No More Learning

? space and the spatial ordering of society 617
? conflict, which the other mode wants precisely to avoid. Typically, this difference in form is important. An object's belonging from the outset to neither of the separate parties can be self-consistent as well as develop into a more legal settlement, so that neither should seize it and at the same time either first seizing it would respectively be justified. Purely personal relationships proceed in accordance with this difference already. There often exists between two people an object or area of theoretical or emotional interest that they do not touch as if by tacit agreement, be it because this touching would be painful or because they fear a conflict on account of it. This does in no way always originate from mere sensitivity in feelings, but also from cowardice and weakness. Here people leave a region between themselves, as it were, empty and deserted, while a forceful seizure that does not shun the first shock25 can develop that region for productiveness and new combinations. There- fore, there is an entirely different nuance, wherein it is mutually felt; and therefore a pre-eminence, respect, and a favorable productiveness of it follows the first encroachment upon the avoided territory as the wage of the courageous. In children's play it is likewise observed that any object that is a taboo for all, that rivalry or cooperation over it must not extend, so to speak, to non-public property, in contrast to the things that are held as public property, and the first one who wants, or who succeeds, can seize it. Economically inclined personalities sometimes leave some possibilities unrealized--in the exploitation of workers, the expansion of business lines, the attracting of customers--because they fear an all too violent clash, the increased strength of which they do not feel; while a stronger competitor, abandoning this foregone protec- tion, actualizes any already existing strengths and chances of their area and looks at everything previously not made use of as public property, in the sense that anyone who comes first should take as much from or do as much with it as possible. Finally in the realm of business in general, insofar as it is considered under the category of morality: Since a social organization never has adequate laws and forces at its disposal to constantly force morally wished-for behavior from its members, it relies on them to willingly refrain from exploiting gaps in its laws. A sphere of reserve against what is used by others surrounds the decent person, a sphere of refraining from egoistic practices that the unscru- pulous engage in without further ado, since indeed such practices can
25 Simmel uses the French, choc--ed.
? 618 chapter nine
? be prohibited only through inner moral impulses. Hence the frequent defenselessness of the moral person; one simply does not want to fight with the same weapons and about the same rewards as the rogue who seizes upon all already existing advantages as soon as it can be done without obvious risk. Thus there is among people an ideal vacuum, so to speak, into which the immoral persons enter and from which they profit. The substantive as well as the sociological essence of the whole social sphere is determined according to the extent to which it pushes through the renunciation of egoistic opportunities between individu- als, securing each from the attacks of each, or whether the general behavior is governed according to the slogan: What is not forbidden is allowed. In the endless variety of all these phenomena, such a formal equality in difference within behavioral styles becomes palpable. The contrast between the principle of the border desert and the one that says that the terrain owned by no one would be open to occupation by anyone is thus stripped of its accidental and superficial character, in accordance with the basic idea. It appears as the clear embodiment, as the example realized in space of a typical functional mutuality of relationships between individuals or groups.
The neutrality of uninhabited territory gains an entirely different meaning when it enables the territory to serve a positive purpose: its function that had been up to now that of separation can also become that of connecting. Encounters of peoples that would be impractical on the territory of one or the other can sometimes still take place on the neutral territory, and the permanent form of that will be an unin- habited region belonging to no one, especially in primitive times. For where there are inhabitants, their impartiality and hence the security of each of the parties coming together is never permanently guar- anteed, and above all a mental framework that clings completely to what is physical and concrete cannot probably imagine the neutrality of a territory better than thinking that no one even lived there. From here, where it indicates a shear absence, there is a further way to the neutrality as a general, wholly positive manner of relationships--and thus it will directly cleave to pieces of space--that indeed produces a totally determined possibility of relationships but which are still wholly indifferent by themselves. Out of all the potentialities of life, space is generally the impartiality that has become visible; almost all other con- tents and forms of our environment, through their specific properties, somehow have other meanings and opportunities for one or the other person or party, and only space reveals itself to every existence without
space and the spatial ordering of society 619
? any prejudice. Often, the uninhabited terrain belonging to no one, which is simply, so to speak, pure space and nothing more, generally nourishes this neutrality of space for practical utilizations. Thus this is the given place for the economic commerce of primitive groups who actually live in a constant, at best latent state of war and mistrust of one another. Economic commerce as exchange of objective values is indeed a principle of neutrality and of position beyond any factional- ism from the outset; even among Native American tribes who depend on war, the merchants can circulate freely from one to the other. The neutral zone, which can be thought of as nothing else because it is unoccupied, is thus everywhere found to be a correlate of the neutral exchange of merchandise and is especially accentuated, for example, in earliest England. Here the talk is admittedly of "the boundary place between two or more marks": this would have been recognized as "a neutral territory where men might meet" for commercial exchange "if not on friendly terms, at least without hostility. "26 So, actually, it is a matter here of the boundary at which the meeting takes place, so that none of the parties needs to leave their own territory; but just as we, when we speak of the 'present,' do not mean the exact present, but compose it on this side and on the other side of these simple points out of a piece of the past and a piece of the future, so that the border region for practical activity everywhere could open up a narrower or wider zone or to stretch ourselves to one like that, so that each party, if it crosses the border of its own mark, would still not encroach upon that of the other party. Thus the neutral space is classified as an impor- tant sociological type. Also where two parties always find themselves in conflict, it will be important for their development if each of the parties can meet with the other without entering upon their territory, thus without a supposition either of hostile attack or of surrender. In addition, if there was such a possibility for meeting without one of the two needing to leave one's standpoint, objectification and differentiation are thus introduced, which separate the object of conflict, about which an understanding or commonality is possible in the consciousness of the parties, from those interests that lie beyond it and that bring with them the more raw or impulsive mental states in the hostility. There belong, for example, quite commonly, at the stage of higher inner cul- ture, the personal sides of the individuals with principled antagonisms
26 The words inside the quotation marks appear in English in Simmel's text--ed.
? 620 chapter nine
? and principled personal interests in personal enmity. There belong especially the spheres of sociability, the church, political life, art, and science, insofar as public peace prevails among them, and beginning in fact with their circuit in the intellectual sense up to the localities that are set aside for them. An unforeseeable number of examples show us areas where commerce, meetings, and material contacts of the kind possible between opposed parties, so that the conflict does not come to words, without having to give up the conflict, so that one in fact goes out from the border that otherwise separates us from the opponent, but without crossing over into it, but rather remains beyond this separation. While the empty, unoccupied border area between two tribes functions as a neutral zone for commercial or other traffic, it is the simplest such structure in its purely and most clearly negative character, which serves as a means for this unique differentiated form of relationship among antagonistic elements and in which it is embodied, so that, in the end, empty space itself is revealed as a vehicle and expression of sociologi- cal interaction.
CHAPTER TEN
THE EXPANSION OF THE GROUP AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUALITY1
The themes, around which the inquiries of this book are collected into chapters, have been up to now generally individual concepts in the field of sociology, which have made room for a great variety, and often con- trast, of the historical forms and form types that these concepts present. The summaries required for the practical purpose of classification had an inner rationale only to the extent that the manifestations and reflec- tions generally contained the concept in question: the content of the individual chapters was not laid out in an integrated thesis, the evidence of which grew gradually, but rather in a sum of propositions that were grouped together under their titles. The inquiry that follows now should exemplify another type: it serves the demonstration of a single type, although in many modifications, packages, and mixtures of the context that emerges; not an idea but a statement is their common element. Instead of pursuing a singular abstracted form in the phenomena, in which it may be found and whose content is established by them in no particular order, here a certain correlation and mutually determined development of forms of social interaction will now be discussed.
