No More Learning

This inconspicuous historical fact also covers one of the rules of life that are deepest and radiating out conspicuously in many social formations. Our life is arranged in such a way that we find ourselves in each moment in an in- between status of certainty and uncertainty about the results of our actions. To have absolute knowledge about this result would be to change our entire inner as well as outer existence in such a completely unpredictable way, as the absolute ignorance about it. Each of our actions takes a definite step on the scale of these mixtures; an infinite multitude of situations, decisions, and tests of power can grow out of the same content of our deeds, according to the share with which the knowledge and lack of knowledge blend in the expectation of its results. The example just cited only seems to show that the winning of dignity and power is not established through inheritance without any such regard for individuality, but by the meeting of subjective sufficiency with objective certainty--those elements precisely so mixed as to elicit a maximum of effort and ability.
Where, however, heredity attains a maximum of certainty and is thus no longer affected at all by the subjective quality of the incumbent, in many cases the office had to lose its importance. The major Castillian offices, e. g. the Admiral and the Constable of Castles, were originally of the greatest importance, but became hereditary in certain noble houses after Henry III20 and quickly fell to merely honorary titles. Entirely the same occurred with the court offices of the Norman kings in England. As soon as the offices became hereditary, the real duties that were associated with them fell to a newly-existent category of officials. Only those offices that escaped being made hereditary still retained an importance for the constitution. It must be remarked concerning unconditional heredity, however, that the only thing that can be inherited with certainty is only the externality of the office, the title, honor, so to speak, the mere 'possibility' of function, which inevitably turns into an empty form since it is no longer borne by a selected individuality and infused with fresh blood. The deeper sociological meaning of the inheriting of offices appears to be that the objectivity of social formation interweaves with the subjectivity of
20 Henry III of Castille reigned 1390-1404--ed.
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personal performance. In the cases just mentioned, however, the latter factor sank to a minimal importance, whereby the whole meaning of this particular socio-historical construct, built from the interaction of both factors, then vanishes. This and other obvious dangers of the inheriting of offices gave a special importance to ecclesiastical honors that celibacy prevented from being inherited. While the major governmental offices in the German Middle Ages became hereditary in individual families, the king could still always move persons, through the bishopric and into the governmental service, who were commendable purely on account of their individual qualities. And in the era of the Norman rule in England and simultaneously in France even the highest political offices were often filled from the clergy, from whom alone it could not be feared that they were forming a monopoly of their power among their descendents. With this strong tendency toward inheritance in the Middle Ages it was from the start an advantage to the crown for no son to be available for a bishopric, who might have raised a claim to the dignity--which William Rufus,21 for example, admittedly used to leave the bishoprics unfilled for a long time and take in their earnings for himself.
The solution that the inheriting of a function offers to the conflict between personal and supra-personal being is the information about a relatively primi- tive, little differentiated social condition. Certainly the official whom the family honor and family interest engage outside his personal relationship, who is educated in advance by the tradition of the predecessors for his occupation, is often the more capable and more reliable for the state; but obviously, this presupposes that the state places more weight on the general qualities of its functionaries, on what can be inherited and instilled, than on the characteris- tics of purely personal talents or suitability for very specialized tasks. Thus it is a matter of the cultural constitution of a public being not very differenti- ated in itself, in which one need not properly train and rationally employ the special kind of individual just yet, but needs sooner to seek to smooth the sharp edges of individuality. On the contrary, from the side of personalities, those particular capabilities and knowledge, which service to the community demanded at the time, were not yet gained in a purely personal way but came about only or most certainly through the tradition of the family entity. Gen- erality and individuality had to meet in a certain state of disorganization and undifferentiation in order for the inheritance of an office to allow for a social purposefulness and to counterbalance its risks. These sociological conditions and results extend beyond the uniquely governmental offices. The gainful occupations are hereditary in many past social situations; the work not only actually passes down from father to son, but it is partly required by the public authority, and the taking up of another occupation is not at all permitted; it is also partly protected in that competition is kept away and patronages are tied to the familial engagement in the occupation. Here, the occupation also
21 Third son of William the Conqueror, William II of England, called Rufus, reigned 1087-1100--ed.
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has the character of a public office. The free exercise of personal powers is not yet suitably formed in order to provide the community with the activi- ties needed by it, but it requires regulation and a certain pre-determination; the individual for his part does not yet find the possibilities of training and utilization of his work in the mere establishment of society but remains dependent on hereditary tradition and the collective force of the family for that. The refinement and strengthening of the public entity on the one hand and the greater independence of the individual on the other led beyond the inheritance of the occupation and even in fact near to where the character of the office first remained. Guild membership in its prime was regarded as a public office and was at the time completely non-hereditary, as the cit- ies began their great development with the decline of feudalism. This was generally the time in which the feudal relationship of official function to the possession of land--obviously the most decisive vehicle of inheritance--was loosened, when the more powerful and, so to speak, more abstract form of political entities gave offices more and more the character of public law. And then the personality of the office, in principle, corresponded to that, which excluded every inheritance. Thus all sociological development seems to follow a typical pattern: the more purely and widespread the spirit or center of a group is elaborated, the higher the capacity and latitude of the whole increases for the personalities who bear the whole to become individual that way. The enlargement of the social group goes hand in hand with the formation of the individual. 22 The expanding, the growing weight of the abstract governmental or societal concept that makes it independent of the narrower aggregates of familial or locally connected groupings thus designates the independent dif- ferentiated individual personality ever more for social functions. This higher social structure leaves only the still completely general rearing and equipping of the future official to the family, but it makes available for his proper education the means that have become objective and that belong to the public entity. It thereby purchases the right to a completely individual and unprejudiced selection, so that family inheritance establishes no legal right to the office any more--a process that obviously is still far from complete. Consequently not the particular individual families but the sociologically related groups of the class, stratum, and 'circles' nevertheless provide even today the particular categories of public officials. It reveals the immense socio-historical import of this development, so that it applies not only to the actual officials but to countless 'statuses' formed by social usefulness, which are seemingly filled through private involvement and personal happenstance. In reality, however, this tends to produce a much more circumscribed group; society has not yet achieved the purely individual designation process but counts on so much preparatory work of the family and the stratum on the person that a certain general inheritance of these 'offices' exists as an equivalent. What remains as the underlying motive is the proportion between the objective determination
