain collective nervousness is produced in a crowd that is gathered together--a being swept away with emotion, a reciprocally produced stimulation--so that a temporary elevation of individuals over the average intensity of their feelings may occur. Thus when Karl Maria von Weber44 said of the general public, "The individual is a donkey and the whole is still the voice of God"--so is this the experience of a musician who appeals to the sentiment of the crowd, not to its intel- lectuality. Rather it remains set at that below average level at which the highest and lowest can meet and which is empirically open to a considerable elevation probably in the area of emotion and impulses of desire, but not at that of the intellect. Now while the preservation of the group on the one hand rests on the immediate relationships of one individual to another and in these every person rests on the col- lectivity, everyone overall develops one's own intellect, this is absolutely not the case in those matters, on the other hand, where the group has
41 Meeting place of the Athenian assembly--ed.
42 Latin: as a body--ed.
43 Greek philosopher, circa 40 to circa 120 C. E. , known to have dressed in rags and
performed manual labor, and as one who spoke truth to power.
44 Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826), German composer, pianist, and conduc-
tor--ed.
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to act with unity. One can call the former the molecular movements of the group, the latter the molar; in the former a substitution of the individual in principle is neither possible nor necessary; in the latter both are the case. The experience of the large English labor unions--to take one example from countless ones--has shown that mass gatherings often embraced the most foolish and pernicious decisions (hence the 'aggregate meetings' were called the 'aggravated meetings'), and most of them were undone at the pleasure of the assemblies of delegates. Where a larger group itself conducts its affairs directly, necessity requires that everyone to some degree embrace and approve the measure, and embrace and approve the norm of trivial matters firmly; only if it is turned over to an organization consisting of relatively few people can the special talent for its business be of advantage. Talent and know how, as they are always characteristic of a few among the many, must in the best of cases struggle every time for influence within the group gathered to make decisions, while the few indisputably possess it at least in principle in the specialized apparatus. 45
45 Undoubtedly contradictory phenomena also appear: inside the civil service petty jealousy often maintains more influence than the talent that deserves it, while on the other hand the large crowd may follow a gifted individual readily and without regard to their own judgment. For an abstracting science such as sociology, it is unavoidable that the typical individual associations that it depicts cannot exhaust the fullness and complexity of historical reality. Then the association that it asserts would still be valid and effective thusly: The concrete happening will still always include a series of other forces outside it that can hide their effect in the ultimately visible effect of the whole. Certain law-like relationships of movements that are never represented in the empirically given world with pure consistency also form in part the substance of physics, which in the empirically given world never represent themselves in their pure consequence, in which mathematical calculation or the experiment in the laboratory reveals them. Thus the established relationships of forces are no less real and effective in all the cases in which the scientifically established conditions respectively find for themselves their original components; but their course does not show the purity of the scientific schemas because in addition to them a series of other forces and conditions is always still having an effect on the same substance; the portion of it may be hidden from immediate observation in the results of this or that which actually comprise the actual events, only an imperceptible and inextricable part may contribute to the total effect. This shortcoming, which every typically law-like knowledge of a relationship in reality manifests, obviously reaches a climax in the cultural sciences, since in their realms not only are the factors of individual events interwoven into a complexity that hardly lends itself to being untangled, but also the fate of the individual which might be analyzed escapes being ascertained through mathematics or experimentation. Every connection between cause and effect that one may look at as normal in historical occurrences or psychological likelihood will, in many cases in which its conditions obtain, still not appear to take place. This need not make the correctness of its certainty erroneous, but only proves that still other forces beside that one, perhaps set in the opposite