The individual peculiarity of the personality and the social influences, interests, and relationships by which one is bound to one's social circle manifest a relationship in the course of their two-sided development, which appears as a typical form in the most different temporal and substantive sectors of social reality: that individuality of being and doing increases, in general, to the extent that the social circle surrounding the individual expands. From the many ways in which this expansion occurs and which supports the correlation just highlighted, I mention first those that go on in the proceedings of previously separate circles. If we have two social groups, M and N, that are distinctly different from each other in both their characteristic properties and opposing beliefs, but each of which consists of homogeneous and tightly inter- related elements, a quantitative expansion brings about an increasing
1 A portion of this chapter is taken from my Sozialen Differenzierung, Chapter III.
? 622 chapter ten
differentiation. The originally minimal differences among the individu- als in external and internal structures and activity are intensified through the necessity of earning an ever more contested living through ever more unique means; competition develops in numerical proportion to the specialization of individuals who participate in it. As different as the starting point of this process would have been in M and N, so must these gradually become similar to one another. However, there is only a relatively limited and very slowly multipliable number of essential human formations available. The more of them there are in a group, i. e. the more dissimilar the components of M become from one another and those of N from one another, the more probable it is that an ever growing number of structures will be produced in one group that are similar to those in the other. The deviation on all sides from the norm valid in itself until then for each complex must necessarily produce a similarity of the members of one group to those of the other group-- at first qualitatively or ideally. This will therefore happen, of course, because among the social groups that are still so different, the forms of differentiation are the same or similar: the relationships of simple competition, the uniting of many who are weaker against a stronger, the greedy impulse of individuals, the progression in which individual relations grow once they are established, the attraction or repulsion that appear between individuals on the basis of their qualitative dif- ferentiation, etc. Leaving aside all interest-based connections with respect to content, this process will often lead to real relationships among members of two or more groups, who came to resemble one another in this way. This is observed, for example, with the international sympathy that aristocrats have for one another and that is independent of the specific content of the issues that would otherwise determine attraction and repulsion. In the same way--through specialization inside each individual group that was originally independent of other ones-- sympathies also arise, however, at the other end of the social scale, as was evident with the internationalism of social democracy and how it has been the affective basis of the early skilled worker associations. Once the process of social differentiation has led to the division between high and low, the purely formal fact of a specific social standing brings the members of the most diverse groups who are characterized by it into internal and often also external relationship. With such a differ- entiation of the social group, the urge and inclination will grow, will reach out over its original limits in spatial, economic, and mental rela-
the expansion of the group 623
tionships, and will set in place, next to the initial centripetalism of the individual group, a centrifugal tendency as a bridge to other groups, with a growing individualization and hence the onset of a repulsion of its members. While originally, for example, the spirit of strict equality prevailed in the guilds, which on the one hand limited the individual to that quantity and quality of production that all the others achieved, and on the other hand sought to protect the individual through rules of sale and exchange to prevent being surpassed by others, it was still not possible to maintain this condition of non-differentiation for the long term. The master, made wealthy by some circumstance, no longer wanted to conform to the limits, sell his own product only, have no more than one trading post and a very limited number of assistants, and the like. But while he won his right to all this, in part after sharp conflict, a two-part result had to come about: First the original homo- geneous mass of guild fellows had to differentiate with a growing divi- sion between rich and poor, capitalists and workers. Then, once the principle of equality was so broadly broken so that one could have another one work for him and choose his market freely according to his personal ability and energy, based on his knowledge of circumstances and his calculation of chances, those personal qualities also had to increase with the possibility to develop himself, to promote himself, and to lead to ever sharper specialization and individualization within the brotherhood and ultimately to its breakup. But on the other hand, a major extension beyond the previous market area became possible through this transformation; through the producer and dealer, formerly united in one person, being differentiated from one another, the dealer gained an incomparably freer mobility, and previously impossible commercial connections were realized. Individual freedom and the enlargement of business remain interrelated. Thus is indicated by the co-existence of the guild restrictions and large industrial concerns, as we had it around the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, the necessity of always allowing the large businesses the freedom of production and commerce, which one could or would limit collectiv- istically to the groups of smaller and narrower firms. It was thus in a twofold direction that the development from the narrow homogeneous guild circles set out and would prepare the way for their dissolution in this two-ness: first the individualizing differentiation and then the expanding out, making distant connections. Consequently the differ- entiation of the English guild members into dealers and actual workers
624 chapter ten
appears most strikingly in the trades that make 'articles of foreign demand,' such as tanners and tool makers. The division that is inter- woven as a correlate with this expansion does not only involve the content of the work, but also the social control over it. So long as the small primitive group is self sufficient, there is still continuing equality even in a particular technical division of labor, so that each works for the group itself, each activity is socially centripetal. But as soon as the confines of the group are broken up and it enters into the exchange of special products with another one, there arises within it the differen- tiation between those who make products for the foreign market and those who make products for domestic consumption--two wholly opposed directions of inner life. The history of the emancipation of serfs reveals a similar process in this connection, for example in Prus- sia. The hereditarily subservient serfs, as they existed in Prussia up to about 1810, were in a unique intermediate position with respect to the land and the lord; admittedly the land belonged to the lord, but still not in a way that the farm worker did not have certain rights to it. Admittedly, on the other hand, he was subject to forced labor on that land, but worked next to the land assigned to him for his own interest. With the end of serfdom a certain part of his previously too limited rights to owned land was converted into full and free property, and the noble of the estate was dependent on wage laborers who were now recruited mostly from the owners of smaller properties bought from him. Thus while under the earlier condition the farmer joined in him- self the partial qualities of owner and worker for an outside interest, he now appeared sharply differentiated: one part became a pure owner, the other a pure worker. But with the free movement of persons thus started, the establishment of more distant relationships was elicited; thus not only did the lifting of an external bond to the soil come into consideration, but also the status of the worker as such, who is soon employed everywhere; on the other hand, it made the alienation of free property by sale and thus commercial relationships, resettlements, etc. , possible. Thus the observation set forth in the first statement is justified: Differentiation and individualization loosen the bond to the closest in order to create a new one--real or ideal--with the more distant.
A relationship fully corresponding to this is found in the world of animals and plants. With our domesticated animals (and the same holds for agricultural plant species) it is to be noted that the indi- viduals of the same subspecies differ from one another more sharply
the expansion of the group 625
than is the case with the individuals of a corresponding species in the wild; but in contrast, the species of a family are closer to one another as wholes than is the case with uncultivated species. The increasing formation through breeding thus produces on the one hand a starker appearance of individuality within the same species, and on the other hand an approach toward the distant, a progression going beyond the originally homogeneous group of a similarity to a greater universality. And it is completely in accord with this if it is made certain for us that the domesticated animals of uncivilized people bear the character of a particular species much more than do the varieties maintained among civilized people; for they have not yet come to the point of training that diminishes the differences of the subgroups with more extended taming while increasing that of the individuals. And here the develop- ment of animals corresponds to that of their masters: In accord with the picture of primitive cultural conditions that we tend to make for ourselves (here the idea can remain in a certain ambiguity without harm), the individuals of the tribes have a greater qualitative similarity and a more solid practical unity; the tribes as totalities face one another as strangers and hostile: the closer the synthesis within each tribe, the more severe the antithesis toward the foreign tribe. With the progress of culture, the differentiation among individuals grows and the resemblance with the foreign tribe increases. An Englishman who had lived many years in India told me that it would be impossible for a European to come any closer to someone born there where castes might exist, but where no caste divisions prevailed, it would be easy. The closed nature of the caste, through such a clear homogeneity within as well as a clear line of separation from above and below, evidently prevents the development of what one must call the human-in-general and what makes a relationship with the foreign race possible.
It is completely in keeping with this that the broadly uncultivated masses of one civilized people are more homogeneous among them- selves as opposed to those of another people who are distinguished by sharper characteristics than both are among the cultivated people of both groups. Within the culture, that synthesis-antithesis relationship is repeated when the ancient German guild system set about binding the guild fellows very closely together in order to set the guild communi- ties strictly apart. The modern association, the goal-oriented group, in contrast, binds the fellows together only so much and imposes an equality on them only to the degree that its firmly re-written pur- pose requires and leaves them complete freedom in other matters and
626 chapter ten
tolerates every individuality and heterogeneity of their general per- sonalities; but in exchange, it strives for a comprehensive union of all associations through the intricate division of labor, the leveling through a legal equality and money economy, and the solidarity of interests in the national economy. In these examples is indicated what the course of inquiry will make manifest everywhere: that the non-individuation of members in the narrower circle and the differentiation of members in the wider is manifest in the groups that coexist side-by-side, just as in the sequence of stages through which the development of a single group undergoes.
