No More Learning

? the poor person 423
? for the poor person in the interest of the whole. Every poor person is to be entitled to a minimum existence just as much whether able and willing to work or not. In contrast, modern charity allows the correlation between moral duty (of the donor) and moral right (of the recipient) to be realized more by the former. Obviously this form is essentially realized by private charity, in contrast to public, and its sociological meaning is now the question for us.
First of all, to state the already mentioned tendency: treating the care of the poor more as a concern of the widest governmental circles after it was originally based everywhere on the community of the locality. At first the care for the poor person was the result of the communal bond that enveloped the community; before the supra-individual structure that the individuals saw around and above them was transformed from a community into the state, and before the freedom of movement com- pleted this process, factually and psychologically, it was natural for the local community to support the needy. This is of the utmost importance for the whole sociology of the poor person: of all the non-individualistic social claims based on a purely general quality, those of the poor are materially the most impressive. Disregarding such acute excitations as those from misfortune or sexual provocation, there are none that would be so completely impersonal, so indifferent toward the other qualities of their object and at the same time making claims so effectively and immediately as those from need and misery. This has always lent a spe- cifically local character to the duty toward the poor person, instead of centralizing it in so great a circle, instead of functioning through imme- diate perception only through the general concept of poverty--which is one of the longest roads sociological forms have had to cover between perception and abstraction. Since this change in the care for the poor person into an abstract state responsibility occurred--in England from 1834, in Germany somewhat after the middle of the century--its nature was modified in tandem with this centralizing form. Above all, the state admittedly kept the community obligated for the substantial part of the care, but now the community is only its agent. The local organiz- ing is turned into a mere technique by which the objectively greatest capacity for action could be achieved. The community is no longer the starting point but the passageway for welfare. Thus poor associations are constituted everywhere according to the consideration of their suit- ability, e. g. in England so that they can maintain one workhouse each and--which is a conscious tendency--remain free of the bias of local influences. The increasing use of salaried welfare officials has the same
424 chapter seven
? intent. Such an official stands in relation to the poor person much more as a representative of the collectivity on which the official depends for a salary than does the unpaid one, who functions so to speak more as a person and will be allowed to hold sooner the human, person-to- person point of view rather than the purely objective one. Finally a most highly sociologically indicative division of tasks appears. The fact that furthermore welfare is also delegated essentially to the community is thus very useful since every case must be dealt with individually, and this is possible only from nearby, and with accurate knowledge of, the milieu; but if the community has to approve the assistance, it must also raise the means since it would readily manage the public funds all too generously. On the other hand there are cases of need for which the danger of pre-schematizing that is avoided in this way does not exist since this and the needed acts of care are established according to wholly objective criteria: illness, blindness, deaf-muteness, insanity, chronic illness. Here welfare is a more technical matter and thus the state or the large unit is more efficient; its greater means and central- ized administration, where personal matters and local circumstances are less decisive, point to its overwhelming advantages. And in addition to this qualitative determination of direct public activity, the quantita- tive appears, which especially distinguishes it from private charity; the state or the public in general only provides for the most urgent and immediate need. Everywhere, and most clearly in England, the care for the poor has the completely fixed principle that one could give to the poor person from the taxpayers' pockets only the absolutely necessary minimum of the cost of maintaining life.
Fundamentally this is related to the spiritual character of community action in general. The community, which encompasses the energies or interests of many individuals, can make room for their particularity only when it is a question of the whole structure of the division of labor whose members perform different functions. If, however, instead of this a uniform procedure is needed, whether directly or through a representative organ, its content can simply contain only the rela- tive minimum of the personality sphere on a par with that of every other. At first this results in no larger expenditure being allowed in the name of a community than what is expected also of its stingiest member. A collectivity that is currently found together may come to an agreement on an upsurge of extravagant generosity; but where the will of every individual is not proven so directly but must be presup-
the poor person 425
? posed on the part of representatives, the assumption can only be that each person wants to spend as little as possible. Admittedly this is not a logically unavoidable necessity--for which the opposite would not also be a logical contradiction--but it corresponds to a psychological dogma that has acquired the practical value of logical proof through the overwhelming magnitude of its empirical confirmation. Out of its necessity the quantification has to embrace in effect the lowest level of the intellectual, economic, cultural, aesthetic, etc. scale: the character of a minimum: the right valid for all is described as the ethical minimum; the logic valid for all is the intellectual minimum; the 'right to work' claimed for all can only be extended to the person who represents a minimum for its value character; membership in a party requires in principle only that one acknowledge the minimum of the party's prin- ciples without which it could not exist. This type of social minimum is expressed most completely even in the directly negative character of quantification and level of interest.
Excursus on the Negativity of Collective Behavior
The unity of the just mentioned phenomena comes about in many aspects only through negation, and in fact such phenomena often develop the char- acteristic of negativity in the degree of its numerical scope. In mass actions the motives of the individuals are often so divergent that their union is all the more possible the more their content is purely negative, indeed destructive. The dissatisfaction that leads to large-scale revolutions always feeds off so many and often so directly opposed sources that their unification around a positive goal would hardly be carried out. The formation of unity, then, tends to be the responsibility of smaller circles, and the dispersed energies of individuals have worked to put in order as well as to destroy the countless private undertakings intended to unify the masses. In view of this, one of the most knowledgeable historians asserted that the crowd would always be ungrateful since, although the whole would be brought to a flourishing condition, individuals would above all feel what they lack personally. The divergence of individual deci- sions that leaves to the collectivity only negation (which obviously is regarded only cum grano salis4 and beyond everything by which society overcomes this fate of its forces) is very evident, for example, in the late Russian revolution. 5 The unsafe spatial expansion, the personal differences in formation, the
4 Latin: with a grain of salt--ed.
5 Simmel appears to be referring to the 1905 failed revolution in Russia--ed.
? 426 chapter seven
? variety of objectives that prevail in this movement actually made the idea of nihilism, the complete denial of what exists, into the applicable expression of the community for all its members.