22 The last chapter considers the explanation of this relationship.
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and performance of the social totality and the subjective uniqueness of the individual, which is only now pulled asunder in a definite measure: what the society does for its officials has become more; with that, the differentiating selection and the individual freedom to choose the occupation have become greater. But each of the two is not yet developed to the highest degree at which the mixed state and the heritability of the function would be wholly and absolutely superfluous and superseded. Some stages of the social development reveal the contradiction to be ripe for that polar separation, while inertia still keeps the state of inheritability in place. The guild lost that free constitution that I mentioned above, and to the degree that its form no longer sufficed at all for the economic demands it became an inherited property of its members, so that at the time of its worst ossification and exclusiveness it was generally accessible only to the sons, sons-in-law, and spouses of the widows of guild masters. That character of public office was lost at the same time as its being filled with the personality, and it remained only familial egoism, which through inheritance excluded any individual selection. For the present this problem is obviously the most burning one with regard to the aristocracy, whose nature and strength rest above all on the hereditary principle but which, perhaps, throughout the greatest part of history, militated against the principle of a higher centralization of the state. How its rights and duties are bound up with property, how its hereditary candidacy is justified by a certain state position, depends on whether upbringing, tradition, and education reproduce in it the proprieties for all of them, as the state still cannot do without it; because the state pays for its incompetence, which the required functionaries by themselves alone exemplify, it must be content with the relative renunciation of individual choice and the protection of a certain type of its officer materials as the bio- logical inheritance and the historical tradition produce it.
The not too frequent, seemingly isolated fact of the actual inheritance of office, as it results with all this, marks a specific stage of the large process between the individual and collective elements and tendencies of history. The liveliness of this process springs forth always anew from the double posture that replaces the social interest in the individual person: society comes from the fact that its element is an individually varied one, that it possesses certain qualities that distinguish that element from others; but it also depends on the fact that it would be the same or similar to others, that it does not stand out, but fits in a series of continuous quality. Individuals being similar to their parents and becoming similar to them through family tradition meets both requirements, insofar as they are fixed in their qualities and intended for specific courses of life and activities on the one hand, but on the other hand again this personal fixedness is still maintained at the level of one social arrangement. The inherit- ing of a social function or office expresses this subjective situation as it were, in an objective reflection. It also presupposes a personal peculiarity in order to be socially useful as a limitation of it to a general, traditionally regulated level. It thus demands and fixes a certain close relation between the individual and social factors, admittedly preparing the replacement of this by the higher form, in which both parts achieve higher rights: the individual, in that this can make personal activity a matter of choice and base it on qualities that are
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independent of their relation to the individual's generational line, and to the extent that the society allows the individual freedom for them, it obtains on its part the full freedom of the choice of its functionaries. The equality of the relationship of both components, through this sociological form, corresponds to the equality of freedom, which evolves beyond itself.
The objectification of the solidarity of the group can also strip off the personal form so much that it links itself to an actual symbol that appears as much the cause as the effect of this solidarity. During the Amphictyonic League23 associated with the common maintenance of the Delphic Temple, the Panionion, the league temple of the Ionic city league, was erected as the symbol of the already existing alliance. So in the German Middle Ages the imperial jewelry appeared as the visible aspect, as it were, of the imperial thought and its continuity, so that the possession of the jewelry procured for a pretender to the crown a considerable advantage over the competitors, and this was one of the factors that visibly supported precisely the legitimate heirs in their can- didacy. It was a great help for Henry I that Conrad I sent the insignia of the crown to him, and for Kunigund that Henry II had later sent it to him. 24 Its delivery to the rightful new sovereign confirms the death, and reinforces the new ruler in his position. As military service became troublesome for the citizens of the larger cities in the Middle Ages and they encouraged journeymen with payment for it, they often retained in peacetime the organization that was once introduced by keeping the banner, since the banner conferred their community the character of being a guild. And it is notable that a violent rebellion of the Landau millers' and bakers' journeymen in 1432 began with their raising a banner on their lodge. Among the ancient Arabs each tribe led with a banner in war, but if several were united into a combat force, they
23 A league of ancient Greek nations connected to the temple of Demeter at Anthela and the temple of Apollo at Delphi. It was involved in four 'Sacred Wars,' circa 595 B. C. E. to 338 B. C. E. --ed.
24 Conrad I (d. 918) was elected king of Germany but was never elected emperor. Emperor Henry I, a Saxon called "the Fowler," reigned 918-936. Emperor Henry II, also from the Saxon dynasty, reigned 1002-1024. Kunigund is evidently Conrad II, who reigned as emperor 1027-1039, the first of the Franconian or Salian dynasty. Both Henry I and Conrad II marked new dynasties and thus needed recognition to assume the imperial throne--ed.