The basic idea may be turned into the generalization that in every person, all things being equal, there exists an invariant proportion, as it were, between the individual and the social that only changes form: The narrower the circle is to which we are committed, the lesser freedom of individuality we have. Thus this very circle is something individual; it cuts itself off just because it is smaller, with a sharper boundary, in relation to the others. And correspondingly: If the circle in which we act and to which we maintain our interest broadens, there is thus more room in it for the development of our individuality; but as parts of this whole we have less uniqueness, this whole as a social group is less individual. It is therefore not only the relative smallness and closeness of the community but also, or above all, its individualistic coloration to which the leveling of its individuals corresponds. Or put into a short formula: The elements of a differentiated circle are undifferentiated, and those of an undifferentiated circle differentiated. Of course, this is no sociological 'law of nature' but only, so to speak, a phenomenologi- cal formula that is intended to conceptualize the usual succession of courses of events that usually occur together; it indicates no cause of the phenomena, but the phenomenon whose entire underlying general association is represented in every individual case as the outcome of very diverse causes, although they represent in their combination the same formative forces of unconnected causes.
The first aspect of these linkages--the non-differentiation among the members of differentiated groups--portrays in a way the social pattern of Quakerism, which leads back precisely to the innermost motivations. As a whole, as a religious principle of the most extreme individualism and subjectivism, it binds the members of the community to the most uniform and democratic kind of life and existence, eliminating all individual differences as much as possible; however, it thus lacks any understanding of higher governmental unity and its purposes, so that
the expansion of the group 627
the individuality of the smaller group on the one hand excludes that of the individuals, while on the other it excludes commitment to the large group. And now this is represented in the individual this way: in what is a community matter, in worship gatherings, each is allowed to step up as a preacher, speak what and when one pleases; in contrast, the community watches over personal matters, so that, for example, no marriage takes place without the consent of a committee established for inquiring into the case. Thus they are individual only in what is common, but socially bound in what is individual. Both sides of that form are exemplified in the differences between the political forma- tions of the northern and southern states of the United States, and in fact most clearly in the time before the Civil War. From the outset, the New England states in North America had a strongly local social trait; they formed 'townships' with a particular bond of the individual to the duties toward the whole, while this whole was comparatively very small but very independent. In contrast the southern states, settled more by individual adventurers who had no particular inclination toward 'local self-government,' very soon formed very extensive 'coun- ties' as administrative units; indeed the actual political importance for them lies in the state as a whole, while a New England state is merely a 'combination of towns. ' The more abstract, more colorless general state formation that joined them together corresponded to the more independent, almost anarchic, inclinations of the individual personali- ties of the South, while the more strictly regulated personalities of the North were inclined toward the cultivation of narrower urban cultures that possessed, however, quite strong individual coloration and autono- mous characteristics.
One could speak, with all the above-mentioned reservations, of a quota of the tendency toward individualization and one toward non- differentiation that is determined by the personal, historical, and social environment and that remains the same, whether it is brought to frui- tion by the purely personal formation or by the social community to which the personality belongs. We lead, so to speak, a double or, if one will, halved existence: one time as an individual inside the social circle, with a perceptible separation from its other members, but then also as a member of this circle, in disengagement from what does not belong to it. Now if a need for individualization as well as a need for its opposite lives in us at all, it may be realized on both sides of our existence. For the plus in the satisfaction that something of the instinct for differentiation gains in the sense of the personality, as opposed to
628 chapter ten
the membership in the group, becomes a minus corresponding to the differentiation of the personality itself that gains the same quality in being united with its group members as a purely social being; i. e. , the increased individualization within the group goes hand in hand with a reduced individualization of the group itself, and vice-versa, if a par- ticular amount of instinct is to be satisfied. As a Frenchman remarked concerning the desire for clubs in Germany,
c'est elle qui habitue l'Allemand d'une part a` ne pas compter uniquement sur l'Etat; d'autre part a` ne pas compter uniquement avec lui-me^me. Elle l'empe^che de s'enfermer dans ses inte? re^ts particuliers et de s'en remettre a` l'Etat de tous les inte? re^ts ge? ne? raux. 2
It is also implied in this negative form of expression that there is a tendency toward the most general and one toward the most individual, but that both are not satisfied here by being differentiated into radi- cally separated special structures; the club, however, would represent a mediator that is adequate for the dualistic quantum of instinct that exists in a certain amalgamation.
This is used as a heuristic principle (i. e. , not thereby portraying the actual causes of phenomena but only claiming: they occur as though such a twofold instinct dominated them and would counterbalance its realization in the separate sides of our nature); thus we have therein a most general norm according to which the different magnitudes of social groups only offer the chance of the most frequent opportunity; meanwhile that opportunity is realized by other circumstances. Thus we notice in certain circles, for example, indeed perhaps among peoples, an extravagant, exaggerated, capricious impulsivity; even a slavish bondage, to fashion is very prevalent. The madness that one person perpetrates is mimicked robotically by all the others. Others, in contrast, with a more sober and soldierly patterned form of life that is not on the whole nearly as colorful, nevertheless have a much stronger instinct for individuality and distinguish themselves within their uniform and simple lifestyle much more sharply and clearly from one another than those who lead a colorful and unsteady lifestyle. Thus the whole has a very individual character on the one hand, but its parts are very
2 French: "This is what accustoms the German not to rely only on the state on the one hand, and on the other hand not to rely only on oneself. It keeps one from being enclosed in one's own particular interests and leaving all general interests to the state"--ed.
? the expansion of the group 629
similar to one another; on the other hand the whole is less colorful, less given to an extreme, but its parts are markedly differentiated from one another. As a form of social life, fashion is already in and of itself an eminent case of this correlation. The adornment and accentuation that it confers on the person nevertheless comes to the latter only as a member of a class that stands out as a whole from other classes through adopting the new fashion (as soon as the fashion has come down to these others, it will be abandoned by the person for whom a new one arises); the spread of the fashion means the inward leveling of the class and its elevation over all others. Meanwhile, for the moment, here it depends principally on the correlation that is associated with the scope of the social circle and tends to link the freedom of the group to the individual's being tied down; the coexistence of being communally tied down with political freedom, as we find in the Russian constitution of the pre-czarist era, provides a good example of this. Especially in the epoch of the Mongolian war, there was a great number of territorial units in Russia, principalities, cities, and village communities that were held together with one another by no unitary state bond and thus in general enjoyed great political freedom; but in turn the individual's being tied down to the local community was the narrowest thinkable, so much so that no private property existed at all in earth and soil, but only the commune owned these. The lack of binding relationships with a wider political circle corresponds to being narrowly enclosed in the circle of the community, which denies the individual any personal property, and often, certainly, personal mobility as well. Bismarck once said that a more restrictive provincialism prevailed in a French city of 200,000 inhabitants than in a German one of 10,000, and gave as a reason for this that Germany consisted of a large number of small states. Evidently the rather large state allows the commune a mental independence and insularity, and when, at a minimum, relatively small community feels like a totality, every assessment of minutiae must take place, which is just provincialism. In a smaller state the commune can feel more like a part of a whole; it is not so self-sufficient, does not have so much individuality, and therefore, more readily escapes that internally oppressive leveling of the individual, the result of which, according to our psychological sensitivity toward differences, must be a mental aware- ness of the smallest and pettiest goings-on and interests. As a rule one can protect individuality in only two ways within a narrow social circle: either by leading it (hence strong individuals sometimes like to be 'the foremost person in the village') or by existing in it only superficially,
630 chapter ten
but in essence keeping independent of it. But this is only possible either through a great strength of character or through eccentricity, since precisely that stands out particularly frequently in small towns.