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Therein resides the superiority of parliamentarianism over the plebi- scite. It has been noted that direct referenda seldom show a majority for original and bold measures, that rather the majority is usually on the side of timidity, convenience, and triviality. The individual repre- sentative whom the mass elects still possesses personal qualities other than those that are in the mind of the voting mass, especially in the era of purely party elections. Representatives add something that exists beyond what really got them elected. One of the best experts on the English Parliament says of it: It is held as a matter of honor for Mem- bers of Parliament not to express the wishes of their constituency if they cannot reconcile them with their own convictions. Thus personal talents and intellectual nuance, as are found only in individual subjects, can gain considerable influence in Parliament and even serve its being preserved from the division into parties that endanger the unity of the group so often. Admittedly the effectiveness of personal principles in Parliament suffers from a new leveling: first because the Parliament, to which the individual speaks, is itself a relatively large body that includes extremely different parties and individuals so that the points of common and mutual understandings can only reside rather low on the intellectual scale. (For example the Parliamentary minutes report mentally trifling jokes: Merry-making! ) Secondly, since the individuals belong to a party that as such remains not on an individual but on a social level and level their parliamentary activity at its source; there- fore, all parliamentary and parliament-like delegations are reduced in value as soon as they have imperative mandates and are mere means of delivery for mechanically collecting the 'voices' of the 'mass' into one place. Thirdly, because a Member of Parliament speaks indirectly, though intentionally directed to the whole country. How much this exactly determines the inner character of the statements is seen from the fact that the speeches in Parliament in seventeenth century England were already somewhat rather clearly and consciously directed to the nation as a whole--although no publication of the debates was think- able at the time. But the necessity of directing it to a mass not only spoils the 'character,' as Bismarck has said about politics and how it reveals the moral instability of actors in a theater despite all the skillful
direction, were at work on the individuals in question, which had preponderance in the total visible effect.
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corrections, but it also ties down endlessly the often unbounded finesse and particularity of intellectual discourse. The representatives of the mass as such seem to have something of the mental instability of the crowd itself--wherein a certain desire for power, irresponsibility, imbalance between the importance of the person and that of the ideas and interests that one represents, and finally something of the very illogical but psychologically still understandable cooperation: namely, precisely the consciousness of standing in the center of public atten- tion. Without evading motives of this kind, one could not comprehend the street-kid-like scenes that are rather common in many parliaments and rather uncommon in very few. Cardinal Retz already notes in his memoirs, where he describes the Parisian Parliament at the time of the Fronde,46 that such bodies, though they very often include persons of high standing and education, behave like the rabble in their discus- sions in assembly.
Since these departures from the intellectual advantage of the forma- tion of the apparatus are only associated with parliamentarianism, they are not encountered in other kinds of that formation. Indeed, as the development of parliamentarianism shows, even these disadvantages form at higher levels precisely a proof for the necessity of construct- ing the apparatus. In England the impossibility of governing with so numerous, heterogeneous, unstable, and yet at the same time barely movable a body as the House of Commons was, led to the formation of ministries at the end of the seventeenth century. The English ministry is actually an organ of the Parliament that behaves in relationship to it somewhat as the Parliament itself behaves in relationship to the whole country. While it is formed by the leading members of the Parliament and represents the current majority in it, it unites the collective stances of the largest group--which it, as it were, represents in a sublimated form--with the advantages of individual talents, as they can take effect only through leadership on the part of individual personages within a committee of so few, as is the case in a ministry. The English ministry is an ingenious means to compensate, by means of a further concentration
46 The Fronde was a rebellion, 1648-1653, during the minority of King Louis XIV, by French nobles against the centralization of government power in the hands of the crown, a policy begun by King Louis XIII and his minister Cardinal Richelieu and continued by the regent Anne of Austria and her minister Cardinal Mazarin (Mazarini). Cardinal Retz was the 17th century archbishop of Paris--ed.