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led with only a single one that indicated their unity, and its bearer was the most prominent person in the war.
In view of the destructibility of a material object that nevertheless cannot compensate for it, as it can a person through the continuity of heritability, it is very dangerous for the group to seek such a support for its self-preservation. Some regiments lost their solidarity as soon as their flags were taken; various leagues dissolved upon the loss of their shields, their chest plates, and their Grail. Because the Hungarian crown kept this symbolic importance for an especially long time, it still stirred up violent unrest under Joseph II once, as it was transferred from Pressburg to Vienna; with the return of the crown these disturbances immediately abated. 25 In the Middle Ages it was especially the seal that symbolized the unity of a group and allowed it to appear to be an autonomous moral person. After an uprising against Emperor Charles IV in Frankfurt, his judge decided in 1366--after highly treacherous letters of the guilds were discovered, who affirmed under oath however that "they were sealed behind their back"--that "all seals of the guilds would be taken from them and not only smashed but also the possession and use of all association seals of the guilds together with those of all other associations" were to remain "forever prohibited. "26 In relation to this, the destruction of the shield of a community appears everywhere as a very real means to strike it, as it were, in the heart, to dissolve its unity. As the commune of Corbie was dissolved in 1308 due to debts and liabilities and its rights reverted to the king, the clapper was taken from the great bell as a sign that the commune had ceased to be. As the skilled workers' associations appeared to oppose the mercantile- despotic tendencies of the government under Frederick William I, the department head wrote to the king about the skilled workers: "these people conceive of themselves as though they formed a special corpus or statum in republica. 27 Thus he suggests "that the underworld plaques, journeymen's emblems and their other idols be destroyed cum ignominia quadam28 so that they constitute no particular corpus as they now think. " And a law of the English reaction specified in 1819 that the holding of
25 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor 1765-1790--ed.
26 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor 1347-1378--ed.
27 Latin: body or type of government. Frederick William I, King of Prussia 1786-
1797--ed.
28 Latin: with a certain ignominy--ed.
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an assembly "with flags, banners or other emblems or ensigns"29 would be punished with several years of imprisonment. Where social solidar- ity is, in the mean time, lost on the way, one can well say that it must have already been greatly weakened internally and that in this case the loss of the external symbols representing group unity is itself only the symbol for it, that the social members have lost their coherence. Then, where that is not the case, there the loss of group symbols has not only no power to dissolve, but directly has a power to unite. In that the symbol forfeits its physical reality, it can work as mere thought, yearn- ing, ideal, something much more powerful, deeper, and indestructible. These two opposite effects of the destruction of group symbols for the solidity of the group at the same time allows one to observe what the destruction of the Jewish Temple by Titus had by way of consequences. The sociological importance of the Temple of Zion was that it gave the purely fluid solidarity of the Jews, who were obeying the Parthians or the Romans and speaking Aramaic or Greek, some tangible focus. What it indicated in itself was wholly indifferent for this; it was only the visible aspect of a functioning community, the possibility of binding together again the scattered and internally torn Jews at a point of, so to speak, real ideality. Now its destruction had the purpose of dissolving the Jewish priestly state that was a contradiction and danger for the political unity of the Roman Empire, compared to a number of Jews not many of whom had invested much in this centralization. In particular, it greatly furthered the loosening of the Pauline Christians from Judaism. For the Palestinian Jews, however, the break between Judaism and the rest of the world was thereby deepened, and its national-religious unity was raised into a despairing force by this destruction of their symbols. Thus the annihilation of group symbols affects the self-preservation of the group in two ways: destroying, where the solidifying interactions of the members are already weak in themselves, and strengthening where they are so strong in themselves that they can replace the lost tangible symbol with a spiritualized and idealized image.
The importance of a material symbol for the self-preservation of a society will now be much increased if beyond its symbolic meaning it also represents a real property, if the centralizing effect of the object thus depends on or is increased by the material interests of all members of the group being met within it. In this case it becomes especially impor-
29 Simmel quotes these words in English--ed.
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tant for the maintenance of the group to secure the common property from destruction, somewhat as one would do with the personal center of the group through the immortality of the king. The most frequent means for this purpose is mortmain, the regulation that the assets of a corporation, which should be such in perpetuity, are inalienable. As the passing of the individual is mirrored in the corruptibility of posses- sions, so are the immortality of the association in the inalienability of its property and the unavailability of that property for sale. Especially the ownership of the church corporation was like the lion's den, into which all went in but from which none came back out again. But just as for the highly-placed persons the immortality in no way means the desire to prolong ordinary life, the longing for a mere quantity of life, but should symbolize a certain quality of the soul, a grandeur of its worth above earthly happenstance only expressed in that way--so the immortality of property did not at all only serve the greed of the church but was a symbol of the eternity of the principle with which it was associated. Mortmain created the union of an indestructible axis and center, an invaluable means for the self-preservation of the group. It supported this character of mortmain that its possession essentially consisted in land and soil. In contrast to all movable property, especially money, real estate manifests an immobility and permanence that makes it the most suitable matter for the mortmain form of property, and its local character and fixed opportunity cause those who share in it to have a fixed point to which they are always, as it were, oriented--be it directly or within their interests--and can invariably encounter themselves. Over and above the material advantage admittedly imparted by it, it is an ingenious means for the group as such to maintain and preserve its form.
