No More Learning

This is especially obvious in the relationship of mon- archy to aristocracy. On the one hand, the aristocracy's principle of heredity is inextricably relevant to monarchy; on its account a party alliance is formed with them; a platform is established on it and thereby advantaging it; on the other hand, the monarchy cannot often toler- ate a status existing next to it, even a hereditary one by which its own right is privileged; it must desire that every one of its own members be specially privileged. So the Roman Empire originally privileged the
160 chapter three
? senatorial aristocracy and guaranteed them their heritability--however, after Diocletian it was overshadowed by a civil-service aristocracy in which every member achieved the high position by way of personal advancement. Whether in such typical cases attraction or repulsion of the similar is given greater weight is decided apparently not only from utilitarian motives but from those deep dispositions of the soul for the value of the similar or that of the dissimilar.
The particular type under discussion here devolves from the wholly general type of this sociological problem. Time and again it is a matter not of a rationalized sentiment whether one feels more humbled by subordination to someone near at hand or someone at greater distance. Thus the whole social instinct and sense of life of the Middle Ages is seen in the fact that the appointments of the guilds with public author- ity in the 13th century required at the same time the subordination of all workers of the same trade under it: because it would have been unthinkable that a commercial court would be required for anyone who was not a comrade of the legal community doing the deciding sit over people. And just the opposite and hard-to-explain feeling, because of no obvious single advantage, leads several Australian tribes to not elect their own chiefs, but to have them elected by neighboring tribes--as also with several primitive peoples common currency is not manufactured by them themselves but must be introduced from the outside so that now and then one finds a kind of industry, producing specie (mussel shells etc. ) that is exported as their money to distant places. On the whole--qualified by various modifications; the lower a group is situated as a whole, the more each single member is accustomed to subordina- tion--a group will even more grudgingly allow one on the same level as they to dominate them; the higher a group as a whole is situated, the more likely it is to subordinate itself to a peer. Domination by equals is difficult for the former because each is positioned lowly; for the latter more easily because each is highly placed. The acme of this sentiment was furnished by the House of Lords, which was not only recognized by all the peers as their sole judge, but in the year 1330 once explicitly rejected the insinuation when it wanted to pass judgment on yet other people as though they were peers. So decisive, therefore, is the ten- dency to grant the power of judgment only to one's equals that it even becomes retrogressively operative; logically incorrect but throughout deeply psychological and understandable, they conclude: because our equal is judged only by us, so everyone we judge becomes in some sense our equal. Just as here such a distinctive relationship of subordination
domination and subordination 161
? as that of the judged to one's judge, so is a definitive coordination is felt, as sometimes conversely coordination is felt as subordination. And conceptually here the dualtiy repeats itself--dissociation as well as involvement--ostensibly rational grounds and dark instincts. Medieval city dwellers, with their rights under the aristocracy but positioned over the peasants, expediently rejected ideas of a universal equality of rights, because they feared that equalization would cost them more, to the advantage of the peasants, than it would secure for them from the aristocracy. Not uniquely, this sociological type is encountered: that a midlevel social stratum can achieve higher elevation only at the price of aligning itself to the lower--this equalization, however, feels like such a reduction in rank for itself that it prefers to forego the elevation that could be won only in this way. Thus the Creoles in Latin America experienced unequivocally fierce jealousy toward the Spaniards from Europe, but even stronger disdain for Mulattoes and Mestizos, Negroes and Indians. The Creoles would have had to align wthemselves with them in order to acquire for themselves equality with the Spaniards, and given their racist feelings, this alignment would have felt like such a demotion that, for that reason, they preferred relinguishing equality with the Spaniards. Yet more abstractly and instinctively, this forma- tive combination is stated in Henry Sumner Maine's expression: the principle of nationality, as it is often advanced, would seem to mean that human beings of one race act unjustly towards those of another when they should have common political dispositions. Wherever thus two different national characters exist, A and B, A then appears subor- dinate to B as soon as the same constitution is expected for the former as for the lattter, and furthermore even if identical contents throughout defines no lower position or subordination.
Finally the subordination under the more distant personality has the very important significance that it in the same measure is the more suitable in so far as the circle of subordinates is made up from het- erogeneous members, foreign or hostile to one another. The elements of a majority, subject to a superior, operate like the particular ideas that belong under a universal concept. This must be even higher and more abstract, that is, the further it is from each particular concept, the more different are all those concepts from one another which it has to encompass uniformly. The most typical case, presenting itself in identical form in the most varied realms, is the handling from above of conflicting parties who choose a referee. The farther this one is from the party-like interestedness from the others--while, analogous to the
162 chapter three
? higher concept, it must somehow have inherently and accessibly that which both sets up the strife as well as the potential reconciliation--the more readily will the parties submit to its decision. There is a threshold of difference beyond which the meeting of the conflicting parties might find a point of uniform agreement however far such a point is. Looking back at the former history of the commercial court of arbitration in England, it is to be emphasized that the same thing is excellently served in the interpretation of work contracts and laws. These, however, would be seldom the reason for larger strikes and lockouts alongside of which it would be a question whether workers or employers preferred to change the working conditions. Here, though, where it is a ques- tion of new foundations of relationship between the parties, the court is irrelevant; the discrepancy between the interests has become so wide that the arbitration courts would have to be infinitely high over them to span it and effect a settlement--however imaginable concepts are with such heterogeneous contents, no such universal concept is to be found that would allow them to strike a bargain based on what they share in common.