The circles of social interests surround us concentrically: the more closely they enclose us, the smaller they must be. But now the person is never a purely collective being and never a purely individual one; of course it is a matter here, therefore, of only a 'more' or a 'less,' and only particular aspects and determinants of existence, in which the development of a prevalence of the 'more' is manifest in a prevalence of the 'less,' and vice-versa. And this development will be able to have stages in which the affiliations to the small as well as the larger social circles appear next to one another in a characteristic sequence. Thus while commitment to a narrower circle is less favorable in general for the survival of individuality as such than its existence in the largest possible generality, it is psychologically still to be noted that within a very large cultural community the membership in a family promotes individualization. The individual is not able to escape the whole; only insofar as one yields a portion of one's absolute 'I' to a few others and is joined together with them, can one still maintain the feeling of indi- viduality and, in fact, do so without an exaggerated insularity, bitterness, and strangeness. Even while one expands one's personality and interests around those of a series of other persons, one is also set against the rest of the whole in a, so to speak, broader mass. Admittedly wide latitude is allowed for individuality in the sense of eccentricity and the unusual of every kind by a family-less life in a wide circle of wider playing field; but for differentiation, which then benefits the greatest whole and emerges from the strength but not from the lack of resistance against one-sided instincts--for this membership in a narrower circle inside the widest is often of benefit, admittedly often only as a preparation and transition. The family, whose meaning at first is one of Realpolitik and with cultural progress is increasingly one of ideal-psychology, on the one hand offers its members as an individual collectivity a provisional differentiation, at least in the sense of absolute individuality, and on the other hand it offers it a protective area within which individuality can develop, until it is ready for the widest universality. Membership in a family in higher cultures represents a blending of the characteristic importance of the narrow and wider social group where the rights of individuality and of the widest circle are asserted simultaneously. With respect to the animal world, the entirely similar observation was made already, that the inclination toward forming families stands in inverse relationship to
the expansion of the group 631
the formation of larger groups; the monogamous and even polygamous relationship has such an exclusivity; the care for the offspring preoccu- pies the elders so much, that the formation of broader societies suffers because of that among those kinds of animal. Thus organized groups are relatively rare among birds, while wild dogs, for example, among which complete sexual promiscuity and mutual distance between the sexes after the act prevail, mostly live in closely united packs; among the mammals, among which both familial and social instincts prevail, we always notice that in times of the dominance of these instincts, thus during the time of mating and reproduction, the social ones decrease significantly. Also the narrower the union of the parents and children in a family is, the smaller the number of children; I will mention only the instructive example that within the classes of fish whose offspring are left completely to themselves, the eggs are cast off by the millions, while the brooding and nesting fish, among whom the beginnings of familial unity are thus found, produce only a few eggs. This is why it has been asserted that social relationships among the animals did not evolve out of marital or parental relations but only sibling-like ones, since the latter allowed the individual much greater freedom than the former, and they therefore dispose the individual to join tightly in the larger circle that is offered right away among the siblings, so that being enclosed in an animal family was considered the greatest hindrance to an association with a larger animal society.
That unique twofold social role of the family--one to be an expansion of the individual personality, an entity in which one feels one's own blood coursing and appears closed off from all other social entities and enclosing us as a member, but then to represent a complex in which the individual is set off from all others and forms a selfhood over against an object--this twofold role inevitably causes a sociological ambigu- ity in the family; it allows the family to seem like a unified structure that acts like an individual, and thus assumes a characteristic position in larger and largest circles as soon as a middle circle appears that is inserted between the individual and the large circle positioned around it. The evolution of the family, at least as still seems recognizable in a series of points, repeats the pattern within itself, according to which it appears first as the enclosing circle that separates the life-periphery of its individuals, but itself is of greater independence and unity; but then contracts into a narrower formation and thus becomes suitable to play the role of the individual in social circles considerably widened beyond that first one. As the matriarchal family was supplanted by the sway
632 chapter ten
of male power, it was not at first so much the fact of procreation by the father that represented the family as one, but rather the dominance that he exercised over a particular number of people, under which were found and united under a single reign not only his offspring but people adopted, purchased, in-laws, their whole families, etc. The more recent family of pure blood relationship, in which parents and children form an independent household, differentiated out from this original patriarchal family later. Of course this was with far smaller and more individual a character than the expansive patriarchal family. That older group could be self-sufficient, if need be, both in maintaining itself and in military activity; but if it once individualized in small families, the uniting of the latter into a now expanded group, the supra-familial community of the state, was now possible and necessary. The platonic ideal state only extended this developmental trend since it suspended the family altogether and instead of this middle structure allowed only the individual to exist on the one hand and the state on the other.
Incidentally it is a typical difficulty with sociological inquiry, which finds in that twofold role of the family its clearest example where a larger and a smaller group do not confront each other simply so that the position of the individual in them is allowed to be compared with- out further ado; but where several ever widening circles build on one another, there the relationship can be visibly altered, insofar as a circle can be the wider one relative to a narrower one, and the narrower one can be wider relative to a third. Within the largest, still generally effective circles around us, all circles involved with it have this double meaning: they function on the one hand as unions of an individual character, often directly as social individualities, and on the other hand they function in accord with their being elements of a complex of a higher order, which perhaps still include in themselves beyond their individuals further complexes of a lower order. It is always precisely the intermediate structure that manifests the relationship in question--inner cohesion, outer repulsion--with regard to the more general higher structure and the more individual deeper one. The latter is a relative individual in relation to those just as it is a collective structure in rela- tionship to still other ones. So where, as here, the normal correlation is sought among three stages described by their size--the primary individual member, the narrower circle, and the wider one--there possibly one and the same complex will be able to play all three roles under the circumstances, according to the relationship into which it enters. This does not thoroughly reduce the hermeneutic value of stat-
the expansion of the group 633
ing this correlation, but on the contrary provides its formal character to be accessible in every substantive particularity.
Of course there are enough social configurations in which the value of individuality and the need for it sharpens exclusively for the indi- vidual person, where each complex of several brings these features to the fore under all circumstances as the principal other authority. But on the other hand, it was already shown, however, that the meaning and instinct of individuality never stops at the boundary of the indi- vidual person, that it is something more general, more a matter of form, that can apply to a group as a whole and to individuals precisely as members of it, as soon as there is only something more extensive, something confronting it toward which the collective structure--now relatively individual--can be something conscious for itself and can gain its singular or indivisible character. Thus the phenomena that seem to contradict the correlation asserted here are explained as the following from the history of the United States. The anti-federalist party (which was first called the Republican), then the Whigs, and then the Demo- cratic Party defended the independence and sovereignty of the states at the expense of the centralizing and national regime--but always with an appeal to the principle of individual freedom, the noninvolve- ment of the whole in the affairs of the individual. Individual freedom from precisely the relatively large circle is not thereby an occasion for a contradiction of the relationship, since the feeling of individuality here had penetrated the narrower circle that also encloses many individuals; these latter thus exercised the same sociological function here as single individuals do otherwise.
The boundary between the spheres that the instinct for individual- ity meets and the ones that this same instinct needs is thus not fixed in principle because it can extend from the position of the person to an indeterminant number of concentric structures around the person; one time its strength appears in any one sphere filled by it defining a neighboring one instantly as other and anti-individualistic, and at another time precisely by the need for separation not appearing so quickly and the neighboring sphere also still being of an individualistic shade. The political attitude of the Italians, for example, is on the whole regionalistic: Every province, often enough every city, is extraordinarily jealous of its uniqueness and freedom, often under a complete con- trast against another and completely unconcerned with the value and right of the whole. Apparently, in accord with our general formula, it would have to be concluded that the members inside these separate
634 chapter ten
individualized sectors would be attuned collectivistically toward one another and toward equalization. But this is not the case at all; on the contrary the families among themselves and then again the individuals among themselves are driven by an extreme independent and separat- ist force. Here, as in the American case, there are, however, the three layers of our correlation: the single individual, smaller circles of them, and a large all-encompassing group. But there is no cause for that characteristic relationship between the first level and the third under a common contrast against the second, since this second becomes in practical consciousness an aspect of the first. Here the feeling of indi- viduality has exceeded, as it were, the dimensions of the individual and has taken with it that social side of the individual that as a rule is constituted for the individual as the non-self.