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of the differentiated apparatus, for those deficiencies with which the lat- ter duplicates the inadequacy of the action of the whole group, for the avoidance of which it was created. The English labor unions preserved the advantages of the parliamentary form in another way through its disadvantages. They could not properly manage themselves just with their assembly of delegates, their 'Parliament,' but with salaried officials they believed to have brought under their jurisdiction a bureaucracy that was difficult to control. The large labor unions helped themselves by employing such officials for the districts in addition to the officials of the whole union, and sent them to the parliament that had control over the latter. Through their close connection with their respective constituencies, the district officials had different interests and duties quite different from those of the officials of the federation, which kept them from forming a unified bureaucracy together with these officials. The two positions, as representative of a district and as the employed official of the latter, form mutual counterbalances, and the function that the ministry exercises in the regional parliaments is shared by virtue of this provision by the parliament itself--a sociological formation that was anticipated in the primitive kind of 'Council' of the German cities as it originated everywhere in the twelfth century. Thus its nature signi- fies that it presents an advance from an either purely representing or purely governing officialdom to one that represents and governs at one and the same time. While the council governed, it nevertheless did so as an apparatus, not as master--which was symbolized by it swearing allegiance to the city. And here an attempt appears with a technique completely different from that which determines the relationship of the English ministry to the Parliament, and yet with a teleology, similar in form, of uniting the advantages of a smaller group with those of a larger one with regard to practical governance. Around the year 1400, the Frankfurt council consisted of 63 members for a time, of whom however actually only a third always conducted business, in fact in regular one-year rotation; but in important cases the portion that held office was authorized to consult one or both of the other thirds. Thereby such advantages as the following were gained, which were tied to a having a large number of council members. The trust of the citizenry, the representation of varied interests, and the mutual control that works against economic cliques and at the same time those that are wedded precisely to a numerical reduction of the apparatus, a tighter centralization, an ease of communication, and a less expen- sive administration. The proof for the formation of an apparatus that
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grows above and beyond the parliaments is no less to be drawn from the opposite. The immense waste of time and resources with which the state machine in North America moves itself forward, writes one of its best scholars, is due to the fact that the public opinion influences everything, but none has the kind of leading power against it, as are the ministries in Europe. Neither in congress nor in the legislature of each state do government officials sit with ministerial authority, whose particular duty and task in life would be to take the initiative for fields yet to be taken up, to coordinate the conduct of business through lead- ing ideas, to take responsibility for the maintenance and progress of the whole--in short, accomplishing what only individuals as such could accomplish and what, as this example shows, can hardly be replaced with the collective action of the members of the principal group--here under the form of 'public opinion. '
Excursus on Social Psychology
This consideration of the results that derive from the alliance of particular group members with the leading apparatuses is so essentially of a psychological kind that to a considerable extent sociology seems to become another name for social psychology. Since I sought to establish the epistemological difference between sociology and psychology in Chapter 1,47 beyond this boundary setting, a closer positive determination of the particular psychology that is termed 'social' is now necessary. For if one does not really want to assign individual psychol- ogy to the place of sociology, social psychology is still termed a problem area independent of sociology and therefore it being confused with sociology could become a danger for the latter. So that the methodical separation of sociology from psychology generally accomplished above--despite all the dependence of sociology on psychology--would be valid also with regard to social psychology, proof is needed to show that the latter possesses no fundamental uniqueness concerning what is individual. I am building this proof here from the basis emphasized above, even though it would have its place anywhere else in this book. Admittedly the fact that mental processes occur only in individuals and nowhere else does not yet sufficiently negate the theory according to which the psychology of 'society' (of crowds, groups, nationalities, times) along with the psychology of individuals has as an equally valid structure, but one that is heterogeneous in nature and bearing. Rather, from the particular structure of the phenomena, to which this opinion refers, it must be made comprehensible how the notion of social psychology could result, despite the evident limitation of mental life to the individual bearer.