Further, in the case of conflicting parties who might submit to the higher authority of the arbitration court, the parties having to be coor- dinated is of decisive importance. Should some kind of a dominant and subordinate relationship already hold between them, it becomes far too easy for the relationship of the judge to one of them to pro- duce a disturbing impartiality for that one; even if the judge is quite distant from the material interests of both parties, often the judgment will favor the dominant, sometimes though also the subordinate party. Here is the region of class sympathies that often are entirely subcon- scious since they have developed perpetually with the whole thought and feeling of the subjects, and they form, as it were, the a priori that shapes the judge's ostensibly purely objective deliberation of the case and manifests interconnections with their congruent perspectives so that, in spite of the endeavor to avoid it, most of the time lead not to actual objectivity and balanced judgment but to its exact opposite. Furthermore, the belief that the judge is biased--especially where the parties are of very different ranks and power, and even if the judge is not so biased--is enough to make the entire proceedings illusory. The English chamber of arbitration often calls a foreign manufacturer as an arbitrator for conflicts between workers and employers. Ordinarily, however, if the decision turns out against the workers, they accuse the judge of favoring the judge's class, however irreproachable the judge's
domination and subordination 163
? character may be; on the other hand, if perhaps a parliamentarian is called, the manufacturers assume then a partiality for the largest class of voters. Thus a fully satisfying situation will result only with full par- ity for both parties--indeed because the superior ones will otherwise exploit the advantage of their position to get a personality whose deci- sions will be convenient for them. Therefore we can on the other hand conclude: The naming of an impartial arbitrator is always a sign that the conflicting parties are together achieving at least some coordina- tion. Precisely on account of the voluntary English court of arbitration, where workers and employers submit contractually to the decision of the judge, who may be neither employer nor worker, the equalization granted to the workers by the employers on their part could move the latter to relinguish assistance from their kind for the settlement of the conflict and entrust it entirely to this outsider. Finally an example of the greatest material difference can tell us that the more the shared relationship of several elements to a superior assumes or produces a coordination between these elements--in spite of all otherwise existing distinctions, unfamiliarities, conflicts--the higher the dominant power will stand above them. For the importance of religion for forming societ- ies in wider circles, it is obviously very important that God is located at a definite distance from the believers. The, as it were, immediate proximity with believers where the divine principles of all totemistic and fetishistic religons, but also the old Jewish God, are located makes such a religion quite unsuited for ruling wide circles. The incredible height of the Christian concept of God first makes the homogeneity of the heterogeneous before God possible; the distance from him was so immeasurable that the differeneces between human beings is thereby dissolved. That did not hinder an intimate relation of the heart to God, for here dwelled those aspects of humanity in which presum- ably all human distinctions fade, which, however, crystallized into this purity and this unique existence only by way of the influence of that highest principle and, as it were, the relationship to it. But perhaps the Catholic Church could only create a world religion precisely so that it interrupted this direct immediacy and, as it inserted itself into the breach, rendered God as well itself highly unreachable in this relation- ship to the individual.
With regard to those social structures that are characterized by domi- nation of a majority, of a social totality over individuals or other totalities, it is noticeable from the outset that the consequence for the subordinates is very uneven. The most that the Spartan and Thessalonian slaves
164 chapter three
? wanted was to become slaves of the state instead of individuals. In Prussia, before the emancipation of the serfs, they were by far better off on demesnes of the state than were the private peasants. In the large, modern business enterprises and warehouses, where there is practi- cally no individuality, but they are either corporations or they possess the same impersonal techniques of management, the employees are better situated than in the small businesses where they are exploited by the owners. This relationship repeats itself wherever, instead of the difference between indivduals and collectives, it has to do with that between smaller and larger collectives. The destiny of India is better under the British government than under the East India Company. At the same time it is of course irrelevant whether this larger collective stands under a single ruler, particularly when the technique practiced by the superior carries the character of superindividuality in the wid- est sense: the aristocratic rule of the Roman Republic oppressed the provinces at a distance far harder than Caesarism, which was much more just and objective. To belong to a larger realm also tends to be better for those in service positions. The large manors that arose in the seventh century in the kingdom of France in many cases created an entirely new advantageous situation for the subordinate population. The large estate permitted an organization and differentiation of the working personnel among whom there emerged qualified individuals doing highly valued labor and were thus permitted, although still not free, to climb socially within the estate. It is entirely in this manner that state penal laws frequently come to be milder than those of the liberated realms.
Now, however, as indicated, a number of phenomena run counter to this. The allies of Athens and Rome and the territories that had formerly been subject to individual Swiss cantons were as gruesomely oppressed and exploited as would have hardly been the case under the tyranny of a single sovereign. The same corporation that, because of the technique of its operation, exploits its employees less than the private entrepreneur, in many cases, was allowed, when it has to do with compensation or benefits, to operate less liberally than the private person who is not accountable to anybody with regard to costs. And regarding the specific impulses: the cruelty that was exercised for the pleasure of the Roman circus-goer, who often demanded even more extreme intensification, would probably not have been perpetrated by many of them if the offender had stood individual-to-individual, right before them.