However, precisely this fact often involves the group in a conflict of a typical sociological importance, and indeed because of that it is inclusive of political society since the group that is promoted in its self- preservation is only a part of an always greater one. Almost all human forming of society, having the same character as well as content, labors at consolidating each individual segment into social unities that culti- vate a tendency toward egoistic self-preservation in themselves. Their form and tendency replicate on a small scale those of the total group of which they are a part, but they also thereby simply place themselves in opposition against this group. The role that falls to them as a part and limb of an encompassing whole is not really compatible with the role that they themselves play as whole persons. I come back to the
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principal side of this tragic relationship that recurs within every larger society and note only here how greatly it marks mortmain. While, as I explained above, it is of the highest importance for the existence of a self-contained total group that it possesses a land and soil as a solid foundation for its unity and demarcation, it can become alarming if a part of it simply demands the same thing for itself. The conflict of interests thusly established between the part and whole is manifest immediately in the fact that mortmain demanded and obtained freedom from taxation most of all, and indirectly, though significantly, that it was often a disadvantage to the national economy if such properties were removed from the flow of commerce. The modern suppression of the natural economy by the money economy admittedly not only allows the domination of the phenomena that are contrary to basing life generally on land ownership, but it led definitively to conditions changing over to the money economy that actually converted land ownership into a matter of possessing money. The Catholic congregations in France, for example, have largely converted their landholdings into money for decades because this directly promised them greater security: Money is allowed to be hidden more easily, attributed more readily to straw men, and more readily withdrawn from assessment and taxation than is real estate. While they mobilized their assets, they kept--by means of the safeguards of the modern legal environment that is replacing the substantial permanence that formerly real estate alone guaranteed-- the advantages of the earlier form of mortmain while avoiding all the disadvantages that ensued from its inflexibility and immobile bounds. For the state, however, the danger of these accumulations of property of mortmain did not thereby lessen; their property in France was esti- mated some years ago to be up to eight billion franks--a substantial amount, which with its consolidation could very well use its cards against the state. The solidity of the social continuation that springs from the indestructibility and indissolubility of property works as a thorn in the side as soon as it is a matter of a part of a larger group, and what is self-preservation for just this part of a group becomes, from the point of view of the interests of the encompassing group, a stiffening and constriction of an organic limb and directly opposes the self-preserva- tion of the whole. The noxiousness of mortmain was recognized very early. For example, the 1318 Frankfurt city peace settlement stipulated that within a year all the orders had to sell the properties that had been given to them; the same intent is revealed in the fifteenth century when the city ordinance of a Frisian town prohibited the clergy from build-
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ing houses of stone without special permission of the city council. Such phenomena are typical in England from the Anglo-Saxon era since the clergy there was closely interwoven with the life of the community and had fully recognized the involvement of their land properties with communal responsibilities. Nevertheless already near the end of the Anglo-Saxon kingships the size of church properties in land was a dif- ficult hindrance to the administration of the state insofar as it denied the king the means of remunerating his warriors. And the same appre- hensions about mortmain for the whole state were also recognized in the structures indirectly or only minimally dependent on the church: in 1391 an English law was enacted that simply prohibited permanent corporations such as guilds and brotherhoods from acquiring lands! From the same point of view, the modern era struggles against the pleasure of the aristocracy pursue a quite parallel purpose: to create an objective organ that is free of the vicissitudes of individual fates for the unity and continuation of the family. Here too not only would there be the economic basis in the inalienable and indivisible property by which the continuity of the family is maintained under all circumstances, but at the same time a central point for family solidarity; the continuation of the family would be guaranteed not only in its material conditions but also in its sociological form. But here also--at least according to the opinion of many--this centripetal self-preservation of a small group is set in contrast to the self-preservation of the surrounding political totality, which, to be sure, wants to be an absolute entity and can therefore permit its parts just a fragile and relative existence--even while the absolute self-preservation of the parts makes that of the parts of the totality into a lose and endangered one.
Modern associations occasionally seek to replace these basic ideas of mortmain and cross-generational inheritance, with their enormous importance for the preservation of the group, with other forms having the same purpose--the thought that the fortune of the group is removed from the individual's disposition and strengthened as an independent objective structure, surviving untouched all instances of change in the individual. So some clubs bind their members through this practice so that when a member leaves, the payment of dues to the organization is not refunded. 30 It is thus documented that the group with its interest is
30 How much groups facilitate and impede the entry and exit of individual members pertains to the quite essentially sociological characterizations and differentiations of the
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placed completely beyond the individual member's sphere of interest, that it lives a life of its own, that it appropriates completely for itself the assets thereby gained for it, fully frees them from their individual owner and restores so little to them, as an organic body is capable of giving back to its possible previous bearer the nourishment that it once incorporated into its inner circulation. The old English labor unions that levied only low dues had the experience of their members joining and leaving with great ease. This changed with the increase of the dues. If a subdivision is dissatisfied with an activity of the whole union, it will think seriously before leaving since this entails the loss of its share of a considerable sum that accumulated over time. The continuous and intrinsically permanent preservation of the group is supported by not only this modus procedendi31 but especially also by the same modus having to make psychologically vibrant in each member the idea of a
social interaction. From this point of view one could set up a scale for all social creations. Groups for whom having many members matters because they draw their power from the shear volume of them, will generally facilitate entry and make exit burdensome. In contrast aristocratic groups will in general make entry difficult; but directly to the extent that they internally take much pride in themselves they will facilitate exit, so to speak, since these become the ones who do not want to take part in the prerogatives of the aristocracy, because they do not wish to stop those who do not want on any basis to assume the responsibilities of the group. Meanwhile within the nobility there emerges that formal relationship of the whole to the individual, the highest climax of which we already noted earlier with the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, of course, has always had the tendency to treat heretics or those suspected of secession, as well as unreliable types, as self-evidently belonging to it as long as possible, and to overlook what separated them from her, as though it was not said; but the moment when that is becomes no longer tolerable, it tends to eject the heretic and the dissident with absolute decisiveness and without any compromise or without any transitional appearances. This practice encompasses a great part of the power and cleverness of the Catholic Church: the enormous broad mindedness, so long as it is still possible to fend off dissidents from within, and conversely its radical repulsion of them as soon as that is no longer possible. It has thereby combined the advantages of a maximum extent with those of a clear boundary. With regard to belongingness, the relation of the individual to a group stands under the formula: "The first sets us free, with the second we are vassals"--at another time, however, also under the exact opposite; then again entrance and exit are equally easy or equally difficult. The difference of the means through which both ease and difficulty occur is to be further noted: whether they are economic or moral, whether they do this as external law, as egoistic advantage of the members, or work as the inner influence of these. All this would require a detailed examination, the matter of which would be all existing types of group and in which the latter form-problems of their life must cross and in fact it would require an exami- nation of two essential categories: the group life in its supra-personal being-for-itself and the relationship of the individual to this social union.