47 Pp. 21ff. (in the German text--ed).
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The development of language as well as of the state, of law as well as of religion, custom as well as general forms of culture generally point far beyond every individual mind; individuals can indeed share in such mental contents, without however the changing quantity of these participants alter- ing the meaning or necessity of those structures. But because they in their collectivity must still have a producer and bearer, which no individual can be, it appears that the only subject that remains is the society, the unity out of, and above, the individuals. Here social psychology could think it would find its special area of interest: products of an undisputedly mental nature, exist- ing in society and yet not dependent on individuals as such; so that if they are not fallen from heaven, only the society, the mental subject beyond the individual, is to be seen as its creator and bearer. This is the point of view from which one has spoken of a mind of the people, a consciousness of the society, a spirit of the times, and productive forces. We raise this mysticism, which places the mental processes outside the mind, which are always indi- vidual, while we distinguish the concrete mental processes in which law and custom, speech and culture, religion and life forms exist and are real, from the ideal contents of the same that are imagined for them. It can be said of the vocabulary and the connecting forms of language, as they can be found in dictionaries and grammar books, the legal norms set down in law codes, and the dogmatic content of religion, that they are valid--though not in the supra-historical sense, in which the natural law and the norms of logic are 'valid'--that they possess an inner dignity that is independent of the individual cases of their application by individuals. But this validity of their content is no mental existence that would need an empirical vehicle, even reserving the just mentioned distinction, as little as the Pythagorean theory needs anything similar. This intellectual nature is also certain and does not lie in the physi- cally existing triangle because it expresses a relationship of its sides that we find to none of the same in their existence for themselves. On the other hand this incorporeality of the Pythagorean theorem ist also not the same, however, as its coming into thinking through an individual mind; for it remains valid, completely independently of whether or not it is imagined by one at all, just as language, legal norms, the moral imperatives, and the cultural forms that exist according to their content and meaning, independently of their fulfillment or non-fulfillment, frequency or rarity, with which they appear in the empirical consciousness. Here there is a special category that is admittedly only realized historically, but in the totality and unity of its content in which it appears to require a supra-individual creator and protector, not historically, but only existing ideally--while the psychological reality only creates fragments of it and carries it further or imagines that content as pure concepts. The empirical origin of the individual parts and forms of speech, as well as their practical application in each individual case, the effectiveness of law as a psychological factor in the merchant, in the criminal, or in the judge; how much and what kind of cultural content is passed on by one individual to another and is further developed in each--these are thoroughly problems for the individual psychology, which is admittedly only very incompletely developed for them. But in their disconnection from the process of the individual realization, speech,
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law, general cultural structures, etc. are not perhaps products of the subject, a social soul, since the alternative is faulty: i. e. , if the spiritual does not dwell in individual spirits, it must certainly dwell in a social spirit. Rather there is a third: the objective spiritual content, which is nothing more of a psychological content than is the logical meaning of a judgment something psychological, although it can achieve a conscious reality only within and by virtue of the mental dynamic.
But now the lack of an insight into every mental production and reproduc- tion, which foreseeably cannot be removed, allows these individual psychologi- cal actions to flow together into an undifferentiated mass, into the unity of a mental subject that offers itself seductively close to its bearer, a structure so obscure in its origin. In reality, its origin is individual-psychological, but not more unified, but needs a majority of mental unities that act on one another; conversely, insofar as they are considered a unity, they have no origin at all but are an ideal content, in the same way that the Pythagorean theory has no origin in terms of its content. Thus in contrast to them as unities, in abstraction from their accidental and partial reality in the individual mind, the question about a psychic bearer is posed altogether incorrectly and applies again only when they subsequently become concepts in individual minds, as when we speak of them now.
Now the motive that seems to force a special social psychic reality beyond the individual ones not only affects where objective spiritual structures pres- ent themselves as an ideal common possession but also where an immediate, sensual action of a crowd draws in the behavior patterns of individuals and molds them into a specific phenomenon not analyzable into these individual acts. This motive is the result of behavior--though not the behavior itself-- appearing as something uniform. If a crowd destroys a house, pronounces a judgment, or breaks out into shouting, the actions of the individual subjects are summarized into an event that we describe as one, as the realization of an idea. And this is where the great confusion enters in: The unitary external result of many subjective mental processes is interpreted as the result of a unitary mental process--i. e. of a process in the collective mind. The unifor- mity of the resultant phenomenon is mirrored in the presupposed unity of its psychological result! The deception in this conclusion, however, on which the whole of collective psychology rests in its general distinction from individual psychology, is obvious: the unity of the collective behavior, which relies only on the side of the visible results, will worm its way into the side of the inner cause, the subjective bearer.