Now the fact that the first and the third members in the three-member structure in general point to one another and form a common anti- thesis--in all the most different meanings of this word--to the middle member is revealed no less in the relationships of the subjects to those levels than in the objective relationships. An individual's personally ardent commitment tends to be aimed at the narrowest and widest circles, but not at the middle one. Perhaps, anyone who is devoted to a family will also be devoted to a fatherland, perhaps also to a completely general idea such as 'humanity' and the demands associated with a concept of it, perhaps also to a city and its honor in times when 'the city' constituted the widest practical circle of life. But for intermediary structures it will hardly occur either for a province or for a voluntary association; it may happen for one person or for very few who com- prise a family circle, and then again for a very great number--but, for the sake of a hundred people hardly anyone becomes a martyr. The psychological meaning of the purely spatial 'nearby and distant' coincides completely with the metaphorical meaning of it if it places the entirety of the 'nearby' and the entirety of the 'distant' precisely under a category that is the same in practice. On the one hand, the innermost interest of the heart is linked to that person whom we con- tinuously have in view and to whom our daily life is bound, and on the other hand is linked to someone from whom a wide insurmount- able distance separates us, stirred up just as much by an unsatisfied longing for someone, while a relative coolness, a lesser stirring up of the consciousness, occurs for someone who is admittedly not so near but still also not insuperably distant. The exact same form is realized
the expansion of the group 635 by the fact observed by a noted authority on North America, that the
county there has little importance:
. . . it is too large for the personal interest of the citizens: that goes to the township. It is too small to have traditions which command the respect or touch the affections of its inhabitants: these belong to the state. 3
This 'meeting of the extremes' also holds for negative preferences. The Indian caste is endogamous; but within it there is again a very narrow circle in which marriage is prohibited. Thus the possibility of marriage exists here--and elsewhere still very frequently, indeed, in a certain sense maybe always, at least for the holding of weddings--only in the narrower circle: It is excluded in both the widest and the narrowest. And now this pattern of correlation is manifest once more in historical succession: The power and scope with which the guild once controlled the individual is now no longer valid for this type of circle, but on the one hand is valid for only the narrower circle of the family, and on the other for the wider circle of the state.
That the most individual and broadest formations, relatively speak- ing, relate to one another that way, as it were over the head of the middle formation--that is the underpinning, achieved at this point, of the fact, evident in the preceding and in the following, that the large circle favors individual freedom and the smaller limits it.
The idea of individual freedom covers all kinds of things, through the variety of meanings of our differentiated provinces of interest, from, for example, the freedom of choosing a spouse to the freedom of economic initiative. I will cite an example for precisely each of these two. In times of rigid group separation into clans, families, occupational and birth strata, castes, etc. , there tended to be only a relatively narrow circle available in which the man or wife could marry, compared to the advanced or liberal situation. But as far as we can examine these circumstances and make judgments with certain analogies with the present, the choice of the individuals was not difficult at all; it corresponded to the lesser differentiation of persons and marital circumstances that the individual man could be matched by external propriety without much specific internal direction and exclusivity by both sides, matched with almost any girl from the relevant circle. Advanced culture altered this situation
3 Simmel is quoting James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (1888), Vol. I, Part II, Ch. 49, section v (Reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995)--ed.
? 636 chapter ten
in two ways. The circle of potential spouses has widened extraordinarily through the mixing of strata, the elimination of religious barriers, the reduction of parental authority, freer movement in both the local and social senses, etc. But in turn the individual selection is a much more restricted one; the reality and direction of the wholly personal inclina- tion, the consciousness that among all persons these two are meant for one another and only for one another--this became a shocking devel- opment even for the business class of the eighteenth century. A deeper meaning of freedom arises here: Individual freedom means freedom that is limited by individuality. A uniqueness of a being corresponding to the individual arises out of the uniqueness of that individual's nature, which can fulfill and free the individual. The correlate of the clarity of the individual's needs is that there would be a largest possible circle of possible objects of choice; because the more individual are the wishes and inner necessities, the more unlikely it is that they will find their satisfaction in one narrowly bounded area. In the earlier situation, in contrast, there was much less limitation from the fixed nature of per- sonalities: The individual was much freer from himself concerning what choice one wished to make, since instead of a decisive differentiation there was a rough equivalence of all the choices under consideration; so the circle of these potential choices did not need to be considerably great. Thus admittedly the relatively undeveloped situation socially hemmed in the individual, but with this was joined the negative free- dom of non-differentiation, that liberum arbitrium4 given by the shear equivalency of the possible selections; under more advanced conditions; on the contrary, the social possibilities are much expanded, but they are limited by the positive meaning of freedom, in which every selection is, or at least ideally should be, the clearly determined expression of a unique kind of personality. And now in the general societal meaning of freedom: Feudalism produced nothing but narrow circles that bound one individual to another and limited the one with the duty toward the other. Therefore under the feudal system there was room neither for national enthusiasm or public spirit nor for individual entrepreneur- ialism or private industriousness; the same relationships that did not allow at the highest level the formation of a cultural unity of a social kind hindered the exercise of individual freedom at the lower level.
4 Latin: free choice The term was used historically in theological arguments about the human ability to do good, but commonly translated rather inaccurately as free will.
? the expansion of the group 637
But precisely because of that it remains thoroughly relevant and deeply delineated in concept if the 'free' person in the feudal era is one who stands under the law of the land, i. e. under the law of the widest circle; one who is bound, unfree, belongs to a feudal body, i. e. one's right derives from this narrower circle and in exclusion of the wider one. Now if freedom swings also to the extreme and if, as I indicated above, the largest group allows for an extreme education or miseducation of individualism, misanthropic isolation, grotesque and moody forms of life, it creates greater room for the crassly selfish way of life; this is still only the consequence of the wider group making fewer claims on us, being less concerned about the individual, and thus hinders less the outgrowth of the most perverse instincts than the smaller circle does. Here the size of the circle carries some blame, and it is a matter more of developments, so to speak, outside than inside the group; the larger group gives the members greater potential for these developments than does the smaller one.
In general, the meaning of individuality diverges in two directions; one is the one laid out above, the freedom and responsibility for one- self that suits the person in broad and turbulent social environments, while the smaller group is a 'narrow' one in a double sense--not only in its reach but in the restriction that it places on the individual, the control that it exercises over one, the small range of opportunities and changes that it allows one. The other meaning of individuality, however, is the qualitative: that each individual is separated from others, that one's being and activity with regard to form or content or both suits only that person and that this being different has a positive meaning and value for one's life. The formulations that the principle or ideal of individualism has undergone in modern times differ according to the emphasis placed on its first and second meanings. In general, the eighteenth century strove for individuality under the form of freedom, the emancipation of personal abilities from impositions of any kind, communal or ecclesiastical, political or economic. But nevertheless the assumption was valid that individuals freed from all socio-historical bonds would seem essentially the same, that 'the human as such,' with all the qualities and perfections of human nature, would be contained in every person and would need to be freed from every bond that deforms and misleads. The fact that people, as soon as they gain free- dom, use it in order to differentiate themselves, to dominate or to be enslaved, to be better or worse than others, in short to develop every difference of individual potential--this escaped that individualism for
638 chapter ten
which 'freedom and equality' were two peacefully compatible, indeed mutually necessary values. But it is obvious how the breakup of all nar- row and constraining unions was related to this--partially as its actual historical effect and at least partly as a desire and requirement for it. In the French Revolution, however, even the workers were forbidden to join associations aimed at securing better working conditions because such an association would limit the freedom of the individual member! Therefore this individualism is thoroughly correlated to a 'cosmopolitan' attitude; even national solidarity recoiled before the idea of 'Human- ity'; in place of the particular regulations of the strata and circles, the rights of the individual, which were characterized as 'human rights,' stood prominently, hence that which derived from membership in the widest thinkable circle of all. The nineteenth century cultivated the other meaning of individuality, the opposite of the above-mentioned, that the eighteenth century had not generally seen, most prominently in romanticism from a theoretical viewpoint and practically in the prevalence of the division of labor. That the individual occupies and should occupy a place that this individual and no other can fill, that this place in the organization of the whole waits, so to speak, for one and that one should seek it until finding it, that both the personal and the social, the psychological and the metaphysical meaning of human existence would be fulfilled by this indispensability of one's being and by this sharpened differentiation--that is an ideal construct of individualism that obviously has little to do with the idea of the 'the human as such,' with the uniform human nature that exists in everyone, which would only need freedom for its emergence; it has nothing to do with such an idea; indeed it basically contradicts that: in the first sense lies the value emphasis on what is common to human beings; in the second, on what makes them distinct. However, they coincide precisely with reference to the correlation that I am now trying to prove. The expansion of the circle to which the first concept of individuality corresponded also favors the emergence of the second. Although the second does not look upon the whole of humanity, although it rather allows the individu- als to complement one another and need one another through their specialization in the division of labor instead of allowing the atomizing of society into identical and simply only 'free' individuals; although historically it favors nationalism and a certain illiberalism rather than free cosmopolitanism, it is nevertheless bound to a relatively consider- able size of the group in which it can arise and exist. How immedi- ately the shear expansion of the economic circle, the increase of the