domination and subordination 165
? The principal reason for these various consequences of plural or majority rule over their subordinates lies above all in the character of the objectivity that it bears, in the suspension of certain feelings, sentiments, impulses that are effective only in the individual behavior of subjects but not as soon as they operate collectively. Now as the case may be, the position of the subordinate--within the given relationship and its specific contents, affected favorably or unfavorably by the objectivity or by the individual subjectivity in the character of the relationship--will produce those differences. Wherever subordinates in their situation have need of charitable and selfless grace from the rulers, they will suffer at the objective rule of a majority; with relationships where the situation is served expediently precisely only by legality, impartiality, functionality, this is just what this ruler will desire. It is significant for this reason that the state legally convicts the criminal, but cannot pardon, and even in republics takes care to keep the right of pardon reserved to individual persons. Most effectively this stands for the material interests of com- munity, which will lead to the greatest possible advantages and least amount of sacrifice following purely objective principle. A cruelty, as it may be exericised by individuals for the sake of cruelty, lies by no means in the currently obvious harshness and ruthlessness, but only in a fully consequential functionality--just as also the brutality of the people of sheer wealth, in so far as they operate under the same point of view, which appears to them typically not at all blameworthy because they are conscious only of a strictly logically driven activity.
Indeed this objectivity of the collective behavior, in many cases purely negative, means that certain norms that otherwise hold for the single personality are nullified, and is then only a form for concealing this nullification and soothe the conscience about it. Every individual involved in decision-making can retreat behind it, provided it was simply a general decision, and mask one's own desire for gain and brutality, provided it was only in pursuit of the advantage of the totality. That the possession of power--and certainly on the one side the especially quickly acquired, on the other side the especially enduring--leads to its misuse holds for individuals only with many and illuminating excep- tions; when, however, it does not hold for corporate bodies and classes, then only especially fortunate circumstances prevented it. It is rather noteworthy that the disappearance of the individual subject behind the totality of the system also then promotes relatively increased power for the individual, even if the subjugated party is also a collective. The psy- chological reproduction of suffering, the essential vehicle of compassion
166 chapter three
? and leniency, is easily negated if no identifiable or visible individual has to bear it, but only a totality without, as it were, any subject. So it has been noted, the English polity in its entire history is supposed to have been characterized by an extraordinary justice towards persons and an similarly great injustice towards totalities. It is only through an appreciation of that strong sentiment for the rights of individuals that the psychology behind the treatment of dissenters, Jews, Irish, Indians, in earlier periods also the Scots, can be understood. The submersion of the forms and norms of personality in the objectivity of the collective being is what also defines the suffering of totalities, then, as business- as-usual. Objectivity functions, to be sure, in the form of laws; where it is not essential, though, and personal conscientiousness is stalled, it is frequently demonstrated that the latter is simply not a collective- psychological trait; and this is even more decisive when the object of action, because it too has the same nature of a collective, does not at all offer any stimulus for that personal trait to unfold. The abuses of force, for example, in the American city governments would hardly require their enormous dimensions if the ruling groups were not corporations and the dominated not collectives; it is therefore significant that one believed these abuses could sometimes be controlled by increasing the power of the mayor--so that there would be someone who could be made personally responsibile!
Mass behavior, which I illustrated with the Roman circus crowd, is offered as an exception to the objectivity of the actions of a large number, which in reality presents only a deeper confirmation of the rule. Namely, there exists a fundamental difference between the effective nature of a collective as one homogeneous structure, an abstraction, as it were, embodying a specific structure--economic co-operative, state, church, all combinations that actually or for all practical purposes are to be viewed as legal persons--on the one side, and that of a collective as an actually co-existing aggregation on the other. In both cases the resulting dissolution of the individual-personal differentiation leads in the first to the emergence of opportune traits transcending the individual, if you will; in the other, however, lying below the individual. Inside a physically proximal crowd there are countless suggestions and nervous influences going back and forth, robbing individuals of their repose and independence of thought and action, so that the most fleeting stimula- tions often rise up in the crowd, avalanche-like, to the most excessive impulses, and the higher, discriminating, critical functions are as good as turned off. For that reason, one laughs at jokes in the theater and in
domination and subordination 167
? assemblies that would leave one quite cold in a room; for that reason, the manifestations of spiritualism work best in 'circles'; for that reason, parlor games usually achieve the greatest joyful outcome, however low one is feeling; thus the rapid essentially quite unfathomable changes of mood in a mass; thus the countless observations over the 'stupidity' of collectives. 19 I attribute the paralysis of the higher character traits, this inability to resist being swept away, as stated, to the incalculable number of influences and impressions that crisscross in a crowd from person to person, strengthening, recoiling, distracting, reproducing. From this con- fusion of minimal stimuli below the threshold of consciousness emerges, on the one hand, besides the costs of clear and consequential mental activity, a great nervous excitement, in which the darkest, most primi- tive, normally controlled instincts of nature awaken, and on the other hand, a hypnotic paralysis that allows the crowd to go along with every suggestive impulse leading to the extreme. Add to that the power-rush and the individual lack of responsibility for single persons in a currently teaming crowd whereby the moral inhibitions of low and brutal drives fail. The cruelty of crowds is sufficiently explained by that, be it Roman circus-goer or medieval Jew-baiter or American Negro-lyncher, and the ugly lot of those that are subject to a corresponding submissive crowd. To be sure, the typical duality here shows itself in the consequences of this social relationship of subordination: the impulsivity and sug- gestibility of the crowd can lead them opportunely to follow stimuli to magnanimity and enthusiasm, to which likewise the individual alone would otherwise not rise. The last reason for the contradictions inside this configuration is, to put it this way, that no permanent and change- less but rather a variable and haphazard relationship exists between the individuals with their situations and requirements, on the one side, and all the super- and subindividual entities and internal-external states of consciousness that accompany rallies, on the the other. When thus the abstract social units--factual, cold, consequential--act as an individual, when conversely tangible crowds--impulsive, senseless, extreme--move collectively as if each individual were acting separately, each of these cases can be of such a variety that it can be more favorable or, on the contrary, less favorable for the subordinated. The randomness, frankly, is not at all random, but rather the logical expression of the incom- mensurability between the situations of specific individuals, whom and
19 More about this in the chapter on self-preservation.
? 168 chapter three
? whose needs it concerns, and the entities and dispositions that rule the cooperation and coexistence of the many or that serve them.