But a final motive that shows itself for many of the connections examined here as an indispensable part still appears of course to make a social psychol- ogy indispensable as a counterpart of individual psychology: the qualitative differentiation in feelings, actions, and ideas of the individuals situated in a crowd from the mental processes, which are not enacted within a crowd but in individual beings that are beings for themselves. Many times a commis- sion comes to different conclusions than those the individual members would have reached on their own; individuals, surrounded by a crowd, are drawn into activities that would otherwise have remained quite strange to them; a
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crowd lets itself offer activities and expectations that individuals would not permit to emanate from themselves if it were up to them alone; should the above-mentioned collective stupidity result from such crowds, they are what 'seem to the individual fairly clever and intelligent. ' Here a new unity of their own thus seems to arise among the individuals that acts and reacts in a manner that is qualitatively different from them. When looked at closely, it is a matter in such cases of the conduct of individuals who are influenced by others who surround them; thereby nervous, intellectual, suggestive, and moral transformations of their mental constitution take place in contrast to other situations in which such influences do not exist. Now if these influences that are mutually encroaching internally modify all members of the group in the same way, their collective action will nevertheless look different from the action of each individual, if the latter were in another, isolated situation. Thus, what is psychological in action nevertheless remains no less individually psychologi- cal; the collective action consists no less of purely individual contributions. If one wants to find a qualitative difference here that would actually go beyond the individual, one would compare two things standing under wholly different conditions: the behavior of the individual not influenced by others with that influenced by others--two things whose difference located totally in the indi- vidual soul, along with every other difference of mood and mode of conduct; this difference in no way forces one side of the comparison to localize in a new supra-individual psychological entity. Thus this legitimately remains as a social psychological problem: which modification does the mental process of an individual undergo if the individual goes through the social environment under certain influences? However, this is a part of the general psychological task that is a matter of an individual psychological one--which is to say the same thing. Social psychology as a subdivision of it is somewhat coordinated with physiological psychology, which investigates the determination of mental processes through their connection with the body, just as it investigates their determination through their connection with other souls.
This fact of the mental influence through what is socially constituted--which is the singular object of social psychology, but admittedly one of immeasurably broad expanse--lends a certain claim to this idea of a type of question to which it has no right in and for itself; I call it, in terms of the most important facts, the statistical on the one hand and the ethnological on the other. Where within a group a psychological phenomenon is regularly repeated in a fraction of the whole, or something else, such as a specific characteristic, is found in the whole group or at least in its majority or on the average, one tends to speak of social psychological or even sociological phenomena. This is not without further justification, however. If in a certain era N suicides are found among M fatalities every year, this statement, as true as it may be, is still only pos- sible by means of an overview by the observer. Admittedly social conditions can determine or co-determine the causality of individual deeds, but they do not have to; it can rather be a purely personal, inner deed. Moreover, the on-going spiritual characteristics of a group--be it national, related to status, or some other kind--can be purely parallel phenomena that perhaps go back to the commonality of descent, but are not worked out through the social life
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as such. These cited descriptions of such phenomena are based on confusing being next to each other with being together. They would only be sociologi- cal when they could be viewed as a mutual relationship of subjects--which naturally does not involve morphologically similar contents on both sides--and they would only be social psychological to the extent that their occurrence in one individual would be caused by other individuals. But this need not be obvious at first; if the phenomenon in question were only found in a single individual, one would call it neither sociological nor social psychological, though it would have exactly the same cause in this case, as in the other one, where besides that in the same group hundreds and thousands appear in the same form and efficacy. The mere multiplication of one phenomenon that can be established only in individuals does not yet make them sociological or social psychological! --although this confusion of a high numerical equivalence with a dynamic-functional involvement is a constantly influential way of thinking.
One can name ethnological phenomena an analogous type: when the inability to recognize the series of individual events in their detail or the lack of interest in this detail allows copying only an average, copying a quite general determination of the psychic states or processes in a group. This is also the case, for example, if one wants to know how 'the Greeks' behaved in the battle of Marathon. Admittedly it is not intended here--even if it would be possible--to explain the mental process in each individual Greek fighter psychologically. But a quite special conceptual structure is created: the average Greek, the Greek type, the quintessential 'Greek'--obviously an ideal construc- tion arises from what is required for knowing and without a claim of finding an exact counterpart in any one of the actual Greek individuals. Nevertheless the actual meaning of this conceptual category is not social because its point lies in no interaction, no practical involvement and functional unity of many persons; but actually 'the Greek,' even if unable to be named more uniquely, should be described by the mood and the manner of behavior of the mere sum of the warriors and projects an ideal average phenomenon that is as much an individual as the general concept of the Greeks existing in speech is simply one alone whose embodiment is this typical 'Greek. '
What becomes important in all these cases where it is a matter of a sum of individuals as such, where the social facts become important only as moments in the determination of the individual, not different from physiological or religious facts--what must nevertheless be valid in these as social psychological rests on the conclusion that the similarity of many individuals by which they permit an attaining of a type, an average, a picture uniform in some way, cannot come about without their influencing one another. The object of the research always remains the psychological individual; the group as a whole cannot also have a 'soul' for these research categories. But the homogeneity of many individuals, as these categories presuppose it, normally originates from the individuals' interactions; with its results of assimilation, of identical influence, and of setting uniform purposes, it also belongs to social psychol- ogy--which is revealed here also not as a counterpart adjoining individual psychology, but as a part of it.