The same trait appears in the outcome of large popular referenda, which is so often and almost incomprehensibly purely negative. Thus in Switzerland in 1900, for example, a law about confederate health and accident insurance would be flatly rejected by a referendum after it was accepted unanimously by both representatives of the people--the Nationalrat and the Sta? nderat; and this was just generally the fate of most statutory proposals that were subjected to referendum. Negation is just the simplest act, and thus large masses, whose members cannot agree upon a positive goal, just find themselves united in that. The standpoints of particular groups, by whom every law was rejected, were extremely different: particularistic and ultramontane, agrarian and capi- talist, technical and partisan--and thus could have nothing but negation in common. Of course, conversely also, therefore, where they agree at least in negative stands, negation can suggest or prepare for the unity of many small groups. Thus it is striking that admittedly the Greeks would have shown great cultural differences among one another, but if one even compared the Arca- dians and the Athenians with the contemporary Carthaginians or Egyptians, Persians, or Thracians, various negative characteristics would still have been held in common. Nowhere in historical Greece were there human sacrifices or deliberate mutilation; nowhere polygamy or the sale of children into slavery; nowhere the wholly unlimited obedience to an individual person. Amidst all the positive differences, the commonality of the purely negative still had to bring the solidarity to the consciousness of a cultural circle transcending the individual state.
The negative character of the bond that brings the large circle together into a unity appears above all in its norms. This is prepared by the phenom- enon of binding arrangements of any kind having to be all the simpler and fewer the larger the compass of their applicability would be, all things being equal--beginning approximately with the rules of international etiquette that are very much fewer than would be observed in every smaller group, up to the fact that the individual states of the German Reich tend to have all the less encompassing constitutions the larger they are. Expressed in principle: with a widening scope of the circle, the commonalities that bind every one in the social unity to every one else always become less extensive. Therefore what at first could appear paradoxical: generally, it is possible to hold a large circle together with a small minimal number of norms than a small one. Now, in a qualitative sense, the patterns of behavior that a group must demand of its members in order to be able to exist as a group tend to be all the more purely prohibitive and restrictive in nature, the more extensive it is: the posi- tive associations that give group life its unique substance member by member, must ultimately be left to the individual;6 the variety of persons, interests, and
6 Thus an English adage says: "The business of everybody is the business of nobody. " This unique becoming-negative on the part of an action also appears as soon as it
? the poor person 427
? processes becomes too great for it to be regulated from a center. The prohib- iting function nevertheless remains only for the establishment of what must not be done under any circumstances, the limitation of freedom instead of steering it--by which is meant, of course, only the steering of a development continually thwarted and deflected by other tendencies. Thus it is so where a greater number of diverging circles of religious feeling or interest would be united into a unity. Allah emerged from the decline of Arab polytheism as the general conceptualization, so to speak, of God. Polytheism necessarily generates a religious splintering of faith circles since its components will turn to the different deities in unequal ways according to the difference in their inner and practical tendencies. Allah's abstract and unifying character is thus a negative one at first; it is his original nature "to keep off evil," but not to urge the doing of good; he is only the "one who restrains. " The Hebrew God, who brought about or expressed a union of socio-religious combination unheard in antiquity--compared to every diverging polytheism and every unsocial monism, as in India--gives its most strongly emphasized norms of conduct in the form: Thou shalt not. In the German Empire, positive relationships in life, which are subject to civil law, first found their standard form in the civil code about thirty years after the founding of the Empire; in contrast, the criminal code with its prohibitive stipulations was already uniformly codified in the Empire from 1872. Exactly what makes prohibition especially suitable for generalizing smaller circles into a larger one is the circumstance that the counterpart of forbidden things is in no way always what is commanded but often is only what is permitted. Thus if no ? could occur in the circle of A but probably ? and ? , no ? in the circle of B but probably ? and ? , no ? in C but ? and ? etc. --in this way the unified structure can be established in A, B, and C on the prohibition of ? , ? , and ? . Unity is only possible if ? and ? were not commanded in A but only permitted so that it can also be omitted. If instead ? and ? would be just as positively commanded, as ? is forbidden--and cor- respondingly in B and C--a unity would hardly appear because then what is directly proscribed on the one hand would then always be directly commanded on the other. Thus the following example: Since antiquity the enjoyment of a particular kind of animal--the exact one that was sacred for the individual's locality--was denied to every Egyptian. The doctrine that holiness requires abstention from all meat then arose as the result of the political amalgamation of a number of local cults into a national religion, on top of which a priest- hood stood reigning in unison. This unification could come about only through the synthesis or universalizing of all these prohibitions. Since the enjoyment of all animals allowed in every locality (thus also able to be omitted! ) would
becomes the responsibility of the multitude in the motivation by which one explained the forbearance and indolence of the North Americans, who are otherwise so energetic, about public nuisances. One might resort to public opinion to bring everything about. Fatalism arises from that: "Making each individual feel his insignificance, disposes him to leave to the multitude the task of setting right what is every one else's business just as much as his own. " (Quoted in English--ed. )
? 428 chapter seven
? have been somewhat positively commanded, obviously there would have been hardly any possibility of collecting the particular rules about animals into one higher totality.