With these subordinations under a majority the individual elements of the majority were coordinated with one another, or at least they functioned here with respect to matters to be considered as though they were coordinated. There arises then new phenomena as soon as the dominant majority does not act as a unity of homogeneous elements; the dominated can thereby be either in conflict among themselves, or they can form a hierarchy in which one superior is subordinated to another. I should consider initially the first case, whose types allow us to point out the variety of consequences for the subordinates.
If someone is totally subject to several persons or groups, so much so that there is no spontaneity to exert in the relationship but complete dependence on every one of the superiors--suffering will be particularly severe under conflicts among the latter. For each one will lay complete claim to the subordinates and their powers and services and will hold them, nevertheless, responsible for whatever they do or allow as a result of coercion by the others as though it were voluntary. This is the situa- tion of the 'servant of two masters'; it plays out in any situation, from children standing between parents in a state of conflict to the situa- tion of a small state always dependent on two powerful neighboring states, and in case of conflict, then, the one caught between will often be made responsible by each for whatever the dependent relationship compels to be done for the other. If this conflict is fully internalized within the circle of the individual subordinates, it functions like ideal, moral powers that place their demands on the subjectivity of the people themselves, so the situation appears as a 'conflict of duties. ' That external conflict flows, so to say, not from the subjects themselves but only onto them; however, this conflict crops up in the soul leading the moral consciousness to strive for two different sides, to be obedient towards two mutually exclusive powers. Thus while this in principle excludes the will of the subject, and, whenever this occured, could as a rule be completed quickly, there is precisely underlying the conflict of duties the fullest freedom of the subject which alone can carry the recognition of both claims as morally obligatory. In the mean time this opposition apparently does not hinder the conflict of the two from obtaining both forms of obedience to the demanding powers at the same time. As long as a conflict is purely external, it is worst when the personality is weak; if, however, it becomes internal, it will become most destructive when the personality is strong. With the rudimentary
domination and subordination 169
? forms of such conflicts, through which our life moves, both large and small, we are accustomed to that sort of thing; we come to terms with them so instinctively through compromises and division of our obliga- tions that they, for the most part, do not even become conscious as conflicts. Where this occurs, however, an insolubility of this situation, according to its pure sociological form, tends to become visible, even if its fortuitous contents also permit a disentanglement and reconcili- ation. Since as long as the strife of elements continues, wherein each raises full claim to one and the same subject, no division of one's powers will be enough for those demands; indeed, in general not even a relative solution through such division will be possible, because one must show one's true colors, and the individual action stands before an uncompromising pro or contra. Between the religiously cloaked claim of the family group, which required the burial of Polyneices, and the state law that forbids it, there is for Antigone no differentiating compromise; after her death the internal conflicts she feels are just as difficult and irreconciled as at the beginning of the tragedy, and prove thereby that no behavior or fate whatsoever of those subjugated can remove the conflict they project into it. And even where the collision does not take place between those powers themselves, but only inside the doubly obedient subject, and so seems rather to be mediated by way of a division of the subject's work between them--it is only the happy accident from the consequences of the contents of the situation that makes the solution possible. The prototype is here: Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God; but if one needs for a godly work precisely the coin that Caesar demands? The sheer reciprocal estrangement and disorganization of the authorities, on which an individual is contemporaneously dependent, is sufficient to turn one's situation basically into one full of contradictions. And this even the more so, the more the conflict is internalized in the sub- ject and arises from the ideal demands that draw life from one's own conscientiousness. In both examples drawn above the subjective moral emphasis rests indeed fundamentally on the one side of the opposi- tion, and on the other the subject is more subservient by way of an external inevitability. If, however, both demands are from the same inner gravity, it is of little help, with the firmest conviction, whether we decide for one or divide up our strengths between them. Since the unfulfilled--whether whole or in part--in spite of everything, continues to have an effect with its emphasis on wholeness, its unfulfilled amount makes us fully responsible for it, even if it was outwardly impossible to
170 chapter three
? satisfy it, and even if under the given circumstances this solution was the most morally correct. Every actual moral demand has something absolute that is not satisfied with a relative fulfillment that is alone recognized as real by another one. Here, too, where we are under no other authority than personal conscience, we are not better off than in the external case of the mutually conflicting relationships that grant us no leeway in favor of the other. Also internally we find no peace, as long as a moral necessity remains unrealized, no matter whether we have a clean conscience with regard to it, provided that we, because of the existence of another one--that likewise produces a sense of its possible realization--could not give it more than we did.
