No More Learning

The practice is not entirely separate from this abstract theory. Their most knowledgeable experts say about the federation of the English trade unions that majority decisions in it would be able to be just and practical only in so far as the interests of the individual confederating associations were of the same type. 24 As soon, however, as the varying sentiments of the majority and the minority emerge from an actual difference in interests, every coercive act exercised as a result of outvoting would lead to an inevitable division of the participants. That is, thus, that a vote makes sense only when the existing interests can go together as a unity. Should the disjointedly ongoing efforts prevent this centralization, it then becomes fully contradictory to entrust the decision to a majority because the unity of will that they are otherwise supposed to be able to recognize, certainly better than the minority, does not objectively exist. There exists the apparent contradiction that, however, illuminates the relationship by its foundation: that just wherever a trans-individual unity exists or is presupposed, outvoting is possible; where it is missing, there is need of the unanimity that in practice and in principle replaces that unity by actual uniformity from case to case. It is entirely in this sense, when the town charter of Leiden in 1266 determines that, for the admission of foreigners into the city, the approval of eight town jurors is necessary; for court judgments, however, not unanimity but only a simple majority is required under this. The law, according to which the judges decide, is one for all times uniformly determined, and it has to do only with recognizing the relationship of the single case; what counts presumably more correctly for the majority than the minority. The acceptance of a new citizen, however, touches on all the various and widely dispersed interests inside the citizenry so that its approval can be granted not from the abstract unity of the citizens, but only from the sum of all individual interests; that is, by unanimity.
23 French: General will--trans.
24 Simmel probably has in mind the National Association of United Trades for the
Protection of Labour--ed.
? domination and subordination 181
? This deeper foundation of outvoting, revealing now, if you will, the hypo- thetically already existing will of an authoritative unity, does not, for all that, quite remove the difficulty that attaches to the majority as sheer coercive advantage of power. Because the conflict over what would now be the contents of the will of that abstract unity will not often be easier to resolve than the immediate actual interests. The coercion of the minority is no small thing, even if it occurs in this roundabout way and under some other label. Minimally an entirely new dignity would have to be added then to the concept of the majority: since surely it might be plausible, albeit in no way certain from the outset, that the majority for its part is better informed. This will be especially doubtful where the responsibility for the knowledge and its resulting action are placed on the individual, as in the higher religions. The opposition of the individual conscience against the decisions and actions of majorities is alive through the entire history of Christianity. When in the second century the Christian churches of a regional gathering entered into debate over religious and external affairs, the resolutions of the assembly were not binding for the dissenting minority. But with this individualism the church's aspiration for unity was stuck with an irresolvable conflict. The Roman state wanted to affirm only a united church; the church itself sought to consolidate itself through imita- tion of the unity of the state; so the originally independent Christian churches were forced into a total institution whose councils decided the contents of the faith by majority vote. This was an unheard of coercion of the individuals or minimally the churches whose unity till then had consisted only in the similarity of ideals and hopes that each possessed for oneself. A submission in matters of faith was based on internal and personal foundations; that, however, the majority as such demanded submission and declared every dissenter a non- Christian--this is legitimated, then, as I pointed out, by the appropriation of a whole new meaning of majority: one has to accept that God is always with the majority! This motif, as unconsciously foundational sense formulated in one way or another, runs through the entire later development of forms of voting. That a belief, only for the reason that its carriers make up a greater number than those of another belief, should hit upon the sense of the trans- individual unity of all, is an entirely undemonstrable dogma; indeed, from the very start, with so little foundation, without the help of a more or less mystical relationship between unity and majority, it hangs in the air or rests on the pitiful foundation, which must nevertheless be dealt with somehow, that the majority as such knows what is right; furthermore, if one does not also already accept that the majority knows what is right, there is then also no good reason to accept this of the minority.
All these difficulties that the requirement of unanimity, like the subordination of the minority, threatens from various directions, are only the expression of the fundamental problematic of the entire situation: to extract a uniformity of voluntary action from a totality that consists of variously interested indi- viduals. This balance cannot be smoothly achieved, just as one can hardly, from black and white elements, construct a structure with the requirement that the structure is to be entirely black or white. Even in that most favorable case of a presumed group unity beyond the individuals for whose inclinations
182 chapter three
? the vote count is simply a means of knowledge to be accepted--it remains not only uncertain that the objectively necessary decision would be identical with the outcome of the vote, but then the elements of the minority only actually dissent as individuals, not as elements of that unified group, so they are still present as individuals, belong in any case to the group in the wider sense, and do not simply dissolve before the group. Somehow even as indi- viduals with their dissent they still rise up into the whole of the group. The division of human beings into a social being and as individuals of it is, to be sure, a necessary and useful fiction, with which, however, the reality and its demands are in no way exhausted. It characterizes the inadequacy and the sense of internal contradication of the voting methods that in some places, to the last in the Hungarian Parliament certainly still up into the third decade of the nineteenth century, the votes were not counted but weighed; this so that the leader could also make known the opinion of the minority as results of the vote! It seems ridiculous that a human being accepts an opinion as false merely because others think it is true--others, each of whom is, according to the presupposition of voting, equally justified and of equal worth by that fact; but the requirement of unanimity, with which one wants to confront this nonsense, has shown itself as no less full of contradiction and coercive. And this is no accidental dilemma and simply logical difficulty, but it is one of the symptoms of the deep and tragic ambiguity that fundamentally runs through every social formation, every formation of a unity from unities. The individual who lives from out of an inner foundation, who can be responsible for one's own actions, is supposed to, as if governing one's own convictions, adjust not only one's will to the goals of others--this remains, as morality, always an issue of one's own will and issues from the innermost part of the personality--but one is supposed to become, with one's acquiescent self, a part of the totality whose center lies outside one. This is not a matter of specific harmonies or collisions from both centers of command, but rather of our internally standing under two opposing alien norms; so the dynamic around one's own center, which is something altogether different from egoism, demands to be something just as definitive and the guiding sense of life as is demanded by the dynamic around the social center. Now in the vote over the action of the group the single person does not come as an individual, but in that member-like, trans-individual function. But the dissenting vote grafts onto these mere social bases yet a reflection, a secondary form of individuality and its particularity. And even this individuality, which demands nothing but the recognition and presentation of the will of the trans-individual group unit, is negated by the fact of being outvoted. Even here the minority, to belong to which everyone gets an unavoidable chance, must submit, and certainly not only in the simple sense in which even convictions and drives are, as a rule, negated by opposing forces and their influence extinguished, but in the, as it were, more cunning sense, so that the losers, because they are treated within the uniformity of the group, must participate positively in the action that is decided upon against their will and conviction, indeed, so that they, by the unanimity of the final decision, which does not contain a trace of their dis- sent, count also as bearers of it. In this way the outvoting goes from the mere,
domination and subordination 183
? active coercion of the one by the many to the most excessive expression of the dualism--albeit often in experience harmonizing, but in principle, however, irreconcilable and tragic--the dualism between the independent existence of the individual and that of the social whole.