The more general a norm is, the larger the circle to which it applies, the less is its observance characteristic and significant for the individual, while violating it tends to be especially serious and fraught with consequences. First of all, one should be very clear on the intellectual domain. The theoretical understanding, without which there would be generally no human society, rests on a small number of widely accepted--although of course not consciously in the abstract--norms that we describe as logical. They form the minimum of what must be acknowledged by all who wish to interact with one another at all. The most fleeting coming together in agreement by individuals most foreign to one another, as well as the daily common life of those closest to one another, rests on this basis. Obedience of the imagination to these very simple norms, without which it would never be in harmony with experienced reality, is the most unrelinquishable and general condition of all social life; for amidst any difference between the inner and outer worldview, logic creates a certain common ground, the abandonment of which would have to cancel any intellectual commonality in the widest sense of the term. But now logic, understood narrowly, implies or provides no positive property at all; it is only a norm not to be violated; without that, its observance would provide some distinction, a specific good or quality. All attempts to obtain knowledge of something particular with the help of pure logic are frustrated, and its socio- logical importance is therefore one that is as negative as that of the criminal code: only the violation of it creates a particular and noticeable situation, but persistence in these norms creates theoretically, i. e. practically, nothing else for individuals than the possibility of remaining in the general group. Certainly even the intellectual connection of a thousand substantive divergences can fail with logic strictly adhered to; but with faulty logic it must fail--precisely as, admittedly, the moral and social solidarity can collapse even with a strict avoidance of all that is criminally forbidden, but with the breaking of these norms it must. It is no different with social forms in the narrower sense, inso- far as they are really universal in a circle. They are suspended for nobody, but their violation is at the highest level when only what is most general in a circle will not be violated while the special norms that hold the smaller group together lend the individual a positive quality and difference to the extent that they are special. Also, on these conditions rests the practical uses of the social forms of civility that are so completely lacking in substance. Based on the positive presence of respect and devotion, of which they assure us, we may not exclude their least absence; yet the least violation of them convinces most unmistakably that those feelings do not exist. The greeting on the street does not give evidence of respect whatsoever; its omission, however, very strongly indicates the opposite. These forms completely withhold service as symbols of a positive inner disposition. But they express the negative most suitably, because quite a light omission can determine the relationship toward someone radically and definitely--and in fact, both to the degree to which the form
the poor person 429 of civility is wholly general and conventional, it is of the very essence of the
relatively large circle.
Thus it is that the action of the whole as a whole toward the poor person is limited to a minimum, thoroughly appropriate for the typical nature of the activity of whole societies. Along with the rationale that such action has as its content only what is clearly presupposed for everyone, the second rationale of this activity also has its source in the objective character of the care of the poor being limited to this minimum. What pertains to protecting someone from physical deterioration can be fixed objectively with approximate certitude. Every grant of more than this, every improvement toward a positive increase requires much less unam- biguous criteria and is left to more subjective estimates in quantity and kind. I mentioned above that the cases of not very special neediness and thus ones requiring no subjective judgment--such as neediness through sickness and bodily defect especially--are most suitable for governmental welfare while the individually formed cases better fall to the share of the smaller local community. Even such objective ascertainability of the need that lends itself to the intervention of the largest community exists as soon as the support is limited to the minimum. The old epis- temological correlation between generality and objectivity appears here again; in the field of knowledge the actual generality is the acknowl- edgment of a proposition through the--admittedly not historically real but ideal--universality of the spirit or an expression of its objectivity on one hand, while on the other it may be certainly irrefutable for one or many individuals and may possess the full meaning of the truth, but it still lacks the particular quality that we call objectivity. Thus in practice an action of the community can in principle be claimed only on a plainly objective basis. Where the reason is able to be evaluated only subjectively and lacks the potential for being established purely factually, though the claim may be no less urgent and its fulfillment no less valuable, it is nevertheless directed only to individuals, and their relationship corresponds to purely individual circumstances, and their fulfillment is simply through individuals.
If the objective perspective goes hand in hand with the tendency to nationalize all welfare--which admittedly until now nowhere exceeds the stage of that tendency completely--the extent to which the content is standardized, the logical application of which simply means objectivity,
? ? 430 chapter seven
? derives not only out of the interests of the poor person but also out of those of the state. Here an essentially sociological form of the relationship of individual and community shows its advantage. Where grants or interventions pass over from being fulfilled by individuals to being fulfilled by the community, regulation by the community tends to use either too much or too little individual action. With statutory education the individual is forced not to learn too little; it leaves to the individuals whether they desire to learn more or 'too much. ' With the statutory workday, it makes the employers not to want to expect too much from the workers, as it also leaves to them how much less to expect. And thus this regulation stands everywhere only on one side of the action, while the other side is given over to the freedom of the individual. This is the pattern in which our socially controlled activi- ties appear to us: They are restricted as it were to one end alone; the society sets a boundary that is much for them or little for them, while more or less of the limitlessness of subjective discretion belongs to the others. Now, however, this pattern also deceives us in many cases where the social regulation actually occurs on both sides and only the practical interest steers attention only to the one side and allows the other to be overlooked. Where for example the private punishment of injustice shifts to the society and objective criminal law, in the law one has in view thereby only a greater assurance of expiation and a really sufficient measure and certainty of punishment being achieved. But in reality, it is not a matter of only being punished enough but also not being punished too much. Society not only protects perhaps the possibly harmed, but it also protects the criminal against excessive subjective reaction, i. e. it sets that level of punishment as the objective that corresponds not to the wish or purpose of the victim but to its social interest. And this is so not only in statutorily established relation- ships. Not every social stratum attaches much importance to each of its members achieving a certain minimum expenditure for clothing; it fixes a limit of the 'decent' suit, and one who remains below that no longer belongs to it. But admittedly it nevertheless also sets a limit in the other direction, not with the same clarity and with as conscious an emphasis: a certain level of luxury and elegance, indeed sometimes even of modernity, does not conform to one or the other group; whoever exceeds this upper threshold is sometimes treated as not completely belonging. Thus the group still does not also allow the freedom of the individual to be expanded fully on both sides but sets an objective limit to subjective discretion, i. e. one that the conditions of supra-individual
the poor person 431
? life in it require. This basic form is now replicated in the taking over of the care of the poor by the society. While at first it seems to have only an interest in boundaries: the poor person too receiving a proper share, not too little; the other, practically less effective, nevertheless also exists: that they do not receive too much. The inadequacy of private welfare lies not only in being too little but also in being too much, which leads the poor person to idleness, expends existing resources in economically unproductive ways, and capriciously benefits one at the expense of the other. The subjective impulse to be charitable errs on both sides, and although the danger of excess is not as great as that of too little, the objective norm still stands above it, which subtracts an interest in the individual from the interest of the community to no noticeable degree.