31 Latin: modality of proceeding--ed.
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supra-individual existence of a group unity independent of all personal preferences. 'Irrevocability' is also the technique by which the principal unity of the group is expressly realized and made clear. So some com- munities have the principle that the decision, once it is legally taken, is not changeable at all. A Greek religious community that wanted to discuss anew a rule that had been accepted for years, began with the explicit explanation: it should be allowed to decide contrary to what was earlier established. What is once decided according to the rules of the community appears in such cases to be part of its life, a piece of its being and therefore unchangeable; its 'timelessness' is documented in this, that the earlier moment, in which the decision was made, is inseparable from every later moment. This social technique of self- preservation recurs with greater force in the rule of certain clubs that even upon its dissolution the club's assets should not be divided among the members, but donated to some organization having a similar purpose. Here self-preservation no longer involves, so to speak, the physical existence of the group but its idea, which is likewise embodied in any other group that inherits it, and whose continuity should be maintained and shown precisely in the transfer of the property to it. This relationship is appropriately recognized with clarity in many of the French worker-cooperatives of the 1840s. The regulation is found in their statutes that the union property must, under no circumstances, be divided out, and this idea is set forth there that the associations of the same trades often formed syndicates in which each union turned over its indivisible fund in order to create a group treasury in which the contributions of the individual associations thereby merged into a new and objective unity, as the contributions of the individual did in the funds of the individual associations. A variation, as it were, of the think- ing of these individual associations was thereby created; the syndicate was the embodied abstraction that turned into a self-subsisting entity of interests creating social entities that until then had existed only in a form of association that was characterized by more individual, more solitary contents. Thus the social motive of these associations was raised to a height at which, if no other forces had affected it destructively, it could have been maintained in complete security against all individual and material vicissitudes.
I come now to another type of means of social self-preservation that is detached from any reliance on an external connection and is secured purely mentally. Inside the ideal sphere there is nevertheless a
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rich array of security that fundamentally differs in its importance ever so little from any substantial ones, though of course ultimately the lat- ter also have their mental importance according to their sociological effect. First in order are the feelings that are directed admittedly at a social object but still imply only subjective states: Patriotism for nation and city, dedication to the religious community, family feeling, and the like. All this is so immeasurably important for the preservation of the group that it still remains thusly interwoven into the life process of the subjects and differs from those socially oriented processes whose content has coagulated around a fixed, albeit only ideal structure or is derived from such a one, such as the moral imperative, honor, or law. Morality may yet be autonomous in that way; its power draws from the freedom and self-responsibility of the soul, its content from its individual uniqueness--these nevertheless stand as an objective structure before the soul as a norm for which the reality of its life possesses the various activities of conforming or not conforming to it. Law too--in what it means to us internally and beyond its concrete organs--stands before us as an ideal object, as a norm that binds us purely psychologically and yet as something supra-personal, since the compelling power of law (I am speaking here essentially of the field of criminal law) does not lie completely in our having to do or refrain from doing something; law can only force us to suffer the penalty for a failure to act or refrain from acting, but it has no physical power to impose these matters on the inside of the will itself. Between these two forms in which social self-preservation enjoins its commandments on us, there is a third whose pertinent meaning I want to examine as a type: honor.