I come now finally to the third type of formation, in which subordina- tion occurs neither under an individual nor under a plurality, but under an impersonal, objective principle. In that an actual, at least direct, interaction is excluded here, this form of subordination seems to remove the element of freedom. Those who are subordinate to an objective law feel determined by it; they themselves have no effect on it; they have no possibility to react to the law itself in an effective way, as can even the poorest slave, in some measure, the master. Then those who do not obey the law somewhat are generally not really subordinate to it, and when they amend the law, they are not at all subject to the old law; however, to the new law they are again subordinate in that plainly unfree way. Nevertheless, for modern, objective people, who know to distinguish the realm of spontaneous reality from that of obedience, the subordination under a law that is executed by impersonal, uninfluenceable powers is a more respectable position. Otherwise, however, where the personality could guard its sense of self only by complete spontaneity, this is still always related, in the case of complete subordination, to the reactions between persons. For this reason, the princes of the sixteenth century in France, Germany, Scotland, the Netherlands often experienced sub- stantial opposition when they governed through trained substitutes or administrative bodies--that is, according to laws. The command was felt as something personal; they would consider obedience to it only as a matter of personal devotion which in all circumstances does have the form of free mutuality.
This passionate personalism of the subordinate relationship carried over almost into a caricature when, in Spain at the beginning of the modern era, it is reported that an impoverished aristocrat who became a cook or footman in a noble household did not thereby definitively lose nobility; it remained dormant, and a favorable change in fate would awaken it again. When such a nobleman, however, became at some point a tradesman, one's nobility was destroyed. The modern sensibility that separates the work and the person and therefore views personal worth as best safeguarded by focusing as objectively as possible on content, is directly contrary to this. An American girl, for instance, who would work in a factory without that feeling of disgrace would feel fully
? 184 chapter three
? downgraded as a cook in a family. And already in the thirteenth century in Florence the lower guilds contained the activities of direct service to persons--shoemaker, innkeeper, school teacher--while those indeed still serving the public, but viewed separately from the individual person, formed the higher guilds, such as clothmaker and shopkeeper. In Spain, however, where the traditions of knighthood, with their insertion of the person into all proceedings, still flourished, every functioning person- to-person relationship, to whatever exent, had to count as acceptable, however every subordination under more objective standards, every insertion into an impersonal relational context, because of the many and anonymous persons of service occupations, had to count as fully degrading. Further, in the legal theories of Althusius25 there lingers an aversion to the objectivity of law. With him, the summus magistratus26 does exercise law alien to the individual, but not as representative of the state, rather only because the magistrate is appointed by the people; that, instead of the appointment resulting from or provided by the people personally, the appointment could also be designated by the law of the sovereign to represent the state is an idea still foreign to him. To antiquity, on the other hand, subordination under the law had seemed especially agreeable precisely because of its lack of a personal nature. Aristotle extolled the law as ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , the moderate, neutral, free of passion, and Plato as well had recognized, in the same sense, rule by impersonal law as the best means to counteract self-interest. While this, however, was only a psychological motivation that does not get at the core of the question, the change from personalism to objectivism in the relationship of obedience, in principle not derived from utili- tarian considerations, occurs with Plato in yet another theory: in the ideal state the insight of the ruler stands above the law; as soon as the wellbeing of the whole seems to require it, the ruler has to be able to act even in opposition to the ruler's own laws. Only where there were no true statesmen, laws would be needed that would not under any circumstance permit violation. Thus law appears here as the lesser evil, but not because subordination under a person, in contrast to which all law-abidingness has something mechanical and passive, possessed an element of freer dignity, as with the German experience. But the rigidity of it, with which it confronts the changing and unforeseen demands of
25 Johannes Althusius (1557-1683), early modern Calvinist political thinker--ed.
26 Latin: highest magistrate--ed.
? domination and subordination 185
? life clumsily and inadequately, is experienced as the absence of law--an evil that only the insight of a personal ruler, bound to no prejudice, escapes and which is only converted into a relative advantage where this insight is lacking. Here it thus remains always the content of the law and, as it were, its total state that determines its value or lack thereof over against the subordination under persons. That the relationship of obedience is in its inner principle and in the whole feel for life differ- ent for the obedient, depending on whether it comes from a law or a person, does not enter into these considerations. The entirely universal or formal relation between rule by law and rule by person is in the first place surely practically expressed: Where the law is not strong or extensive enough, persons are needed--and where the persons are not responsive, law is needed. But, far beyond that, it depends on the decisions of the latter undiscussed sociological sense of value whether one views the rule by human beings as the provisional arrangement for the rule of matured law or, on the contrary, the rule of law only as a stopgap or a faute de mieux27 for the rule of a personality absolutely qualified to rule.