However, this transcending of the subjective point of view is valid both for the giver and the receiver of charity. While English public welfare begins only at total impoverishment, which was set objectively-- specifically, that the workhouse offered a stay so little agreeable that no one chooses it but in really extreme need--it completely dispensed with the proof of personal worthiness. Private charity, which is for the clearly worthy individual, can often be much more individually selec- tive, and since the state already provides for the most urgently needy, is thus its supplement. It has the task of making the poor person, who is already protected from starvation, capable of earning a living again, of curing the need for which the state has an only temporary relief. What is decisive is not need as such, although it is the terminus a quo, but the ideal of creating independent and economically valuable indi- viduals; the state proceeds with a causal intent, private charity with a teleological one. Or put differently: The state comes to help poverty; private charity comes to help the poor person. Here lies a sociological difference of the first order. The abstract ideas by which some individual elements crystallize out from individually complicated reality countless times achieve a liveliness and effectiveness for action that seems in real- ity only to benefit the concrete total phenomenon. This begins with quite intimate relationships. The meaning of many erotic relationships is not to be expressed any way other than at least one of the parties not seeking the beloved but love, only that one is generally met with a feeling of remarkable indifference toward the individuality of the lover. In religious circumstances it sometimes appears that the only essential thing is there being a certain kind and degree of religiosity while the bearers of it are irrelevant; the action of the priest or the relationship
432 chapter seven
? of the believer to the community is determined only by this general- ity, without regard to the particular motive that produces and colors this mood in the individual, and without any particular interest in the individual, who comes into consideration--or more correctly, does not come into consideration--only as the bearer of this impersonal activity. From the perspective of social ethics, a rationalism requires that the interaction of people be simply founded on subjective honesty. Truth, as an objective quality of a statement, must require from everyone to whom it would be addressed complete indifference toward the special characteristics and circumstances of the case; one so determined could not produce an individually differentiated right to truth. The truth, and not the speaking or hearing in individualization, would be the presupposition of the content or value of group interaction. Trends in criminology divide over the same question of whether punishment is for the crime or the criminal. An abstract objectivism demands punishment, once the crime occurs, as a restoration of the real or ideal disturbed order; based on the logic of ethics, it demands it as a consequence of the impersonal fact of the crime. From the other point of view only the guilty subject should be affected; the penal reaction comes in not because the crime occurred as something objective but because of a subject of the sin appearing in it that needs educating and being made harmless. Thus all individual circumstances of the case are exactly addressed by the amount of punishment as well as the general fact that there was a crime at all. This two-fold attitude also applies to poverty. One can proceed from poverty as from a specific factual phenomenon and seek to eliminate it with such questions as: to whom, from which individual cause, with which individual consequences do they always appear, does it require remedy and compensation for this social deficiency? On the other hand, interest is directed toward the poor individual--admittedly, of course, since the person is poor, but one does not wish to eliminate proportionately poverty in general with supportive action but to help this particular poor person. The person's poverty here serves only as an individual and singular qualification for it; it is so to speak only the present reason of being occupied with that person; the individual should generally be brought into a situation in which the poverty vanishes by itself. Thus this social service is directed more to the fact, more to the cause of poverty. Incidentally, it is socio- logically important to note about this formulation that the naturally suited distribution of both public and private welfare be modified as soon as one pursues the causal chain a step further. The state meets
the poor person 433
? the superficially apparent need--especially so in England--and private charity addresses the individual reasons for it. But the fundamental eco- nomic and cultural conditions on which those personal circumstances arise as a basis--these again must form the matter for the community, and in fact they are so formed that they give as little chance as pos- sible to individual weakness or unfavorable prejudice, ineptitude or mischance to produce poverty. Here, as in many other respects, the community, its conditions, interests, and actions encompass as it were individual determinations: on the one hand it represents an immediate surface on which the members perceive their appearance, the results of their own lives; on the other hand it is the broad underground where it develops--but in a way that, from its unity, the differences of indi- vidual arrangements and circumstances give that surface of the whole a conspicuous colorfulness of individual phenomena. 7
The French principle of poverty is the direct opposite of the English one that gave occasion to this generalization. Here the care for the poor is regarded as the domain of private associations and persons from the outset, and the state intervenes only where this is not enough. This reversal does not mean of course that the private entities care for the most urgent cases, as the English state does, but the state provides care, as the English private entities do, going beyond what is individu- ally desirable. The French principle makes it rather unmistakable that substantively the help cannot be so sharply and fundamentally separated
7 Perhaps it is worthwhile noting here outside the immediate factual context that this inclusion of the individual formation by the social, where it reaches the root as well as the fruit, is allowed to be exactly reversed in the same form. As the individual appears there as a kind of universal structure for the social essence, so can the latter function as a mere intermediary stage of individual development. This begins with the basic substance of the personality that life brings with it, which we cannot imagine in its purity apart from its being formed through the historical milieu, but only sense as the enduring material of our personal existence and the never completely totaled sum of its possibilities. On the other hand we offer, as it were at the other end of our existence, an appearance or complex of appearances where it brings existence as the ultimate, most important, most formed one to which existence brings it for the individualistic standpoint. Between the two lie the social influences that we receive, the conditions by which the society shapes us in every phenomenon we ultimately present, the whole complex of general demands and inhibitions through which we have to go. Considered in that way, society thus offers with its actions and presentations exactly the stage beyond and before which the individual structure stands; it is the vehicle of the forces through which one of its stages passes into another of its stages, and these forces embrace the society in the way that, from the other standpoint, the social con- ditions and events embrace the individual who mediates between their general bases and their respective manifestations.
? 434 chapter seven
? between the two steps as in England.
Here and there in practice the situation will thus often take shape for the poor person in the same way. It is obvious, however, that a difference of the first order in sociological principles thereby results: It is a special case of the larger process by which the immediate interaction of group members changes into the action of the supra-individually unified whole and by which, as soon as this at all occurs one time, between both ways of social function- ing, continual compromises, displacements, and changes in rank take place. Whether the social tension or disharmony that appears as indi- vidual poverty is brought to resolution directly between the members of society or through the mediation of the unity that is aroused from all the members, this is obviously a decision that is required by a for- mal equality in the whole social field, albeit only rarely as purely and clearly as this. Obvious as it is, this only needs mention in order to not be overlooked how very much 'private' care for the poor is also a social event, a sociological form that assigns the poor person a no less definite position--only not overly clear from a superficial view--as an organic member in group life. This fact is clearly illuminated precisely by the transition in form between the two: by the poor taxes on the one hand, the legal duty to provide for poor relatives on the other. As long as a special poor tax exists, the relationship between the com- munity and the poor person had not attained the abstract clarity that sets one into an immediate bond with the community as an undivided unit; the state is rather only the intermediary that provides a regulation for the individuals absent any more voluntary contributions. As soon as the poor taxes are at all included in the tax liability and welfare follows from the general state or local revenues, that bond is realized; the support-relationship with the poor person becomes a function of the community as such, no longer the sum of individuals as in the case of the poor tax. The general interest is minted, so to speak, into a still more specialized form where the law requires supporting the needy relatives. Private support, which also embraces every other case of the structure and the teleology of group life, comes to a conscious intensification here by which it is dominated as well.