With the subordination under external conflicting or estranged pow- ers, the position of the subordinate certainly becomes a fully different one as soon as the subordinate possesses even some spontaneity, has some of its own power to insert into the relationship. Here the situa- tion comes in the most diverse arrangements: duobus litigantibus tertius gaudet--which the previous chapter treated. Here would be advanced only several of its applications in the case of the subordination of the tertius and also in the event that there exists no strife, but only mutual estrangement of the higher authorities. 20
The availability of some amount of freedom of the subordinates is a condition that is apt to lead to an incremental process that sometimes goes all the way to a dissolution of the subordination. A fundamental difference of the medieval serfs from vassals consists in that the former had and could have only one lord; the latter, however, could take land from various lords and give them the oath of service. Through this possibility, to go into various feudal relationships, the vassal gained in relation to the single feudal lord a firm footing and independence; the essential subordination of the vassal's position became thereby rather considerably equal. A formally similar situation was created for the religious subject by polytheism. Although such subjects are aware of being ruled over by a plurality of divine powers, nevertheless they can--perhaps not entirely logically, to be sure, but at this level actually psychologically--turn from the inaccessible or powerless god to another, richer in opportunities; still in contemporary Catholicism believers turn away from a saint who has not rewarded their special adoration, in order to devote themselves to another--although they could not
20 Latin: duobus litigantibus tertius gaudet, while two argue, the third rejoices--ed.
? domination and subordination 171
? deny, in principle, the continuing power that the former also has over them. In so far as subjects have at least a certain choice between the authorities over them, they gain, at least perhaps for their sense of wholeness, a certain feeling of independence from each one, which is denied them wherever the identical sum of religious dependence is united inescapably in a single conception of God. And this is also the form in which modern persons gain a definite indpendence in the economic realm. They are, especially in the large cities, absolutely more dependent on the sum total of their suppliers than are the people in more natural economic circumstances. However, because they possess nearly an unlimited possibility of choosing among suppliers, with also the possibility to change from one to another, they have then a freedom that is not to be compared to that of those in simpler or small-town relationships.
The same determinate form of relationship arises when the diver- gence of the dominant groups unfolds one after another instead of simultaneously. Here now the most varied adaptations offer themselves relative to the historical contents and special conditions in all of which dwells the same form-phenomenon. The Roman senate was formally very dependent on the senior officials. Since, however, they had short term limits and the Senate in contrast kept its members permanently, the power of the Senate thus became in fact far greater than one would get from a reading of the official relationship to those bearers of power. In basically the same way the power of the Commons against the English Crown has grown since the 14th century. The dynastic parties were still able to determine the elections, in the sense of royalism or reform, in favor of York or of Lancaster. But amidst all these proofs of the rul- ers' power, the House of Commons still persisted as such and acquired thereby, precisely because of those oscillations and changes in the wind among the highest regions, a firmness, power and independence that perhaps it would never have won with undisturbed unity in the move- ments of the highest ranks. Correspondingly the increase in democratic consciousness in France was derived from the reality that, since the fall of Napoleon I, changing government powers quickly followed one after another, each incapable, insecure, wooing the goodwill of the masses, whereby every citizen then correctly came to a consciousness of personal social significance. Although citizens were subordinated by every single one of these governments, they began nevertheless to feel their own strength because they formed the permanent element in the midst of all the change and conflict of the governments.
172 chapter three
? The power against the various concomitant elements, which accrues to an element of a relationship by the mere fact of its endurance, is such a universal, formal consequence that its exploitation through any kind of relationship of subordination may be understood only as a specific case. It holds no less for the dominant parties: from the enor- mous advantage that 'the state' and 'the church' already gain through their mere stability relative to the short life of that of the dominated, to such a singular fact: that the frequency of puerperal fever in the Middle Ages extraordinarily raised the sovereignty of the man in the house. Since the consequence of that was that the strongest men had several wives consecutively and thereby concentrated the head-of-the- household power, as it were, into one person while the power of the housewife was distributed among several sequentially.
Without exception the phenomena of domination and subordination seemed to facilitate entirely opposed consequences for the dominated. Overall, however, closer inspection has allowed us to recognize the grounds of this opposition based on the same general type, without having to give up the nature of the form for whatever contents it offered up. The situation is not different with the second combination now under consideration: that a plurality of dominant authorities, instead of being estranged or hostile to one another, are among themselves even dominant and subordinate. Decisive here is whether the subordinate actually possesses an unmediated relationship to the highest ranked of the superiors above or whether the intermediate authority, still domi- nating the subordinate, is still subordinate to the highest and separates the former from the latter, and thus by itself de facto represents the dominant elements. Cases of the first type were created by feudalism, in which those who were oppressed by the greater vassals remained, yet, simultaneously the oppressed under the highest noble houses. A rather pure picture hereof is provided by English feudalism at the time of William the Conqueror, described by Stubbs:
All men continued to be primarily the king's men and the public peace to be his peace. Their lords might demand their service to fulfil their own obligations, but the king could call them to the fyrd, summon them to his courts, and tax them without the intervention of their lords, and to the king they could look for protection against all foes. 21
21 Simmel quotes in English. Stubbs presumably is William Stubbs, author of The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development (3 vols. ), 1873-78--ed.