If one were to bring these types of norm to their completely articu- lated expression, setting aside the overlapping and exchange of con- tent, law brings about outer purposes through outer means, morality effects inner purposes through inner means, and honor, outer purposes through inner means. They can be further arranged in the following order: morality, honor, law--thus each previous one covers the area of the following one, but not the other way around. Complete moral- ity encompasses in itself what honor and law require; complete honor encompasses what law requires; law has the narrowest scope. Because law only requires that which the self-preservation of the group abso- lutely cannot do without, it must establish an executive that enforces the laws externally. Morality wants to regulate the total behavior of the individual (only that relevant to the social group concerns us here), and no constraint similar to the constraint of the law is allowed to be
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enforced within this area; it remains dependent on the good and bad conscience. Honor takes a middle position: an injury to it is threatened by penalties that neither pure inwardness of moral reproach nor the corporal force of the legal sphere possesses. While society establishes the precepts of honor and secures them with partly inwardly subjective and partly social and externally perceptible consequences for violations, it creates for itself a unique form of guarantee for the proper conduct of its members in those practical areas that law cannot encompass and for which the guarantees through moral conscience alone are too unreliable. 32 If one also examines the precepts of honor for their con- tent, they always appear as a means for maintaining a social group's solidarity, its reputation, its regularity, and the potential to promote its life processes. And in fact, that middle position of honor between law and morality in relation to executive action corresponds to a similar one in relation to the extension of their spheres. Law covers the entire scope of the group whose vital interests form a unity; the forces of morality circulate inside the individual; they are closely bound with the self-responsiveness of the personal conscience; the actions and omis- sions, however, that honor demands is revealed as what is useful to the particular groups that stand between the large group and the individual. Every honor is originally the honor of a status, i. e. a form of life useful to smaller groups that are involved with a larger group and, by virtue of the demands on their members to whom the idea of honor pertains, maintain their inner cohesion, their unifying character, and their clo- sure against even the other groups of the same larger association. Now what appears to us beyond this limitation as the general human or, put differently, as purely individual honor, is a more abstract idea made possible by breaking through the barriers between social ranks; indeed one can name no single act that would attack human honor as such, i. e. , every honor without exception: it is a matter of honor for ascetics to let themselves to be spat at; for the girls of certain African tribes it is especially honorable to have as many relationships as possible. So then those specific ideas of honor of circumscribed groups are essential: fam- ily honor, the honor of officers, honor in commerce, even the honor of scoundrels. While the individual belongs to different groups, he or she can participate in different honors independently of one another; that
32 In Chapter 2 the corresponding formal position was shown to exist for custom as well.
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already became important for us earlier as a manifestation of 'crossing' social boundaries: it can be that someone who lost family honor stead- fastly protects commercial honor or, as a researcher, protects scientific honor, and vice-versa; the robber can strictly maintain the precepts of his criminal honor, while having lost every other honor; a woman can have lost her sexual honor and still be the most honorable person in every other respect, etc.
The phenomenon that already thereby arises, of honor demanding some things but permitting others, indicates the origin of honor in the teleology of the particular group, i. e. what the honor of one group unconditionally prohibits is completely compatible with the honor of a certain other circle and with indifference toward it. 33 The subtle honor that the officer corps cultivated allows some latitude for sexual behavior, which is not compatible with the honor of men in some other groups. The honor of merchants, most rigorous in many respects, allows such an exaggerated hyping of the products that a similar transgression of the limits of truthfulness would make an official or a scholar dishonorable; honor among scoundrels reveals this most unmistakably. Now it is precisely seen that the positive precepts of honor are always the conditions for the inner self-preservation of the group; what they tolerate is what each group, perhaps in contrast to every other group, holds to be compatible with the honor of its mem- bers; the groups relate their members' behavior to those who remain outside, so long as it does not somehow act back on the preservation of the group itself, the affairs of the personality as such, in which the more freedom is compatible with the concept of honor, the less it is tolerant with respect to the sociological requirements. Because it only depends on, and indeed only with respect to, a narrower group firmly circum- scribed within a larger one, honor allows for, indeed demands, various patterns of behavior that are forbidden by law on the one hand--the form of self-preservation of the large group--and by morality on the other hand--the inner self-preservation of the individual; dueling is the most glaring example of this.
What is easily deceptive about the sense of honor as a sociologi- cal expedient is precisely the circumstance with which this expedient celebrates its highest triumph: that it is successful in instilling in the individuals the protection of their honor as their most inward, deepest, the most personal self-interests. There is perhaps no point at which
33 Indifference--Simmel uses the Greek Adiaphoron--ed.
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social and individual interest intertwine that way, where a matter that is comprehensible only from the former that has assumed an impera- tive form that only appears to spring up from the latter. So deeply anchored here is the requirement of the social group in the foundation of the life of its members that honor even takes on a note of isolation, indeed in many respects an almost offensive note. It even includes those patterns of behavior by which the advantage of the circle does not lie in the immediate self-dedication of the individual, in the circles' boundaries overlapping one another, in the indiscriminate uniting of their activities or being, but simply in that each one of them 'keeps to itself'; here it is the mutual independence of the parts that keeps the whole in its form. The social group's vested interests decorated with the name of honor are invested in a sphere around the individual into which no other may penetrate without meeting with repulsion, and these interests are thus secured in their realization by the individual without rival interests. As one can consider it the specific effect of reli- gion that it converts one's own salvation into a duty, so it is the effect of honor, mutatis mutandis,34 that it converts one's social duty into one's personal salvation. Thus the aspects of law and duty as they relate to honor change into each other: the protection of honor is so very much a duty that law presses one to the most enormous sacrifices for it--not only brought upon oneself but imposed on others and passes over oth- ers. It would be wholly incomprehensible why society actually would urge the individual with so strong a social and moral accent to protect this purely personal good of honor if it were not the shear form and technique whose content and goal is the preservation of the group. In this context--and because here it is just essentially a matter of maintain- ing, not actually of advancing and developing--it is conceivable that society provides the individual this good from the outset so that the individual need not acquire it but only to not lose it: the presumption is that everyone possesses it. Society can proceed seemingly so liber- ally because all actions necessary for not losing this personal possession has hardly any other content than what is social. That presumption goes so far that society allows even the libeler, the adulterer, and the slanderer dueling with identical weapons with the person innocently offended; for in so far as one is still 'honorable,' one presupposes the possibility that one perhaps had a right to one's action. But of course,
34 Latin: with the things changed also changing other things--ed.
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every social stratum, as the social bearer of honor, cherishes this favor- able presumption only for its members, while the members of another stratum, beyond those within it notoriously lacking suitable honor, are not 'capable of satisfying' anything. Honor forms in this way one of the most wondrous, instinctively developed means of preserving group existence, not despite but because of the purely personal form of its appearance and consciousness.