Once again I want to explain from the viewpoint just explicated what was emphasized above: that the relationship of the community to its poor is just as formal a society-constructing function as is that to the offi- cial or taxpayer. There I compared the poor person to the stranger, who similarly stands opposite to the group--but this being opposite implies a very specific relationship that pulls one into group life as a member.
the poor person 435
? So the poor person stands admittedly outside the group while being a mere object for undertakings by the community toward the individual, but this being on the outside is--put briefly--only a particular form of being inside. All this occurs in the society as, according to the Kantian expression, what is spatially outside of each other occurs in conscious- ness: admittedly in space everything would be outside of each other, and the subject too, graphically, would be external to the other things, but in a wider sense the space itself would be 'in me,' in the subject. But considered more closely, the double position of the poor person as characterized--as with the stranger--can only be established with gradual modifications to all members of the group. Individuals may adhere to group life with positive accomplishments so very much, may very much allow the personal content of their life to get woven into or to get out of this cycle, yet at the same time they stand facing this totality, giving and receiving, dealt with by it well or poorly, committed to it internally or only externally, in short facing the social circle as partner or as object, as to an opposite subject to which they neverthe- less belong through the very same actions and circumstances on which the relationship of member, of being part of the subject, is based. This duality of the position, seeming logically difficult to reconcile, is a quite elementary sociological reality. An earlier association already manifested this in so simple a structure as marriage; in some situations, each of the spouses sees the marriage as a, so to speak, independent structure before them, creating duties, representations, goodness and evil--with- out this deriving from the other spouse as a person but from the whole that makes each of its parts an object to itself, however much it itself consists immediately only of these parts. This relationship of being simultaneously inside and outside becomes more complex and evident at the same time in the degree to which the membership of the group grows. This is not only because the whole thereby gives individuals an overwhelming independence, but above all because the more particular differentiations among the individuals dispose them to a whole range of nuances of that double relationship. With respect to the prince and the banker, the woman of the world and the priest, the artist and the official, the group has a special tendency on the one hand to make the person an object, to deal with them, to subjugate them, or to recognize them as power against power, and on the other hand for it to draw the person into itself as a direct participant in its life, just as a part of the whole that faces up to other participants anew. This is perhaps
436 chapter seven
? a wholly uniform attitude of the social entity as such that is divided into the two sides or appears so different from two separate points of view--somewhat like the way the individual idea stands in opposition to the mind, really so distant as to be totally removed from it that the mind can be influenced by the mood of the whole: colored, suspended or suppressed, formed or eliminated--even while it is at the same time an integral part of this whole, an element of the mind that exists only apart from the togetherness and interpenetration of such elements. The poor person occupies a clearly distinct position on that scale. The support to which the community is obligated in its own interest but which the person has no right to demand in by far the majority of cases, turns one into an object of group action, sets one at a distance from the community, which often lets one live as an unworthy body at the mercy of the community and for this reason allows one to become a bitter enemy of it. The state expresses this when it withdraws certain civic rights from the recipient of public assistance. But this being on the outside still does not mean an absolute separation but just a wholly different relationship with the whole that, without this member, would just be different from what it is. And with the whole thus produced, that treatment of the individual as an object enters in with respect to the poor in a construction that includes their totality.
Now these descriptions do not appear to be valid for the poor in general but only to a certain portion of them: those who receive sup- port, since there are still enough poor who are not assisted. The latter fact points out the relativistic nature of the concept of poverty. Anyone whose means do not match goals is a poor person. This purely individu- alistic concept is narrowed in its practical application in such a way that certain ends of arbitrary and purely personal discretion are exempted from it. First, those needs that are physically imposed on people: food, clothing, shelter. But no level of these needs is fixed with certainty that would be in effect in all circumstances and generally and below which poverty in the absolute sense would thus have existed. Rather every general milieu and every particular social stratum has needs peculiar to it, which being unable to satisfy means poverty. Hence the fact, banal in all developed cultures, that people who are poor within their class might be so in no deeper way since their means would be enough for the ends typical for them. The poorest in an absolute sense may thereby not suffer from the discrepancy of their means to their class-specific needs, so that hardly any poverty would exist in a psychological sense; or the richest may set goals for themselves that exceed those presumed class-
the poor person 437
? specific wishes and their own means, so that they feel psychologically that they are poor. Thus individual poverty--the non-attainment of the means to personal ends--can be absent where the social concept of it is found, and it can exist where there is no mention of it in the indi- vidual sense. Its relativism does not mean the relationship of individual means to really individual ends--which is something absolute according to the inherent meaning unaffected by anything that lies beyond the individual--but to the stratum-specific ends of the individual, to his or her social a apriori, which changes from one social stratum to the other. What level of need each group fixes, as it were, the zero point below which poverty begins and above which wealth begins, is by the way a very socio-historically notable variable. In somewhat developed circumstances it has always a latitude, often considerable, for fixing this. How the location of this point is related to the actual majority, whether one must already belong to the assisted minority in order not to be considered simply poor, whether on the contrary a class avoiding being overwhelmed by the feeling of poverty out of an instinctive expediency sets the scale very low below which poverty first begins, whether any one phenomenon is capable of moving this scale (as easily happens for example by the entry of a prosperous personality into a small city or into a some other small circle) or whether the group continues to hold onto what it has set once and for all--obviously these are fundamental sociological variables.