? domination and subordination 173
? Thus the situation of the subordinate to a higher dominant group is a favorable one if the latter is also subordinate to an even higher, against which the former has a defense. This is also the actual natural result of the social configuration here before us. Since, as a rule, some kind of opposition and jurisdictional dispute among adjacent elements in the hierarchy of dominant groups is taking place, the intermediate element is often in conflict with the higher as well as with the lower ones. And the fact that common opposition also binds together otherwise most diverse elements with no other means for unity is one of the typical formal rules that prove true universally for all areas of social life. A nuance hereof becomes especially important for the problem before us: already in the early Orient it is the glory of a ruler to take up the cause of the weaker who are oppressed by a stronger--if only because the ruler is thereby shown to be the stronger of the strong. In Greece it is found that a heretofore ruling oligarchy, one and the same personal- ity, is denounced with the label of a tyrant, whom the lower masses honor as their liberator from tyranny, just as happened with Euphron of Sikyon. It is hardly necessary to reiterate the frequency with which the motif--that the lower masses are supported by the ruler in their struggle with the aristocracy--recurrs in history. Indeed even where this direct relationship between the highest and the lowest ranks of the social scale does not exist for the purpose of keeping down the middle level, where instead the lowest and the middle both are oppressed by the highest, the mere fact that this happens to the middle level as well results in minimally a psychological emotional relief for the lowest rank. With some African and Asian peoples polygyny is so designed that only one of the wives counts as the actual, first or legitimate wife, and the others have a subordinate or servant position in relation to her. Even then, though, her position is in no way better against the husband; for him she is just as much a slave as the others. Without a doubt such a situation--that in which the relationship between two dominant groups stands under the same burden from above as that of the subordinates themselves--makes the burden, as human beings in general are disposed, more tolerable for the latter. Human beings tend to extract some satisfaction from the oppression of one's oppressor; with some feeling of superiority they tend to empathize with the ruler of their ruler, even wherever this sociological constellation means not in the least any real relief from the burdens on them.
Now wherever the form or content of the social structure excludes contact between the highest and lowest levels and thus excludes any
174 chapter three
? shared opposition to the middle, and there is a unidirectional continuity between the top and bottom, the way opens up for a typical sociological event that one can identify as a shifting of the burden. Over against the simple case that a more powerful one uses the position for the exploitation of a weaker, what this has to do with here is the stronger parties transfering any decline of their position, against which they can- not defend themselves, onto a defenceless party and seeking thereby to preserve the status quo ante. The retailer shifts the difficulties that arise through the desires and moods of the public onto the wholesaler, the wholesaler onto the producers, the producers onto the workers. In every hierarchy a new burden or demand moves along the line of least resis- tance, which finally, albeit not necessarily upon immediate appearance or at the first stage, tends to be constantly towards those below. This is the tragedy of the lowest people in every social order. They have to suffer not only under the deprivations, strains, and setbacks, the sum total of which simply characterizes their situation, but every new burden that higher levels meet with at any given point is passed down, whenever in any way technically possible, and stops only with them. The Irish agrarian conditions offer a very pure example. The English lord who owned property in Ireland, but never went there, leased it to a tenant, this one again to a another tenant, etc. , so that the poor farmers had to lease their few acres often from the fifth or sixth middleman. With this it came out that, first of all, they had to pay 6 Pf. Sterling for an acre, of which the owners kept only 10 Shillings; further, however, every one-Shilling raise in rent that the owner imposed on the tenant with whom he had immediate dealings, came not as a one-Shilling raise but twelve times that for the farmer. So it goes without saying that the original increase of burden is not passed on absolutely but relatively, which corresponds to the otherwise already existing measure of power of the higher over the lower. So the rebuke that an official receives from a superior may be limited in the moderate expressions of the higher educational level; this official, however, might of course express the consequential frustration by a rough yell at the next subordinate, and this one in anger beats the children for the sake of an otherwsie quite useless reason.
While the especially uncomfortable situation of the lowest element in a multi-level hierarchy of domination and subordination is founded on the reality that the structure permits a definite continual slide of burden from the top down, a formally quite different one leads to similar results for the lowest positioned, in so far as it also destroys that
domination and subordination 175
? connection with the highest element that was its support against the middle rank. When, to wit, this latter moves between the other two so widely and powerfully that all rules of the highest authority in favor of the lowest tier must be mediated by the middle, which is in posses- sion of the governing functions, this results easily, instead of a binding between the high and the low, in a disjunction between them. As long as serfdom existed, the aristocracy was a bearer of the organization and administration of states; they exercised judicial, economic, taxing functions over their subjects without which the state at that time would not have been able to exist, and certainly bound the subject masses in this manner to the general interest and the highest power. Since, though, the aristocracy still has its own private interests, for which it wants to use the peasants, it exploits its position as the organ of admin- istration between government and peasants, and for a very long time actually annuled those rules and laws by which the government would have assumed responsibility for the peasants--what it for a very long time could do only through and by the aristocracy. It is quite obvious that this form of stratification, isolating ranks from one another, dam- ages not only the lowest but also the highest member of the hierarchy because the strengths flowing from the former up are overlooked by it. Thus for this reason the German kingdom in the Middle Ages was extraordinarily weakened, in that the ascending lesser aristocracy was duty bound only to the higher aristocracy because they were enfeoffed only by them.
In the end the middle member of the higher aristocracy cut off the lesser entirely from the crown.