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The aforementioned factors combine to expose a society lacking the formation of an apparatus to the loosening and destructive powers that every social structure produces within itself. It is crucial, among other things, that the personalities that work in an antisocial and destructive way, especially against a certain existing social form, to be normally dedicated completely to this struggle, even if it is an indirect one. Equally whole personalities must oppose their whole personality that they put into play for the defense of the existing order. The col- lectivity of human beings actually develops specific powers that cannot be made up for by the summation of the partial strengths of many individuals. Thus the social self-preservation now above all also needs the formation of the apparatus against strong individual powers that do not actually work destructively and as a socially negative force, but strive to subjugate the group. The fact that the Evangelical Church did not resist the princes and was infinitely much less able than the Catholic Church to maintain its supremacy as a sociological struc- ture seems to me to reside for the most part in the fact that it could not cultivate the supra-individual objective spirit consistently with its wholly individualistic principle constructed on the personal faith of the individual, a spirit that the Catholic Church allowed to become clear and effective in its organs: not only in the tightly structured hierarchy, whose personal head was able to face the principality with a formally equal defiance, but in monasticism, which bound the strictness of its ecclesiastical cohesion and teleology in a remarkably clever way with the great variety of its relationships with the lay world: as an example of sacred-ideal, as preacher, as confessor, as beggar. A band of mendi- cants was an organ of the Church that a prince could ill combat and to which the Evangelical Church for its part established nothing nearly as effective. Such failure to develop an apparatus turned into an undoing of the whole old-German cooperative constitution in this case, where I began this whole discussion. Thus it was no match to those strong rulers as they emerged during and after the Middle Ages in the local and central principalities. It perished because it lacked what only an organ of a society carried by individual powers could secure: swiftness of decision, unconditional summoning of all powers, and the highest intellectuality that is always developed only by individuals, whether their motive is the will to power or a feeling of responsibility. It would have required an 'official' (in the widest sense) whose sociological nature it is to represent the 'social level' in the form of individual intellectuality and activity, or to shape up to it.
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This purposive remoteness of the apparatus of the group from its immediate action goes so far that among officials whose functions bear the character of immediate responsibility, flexibility, and summary deci- sion, an election by the community is not even announced, but only the appointment by the government. The particular objectivity needed here is lacking in the immediate collectivity; it is always the party, and thus the sum of subjective convictions, that also decides about the method according to which they elect. As in fourteenth century England the judicial proceedings conducted before and through the community were always presented as inappropriate for carrying out the expanded range of police responsibilities, and the necessity of individual officers became unmistakable, who were then gradually formed into 'justices of the peace'--until the estates wanted to claim the selection of them entirely for themselves. They were always rejected, however, and rightly so as the result demonstrated. Exactly since the beginning of the parliamentary government it was inviolably held that all the judiciary should emerge from nomination alone, never from election; thus was the English crown already also paying the highest judges itself, and once when Parliament for its part offered to pay the salaries, the crown had rejected the proposal. By the government naming the official, its organizational character is raised, as it were, to the second power--cor- responding to the general cultural development where people's goals are reached through an ever more elaborate structure of means, through which ever more frequent addition of means to means is achieved, but despite this apparent detour still more surely and in a wider range than through the immediacy of the primitive procedure. 48
On the other hand the self-preservation of the group is dependent now on the apparatus being so differentiated out that it retains no absolute independence. Rather the idea must always remain (albeit in no way always consciously) that here it is still only a matter of the interactions in the group itself, that these remain in the end the basis whose latent energies, developments, and goals contain only a different practical form in that apparatus, a growth and enrichment through the specific accomplishments of individuality. The apparatus should not forget that its independence should only serve its dependence, that its character as an end in itself is only a means. Thus it can even happen that the organizational function is fully practiced in many respects when