From such linkages of social self-preservation to an individual per- son, to an actual substance, and to an ideal concept we now come to the cases in which it depends on an organ arising out of a plurality of persons: the objective principle in which their unity is represented, even bears again its group character. Thus the religious community embodies its solidarity and its life motive in the priesthood, and the political community regards its solidarity internally in the civil service, externally in its military standing, the latter for its part in the officer corps, every enduring club in its board of directors, every fleeting association in its committee, every political party in its parliamentary representation. The formation of such organs is the result of the social division of labor. The interactions among individuals, in which every social formation consists and which determines a particular form of the character of the group as such, originally occur quite immediately among the individual members of society. Thus the unity of operation arises from direct agreement or mutual accommodation of interests; the unity of the religious community from the religious need of each pressing to join together; the military constitution of the group from the protection and trust interests of each man capable of bearing arms; the administration of justice from the immediate judgment of the com- munity; the organization for leaders and the led from the personal preferences of the individual before others; the economic coordination from the immediate exchange among the producers. 35
These functions performed by the interests themselves, the functions that effect social unity, come undone over particular subgroups. The interactions of members with one another are thus substituted so that all of these members enter into relationship with the newly established
35 I do not wish to claim that this logically simplest condition actually formed the historical starting point of further social development everywhere else. But in order to clarify the actual importance of the division of labor of social apparatus, one must presuppose it, even if it would only be a fiction, which certainly it is not in numerous cases.
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apparatus for themselves; put differently: While wherever no formation of an apparatus occurs, primarily the individual members alone have substantial existence, and their association is a purely functional one, this association now achieves its own separate existence for itself, not only apart from all group members to whom it generally refers, but also beyond the individual members who support it or enrich it. Thus the business class is a structure existing for itself that as such performs its function as a go-between among producers regardless of personnel changes. Thus still more clearly, the office exists as an objective appara- tus through which the individual officials only, as it were, pass through, and behind which their personalities often enough vanish--even more completely than with the individual ruler, whose individual position blends with its bearer so much more closely than a pluralistic govern- ment; thus the church is an impersonal organism whose functions are assumed and carried out by the individual priests but not produced by them. In summary, what one earlier thought incorrectly about living beings--that life, which is actually only just a kind of interaction among some physical atoms, is borne by a unique life spirit--is valid as a cor- rect simile for social existence: what is a direct interaction in its origin becomes in the end a special structure that exists for itself. But this special structure performs its function only as a supra-personal totality, i. e. the function of the total group; for the rest, its individual members remain individual members of the group and as such are subject to the conditions under which the effectiveness of any apparatus places all members of the totality: merchants must purchase the objects for their personal needs just as judges are subject to the law that they carry out, tax collectors must themselves pay taxes, and priests themselves must confess. Apart from all these personages these structures of the division of labor alone represent the idea or power that keeps the group together in the relationship under consideration, and these structures, as it were, solidify from the functional into a substantive reality.
It is one of the most deeply ingrained and most characteristic facts in human nature that both individuals and groups draw considerable power and support from structures that they themselves first equipped with the energies and qualities necessary for them. The strengths of the subject that support its preservation and development are often indirectly expressed, so that they first construct an apparently objective structure, out of which these strengths then flow back onto the subject: thus we conduct ourselves like someone who is recruiting an ally into a war, but first allocates for himself all armed forces with which he
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might come to his assistance. I am reminded of the idea of gods that people first provided with all possible qualities, values and sublimities created from their own minds, in order then to obtain seemingly from them the moral law and the power to comply with it. I am reminded that we introduce our own feelings, profundity, and meaning into the landscape in order then to bring home from it solace, significance, and stimulation. I am reminded how often friends and wives seem to enrich us intellectually and with leisure, until we recognize that all these mental contents stem from ourselves and are only reflected back onto us by them. If a self-deception lies in all such processes, it is certainly not without a profound usefulness. Certainly many of our natural pow- ers need such an expansion, transformation, and projection in order to reach their greatest usefulness; we must place them at a certain distance from ourselves so that they work on ourselves with maximum strength--thereby the deception as to their actual source becomes manifestly very useful so as not to disturb this effect. The development of differentiated organs for individual social purposes often falls into this form type: the group forces are concentrated into a special structure that then approaches the group as a totality with its own existence and character; while it serves the group purposes, powers independent of it seem to extend out from it that are nothing like even the transformed powers of its members, on whom it now works back.