The outcome of this structure, with its divisions and unifications, for the lowest member by the way naturally depends on the tendency of the higher members to have the lowest at their disposal. In contrast to the heretofore noted phenomenon, the detachment by the middle members favorable to the lowest, the extension over them through modifications can be unfavorable for them. The first case occurred in England after Edward I, when the exercise of the judicial, financial, and police ministries gradually switched over officially to the moneyed classes organized in county and city units. They took over entirely the protection of the individual against absolute power. As the regional units concentrated in Parliament, they became that counterweight to the highest power, defending the vulnerable individuals against lawless and unjust infringements of state regimes. In the ancien re? gime of France the process ran in the reverse. Here the aristocracy was always bound closely to the regional circles in which they managed and governed
176 chapter three
? and whose interests they represented against the central government. The state forced itself into this relationship between aristocracy and peasant and gradually took from the former their governing functions: judicial as well as care of the poor, law enforcement as well as road construction. The aristocracy wanted to have nothing to do with this centralized regime, which was driven only by financial distress; they pulled back from their social responsibilities and turned the peasants over to the royal governors and officials, who were concerned only with the state's treasury or their own as well, and pushed the peasants fully from their original foothold with the aristocracy.
A particular form of subordination under a majority lies in the prin- ciple of the 'outvoting' of minorities by majorities. However, this takes root and it branches out into much broader interests of social formation, beyond its significance for the sociology of domination and subordina- tion, that it seems appropriate to treat in in a special excursus.
Excursus on Outvoting
The essence of the construction of society, from which the incomparability of its results as well as the insolubility of its internal problems consistently emerge, is this: that from self-contained unities--as human personalities more or less are --would come a new unity. One cannot, for sure, produce a painting out of paintings, no tree is made up of trees; the whole and the independent do not grow out of totalities, but out of dependent parts. But society turns whole and fully self-centered parts into an overarching whole. All the restless evolution of societal forms, large as well as small, is in the last analysis only the ever-renewed attempt to reconcile the inner-oriented unity and totality of the individual with its social role as a part and contribution toward saving the unity and totality of society from dissolution by the independence of its parts. Now since every conflict between the members of a whole makes its continued existence doubtful, it is the significance of voting, the results of which the minority also agrees to accept, that the unity of the whole over the antagonisms of the principles and interests under all circumstances should remain master. It is, in all its apparent simplicity, one of the most genial of means to bring the strife among individuals into an eventually unifying conclusion.
But this form, the including of the dissenters too, by which each partici- pant in the voting accepts its result in practice--unless someone leaves the group altogether with this result--this form has in no way always been as self-evident as it appears to us today. In part a mental inflexibility that does not understand the establishment of a social unity out of dissenting elements, and in part a strong individuality that might not obey any decision without its own full agreement have not admitted the majority principle into many kinds of communities but demanded unanimity for every decision. The decisions
domination and subordination 177
? of the Germanic Marches had to be unanimous; whatever could not achieve unanimity did not happen. Late into the Middle Ages the English aristocracy, who had dissented from or was not present at the approval of a tax, often refused to pay it. Wherever unanimity is demanded for the choice of a king or leader, that sense of individuality is in effect; of those who have not themselves chosen the ruler, it is also not expected or required that they obey the ruler. In the tribal council of the Iroquois as in the Polish parliament, no decision counted from which even only one voice had dissented. Nonetheless, the motive--that it would be fully contradictory to perform a collective action that an individual disagrees with--does not have such a requirement of unanimity as a logical consequence, since if a suggestion without full unity of voice is considered rejected, thus to be sure the coercion of the minority is prevented, but now in reverse the majority is thereby coerced. Also, those who refrain from a majority approved discipline tend to foster something quite positive, accompanied by perceptible results, and then this becomes the totality forced by the minority by dint of the principle of necessary unanimity. Apart from this outvoting of the majority, which in league with the unanimity principle negates in principle the individual freedom striven for, it results often enough in historical practice in the same result. For the Spanish kings there was no favorable situation for the suppression of the Aragonese Court just because of this 'freedom': until 1592 the Court could make no decision if only one member of the four classes objected--a paralysis of actions that required a substitute directly through a less crippling authority. Now when it is not possible, in lieu of some practical conclusion, to let a decision drop, and it must be obtained under any circumstance, as though by the verdict of a jury (which we meet, for example, in England and America), its requirement of unanimity rests on the more or less unconsciously operating assumption that the objective truth must be simply always subjectively convincing, and that, conversely, the confluence of the subjective persuasions is the sign of objective substance. A simple majority decision thus probably does not yet contain the whole truth; otherwise, it ought to have been successful at marshalling all the votes around it. In spite of its illusory clarity, the fundamentally mystical faith in the power of truth, in the final coalescence of the logically correct with the psychologically real, thus contributes here to the creation of the solution of those major conflicts between the individual persuasions and the requirement for a unified whole outcome. In its practical consequences this faith, no less than that individualistic foundation of consensus, turns its own underlying tendency around: where the jury remains sequestered until they come to a unanimous verdict, nearly unavoidable for a possible minority there arises the idea to try, against the minority's own persuasion which it cannot hope to carry through anyway, to side with the majority in order thereby to avoid the meaningless and eventually unbearable prolonging of the session.