48 Addition of means to means: literally insertion of means for means--ed.
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it does not fill up the entire existence of the functionary but holds good as a kind of a secondary office. The earliest bishops were laymen who occupied their position in the community as an honorary office. For precisely that reason they were able to live their lives in office in a purer and unworldly manner than later when it became a more dif- ferentiated independent calling. Then because it became inevitable that the forms of vocational officialdom that worldliness had cultivated now also found application to the spiritual; economic interests, hierarchical structures, thirst for power, and relationships to external powers had to build on to the purely religious function. To the extent that the function confers on the secondary office a clear objectivity of function, precisely the form of the principal vocation can bring with it an openly objective sociological and material consequence. Thus the dilettante is often devoted to art more purely and selflessly than the professional who must also live off of it; thus the love of two lovers is often of a more purely erotic character than that of a married couple. This is of course an exceptional formation that should only lead into the argu- ment that autonomy and liberation of an organ from dependence on the whole life of the group can occasionally change its preserving effect into a destructive one. I introduce two kinds of reasons for this. First: If the apparatus attains too strong of a life of its own and its emphasis no longer resides in what it does for the group but on what it is for itself, its own self-preservation can come into conflict with that of the group itself. A mostly harmless but thus precisely very clear represen- tative case of this kind is bureaucracy. The nature of the bureau, a formal organization for executing a more extensive administration, forms a pattern in itself that very often collides with the variable needs of practical social life, and indeed, on the one hand, because the spe- cialized work of the bureau is not equipped for very individual and complicated cases that nevertheless must be dealt with within it, and on the other hand, because the only speed at which the bureaucratic machinery can work often stands in screaming contradiction with the urgency of the individual case. Now if a structure only functioning with such unbeneficial consequences forgets its role as a mere auxiliary organ and makes itself the goal of its existence, so must the difference between its life form and that of the whole group sharpen to directly harm the former. The self-preservations of both are no longer compatible with one another. From this perspective one could compare the bureaucratic pattern with the logical one that relates to the recognition of the real-
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ity on the whole as the former does to public administration: a form and an instrument indispensable in the organic connection with the substance that it is called to shape, but in which its whole meaning and goal also lie. Meanwhile if logic opens up as an independent realization and presumes to construct for itself a self-contained knowledge without regard to the actual substance whose mere form it is, it constructs a world for itself that tends to stand in considerable opposition to the real world. The logical forms in their abstraction in relation to a par- ticular science are a mere organ of the complete knowledge of things; as soon as it strives for a complete self-sufficiency instead of this role and is taken as the conclusion rather than a means of knowledge, so it is for the preservation, hampering the development and the unity of the of knowledge, as it can occasionally become the bureaucratic pat- tern with regard to the totality of the group interests. Thus it is said of collegiality and the 'provincial system' that it would admittedly be less consistent, knowledgeable, and discreet than the bureaucratic depart- ment system, but milder and more thoughtful, and more inclined to allow the person of those affected to be respected and to allow for an exception to the unrelenting rule when that is called for. In these sys- tems the simply abstract state function has not yet become as objective and autocratic as in bureaucracy. Indeed even law does not always escape from this social configuration. From the outset it is nothing other than the very form of the mutual relationships of the group members that was presented as most necessary for the continuance of the group; it alone is not enough for guaranteeing this continuance or even prog- ress of society, but it is the minimum that must be protected as the basis of every group's existence. Here the formation of the apparatus is twofold: 'Law' differentiates itself out from the factually required and, most of all, actually practiced behaviors, as the abstracted form and norm of these behaviors, logically connected, and complements them so that it now stands as authoritative against the actual behavior. But this ideal apparatus, serving the self-preservation of the group, now still needs resistance from a concrete organ for its effectiveness; technical grounds cancel that original unity in which either the pater familias or the assembled group administered justice, and they require a special profession for securing the maintenance of those norms in the interac- tion of group members. Now both that abstraction from group relation- ships into a logically closed system of laws and the embodiment of their content in a judiciary is so useful and indispensable that both bring