the expansion of the group 639
population, and the spatial limitlessness of competition has driven the specialization of activity needs only be mentioned. It is no different, and in fact especially so, with mental differentiation, since that tends to arise through the encounter of latent mental aptitudes with objectively existent mental products. The immediate interaction of subjectivities or the purely internal energy of a human seldom brings forth all that that one possesses by way of mental distinctiveness; rather a certain portion of what is called the 'objective spirit' appears to belong to traditions and the experiences of the genre in a thousand patterns, the art and knowledge that exist in perceptible forms, all the content of cultivation that the historical group possesses as something supra-subjective and yet as something in principle accessible to each person. It is characteristic of what is generally offered in objective structures of crystallized spirit that it provides precisely the material and stimulation for constructing the peculiarly personal form of mind: It is the essence of 'cultivation' that our purely personal potentiality is developed sometimes as a form of the content of the objective-spiritual given, sometimes as the content of the form of the objective-spiritual given; our mental life achieves its full uniqueness and personhood only in this synthesis, only in that it concretely incorporates its irreplaceability and complete individuality. This is the context that attaches spiritual differentiation to the size of the circle out of which the objective spirit comes to us; this circle can be the real-social one, or it may be of a more abstract, literary, historical kind--in correlation with its range, the chance will always grow to develop its performance, the uniqueness, the singularity, the being-for-self of our inner life and its intellectual, aesthetic, and practical creativity, as objective and general as these may be. The individualism of equivalency,5 which is not from the outset a contradictio in adjecto6 only if under 'individualism' one understands independence and freedom not limited by any narrow social bond, and the individualism of inequality, which draws the consequence of that freedom on the basis of the infinite variety of human capabilities and thus makes them incompatible with equivalency--both of these forms of individualism are found in their basic opposition together at one point: that each one finds the possibil- ity of its development in the measure in which the circle around the
5 Gleichheit, which can also mean equality--ed.
6 Latin: a direct contradiction--ed.
? 640 chapter ten
individual provides it the stimulus and material through its quantitative expansion of the room for that purpose.
Now I will return to the association mentioned above: between a stronger cultivation and evaluation of individuality and cosmopolitan- ism, the next social milieu of the individual, which is, so to speak, one of a mindset that leaps over--and I am immediately reminded of the teaching of the Stoics. While the socio-political context in which the individual remains still forms the wellspring of ethical rules for Aristotle, the Stoic interest, which involves practical activity, was actually fixed only on the individual person, and the shaping of the individual toward the ideal that the system prescribes becomes so ultimate under the aegis of stoic praxis that the association of individuals to one another appeared only as a means to that ideal individualistic goal. But admittedly this was determined by the content of the ideal of a general reason that is at work in every individual, and every human has a share in this reason, whose realization in the individual comprises the Stoic ideal; reason threw a bond of equality and brotherhood around all that humanity signifies, beyond all limitations of nationality and social bar- riers. And so the individualism of the stoics thus has cosmopolitanism as its complement; the breakup of the narrower social group, favored no less in that epoch by the political relationships than by a theoretical consideration, shifted the central focus of ethical interest on the one hand to the individual and on the other hand to the widest circle to which each belongs as a human individual. Historical reality has fol- lowed this pattern in countless variations. When the medieval knight with his life orientation to the whole individual linked an emphatically cosmopolitan trait to testing and proving the person, when his self-deter- mination gave room to the forms that created a European knighthood over all national boundaries, the directions were also signaled by this formula, which held sway in the entire Holy Roman Empire that in the end dissolved them. Thus it was destroyed on the one hand by the particularism of its components and on the other hand by the binding relationships to the remaining components of the European politics as a whole, through tightening and extending, which split up the national intermediary structures. That particularism was already evoked in and of itself by the same constellation, though extended in another dimen- sion. Where elements that are already differentiated or on the way to being differentiated are forged into a comprehensive unity, there an increased intolerance, a stronger mutual repulsion, is often the result. The large common context that nevertheless requires differentiation
the expansion of the group 641
on the one hand in order to be able to exist as such, causes on the other hand a mutual friction of elements, a validation of oppositions, that would not have come about without their being forced into the union. The unification within a large commonality means that, albeit a passing one, it becomes a means for individualization and becoming aware. Exactly thus the medieval empire's politics of world domination first unleashed the particularism of peoples, strata, and princes, indeed called it into life; the intended and partially completed unification into a large whole first created, expanded, and made conscious that which was admittedly destined to cause its break up: the individuality of the parts. The culture of the Italian Renaissance followed this norm in a vivid fashion. It cultivated full individuality on the one hand and the attitude and cultured behavior extending far beyond the limits of the narrower social environment on the other. This was expressed directly, for example in the words of Dante that--with all his ardent love for the city of Florence--for him and people like him the world would be one's native land, as the sea is for fish; indirectly, and as it were a posteriori, it is thus shown that the life forms that the Italian Renaissance created were taken from the whole civilized world, and in fact precisely therefore, they gave previously undreamed of room for individuality, whatever kind of individuality it might be. As a symptom of this development, I mention here the contempt for the nobility during this epoch. The nobility is only of real importance so long as it signifies a social circle to which they tightly belong that stands out all the more vigorously from the mass of all others and indeed from below and above; denying it worth means infringing upon both markers; it means on the one hand the recognition of the value of the person, whatever hereditary group one belongs to, and on the other hand a leveling in relation to those over whom one has otherwise been elevated. Both find unconditional expression in Renaissance literature.
Excursus on the Nobility
With the nobility, social development created one of the intermediary struc- tures around which turns the correlation that has been claimed here. And in fact it is 'intermediary' in the double meaning that the beginning of this inquiry into the concept of society has shown: The nobility is on the one hand a supra-personal social form of a unity of individuals that is inserted between these elements as individual beings and a large circle encompassing the nobility itself, like the guild and sect, the family and the political party; on
642 chapter ten
the other hand it is a concrete conglomerate of people that forms a middle member between the ruling power and the broad mass of the body politic. 7 This two-fold configuration rests on, thusly nuanced, and above the actual subject matter of this chapter, going so far beyond the determinations that have been laid out, that a separate presentation seems advisable for it.
The above-mentioned position of the nobility, which is between the most highly placed and the lower elements of the group, is also a formally different one from what we observed earlier as the 'middle class. ' For the latter has its sociological distinctiveness in its being open to both of its boundaries, but the nobility in its being closed to both of them--though with many qualifications. The middle class can expand upward or downward, but the nobility repulses both. Even if the nobility tends to move its boundaries upward more readily than downward, for obvious reasons there are enough historical examples where it nevertheless also has positioned itself in opposition to the ruler as quite self-sufficient, enclosed, and centered on its own interests. It has thus brought about a position independent from both sides in a twofold sense: It derived itself like a wedge between the ruler and a large portion of the population, paralyzed the action of the former for the interests of the latter (as often at the time of the peasants' hereditary subservience and frequently during the feudal governments), but also has exercised a unifying effect, a mediating representation of the one to the other (especially so in England). In monar- chical countries where the setting of the two boundaries is not clear-cut, the formation of a nobility also remains rudimentary. Thus a real nobility never developed in Turkey. This is due on the one hand to the Islamic perspective that allows the whole people to feel like an aristocracy, as something select compared to the unbelievers; on the other hand, because the absolute grandeur of the Sultan that was not to be mediated through anything did not allow to come into existence an authority that would stand closer to him in principle and in its own right than any other one. The fact that in Russia there is no aristocracy as a cohesive stratum but only isolated aristocrats who occasionally form groups--to be discussed later in more detail--results similarly from the absolutist position of the czar, but also because of the fact that the subject population forms no such practically united stratum as to provoke an asso- ciation that would position itself above it. Conversely, the two-fold boundary of the nobility--which is still also a two-fold relationship--will nevertheless become diverse in lands having a developed stratum and richer relationships of strata, mixed in various ways in syntheses and antitheses--which must push the nobility from its actual position, though a new significance may develop for them. The life motives that Napoleon I imputed to the group that he created as his new nobility shows this to the point of caricature. Of this intermediary caste8 he is reported to have said to the democrats, it is thoroughly demo-
7 Of course, the second form applies only to the nobility in monarchical states; but in the context of this chapter, I am discussing only that, not the nobility of a govern- ing aristocracy as such.