Because poverty appears in every social stratum that has formed a typical standard of needs pre-established for every individual, it also happens without further ado that in many cases a support for the poor person does not at all come into question. Nevertheless the principle of support is extended further than what its, as it were, official manifestations indicate. If in an extended family, for example, poorer and richer members exchange presents, one gives to the latter gifts according to good manners; to the former gifts not only more in value than that received from them, but precisely the quality of the gifts reveals the supportive character: one gives the poorer relatives useful things, i. e. those that help them maintain the accustomed class standard of living; thus in this sociological constellation the gifts prove to be completely different in the different strata. The sociology of the gift partially overlaps with that of poverty. An extremely rich scale of reciprocal relationships of people is shown in the gift, as well as in its content, the attitude and kind of giving, and also in the attitude and kind of receiving. Gift, theft, and exchange are the external forms of
438 chapter seven
? interaction that are immediately linked to the question of property and by which each receives an inestimable richness of psychological prop- erties defining a process social in itself. They correspond to the three motives of action: altruism, egoism, and objective standardization. Then it is the essence of exchange that objectively equal values are involved, the subjective motives of kindness or greed remain outside the process; to the extent that the exchange clearly reflects its idea in the process, the value of the objects is not measured according to the desires of the individual but according to the value of the other objects. Of the three, the gift manifests the greatest wealth of social constellations since the sentiment and condition of the giving and receiving are combined in it in the most various ways with all their particular nuances. Under the many categories that make a, so to speak, systematic ordering of these phenomena possible, this seems to be the most important for the problem of poverty: whether the particular meaning and goal of the gift resides in the end state attained with it, wherein the recipient should just have a particular object of value, or in the action itself, in which the giving as the expression of a sentiment of the giver, a love that must sacrifice, or an expansion of the Ego which more or less indiscriminately radiates itself in the gift. In this latter case, in which the process of the giving is, so to speak, its only purpose, the question of wealth or poverty obviously plays hardly any role; it would then be for the sake of the practical possibilities. But where it is given to the poor person, the emphasis is not on the process but on its result; the poor should have something. Obviously, countless mixtures of each kind exist between these two extreme kinds of gift. The more purely the latter kind prevails, the more impossible it often is to contribute to the poor person what is lacking in the form of gifts since the other social relationships among the persons are not carried out with gifts. One can always give where there is very great social distance or where there is greater personal closeness; however, it tends to be difficult to the extent that the social distance diminishes and the personal distance increases. In the higher strata the tragic situation often comes about that the needy would like to receive support and the wealthy would like to grant it, but the former can neither ask for it nor the latter offer it. The higher a class is, so much the more does it have an economic a priori limit below which what is poverty for it begins, set in a way so that this poverty seldom occurs, and is indeed in principle actually impossible. Accepting support thus moves the supported ones away from the prerequisites for status; it brings the evidence to light that one is
the poor person 439
? formally downgraded. Until this happens, the class prejudice is strong enough to make poverty, so to speak, invisible, so long as it remains an individual problem and does not have any social effect. The entire presuppositions of upper class life entails someone being poor in an individual sense, i. e. someone can stay within one's means below the needs of the class without having to reach for support. Thus one is poor in a social sense only if receiving support. And probably this would be generally valid: viewed sociologically, poverty does not occur first and then support follows--rather this is only its destiny also according to one's personal form--but the one who enjoys support should also enjoy it according to one's sociological constellation, which is called poverty--even if by chance this does not happen.
It is entirely in this sense, when it had been emphasized by the Social Democrats, that the modern proletarian would admittedly be poor, but not any poorer. The poor person does not come about as a social type through a certain level of want and deprivation but through receiving support or should be receiving it according to social norms. Thus to this way of thinking, poverty in itself and for itself is not to be defined as a fixed quantitative condition but only in terms of a social reaction that appears after a certain condition, just as crime, which immediately is a very difficult concept to define, has been defined as "an action associated with a public penalty. "8 So now some no longer define the essence of ethics from the inner constitution of the subject but from the results of what the subject does: its subjective intent counts as valu- able only to the extent that it normally occasions a particular socially useful result. Thus the concept of personality is often not viewed as a characterization of one's being from within, which would qualify one for a specific social role, but on the contrary, the members of society who play a certain role in it are called personalities. The individual condition, as it is constituted from within itself, no more determines the idea in the first instance; rather the social teleology does this. The individual is established by the type, as the environing whole behaves around and toward the individual. Where this happens it is a continu- ation of a kind of modern idealism that does not seek to define a thing any more by its inherent nature but from the reaction that is given off
8 Simmel seems to have E? mile Durkheim's treatment of crime in mind; see Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, tr. George Simpson (New York: Macmillan, 1933), Ch. 2-- ed.
? 440 chapter seven
? from it in the subject. The membership function that the poor person serves within the existing society is not already given by one's being poor; only when the society--the whole or the individual members of it--responds with support to the person, does the latter play a specific social role.
This social meaning of the 'poor,' as opposed to the individual one, first allows the poor to unite into a kind of status group or unified layer within society. As was said, one does not belong to a socially defined category by simply being poor. One is just a poor merchant, artist, worker etc. and remains such through the kind of one's activity or standing of one's particular rank. One may take up a gradually changed position within the society because of poverty, but the individuals who find themselves in the different statuses and occupations at this stage are in no way united into a special social unit outside the boundaries of their home stratum. The moment they are assisted--many times already if the whole constellation normally requires this, even without it actually happening--they enter into a circle characterized by pov- erty. Admittedly this group is not held together by interaction among its members but by the collective attitude that society as a whole takes up toward it. Still there has not also always been a lack of that direct creation by society; in the fourteenth century, for example, there was a guild of poor people in Norwich, a Poorman's Gild, in Germany the so called Elendengilden (guilds of the wretched)--just as some time later in the Italian cities one encounters a party of the wealthy people, the Optimates, as they called themselves, that found the basis of their unity only in the fact of the wealth of each member. Certainly such a union of the poor soon became impossible because, with the increasing dif- ferentiation of society, the individual differences of the members in suitable education and attitude, interests and backgrounds became too many and too strong for still allowing the strength for the society- creation of one community.