Where in contrast majority decsions are what count, the subordination of the minority can arise from two motives whose difference is of utmost socio- logical significance. The coercion of the minority can come, first precisely from the fact that the many are more powerful than the few. Although, or rather, because each individual counts the same as another in voting, the
178 chapter three
? majority would--whether through the ballot or the medium of a system of representation as such--have the physical power to coerce the minority. Voting serves the purpose of restricting the exercise of every immediate measure of power and mediating its eventual result through the vote count, thereby per- haps convincing the minority of the futility of a substantial resistance. There are thus in the group two parties standing as two opposing groups, between which the balance of power, represented by the vote, is decisive. The latter serves here the same methodological purpose as diplomatic or other negotia- tions between parties who want to avoid the ultima ratio of fighting. Finally, exceptions aside, each individual also gives in only when the opponent can make it clear that the real thing would bring at least even as great a loss for the individual. Voting is, just like negotiations, a projection of the real powers and their consideration onto the level of spirit, an anticipation in an abstract symbol of the way out of real fighting and coercion. For all that, this supports the actual balance of power and the forced subordination imposed on the minority. Sometimes, however, this is sublimated from the physical into the ethical form. When in the later Middle Ages the principle is often met-- the minority is supposed to follow the majority--evidently by that it is not only meant that the minority is for all practical purposes supposed to join in in whatever the majority decides, but it is also supposed to accept the will of the majority, to acknowledge that the majority wants what is right. Unanimity reigns here not as reality but as moral requirement; the resulting action, against the will of the minority, is supposed to be legitimated subsequently by unity of will. The old German tribes' real requirement for unanimity effervesces into an ideal requirement, in which indeed a whole new motive is discernible: from an internal right that goes beyond the predominance of the vote count and beyond the external superior strength, the majority might symbolized by this. The majority looks like the natural representative of the totality and plays a part in that meaning of the unity of the whole that, beyond the mere sum of individuals participating, does not entirely lack a trans-empirical, mystical tone. Later when Grotius claimed the majority has naturaliter jus integri,22 that internal claim is thereby attached to the minority; because a right not only must but should be acknowledged. That, however, the majority has the right of the whole 'from nature,' that is, by way of inner, rational necessity, this leads to the presently emergent nuance of the right to out vote, to its second significant main motive. The voice of the majority means now no longer the voice of the greater power inside the group, but the sign that the unitary will of the group has decided for the one side. The requirement of unanimity rests throughout on an individualistic basis. That was the original sociological perception of the German tribes: the unity of the community did not live beyond the individuals but entirely in them; for that reason the group will was not only not emphasized, but it did not exist at all as long as one single member dissented. But also where outvoting counts, it still has an indi- vidualistic foundation if its meaning is simply that the many are more power-
22 Latin: by nature the right of the whole--ed.
? domination and subordination 179
? ful than the few and that the vote is supposed to arrive at the eventual outcome of the real measure of powers without this measure itself. Over against that now it is in principle a new direction when an objective group unity with its own one unified will is presupposed, if it were conscious, if it were such that the praxis unfolds as if such a being-for-itself group will existed. The will of the state, the community, the church, the special-interest group exists then beyond the differences of the inclusive individual wills, just as it exists beyond the temporal changes of its carriers. Since now it is only one, it must operate in a definite unified manner, and since the fact of the antagonistic wills of its bearers resists it, one must solve this contradiction by accepting the majority of these wills knowing or representing better than the minority. Here the subordination of the latter has thus an entirely different meaning than formerly because it is in principle not excluded but included, and the majority operates not in the name of its own greater power but in that of the ideal unity and totality, and only this, which speaks through the mouth of the majority, sub- ordinates the minority because the minority is a part of it from the outset. This is the internal principle of parliamentary votes, insofar as every member of parliament feels oneself as the representative of the entire people, in con- trast to special-interest representation, for which it in the end always operates based on the principle of individualism as the measure of power, and likewise with regional representation, which is based on the erroneous idea that the totality of regional interests would be the same as the totality of interests. The transition to this fundamental sociological principle is to be seen in the devel- opment of the English Lower House. Its members were counted from the outset not as the representatives of a definite number of citizens but also not as those of the people as a whole, but rather as appointees of specific regional political associations, villages and counties that simply had the right to par- ticipate in the formation of Parliament. This regional principle, so firmly held that for a long time every member of the Commons had to maintain residence in one's electoral district, was nonetheless still somehow of an ideal nature, in that it ascended over the mere sum of individual voters. Now all that remained was to bring the common interests of the proliferation and growing awareness of all these associations into the higher association to which they all belonged: to have the unity of the state gradually appear as the actual subject of their commissions. The individual districts that they represent cohere through the recognition of their essential solidarity with the state as a whole to such an extent that those districts then exercise only the function of designating the representatives for the representation of the whole. Wherever such a cohesive will of the group is axiomatic, elements of the minority dissent then, as it were, merely as individuals, not as members of the group. This alone can be the deeper meaning of the Lockean theory of the original contract on which the state is supposed to be founded. This must, because it forms the absolute basis of unification, be thoroughly settled unanimously. However, it now includes, for its part, the provision that everyone should look on the will of the majority as one's own. While individuals embrace the social contract, they are still absolutely free; they cannot then be subjugated by any outvoting. If they embrace it, though, they are then no longer free individuals but social
180 chapter three
? essence and, as such, merely a part of a unity whose will finds its decisive expression in the will of the majority. It is only a definitive formulation of this if Rousseau thus perceives no oppression in outvoting since only a misconcep- tion by the dissenter could elicit that; the dissenter would have taken the volunte? ge? ne? rale23 to be something it was not. This is also the basis of the belief that as an element of the group one could not want anything other that the will of the group, about which surely the individual but not the majority of individuals could be mistaken. For this reason Rousseau makes a very fine distinction between the formal reality of voting and the contents thereof, and explains that one indeed participates through it in and for oneself in the formation of the general will. One is duty bound thereby, so one could expli- cate the Rousseauean ideas, not to avoid the unity of this will, not to destroy it while one is setting one's own will against that of the majority. So the sub- ordination under the majority is simply the logical consequence of belonging to the social unity that one declared by voting. 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.