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with them so inevitably the danger that precisely the firmness that is so necessary and the inner consistency of these formations may occa- sionally enter into opposition to the real progressive or individually complex circumstances and requirements of the group. Through the logical cohesion of its structure and the dignity of its administrative apparatus, law achieves not only an actual autonomy and, through its aim in a wide range, a necessary one, but it creates from itself--admit- tedly through a vicious circle--the right to an unconditional and unquestionable self-preservation. While the concrete situation of the group now occasionally requires other conditions for its self-preserva- tion, situations arise that are expressed by the words: fiat justitia, pereat mundus and summum jus summa injuria. 49 Admittedly one seeks to attain the flexibility and pliancy that law should have by virtue of its being a mere apparatus, through the latitude that the judge is allowed in the application and interpretation of the law. Those cases of the collision between the self-preservation of law and that of the group lie at the limits of this latitude, which should only serve here as an example of the fact that precisely the solidity and autonomy that the group must want to concede to its apparatus for its own preservation can obscure the very character of the apparatus, and of the fact that the autonomy and inflexibility of the apparatus that acts for the whole can turn into a danger to the whole group. This evolution of an organ into an auto- cratic totality through bureaucracy as well as through the formalism of the law is all the more dangerous in that it has the appearance and pretense of happening for the sake of the whole. That is a tragedy of every social development that is more advanced: the group must want for the sake of its own collectively egoistic purposes to equip the appa- ratus with the independence that often works against these purposes. Sometimes the position of the military can also bring about this socio- logical form, since, as an apparatus in the division of labor for the self-preservation of the group, it must on technical grounds be an organism itself as much as possible; the cultivating of its occupational qualities, especially its tight inner cohesion, requires a vigorous closure against the other strata--beginning with the idea of the special nobil- ity of the officer corps including the distinctiveness of its attire. As much as this independence of the military lies in a specific uniformity of life
49 Latin: "Let there be justice, the world be damned," and, "Highest law, highest injury"--ed.
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in the interests of the whole, it can nevertheless assume an absoluteness and rigidity that sets the military apart from the solidarity of the group as a state within the state and thus destroys the bond with the root from which alone its power and legitimacy can ultimately come to it. The modern citizen army seeks to confront this danger, and it represents a happy mean in the temporary duty of service of the whole people to bind the independence of the military to its organizational character.
Because for the sake of preserving the group, their organs, as inde- pendent to some degree, must confront it and must be set at a remove from the breadth of its immediate life, but this independence even for the sake of its own preservation needs very definite limits--this is obviously expressed in the problems of the term of office. 50 Even if the office is 'eternal' in principle as an expression and consequence of the eternal nature of the group with which it is bound as a vital organ, so is the independence of its real exercise still modified by how long the individual occupant administers it. The excursus on the inheritance of office shows the extreme in terms of longevity because heredity is as it were the continuation of the individual function beyond the lifespan of the individual. Admittedly at the same time an opposition emerges in the results: the inheritance of office at one time gave it its indepen- dence, with which it became like an autonomous force within the state, and at another time it allowed it to sink into insignificance and empty formality. Now the length of the personal term of office works in the very same dualism. The office of the sheriff was of great importance in the English Middle Ages; it lost that when Edward III in 1338 decreed that no sheriff should remain in office longer than one year. Conversely: the 'Sendgrafen' (legate counts) who were a very important apparatus of the central power under Charlemagne for the general control over the provinces, were normally nominated for only a year; meanwhile they
50 This relationship mentioned here and previously belongs for the most part to a future discussion of a remaining sphere of tasks: what role the purely temporary regulations play for the constituting and the life of social forms. How the change in relationships, from the most intimate to the most official, behave as a function of their duration without outside moments influencing them; how a relationship obtains a form and coloration beforehand through it being based on a limited or long dura- tion of time; how the effect of the limitation itself is modified completely according to whether the end of the relationship, of the institution, the employment etc. is set one point in time in advance or whether this is uncertain, and depends on 'notice,' on a waning of unifying impulses, or a change of external circumstances--all of which must be investigated in the individual case. There is a note about this in the chapter on space [Ch. 9--ed. ].
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