Only where poverty brings with it a positive content that is common to many poor does an association of the poor as such come about. Thus the most extreme phenomenon of poverty--the lack of shelter--allows the persons affected by it to stream together in certain shelters in the large cities. When the first haystacks are erected in the vicinity of Berlin, the homeless, the Penner (bums), find one for themselves to make a suitable night lodging in the hay. A beginning of organization, nevertheless, exists under this, since the Penner of the one territory have a kind of leader, the
the poor person 441
? Oberpenner, who assigns the places in the night quarters to the members of the guild and settles disputes among them. The Penner see to it that no criminal sneaks in among them, and if this does happen they do him in, i. e. betray him to the police, for whom they generally perform occasional good services. The Oberpenner are well known personages whom the authorities always know how to find if they need information about the personal details of someone with a shady existence. Such specification of poverty, which they experience through its progression up to the point of homelessness, is necessary nowadays to win for them an associative momentum. By the way it is notable that the increased general well-being, the closer police supervision, above all the social consciousness that strangely mixes good and bad sensitivities, 'cannot bear' the sight of poverty--all this imposes on poverty the tendency to hide itself ever more. And this conceivably holds the poor further apart, allows them to feel much less like a coherent stratum than could be the case in the Middle Ages. The class of the poor, especially in modern society, is a most unique social synthesis. It has its importance and place- ment in the social body because of a great homogeneity that, however, as indicated, is absent from it in terms of the individual characteristics of its members. It is the common endpoint of destinies of the most different kinds; persons from the whole range of social variation flow into it. No change, development, intensification, or depression of social life passes by it without depositing a residue in the stratum of poverty as if in a reservoir. That is what is dreadful in this poverty--as distinct from merely being poor, which everyone has to sort out for themselves and which is only a coloration of an otherwise individually qualified situation--that there are people who are only poor in terms of their social position and nothing more. Incidentally this becomes especially certain and clear by virtue of an expansive and indiscriminate almsgiv- ing, as in the Christian Middle Ages and under the rule of the Koran. But precisely to the extent that one was content with an official and unalterable fact, it did not have the bitterness and actual opposition with which a class influences the developmental and turbulent tendency of modern times that establishes its unity on a purely passive element, i. e. on that basis on which the society behaves toward the class in a certain way and treats it in a certain way. If political rights are taken away from the recipients of alms, this is the adequate expression of their not being anything socially, except being poor. This absence of a positive qualification for oneself causes what was indicated above--the stratum
442 chapter seven
? of the poor developing no socially unifying force from outside or within itself despite the similarity of their situation. Poverty thus presents the wholly unique social constellation of a number of individuals taking up a very specific organic membership inside the whole by means of a purely individual fate. But this position is still not determined by one's own fate and condition but by others--individuals, associations, whole societies--seeking just to correct this condition, so that, according to the sociological concept, it is not the personal deficiency that makes people poor but the people supported for the sake of the deficiency are primarily the poor.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SELF-PRESERVATION OF THE GROUP1
The conflictual character that immediate experience manifests in the life of the individual--the need for conquest given at every moment, for defense against attacks, for firmness against temptations, for regaining a continuously losing balance--persists, as it were, above and below the psychological existence of the individual. The physiological processes within our bodies offer the same picture of an unceasing struggle. The self-preservation of the physical life is also never a static persistence, but an exercise in overcoming resistance, a construction of antitoxins against the poisons generated in the body itself, a response to attacks that would immediately become destructive without resistance offered against it. And such are the general forms in which the supra-individual structures also lead their lives. Even if they 'preserve themselves'--and, in fact, not only against external attacks that threaten their entire exis- tence with one stroke as it were--we combine innumerable uninter- rupted processes that are made manifest inside these structures as punch and counterpunch, peril and prevention, repulsion and reengagement among the members. For many reasons it is understandable that we see the simple stasis, the continuity of undisturbed tranquility, much more than the adjustments in play back and forth, formations of ever new means against ever new dangers in the preservation of the state and guild, church and interest group, family and school. First because the individual experiences all the frailty of life, the endlessness of offense and defense only within the self, while the corresponding processes of the collective structures are divided up among many individuals and over many points quite separated by space, content and interests, and are, therefore, not readily present in the consciousness of the individual in their entirety, though probably in their result: the persistence of the whole. Furthermore, these processes frequently occur in substrata of major dimensions and thus more slowly and ponderously over such long periods of time, so that the transitions of their individual stages
1 We are indebted to Lutz Kaelber for his many suggestions for rendering Simmel's prose in this chapter--ed.
? 444 chapter eight
are barely noticeable. Finally, the most difficult but perhaps the most effective factor: all those collective structures affect us not only as indi- vidual historical realities whose temporal life process carries its entire significance, but they possess something of the timelessness of the general concept, the universal law, the general form, whose meaning and validity are not identical with the single appearing and disappear- ing example or occurrence. Admittedly the concept of the individual is also independent of the forces of reality generating or destroying one or the other individual; nevertheless we feel that the individual state or church seemingly absorbed more from the general concept of the state or church, and that here the historical structure somehow shares in the supra-particular, in the timelessness of the universal or form drawn from all the vicissitudes of life. The basis of this feeling should be that such collective structures admittedly possess an eternity relative to their individual participants and that they are indifferent toward their distinctiveness and survive their coming and going (which will be spoken about below). They proceed from there into the category of law, which is valid independently of its individual applications, and form, whose ideal meaning remains unaffected by all the variety in its material fulfillments. But these structures achieve this affinity with general timelessness only from the standpoint of the individual from whose fluctuating and transient existence they face as something persisting and ever surviving. Viewed from this comparison, they are themselves involved in the coming into and passing out of existence; if it happens in what one must call a life process, in another tempo and rhythm than that of the members, the self-preservation over a span of time, which is not a rigid unquestionability and inner immobility but a sum of internal processes, they are the defense against an enduring threat, the re-establishment of an often lost balance, the conscious or unconscious preparation of means to an end never realized by self, in order to experience the next moment.