8 Simmel uses the French: caste intrme? diaire--ed.
? the expansion of the group 643
cratic because it is open at any time to anyone without hereditary prejudice; to the great lords: it will support the throne; to the moderate monarchists: it will counter any absolute regime because it will become a power in the state itself; to the Jacobins: the old nobility will actually be completely destroyed by it for the first time; to the old nobility: once it is decorated thus with new dignities, your old ones will be revived in them. So here the double position of the nobility was inflated into an ambiguity, which reveals precisely the specific duality as right and essential for it alone.
The two-front position of the nobility, which rests precisely on its self-con- fidence and being for itself (to be treated later in more detail), is mirrored again in its distinctive, more inwardly directed duality. It originates from the personages who always, for whatever reasons, are better off than others; but once it exists, personages who are already better off thus have it retroactively, as it were, because they belong to it. There is no need for examples of the 'prerogatives' of the nobility. But there probably is, for the other side of its position, its limitations and disadvantages. Around the year 1300 there was an extensive democratic movement in Florence, in the course of which quite specific, clear restrictions and burdens were imposed on the nobles, so that at the time one could be made a noble as a penalty. The original precedence of the nobility was extended, as it were, with a negative sign: The exceptional position of the nobility would remain as already existing, just that instead of the special advantages that it otherwise owed to this position, it found the content of that position in a very particular sacrifice and restriction. Something similar is found in a regulation in the eighteenth century in the very democratic Thurgau Canton in Switzerland. It was a matter at the time of eliminating all stratum-specific prerogatives, and the rule was subsequently accepted in the constitution that whoever wished to occupy a public office had to first renounce any nobility. The penalty, so to speak, thus weighed on the nobility, not to be able to hold public office. That was the limitation that was imposed on it, the counterbalance against the social prerogative. Such disadvantages of the nobles are expressed most characteristically if their criminal exemptions were turned into the reverse. While countless times the crime of the noble was punished more lightly than that of the common person, we nevertheless also encounter phenomena as the following. In medieval Dortmund, there was an extraordinarily distinguished guild, called the Reinoldsgilde, which was always called the Major Gilda. If any of its members committed a crime against the body and life of any other member, he had to pay an extra fine to the council in addition to the usual fine that anyone generally faced for that offense. An ordinance of the city law of Valenciennes from the twelfth century goes even further. It sets a certain fixed penalty for a theft committed by a page, apprentice, or citizen. But if a knight steals, the matter is quite different. A noble does not actually steal, but he robs; stealing does not fall within his competence, so to speak. If he appropriates something by injustice, it is pre- sumed that it occurred by force, as robbery--and because it becomes robbery under that law, it is punished more severely than theft! The noble position of the knight thus prevents him from suffering the milder penalty. He stands on a height from the outset, where one can only sin more fundamentally, where
644 chapter ten
one cannot so much as commit so petty a sin such as theft that is settled with a lower penalty. Rights and burdens exist for the Brahmanic priestly aristocracy in a subtler way, but perhaps with the most radical tension. Perhaps there was never a hierarchy that dominated as unconditionally and possessed such fantastic prerogatives as these. But then one examines the life of the Brahman who was provided with this unheard of power and against whose word there was no appeal at all, who appeared as the only authoritative person in the whole population so that even the king was nothing but the subject of the priest--it was a so unbearably hard existence, of one enlaced in forms and formula, self-chastisements and limitations, that there would probably have been remarkably few Europeans who would have wanted to obtain the unheard of rights of the Brahman priest at this price. He was the most powerful but also the least free person in India. But maybe--as according to Giordano Bruno, necessity is of inferior value to God, and freedom of inferior value to a human being--even freedom seemed contemptible to him since it would have meant that every element of life would be something of equal value. It may be of equal value, whether the rabble did this or that; for a person of the highest nobility every moment must be arranged by a law because every moment is completely important. The phenomena of this type are summarized in noblesse oblige. All such difficulties or subtractions from the advantages of the position of the nobility in reality only fully signify its prominence and exclusivity. Only in allowing the masses of the many to do what is forbidden to the nobility is there the deepest contempt and indifference toward the masses. It lies in the fact that they are permitted many things that the nobility is forbidden to do: The masses are not considered to be worthy of the more stringent regulations. The non-noble may, if desired, make the same renunciations, but that does not belong to their social position; it is an irrelevant private matter. But for the noble it is a social duty, or more correctly: It is the prerogative of one's social stratum not to be allowed to do many things--perhaps the prohibition against commerce of is of that type, which runs through the whole history of the nobility from the ancient Egyptians onward. If the nobility has emphasized that Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi,9 in its principle there is still also the reverse, Quod licet bovi non licet Jovi. 10 If the sociological form of the nobility is built at first on its clear group demarcation, which involves the whole being of person- hood--so that all individual differences are only the symbol of an absolutely self-sufficient and closed kind of being--so this differentiation from the entire non-nobility will specify fully that the nobility may do what others may not, and what it may not do the others may.
Obviously the collective life of a group generated the nobility's particular structure from the inner conditions of its interaction, which reveals its formal character through the similarity of essential traits among endless differences of these groups in their otherwise formal and material characteristics. The
9 Latin: What is permitted to Jove is not permitted to an ox--ed.
10 Latin: What is permitted to an ox is not permitted to Jove--ed.
? the expansion of the group 645
nobility in ancient Rome or in the Norman Empire, among the Indians or in the ancien re? gime possesses a correspondence of social traits within all the uniqueness of their life contents; and these also appear in a more rudimentary, unsettled, and passing form in any smaller groupings in which a fraction is gathered and set off as 'the aristocracy,' be it in large family groups, among workers, or within the clergy. For the nobility in the narrower sense, this com- monality is illustrated with the observation that "Nobles become acquainted better in an evening than commoners do in a month. " That obviously depends on the common conditions of existence being extended here very widely in personal conditions and the natural presupposition of relationships that are brought with them. In interests, world view, personal awareness, feeling for the position where they stand within the social order--in all that, the aristocrats obviously agree so much, and the fact that they agree in them is so known and obvious to them that they can come to personal matters much more quickly than others who must first assure themselves what basis they have in com- mon. In order to "become acquainted with one another," i. e. , to reveal their individualities to one another, the nobles do not need so many preliminaries as those who have to first look for the a priori from which the particulars of thinking, interests, or natures can be presented.
This homogeneity of the sociological form appears to be important in a series of historical phenomena. The strange fact has been noted that many of the families of the high nobility in the separate countries of Europe are of foreign birth. In England the Fitzgerald family and the Herzogs of Leicester originate from Florence, the Herzogs of Portland from Holland; in France the Broglie family from Piedmont, the Herzogs of Des Car from Perugia, the Luynes from Arezzo; in Austria the Clary from Florence; in Prussia the Lynar from Faenza; in Poland the Poniatowski family from Bologna; in Italy the Rocca from Croatia, the Ruspoli from Scotland, the Torlonia from France, etc. Precisely because of its bond to the ownership of land and because of its traditional nationalism, with which its conservative world view tends to be bound up, the nobility seems to be especially little suited for such transplantations. The factors making them alike must be all the more effective, which suggest such a glimmering of the sort within it, which has been called the international republic of the nobles. This is enhanced through particular associations of the national nobility. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, the German nobility had very little connections with one another. Most nobles cared for their interests within the narrower circles of their places of residence or else their narrowest homelands. 11 But as the German nobles of the different regions met together during the war against Napoleon, for example, a contact among them produced what led to the quite unique structure, as it was called the Adelskette (Nobility Chain). The Adelskette was a half-secret association that probably came to be at the time of the Congress of Vienna. The nobility
11 Simmel appears to have in mind the small countries that at the beginning of the nineteenth century had not yet formed a united Germany--ed.