Objective authority can become pivotal for the relationship between the ruling and the ruled in still another form: in that not a law or an ideal norm but a concrete state of affairs arranges the relationship of domination. Thus under the legal force of the principle of patrimony, according to which within serfdom, where "the air makes one its pos- session," most radically in Russian feudalims, the subjects as such are only jurisdictions of land areas; for its fearsome hardness gradually ended a personal enslavement that had also allowed the selling of slaves, and the kind of subservient relationships to the estate required that the serf could be sold only with it at the same time. Allowing for all the differences in contents and quantity, this form, though, is sometimes repeated in the context of modern factory workers who are shackled by their own interest to a factory by means of certain arrangements: if somehow it has become possible for them to purchase their own home, if they have to use up all their own money to participate in the welfare system, they leave the factory at their earliest convenience, etc. So they are shackled in a way purely by property, which makes them in a quite specific manner helpless in relation to the employer. Indeed, at bottom, it was the same form of rule that was established in the most
27 For want of something better--ed.
? 186 chapter three
? primitive patriarchal relationship by means not of a merely physical but by a living object: the children belonged to the father, not because he was their progenitor but because the mother belonged to him; just as the owner of a tree also owns its fruit, so also the children fathered by other men were no less his own. This type of rule tends to bring with it a degrading harshness and existence of absolute subjugation. Since, insofar as people are subjugated in this way they belong to things, they sink psychologically into the category of a mere thing. Where law estab- lishes rule--so one could say with the necessary reservations--since the dominant ones move onto the plane of objectivity, where it is a matter of acting as thing, so the same thing happens to the dominated. This situation tends to be more advantageous in the first case, less in the second, than in the many cases of purely personal subordination.
A sociological interest in the direct sense attaches itself now to the subordination under an objective principle in two essential cases. First, when that ideal, dominant principle is itself a sign of the psychological consolidation of a real social power, and secondly, when it establishes ties among the those same groups subordinated together under it. The first is, above all, to be taken into account in consideration of the moral imperatives. In moral consciousness we feel ourselves subordinated by a command that appears to be carried by no human, personal power. We hearken to the voice of conscience only in us when, equal in deciveness against all subjective egoism, it appears to be able to stem only from a suitable authority outside the subject. As we know, the attempt has been made to resolve this contradiction in such a way that one would derive the contents of morality from social commands: what is necessary to the species and the group, and what this therefore requires for its self-pres- ervation from the members, is to be cultivated in individuals gradually as instinct, so that it would appear in them as their own autonomous feeling, the actually personal, and thus often in contrast to the social commands. Thusly is explained the double character of the moral com- mand: that it, on the one hand, confronts us as an impersonal order, to which we simply have to submit, and that yet, on the other hand, is imposed on us from no external power, but rather only from our own most inner impulse. In any case here is one of the cases in which the individual reproduces inside one's own consciousness the relation- ships that exist between one as wholeness and the group. It is an old observation that the ideas of the individual soul in all its relationships of association and separation, of differentiation and unification, act in such a way as individuals act towards one another. From this there
domination and subordination 187
? forms a curious specification, that those internal psychological relations repeat, then, not only those between individuals in general, but between the individual and the surrounding circle. What society requires of its members: fitting in and being loyal, altruism and work, self-control and truthfulness--all this the individuals require of themselves.
With that, there are several rather significant motives mixed together. Society confronts individuals with regulations, to which they become accustomed until it is no longer necessary to use the coarser as well as more refined means by which the coercion was effected. Either one's nature becomes thereby so fashioned or refashioned that one acts, in a sense, instinctively, with consistently unmediated will, without even being conscious of a law; in this way the pre-Islamic Arabs lacked any concept of an objectively legal restraint; the final authority everywhere was the purely personal resolution; however, this was thoroughly steeped in and normed by the spirit of the clan and the requirements of clan life. Or the law dwells as imperative in the individual consciousness, carried by the authoritative weight of society, but independent of whether the society really stands behind itself with its power of coercion or only with its openly declared will. The individual interacts with society in such a way that that objective relationship--with all its oppressions, liberations, changing emphases--has come to be an interplay between the individual's social impulses and those of the 'I', in the narrower sense, whereby both are included in the 'I' in the wider sense. However, this is not yet the above-mentioned objectively real legality in which the socio-historical origin is lost to consciousness. On a certain higher level of morality the motive of action is no longer in a substantially human, albeit individual-transcendent, power; rather here the origin of moral necessities flows beyond the antitheses of individual and totality. They stem just as little from the latter as from the singular reality of individual life. Only for the carriers in this place of reality is their conscience free for acting based on individual reason. Their obligating power stems from them themselves, from their inner, transpersonal authority, from an objective ideality that we have to recognize, whether we want to or not, as a reality whose validity is fully independent from its awareness in a consciousness. The content that fills these forms, however, is--not necessarily, but frequently--the societal requirement that now, as it were, no longer operates with its social impetus, but rather as in the metempsychosis into a norm that is supposed to be fulfilled for its own sake, not on my account and not on your account. It is a matter here of differences that are not only psychologically of the greatest weakness,
188 chapter three
? but whose boundaries are also in practice constantly blurring. But this mixing of motives in which the mental reality moves, makes its basic division that much more urgent. Whether society and the individual confront one another as power and power and the subordination of the latter is effected through a source, flowing as if without inter- ruption, always renewing the energy of the former, or whether this energy transforms itself into a psychological impulse in the souls of the individuals and this, feeling like social nature itself, fights against and represses the individual's own impulses directed by the 'egoistic' part, or whether the ought that human beings experience as an objective reality over them as real as Being itself, fills up with the contents of society's life demands--those are types that only exhaust the kinds of subordination of individuals under their group. The three powers that bring about societal life: the society, the individuals, objectivity-- one after another here become norm-giving, but in such a way that each of them takes into itself the social contents, the measure of domina- tion of the society over the individuals, and each of them forms and carries forward the power, the will, the necessities of society in its own specific manner.