These three kinds of self-preservation are independent of one another to a relatively great extent: Physiological self-preservation often occurs with a success or failure that is wholly opposed to the simultaneous psychological results; and this again has the same random relationship to that of the social group. The individual's instinct for self-preservation requires wholly different actions and employs wholly different powers than the self-preservation of one's group, so that the self-preservation of individuals can sometimes exist thoroughly intact and successful while that of the group becomes weak and the group splinters. Conversely
the self-preservation of the group 445
the latter can appear in full strength although that of the individual members is in decay. Above all, this phenomenon has led to the uni- fied group being considered as a structure with an independent reality, leading a life according to its own laws and its own powers, independent of all its individual bearers--in a close analogy to the construction of a 'life spirit' or a special personal 'life force' in the physiological indi- vidual. A substantial unity, as it were, that was maintained in itself seemed to be created by the existence of the subject, in which delayed knowledge blocks the persistence of life, and replaced the thousand-fold intermeshing interaction processes among the factors. Our task in this essay is the social parallel. When we see that the most diverse social interactions visibly manifest particularly effective powers for self-preser- vation, into what more primary processes is this manifestation allowed to be decomposed? Nevertheless the persistence of the group--once it has come about--seems to portend a particular vitality, as it were, a permanence stemming from a unitary source, but which is thus only the apparent result or, more accurately, the complex of a number of individual and varying processes of social nature. Thus we ask, what particular kinds of direct or indirect interaction are there, if one speaks of the self-preservation of a social group?
The most general case in which the self-preservation of the group becomes a problem is found in the fact that it maintains its identity during the departure and change of its members. We say that it would be the same state, the same organization, the same army existing now as the one that existed for one or another number of decades or cen- turies, even though not a single one of the members of this association is 'the same' any more as in the earlier point in time. Here one of the cases is offered in which the temporal order of the phenomenon manifests a decided analogy with its spatial one. As the social union is still formed out of the individuals existing next to one another--i. e. , still outside one another--as the unavoidable separation that creates space between people is nevertheless overcome through the psychological bonds among them so that the image of a united 'one' arises in one another, so also the temporal separation of individuals and generations does not hinder their forming in our thinking a solid and continuing whole. With the spatially separated entities, this unity is borne by the interaction among them that takes place through space: among com- plex entities unity means nothing but a cohesion of the members that is represented by mutually exercised forces. With temporally separated entities, their unity cannot occur in this way since the interaction is
446 chapter eight
absent: an earlier one can probably affect a later one, but not the other way around. Therefore, precisely by the turnover of individuals, the maintenance of the social unity constitutes a special problem that is not yet solved at the same time with the coming into being of its unity at a given instant, as was explained.
The first and most immediate temporal element that confers this continuity on the unity of the group is the persistence of the locality, the soil and earth on which it lives. The state, still more the city, but also numerous other associations, have their unity first in the terri- tory that forms the enduring substrate under all the changes in its content. In classical Greece it was above all the maintenance of the landownership to which the continuity of the family group was linked. This was carried in two opposite directions: its reduction by sale was typically regarded as an offense not only against the children but also the ancestors, since that broke the thread of the family's existence lead- ing up from them; and its increase was only possible with difficulty, depending on circumstances. Thus Greece experienced landownership from above and below, as it were, to be suited to leading the family through all the vicissitudes of its individual existence as, in principle, something indestructible. Most remarkable, but also conceivable, is this importance of landownership for the continuation of the family in view of the fact that territory and land nevertheless did not possess its later importance for the Greek concept of state. As one always spoke of foreign state 'territories' as only the sum of their inhabitants--? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 2--so for the Greeks the affiliation to one's state is never predicated on the land but only on the community of citizens. Where banished citizens are gathered in sufficient numbers elsewhere, they continue there without the state entity being further disturbed by the enemy; their continuity of life is thus manifest in the persons of the participants, but it does not seem to be bound to the land. In contrast, during the feudal and patrimonial era, the model principle by which the bond mediated by territory becomes effective in a definitely different manner. The inhabitants of the land are subject to the state government only as entities that come within its territory. Here the state as a specific formation of human materials actually has its conti- nuity only in the permanence of the soil. While acquisition and loss of the domicile in the land means acquisition and loss of citizenship, the
2 Greek: 'the Egyptians, the Persians'--ed.
? the self-preservation of the group 447
specific ground and soil is the genuine object of rule, continuation of which carries the state through all the changes of its material. To the extent that the idea of the state in its ideal unity and indestructibility rose above the idea of the privately governed kind, the indivisibility of its territory also becomes a principle; its territory is no longer an indivisible thing, but a conceptual unity that is the correlate of state unity in general. While this crosses over from the abstract sphere into that of feeling, it constructs in the latter an emotion of patriotism that is infinitely important for political self-preservation. Consequently, as the modern person feels it, the persistence of the emotional sphere is wholly indispensable for it; the fatherland is very much a part of its effectiveness for holding the political group together. In the same way it is the sociological characteristics of the circumstances, which would be somewhat similar in every other respect, that considerably differ in their actual manifestation by their varying duration. One does not tend to clarify how much every factor of a human relationship that seems completely and exclusively distinct from its factual content, from its idea and feeling, what is actually present and is effective in it, and what appears definite, although at the same time, it depends on the conscious and unconscious thoughts over the duration of these factual contents; how every relationship is inevitably influenced by one esti- mating one's survival for a longer or shorter time, by one foreseeing one's end or seeing it as unlimited, by limitness appearing only as an actual non-ending or the impossibility of an end in principle. Examples of the last mentioned cases are marriage, the relationship to God, and that to the fatherland. These temporal determinants need not change the immediate and individual content of the relationships; they are a formal, though for their course an extremely influential coloration of themselves. Thus patriotism is not at all only a feeling and an ethical bond of individuals to their political group, but it needs the collabora- tive notion that the relationship to them is not dissolvable, and in fact is not dissolvable at all despite the freedom of movement of modern people. The clarity of the patriotic basis and ground as the unalter- able and irreducible reason for that relationship becomes a vehicle of patriotism and a symbol of its limitlessness in time, and with this formal emphasis also gives its first individual moment the full solidifying force of the whole.