? 646 chapter ten
felt that since the French Revolution its role was in decline in Germany too, particularly through the emancipation of the peasants, and so sought some- how to create a common structure in order to restore its lost importance by taking advantage of the solidarity that existed among the whole nobility. This Adelskette expressly emphasized in its charter that everything political should remain foreign to it. If this might have contained a certain deception or self- deception, it nevertheless brings to expression here the essential thing, i. e. , the nobility have in common what is common to all, purely because they are the nobility, as opposed to the sameness of their political and geographical boundaries. The similarity of purely material interests would not have been big enough to bring about this inter-German association of the nobility if the deeper bond in the form of nobility as such--the interpretation of which is still to be made--had not been effective. Finally a last example: The great importance of the nobility in Austria and the considerable prerogatives people have always granted it there goes back to the fact that, in the extraordinarily heterogeneous and divergent components of the Austrian monarchy, the nobil- ity was still a continually uniform and qualitatively common element, and thus greatly served the unity of the whole. The similar formal position of the nobility in the very different parts of this assemblage of countries enabled it to be a collective Austrian aristocracy even if there is no collective Austrian nation. The unity that it had by virtue of its every similar social position enabled it to serve as the glue for uniting the whole.
However, everything considered up to now is a more or less superficial phe- nomenon that is based on the inner social structure of the nobility, but it still does not identify it. The sociological analysis of the nobility now centers around the general social content of the life of this particular group that possesses a wholly unique relationship to the individual being of its members. Here the individual is not only included in a union of individuals existing before him, contemporaneous with him, and after him, who are bound together following a formula in effect nowhere else; but what characterizes it is that the best and most valuable of this whole rank benefits every single member. It was often emphasized in this inquiry that the collective level of a group, the worth of all that which is really common, lies very close to the level of the one standing lowest in it; for as a rule someone with a high standing can sink to that of the lower, but the lower one cannot rise to that of the higher. Thus what should be common to them will be on the whole what the lower ones possess--as, for example, if a hundred people would march at the same pace, the pace that is kept is that of the person whose ability to march is the most limited. Now with the nobility the assumption is the reverse. Every personage in a noble group (be it in the narrow sense, the noble family, or in the wider sense of the noble of a land or epoch) has a share according to his worth in the fame that precisely the most outstanding members of this group have earned; such a personage joins the heritage of the stratum, as it were, sub beneficio inventarii;12
12 Latin: under the generosity of the inventory--ed.
? the expansion of the group 647
the positive values directly accumulated here in merits, precedence, and honors stream down on the individual in a direct way other than happens in any other group. This is the prejudice that the other strata allows to benefit the nobility that it cultivates among its own, which is ultimately the presupposition of the self-awareness, so to speak, for each individual member and forms as strong an individual foundation for it as a social one for the totality of the social stratum. The nobility has a unique tenacity situated in its social structure in the conserving of its 'objective spirit,' which the productivity of individuals crystallized in tradition, fixed form, work outcomes, etc. Thus in individual families what comprises their merit, glory, and value is what streams together, so to speak, into the general position of the 'nobility,' which is to be nevertheless distinguished in this respect from its purely external power and property. This even appears in an actual inverse formation. It was said of the organization of ancient nations that very frequently a nobility came into existence by the leader of the gens always being selected in the traditional manner from the same lineage. This lineage was thus not the one favored from the outset, but it would become favored only by its being expected that it would always bring forth a person qualified for the position of leader. Consequently while the whole family turns into a nobility, it discounted the service and merit that any one member of it might acquire sometime and which, reflected back, as it were, from the future, might procure the ennobling substance for the whole lineage. It is an informative metaphor when one speaks of the 'noble metals,' of the 'nobility' of gold and silver. This aristocracy of the metal exists, so it seems to me, first in its relative indestructibility: It is preserved forever because of its value, and it only changes the shape in its being continually recast, while its capital value is relatively unchangeable. A similar idea is the basis for the feeling of nobility and for the nobility: as if its individual members were only, so to speak, nothing but different castings, nothing but different forms of an enduring substance of value that is preserved through the whole series of being inherited. Hence the relationship that these individuals have to the historical group leading up to them gains a completely special accent. It is, so to speak, an immortality of the value that the nobility claims for itself and seeks to realize its sociological conditions. The reason for the fact that no aristocracy formed as a closed social stratum in Russia, up to Czar Theodore II,13 the predecessor of Peter the Great is this: The honors and dignities of each person depended exclusively on the 'service,' the official activity, from which a classification for the family derived. The unique principle prevailed, that nobody should serve under a superior who had himself, in his turn, served under the father of the candidate; in order to establish the possible rights and positions of each person according to this principle, special registers were consulted. Continual conflicts over facts and rights among the families coming into consideration were the result of this, open and hidden competitions and rivalries. Therefore
13 Czar Theodore II reigned from 1676 to 1682. The immediate predecessor to Peter the Great was Czar Ivan V, 1682-1689--ed.
? 648 chapter ten
the formation of a centripetal social stratum, the consolidation of individual forces and preferences into that common unified and persisting capital, around which the whole social structure of the nobility grows, was stifled.
This structure, as already described so far, lets one recognize without fur- ther ado why the nobility must attach importance to equality. It was already claimed about the ancient clan government that the nobles of different clans belonged to a single stratum, and that while the clan as such is exogamous as a rule (thus it permits no marriage among its members), that stratum always had the inclination to be endogamous, i. e. marrying only within itself. If the nobility presupposes, as it were, a strong foundation, with which each member in it is equipped and which must be passed on to later generations undiminished, each member must also emerge from only this circle; no circle in which privileges are not hereditary, which created that foundation, should be blended into it. Only thus can one be sure by and large that every member would also actually share in the power, attitude, and importance of the whole and that the particular relationship would be realized in which the value of the whole extends through each individual. This self-amplification from within supports the unique solidarity and self-sufficiency of this stratum that, so to speak, cannot need and must not need what lies outside itself. Thus it is like, so to speak, an island in the world comparable to artwork in which every part receives its meaning from the whole and testifies with its frame that the world can do nothing within and that the work is absolutely self-sufficient. This form creates a large part of the aesthetic appeal of the nobility that it exercised throughout time; for it holds not only for the individual, who thus attaches to and depends on good breeding and on the members of the nobility having cared for and cultivated their body and their social form over long generations better than is the case in other social strata, but that kind of appeal hovers in the image of the whole of the nobility, an attraction clearly dependent on the aesthetically satisfying form of the being-for-itself and solidarity-in-itself, the unity of the parts--all of which is analogous to artwork. This amplification of the being of the individual with a psychologically and historically inherited content can admittedly lead directly to a decadent emptiness. It appears as though traditional social contents and significance only become actual life values when they are balanced by the formative strength rising to a certain extent out of the individual. Consequently a self confidence of personal existence, a feeling of equally strong independence, but also a responsibility on the part of the individual, appear in the more excellent manifestations of the nobility. This is the result of the unique narrowness under the social forma- tions with which a dependable essence, extended along the three dimensions of the past, present, and future, merged with the individual existence and has been converted into the consciousness on the part of the individual of a higher life value. But where the individual factor is too weak for the personal form to create the supra-personal essence, decadent phenomena appear, as noted: Then that essence inevitably becomes form; there is no importance to that life but the preservation of the specific honor of the social stratum and 'keeping one's composure'--somewhat as ultimately emerged in the nobility of the ancient re? gime.
the expansion of the group 649
The importance of the 'family tree' for this relationship of the family--as well as for the noble group generally--to the individual is of a deeper symbol- ism: The essential matter that forms the individual must have gone through the single trunk of the whole, just as the matter of the branch and fruit is what also formed the trunk.