Objectivity in the relationship of these three is not only valid as the absolute, a law towering over the other two in an ideal realm, but determinative, as it were, in a yet other dimension altogether. Society is often the third party that solves the conflicts between the individual and objectivity or fosters links between their discontinuities. In the field of the genealogy of knowledge, the concept of society freed us from the alternative of earlier times: that a cultural value either originated with an individual or had to be bestowed by an objective power--as was shown in the first chapter with several examples. In practice it is through the workings of social interaction that one can satisfy one's demands on the objective order. The fact that the cooperation of the many, the efforts of the society as a unity, side by side and one after another, coaxes out of nature not only a higher amount, but higher qualities and types, of need satisfactions that have to remain denied to individual effort--that is a symbol of the deeper basic reality that society stands between the individual person and the general law of nature--as a mental particular it approaches the former, as a universal the latter. Only, it is the universal that is not abstract. Indeed, every historical group exists as an individual case, as does a historical per- son; but what it is in relationship to other groups, in relationship to its members, is supra-individual. However, not in the way the concept
domination and subordination 189
? of its individual realizations, which combines what they have in com- mon, but in a particular type of generality, like the organic body--the generality of its members, or something like 'room furnishings'--the generality of table and chair, wardrobe and mirror. And this particular generality coincides with the specific objectivity that society possesses for its members as subjects. The individual does not stand in relation to this universality as to nature whose objectivity is altogether indif- ferent to whether a subject mentally participates in it or not, imagines it correctly or falsely or not at all; the being of that is and its laws hold, independently of the meaning that both may have for a subject. Society, however, also transcends the individual, lives its own lawful life, confronts the individual with historical and imperative steadfastness; however, this confrontation is simultaneously a being inside; the hard indifference towards it is simultaneously an interest; the social objectivity has need of, if indeed it is not determined by, individual subjectivity in general. Through such determinations society becomes a mid-level structure between the subject and every absolutely impersonal generality and objectivity. In this direction there lies something like the following observation. As long as the economy has not yet offered up actually objective prices, had not yet led knowledge and regulation to the idea of supply and demand, production costs, rewards for risk, profits, etc. , this commodity would just be so and so much value and must have this and this firm price--so long are the direct interventions of soci- ety, its organs and laws, much stronger and more rigorous in business enterprises with regard to price and stability. Sales taxes, oversight of quantity and quality of production, indeed, in additional ways, even luxury laws and consumer constraints are frequently introduced in the stage of the economy where the personal freedom of the business enterprise would strive for an unrelenting objectivity still without yet being able to get to a pure, abstract determination of prices. Here the concrete generality enters, the living objectivity of society, often inept, limiting, schematic, but always a transubjective power that provides the individual with a norm before receiving this from the structure of the thing itself and from its recognized lawlikeness. In the intellectual arena the very same formal development takes place to a much greater measure yet: from subordination under society to subordination under objectivity. The entirety of intellectual history shows how very much the intellect of the individual--before directly confronting the object in order to derive the content of its ideas of truth from its material- ity--fills up exclusively with traditional, authoritarian ways of thinking,
190 chapter three
? 'assumed by all. ' A tenet and norm of the mind that desires to know is not at first the object, the immediate observation and interpreta- tion of which it is not able to handle at all, but the common opinion about the object. This mediates a theoretical idea of it, from the most stupid superstition up to the most refined prejudice almost completely disguising non-independence of accepting and unobjectivity of content. It is as if the human being cannot so lightly bear standing before the object eyeball to eyeball, had grown up neither to the severity of its lawlikeness nor to the freedom which it, the object, gives the person, in contrast to the coercion coming from all of humankind. Bending under the authority of the many or their representatives, under the hand-me- down opinion, under the socially accepted viewpoint is a mediator: it is, after all, more modifiable than the law of matter; the mediation of the mental is perceptible in it; it delivers, as it were, an already digested mental product--and, on the other hand, it gives a dependence, a reduction of responsibility that is the compensation for the lack of that self-reliance that the pure, situated relationship between the 'I' and matter gives us. No less than the concept of truth, the individual finds that of justice in the objective sense of its mediation leading up to this stage in the manifest behavior of society. In the realm of punishments as in the specific regulations of life the correlation of guilt and sin, merit and debt, accomplishment and failure is evidently at first a mat- ter of social expediency or social impulsivity. Perhaps the equivalence of action and reaction, in which justice exists, is never one analytically resulting directly from these elements--but always requires a third: an ideal, a goal, a final authority, by which it first establishes or produces its synthesized self-correspondence. Originally the interests and forms of the community life that surrounds the individuals, the subjects of the realization of justice, are the third factors. This community life creates the measures and implements them, in which the justice or injustice of their relationship, not detectable in those elements in isolation, is brought forth. Because of that and first mediated by it, the inner necessity of their 'just' self-consistency arises as the materially and historically later stage, appearing in the counterpressures of those very elements. The higher norm, which perhaps also in this case still determines weight and counterweght according to its degree of relationship, has now fully entered into the elements, has been transformed from it into a powerful functioning value in itself. Justice appears now--from the inner meaning of sin and of pain, of good deed and of happiness, of performance and of reciprocation--as itself an objective essential relationship; it
domination and subordination 191
? is even supposed to be realized for its own sake: fiat justitia, perat mun- dus--while to the earlier standpoint precisely the preservation of the world made up the legal argument of justice. 28 No matter which of the hypothetical meanings of justice is not discussed here--historically and psychologically objective law, in which it is embodied purely for its own sake and which requires fulfillment for its own sake, is a later stage of development that precedes, preparing and mediating the way for, the demand of justice from social objectivity alone.
Finally this same development occurs inside morality in the nar- rower sense. The first given content of morality is of an altruistically social nature; not as though it had in and for itself an independent essence, which this content only appropriated, but the devotion of the I to a You (in the singular or the multiple) appears as the concept of the moral itself, as its definition. Over against this are presented the philosophical moral teachings in which a gradually objective ought is detached from the question of the I and the You, a much later stage. If for Plato it is a matter of the idea of the good becoming realized, for Kant, that the principle of individual action is adaptable to universal law, for Nietzsche, that the human being is to go beyond the current level of development--so these norms may cover also appropriately the for-one-another of subjects; on some fundamental level, however, it does not now depend on this but also the subjectivity of beings for whom action eventually becomes relevant. Since seen from this per- spective the relationship is also for the societal complex of subjects only the incidental fulfillment of a much generalized norm and basis of obligation that can offer legitimation to the socially and altruistically directed action, but can also withhold it. The ethical obedience to the demands of You and society is, in the development of the individual as well as the married, the first dissolving of naive egoism prior to the ethical state; at this stage numberlessness remains standing: in principle, however, it is preparation and transition for the subordination under an objective law that even stands beyond the You and the I and by itself first offers the interests of one or the other as moral contents.
What now concerns the second sociological question in relation to the subordination under an impersonal ideal principle: how this func- tions based on the reciprocal relationship of the jointly subordinated,
28 Latin: fiat justitia, perat mundus, Let justice be done (even if ) the world be des- troyed--ed.
? 192 chapter three
? so also to be grasped here is that in many cases that subordination by abstract ideal is preceded by a real one. Frequently we see a personal- ity or class exercising its domination in the name of an ideal principle by which they too would be subordinated. So this last appears then logically to precede, and the real organization of rule under people appears to develop, in consequence of this dependence on an abstract ideal. Historically, however, the path into rules is reversed: from very real personal relationships of power arises dominations and subordinations, out of which gradually, through spiritualization of the dominating power or through enlargement and depersonalization of the whole relationship, an ideal, objective power grows, as if then the dominant exercises its power only as its nearest agent. The development of the position of the pater familias by the Aryans shows this clearly. 29 Originally--as this type was presented--its power was unlimited and thoroughly subjective, that is, his momentary wish, his personal advantage is decisive over all arrangements. However, this arbitrary power moved gadually under a feeling of responsibility; the unit of the family, somewhat embodied in the spiritus familiaris,30 came to be felt as the power of the abstract ideal, in relation to which also the master of the whole was experienced as a mere executor, abiding by the law. In this sense it happens that custom and habit, instead of subjective desire, determine his actions, his deci- sions, and judgments, so that he no longer acts as unlimited master of the family estate, but more as its custodian in the interests of the whole, so that his position bears more the character of an office than of despotic law. So the relationship between dominant and subordinate is placed on a whole new basis: while in the first arena the latter, as it were, constituted only a personal jurisdiction of the former, now the objective idea of the family is created, which stands over all indi- viduals, and of which the leading patriarch is as subordinate as every other member, whom he now is able to command only in the name of the ideal of unity. Here arises the most extremely important type of this form: that the commanding themselves are subordinate to the law that they have given. Their will receives in that moment, in which it becomes law, the nature of objectivity and thereby separates from its subjective-personal origin. As soon the master gives the law as law, it is documented thusly as the organ of a spiritual necessity, revealing
29 Latin: pater familias, father of the family, i. e. , patriarch--ed.
30 Latin: spiritus familaris, family spirit--ed.
? domination and subordination 193
? thereby only a norm that is valid merely because of its inner sense and that of the situation, whether or not it is actually just then given by the lord. Indeed, when instead of this more-or-less clearly conceived legitimation, the will of masters itself actually becomes law, they cannot at all avoid therefore stepping out of the sphere of the subjective; they carry that transpersonal legitimation in themselves, as it were, a priori. Accompanying the inner structure of the law is the lawgiver, insofar as there is such, thereby being as a person even as subordinate as all other persons. So is it clearly expressed in the privileges of medieval Flemish cities; the jurors were supposed to offer every person an impartial judgment, even against the counts themselves, who grant the privilege, and such a sovereign ruler as the great Elector introduces, without seeking collective approval, a poll tax--but then he has not only his court pay it, but pays it himself!
The most recent period offers an example of the development of an objective superiority, to which the original and also continuing com- mand has to submit along with the subordinates under it, similar in form to that of the history of the family insofar as its mode of production allows objective and technical factors to dominate the personal. Many kinds of domination and subordination that earlier bore a personal character, so much so that in the relationship in question the one was plainly dominant, the other just as clearly subordinate, have now so changed that both are in like measure subject to an objective purpose, and only inside this common relationship to the higher principle does the subordination of the one continue under the other as a techni- cal necessity. As long as the relationship of hired labor is viewed as a contractual agreement--the working person is leased--so long does it contain essentially a factor of subordination of the worker under the contractor. This factor is, however, dismissed as soon as one views the labor contract not as leasing the person, but as purchasing the commod- ity labor. Then the subordination that it requires of the worker--so it has been expressed--is effected only "under the cooperative process that is as necessary for the entrepreneur executing some kind of activity as it is for the worker. " The worker is now no longer subject as a person, but functions only as a servant of an objective economic process, inside of which the element of contractor or manager is superior to the worker, thus not at all personally but solely objectively required.
The feeling of equality of the modern worker must be in part based on this foundation, which points as well to its purely sociological nature, in that it continues frequently entirely without influence on the materal
194 chapter three
? well-being of the worker. While workers yet sell only a quantitatively circumscribed ability--be it more or less than that required of them before in the personal formation--they are liberated as human beings from the relationship of subordination, which they view now as only an additional factor of the processes of production, in so far as these are coordinated by the head of production. This technical objectiv- ity has its symbol in the legitimation of the contractual relationship: once the contract is concluded, it stands then as objective norm over both parties. In the Middle Ages this identifies the turning point of the relationship of association that originally means complete personal submission to the master; in general journeywork was serfdom. The association of journeymen of a particular position coalesced around the attempt to change the personal relationship of service into a rela- tionship of contract. Of highest significance is the appearance, as soon as the organization of the serfs succeeded, of the title 'journeyman.
' The contractual formation, whatever be its materal content, correlates relative equality instead of absolute subordination. It strengthens its objectivity yet further when the contract, instead of being made between two individual persons, consists of collective determinations between a group of workers on the one side and a group of employers on the other, as was done particularly through the English trade unions. The trade unions and the employer federations in specifically widely progressive industries conclude contracts over pay rates, work hours, overtime, time off, etc. , from which no concluded contract between individuals of these categories was permitted to deviate. Hereby the impersonality of the labor relationship is obviously extraordinarily heightened; its objectivity finds its suitable carrier and expression in the individual-transcending collectivity. All things considered, this character is especially guaranteeed when the work contracts are concluded for the shortest possible time. The English trade unions have always pressed for that, in spite of the consequentially greater insecurity of employment. By the right to leave one's workplace, so it has been explained, the laborer is distinguished from the slave; when the workers, however, give up this right for a lengthy period, they are for that entire extended period then subject to all conditions that the employer imposes on them, with the exception of those explicitly stipulated, and have lost the protection that that right of dissolving the relationship gives them. Instead of the breadth of the bond, with which earlier the whole personality was bound, with much longer contract periods the duration of the bond becomes the concern. What the objectivity with short contracts more decisively safeguards is
domination and subordination 195
? nothing positive, but only this: to set boundaries so that the objectively determined relationship of production would be transformed into a subjectively determined choice, whereas with long contracts there is not sufficient protection. The fact that inside the domestic-servant relationship, at least as it is constituted in middle Europe at the time, the whole person, as it were, still enters into subordination, and this did not yet develop into the objectivity of a materially circumscribed performance--explains the basic unwholesomeness of this arrangement. Actually it comes nearer to a more complete form where it is taken over by the services of persons who only have to perform distinct material functions inside the house and in so far as they are coordinated by the 'housewife,' while the respectively earlier prevailing relationship engages them as whole personalities and they are responsible, as the concept of 'all-around maid' shows most clearly, for 'unbounded services'; precisely through this lack of objective determination they become subordinated to the housewife as a person. In pronounced patriarchal circumstances, in contrast to the present, the 'house' counted as an objective end and value in itself, towards which the housewife and the domestic servants worked together. Even with a full personal subordination, this creates a certain equalization carried by the interest that the servant, bound firmly and permanently to the house, tends to experience. The 'Du,' the domestic servant, expressed in one respect one's subordination as person; in another respect, however, it put the servant on a level closer to the children of the house and inserted the servant that much more intimately into the organization. Thus this relationship of obedience is oddly in force at just the opposite pole of its development into some measurable kind of objective conception: with complete patriarchal subordination, whereby the household still has, as it were, absolute value, which the work of the housewife serves likewise just like that of the domestice servant, albeit in a higher position; and then with com- plete differentiation, where work and service for trade are objectively predetermined, and personal attachment, which is the correlate of subordination of indeterminate measure, does not come into play. The current position of the domestic servant as member of the household, especially in the major cities, has lost the one objectivity, but not yet won the other; the whole personality is no longer subjectively engaged in the objective ideal of the 'house,' though without being able to actually withdraw from this because of the demand for a kind of complete service. Finally the relationship between officers and common soldiers may exemplify this type of form. Here the tension between the
196 chapter three
? subordination inside the organism of the group and the equalization that arises through service is shared under the concept of the defense of the fatherland that is imaginably the broadest and understandably manifests this breadth most noticeably in the field, where on the one hand discipline is most unmerciful, on the other hand, however, com- radely relationship between officers and the rank and file is required, in part, by unique situations, in part, by the morale of the whole. In peacetime, where the military is in the position of being prohibited from the methods of its purpose, its technical structure unavoidably develops psychologically into the end purpose, so that the domination and sub- ordination on which the technicalities of the organization rest stand in the foreground of consciousness, and that peculiar sociological hybrid of equalization through common subordination only comes under an objective concept when the situation changes calling this concept as the actual purpose of the military into consciousness.
Such double roles of the individual--one occupying a dominant or subordinate position inside the organization of the contents of one's unique life, this organization as a whole, however, standing under a ruling concept that every one of its members obtains an equal or nearly equal position in relation to everybody on the outside--these double roles let the purely form-sociological situation become one of peculiarly mixed feelings in the life of its carrier. An employee of a large business may have a leading position in it; however, as soon as that employee is in a position before the public and for that reason is acting ideally for the business as a whole, the employee will behave zealously and devotedly. In contrast, these elements in the frequent pride of the subordinate--the servant in the aristocratic household, the member of free-standing intellectual or social circles that at this level are still only peripheral--coalesce in order to represent the worth of the entire circle and its concept all the more energetically before all those standing outside, since they seek to obtain, in the negative way of differentiation from others, the fixed internal-external position, which is granted them only imperfectly by a kind of positive relation to the circle itself. The greatest formal multiplicity of this type is offered perhaps by the Catholic hierarchy. While every member is bound by a blind, unresisting obedience, the lowest member, nevertheless, also stands apart from every layperson in absolute height at which the idea of eternity rises over everything temporal--and at the same time its highest member is professed 'the servant of the servants'; the monk, who may be absolute dictator inside his order, clothes himself with the
domination and subordination 197
? deepest humility and servility before every begger; but the brother of the lowest order is with all unconditionality of church authority superior to the earthly prince.
Besides this cross-cut through the phenomena of domination and subordination, which orders them according to the question whether one or many, whether persons or objective structures bear the weight of governance, another is allowed to emerge in the sociological per- spective that alters the degrees of domination, especially as it relates to freedom and the conditions for it. This line will be pursued in the following investigations.
Where multiple and dynamic dominations and subordinations exist in a group--be it as a unified hierarchical construction, be it as a mul- tiplicity of dominant-subordinate relationships existing side by side--the group will as a whole derive its character essentially from subordination, as it is evident especially clearly in bureaucratically regulated states. For the strata extend downward in rapid proportion. Where thus domina- tion and subordination in general stand in the foreground of form- sociological consciousness, the quantitatively predominant sides of this correlation, that of subordination, will color the totality of the picture. Based on entirely unique combinations, the impression and the feeling of an overall domination of a group can also certainly ensue. The pride and the contempt for work of the Spanish originates from their having for a long time the oppressed Moors as their workers; when later they had exterminated and expelled them and the Jews, there remained to them indeed only the aura of the dominant, while there were no longer any subordinate people present who could form a complement to it. At the time of their highest glory it was particularly expressed among the Spanish that, because they wanted to take a position as a nation in the world, in the individual states the nobility would assume the positions of military officers and civil servants. Something similar, only on a more solid foundation, had already appeared in the Spartan warrior democracy. Because, while it oppressed the neighboring tribes, it did not enslave them but allowed them their land and treated them only as serfs, these developed together into a lower stratum that formed a gentry over against the totality of full citizenship--so they behaved very much among themselves democratically. This was not a simple aristocracy that from the beginning had arranged the more unlawful elements together into a group unity. But it was actually the entire original state that, in preserving the status quo through the substruc- ture of that stratum, made the totality of its membership, as it were,
198 chapter three
? into an aristocracy. Also in more characteristic respects the Spartans repeated the principle of universal domination: the Spartan army was so stratified that it consisted in large part of commanders.
At this point the peculiar sociological type of form crops up: an element's arrangements, which could arise only in their relationship to another and possess their content and meaning in relation to that other, becoming, nevertheless, autonomous from all interaction-dependent qualities of that element. That one is dominant presupposes an object of domination; the mental reality by itself can avoid this conceptual necessity up to a certain degree. The one internal motif involved points to Plato for sure. Among the endless variety of realms of sovereignty, by size and content, in respect to sovereignty as such, as function, there would be no difference: it would be the one and the same capacity to command, which the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? as well as the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? as well as the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? would have to possess. 31 For that reason the actual ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? is for him not necessarily the practitioner of the highest execu- tive power, but the one that possesses the 'science of command'--no matter whether or not one has something to command. This originated thus in the subjective ground of the relationship of sovereignty, which arises not only as the correlate of a real relationship of rule, but exists independently of its material existence. The 'born king' requires, if you will, no land, he is king, he does not need it to become one. If the Spartans formed no aristocracy, but felt themselves nevertheless noble, the Spaniards had the consciousness of lordliness, even as they no longer possessed servants--so this has that deeper meaning: that the interaction of the lordly relationship is the sociological expression or the actualization of the more internally determined qualities in the subject. Whoever adopts this is a ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , a ruler; one side is, so to speak, dropped out of the two-sided relationship, and exists only in ideal form, without which the other would thereby lose the importance that would be one's due within the relationship. While this then occurs for all the members of a larger group, it gives expression to the idea that they see themselves overall as manifesting 'equality,' without having to underscore by that name precisely wherein their equality lies. The fully enfranchised citizens of Sparta were called simply the '? ? ? ? ? ? . 32 The
31 ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (politikos), politician; ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (basileus), king; ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (despotes), despot; ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (oikonomos), head of household--ed.
32 `? ? ? ? ? ? , equals--ed.
? domination and subordination 199
? aristocratic nature of their political and economic position in relation to the other levels is fully self-evident, so that they use as identification for themselves only their formal relationship to one another and did not have to mention at all what constituted the contents of other strata. A similar feeling lies overall at the foundation, where the aristocracy signifies itself as peers. They exist, as it were, only for one another; the others do not concern them even enough to give expression in their collective identity to their superiority--on their account indeed only one kind of identification is needed. 33
The other type, the concept of domination without realizing the logically required correlate of the corresponding subordination, lies in the transfer of forms produced inside a large circle to a small one whose relationships do not justify it. Specific positions in an expanded circle make up a power, a measure of domination, a meaning in itself, that they lose as soon as they are repeated in a smaller circle without changing their form. However for all that, they also bring into these the tone of superiority and command with them that they possessed there and that has become, as it were, a determination of such a position substantially independent of the relation that carried it. The
33 This is only an example of a general sociological occurrence. A number of elements have the same relation to a definite condition; the latter gives content and meaning precisely to the uncertain group interest. Now it happens that this decisive point on which the elements converge disappears from the identification, indeed, perhaps from consciousness, and only the fact of the equality of the elements--thus taking place exclusively in relation to that point--finds emphasis. So the aristocracy, as mentioned, not only often identifies itself as peers, but with the same name many French cities in the 12th and 13th centuries identified their jurors and judges. When the 'Society for Ethical Culture' was supposed to have been founded in Berlin, a brochure about it appeared under the title, 'Preliminary Communications of a Circle of Like-minded Men and Women. ' Not a word was offered about in what the equality of views actually consisted. In the Spanish Chamber, around 1905, a party formed that identified itself simply as the 'Party of the United. ' A party-type group of Munich artist colleagues in the nineties called itself 'The Group of Colleagues,' without adding any wholly officially used title that would then make up the contents of collegiality and distinguish this combination from a union of colleagues among school teachers or actors, agents or editors. These inconspicuous events contain the most striking sociological fact that the formal relation of certain individuals can become master over the contents and purpose of this relation; this could not occur in all that labeling if it did not somehow reveal the direction of social consciousness. The elements of a group being of equal right, their being like-minded, their being colleagues, has won an extraordinary importance over the substance that it clothes in these sociological forms, and with respect to that the latter now have an overall meaning. And the practical conduct, very much deter- mined by matter excluded from the naming, is manifest countless times indeed, upon a more exact examination of such groupings, in the relevance and the effectiveness of those pure types of relation and formal structures.
? 200 chapter three
? communication here is often a 'title' to which close relationships allow hardly a trace of meaningful power, whose aplomb, however, it has still maintained from its origin in the outlying group. The Dutch Rederikjers, a kind of mastersinger in the 15th century, had in every one of its many groups kings, princes, archdeacons, etc. I remember the 'officers' of the Salvation Army, the 'high degrees' of the Free Masons: a Free Mason chapter in France, 1756, declared its members "sovereign and born princes of the whole order"; another, a little later, called itself Conseil des Empereurs d'Orient et d'Occident. 34 Of course, it is not only the purely spatial-numerical size of the groups, whose transformations effect the transposition of an originally dominant position in relation- ships that release them from their logically required subordination and allows in spite of that the cachet of domination. Contractions of the group's life in the sense of intensity could cause this as well. What the entire Hellenistic reality destroyed during the period of the emperor was the restriction of its sphere of significance, the evacuation of all deeper or wide-ranging content--while a feeling still able to or having to protect some kind of superiority, an ambition that carried its ideal from the great past to feudalism, had survived this past. With that arose that empty ambition that eventually was celebrated by the victor in the festivals, the officers of a meaningless commune, the inhabitant of a seat of honor or of a recognition by statue, by a public of idlers for the wordsmithing of the speaker who yet lacks any political influ- ence--the ambition arose by which all these suggested a feeling of significance and prerogative without any real superiority. The height over the average level in which the social preferences and privileges of this plane of persons was raised would not at all have been capable of being introduced in the real structure of the Greek society of that time. Descending from the previous meaning of the community that offered overall a foundation for the same kind of superiorities, they were now, without changing their dimensions, instituted in much smaller propor- tions and made possible precisely because of their lack of content, a general search for social positions of elevation that were missing the lower-level correlate. And it introduces here, to a certain extent regressively, an odd multi-leveled interconnected character into human activities that the primitive, 'sympathetic magic' shows in great purity: one believes, phenomena lying outside the human spheres of power to
34 French: Council of the Emperors of the East and West--ed.
? domination and subordination 201
? be able to be called forth for that purpose, so that one produces it in smaller measures in oneself. So with many kinds of peoples, pouring out water is a strong rain enchantment. The power of the universal concept is in every way so far-reaching that one believes, with some kind of a minimal or one-sided realization of it, to have won for it in general even more of its reality on much higher levels of extensity and intensity. A phenomenon of 'authority' shows the type, of interest to us here, of this behavior in a particular modification. The internal dominance that someone has won on the grounds of a one-sided ability or quality very often helps acquire 'authority' in question and responsi- bilities and perspectives that have nothing at all to do with that actual guarded excellence. Even here then the partially existing and justified 'domination' will carry over to a complete relationship in which the correlate of an actually 'ruled' realm is missing. Only, the paradoxi- cal phenomenon of the absolutely developed level of domination has changed here as into another dimension, for which the logically required measure of subordination is lacking, a dimension that has, as it were, absorbed this or only imaginarily possesses it.
I begin with a group as a whole being able to bear the character of subordination without the actual corresponding measure of domination existing in it practically and comprehensibly; the opposite is formed by the cases here treated, in which a domination as an absolute quality seems to exist, resting on no corresponding measure of subordination. However, this is a rare form; rather the opposite of the former gener- ally appears as freedom for all. Taking a closer look however, liberation from subordination shows up almost always at the same time as the gain of some kind of command--be it the hitherto opposing dominant group, be it a newly constructed level designated definitively now as subordination. As the greatest English constitutional historian once said of the quarrel of Puritanism: "Like every other struggle for liberty it ended in being a struggle for supremacy. "35 Now this general scheme is, of course, not often realized in an entirely pure type, but rather mostly as one tendency simultaneously at work among many fragmentary, refracted, modified forms, deriving, nevertheless, from that foundational drive; substituting domination for freedom is always noticeable, and I now apply myself to its essential types.
35 Simmel gives this in English--ed.
? 202 chapter three
? For Greek citizens both values were in general not sharply separated in the political realm. What they lacked was the sphere of individual rights that protected them from the claims and arbitrariness of the gen- eral public and that would have guaranteed them a truly independent existence as well as constitutional freedom vis-a`-vis the state.