Meanwhile this transformation is something completely radical and creative. Admittedly we will recognize what high usefulness for the social processes the mere representation of collective behavior through the action of a smaller number of representatives already possesses; but behind or next to this significance of mere quantity stands a deeper and qualitative significance of transferring the functions of the whole group onto a smaller select subgroup. There is an analogy to this in global scientific recognition. No science can describe or formulate exhaustively the fullness of the actual processes in existence or those of the qualitative conditions affecting something. Thus if we use the concepts that condense in themselves what is unclear and, as it were, make them manageable, that is not only a representation of the whole through a part that is essentially identical to it; but the idea has a dif- ferent inner structure, a different epistemological, psychological, and metaphysical meaning as the whole of the thing that is subordinate to it; it projects this whole at a new level, expresses the extensive not only with a smaller extensity but in a fundamentally different form
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whose syntheses are no miniature picture of any immediate appear- ances of totality, but are autonomous structures derived from their material. Thus arise, as it manifests itself, completely new sociological phenomena, not only existing in a reduced measure when it raises the representing and leading organ above a group, as it were, as its extract or as the general concept over an immense area of many individual activities. That such organs are of such importance for the self-preser- vation of the group perhaps becomes clearest through a consideration of a counter example. The original federal constitution of Germany perished in part because the federation developed no such organs. It had representatives with individual powers, for sure, but these were of a purely individual nature; the precisely required function was given to an individual representative. But how a representative of this kind differs from an official is unmistakable from the legal as well as from the sociological standpoint, although it is often irrelevant for our pres- ent inquiry, and mixed cases and transitions also appear in history often enough. At this position it is essential that the representative has a greater relationship to the individuals and their sum, and to their individual interests; but the official has a greater relationship with the objective social unity beyond the individuals. 36 This latter relationship
36 It is relevant that, as a fact of greater form sociological importance, the 'rep- resentative' as a rule is only an individual from the group who is not, by virtue of the commissioning, singled out through this coordinating activity in principle, while the 'official' may be regarded as a private person unto himself even as he stands before all the individual persons of the group as an official. This results in an important association where for example, employers and employees negotiate wage agreements. The German commercial law stipulates that such negotiations must be conducted only by 'participants,' i. e. by managers and workers as representatives of their respec- tive groups. That may have a purely technical rationale in that one credits only the participants with the necessary expertise and interestedness. Sociologically, however, it has to do with the fact that the parties do not form the necessary and mostly not at all a 'legal staff' or anything like that at all. Especially on the employees' side the representatives are chosen as a rule at meetings of a wholly unchecked, fluctuating crowd; there is hardly any discussion about all of the people affected by the wage agreement sharing in the authority, and it lacks what would make this superfluous: the social unity, a totality outside of its members, of those who are by chance present or absent. Actually this is the typical situation of the 'representative,' i. e. of the member of a mass consisting of a sum of its members who is assigned by them and indeed, with suitable sociological logic, as a rule with an imperative mandate. In contrast the official, who acts out of a spirit of supra-personal group unity, possesses much greater freedom with regard to the complex of the actual members. Precisely in the differ- ence from the situation of the worker's representative it is remarkable that the general secretary of the English trade union organizations, which are of course structured
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is especially favored and it makes it clear that as a rule it is a matter of an office, an organization of more or several of them that form an even supra-personal unity, one including the individual only by chance. It did not come to that in the early German period. The unity of the group remained limited to the immediate interaction of the member persons. It condensed again on the whole into the idea of the objective state, for which every momentary existence for the individual would be, as it were, only a sample or representative, even as it thus solidified into the individual organs from which each one undertook a special social function and relieved the whole community of it. The threats to the self-preservation of the group that arose from this insufficiency lend themselves somewhat to being subsumed under the following three main concepts:
1. The mechanism for the division of labor enables an easier mobility of the social body. As soon as the whole group must take action for a particular purpose--for political decisions, legal finding, administrative rules, etc. --it will suffer from an enormous unwieldiness, and indeed on two sides. First on the physical or local side: in order for the group to be able to work as a whole, generally it must first assemble in a place. The difficulty and the languor, indeed often the impossibility, of bringing them all together generally thwarts numerous undertak- ings and puts others on hold so long until it is too late. In this respect a wholly instinctive functionality creates a difference between groups, in which the difficulty of coming together exists and in those where it does not exist. Compare the constitution of Athens and that of the Achaean League: in Athens an assembly of the people was held three times a month, and thus the people could rule directly since everyone could be present easily; the office holders had only to carry out their commands. In contrast, the Achaean League was so spread out that only a small fraction of the people could come to the meeting--two times a year. Thus, although in principle the League was as democratic as Athens, the office holders had to be vested with greater power and freer discretion; they were 'officials' to a greater degree, in the sense of being bearers of the group's unity that existed beyond its temporary members. But if this external difficulty of gathering is overcome, the
absolutely democratically, possesses a quite extraordinary power because he attends to the business of the association as a permanent officer--and not as a 'participant,' and that he actually exercises a personal dictatorship in the union organization where he is the only permanent officer.
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psychological difficulty of coming together arises: achieving unanim- ity in a large crowd. Every broadly viewed action of a crowd carries a ballast of misgivings, reconsiderations, side interests, and especially lack of individuals' interest in it, from which a social apparatus is dis- connected to the extent that it is intended exclusively to serve this one tangible purpose, and it consists of relatively few persons. Such group apparatuses thus serve their self-preservation through an increased flex- ibility and precision of the collective action, in contrast to which the movements of total groups have a rigid and sluggish character. 37 The deficiencies of mass action are openly attributed to these physical and psychological difficulties where the representatives are not appointed because of special qualifications and factual knowledge expertise. Thus at the end of the fifteenth century an ordinance from the district of [Bad] Du? rkheimer in the Palatinate speaks of matters "that would be too much and too difficult for a whole community to deal with; so they chose eight able people from the community who promised to represent all that a whole community had to do. " So in innumerable cases of the simple representation of the many by the few, the concern is about this superficial moment: an organization of the few, even without specific privileges, clearly has the advantage, over a crowd with many lead- ers, of easier mobility, shorter meetings, and more specific decisions. Thus one could call this a principle of the unspecialized apparatus: what
37 The greater mobility of the task-differentiated organ does not completely impede its having a conservative character, especially if it serves those interests that are quite central to the group. Indeed, this must be so insofar as it is intended to maintain group unity, around which the singular, individually determined goings-on in and among the group members swing with unpredictable scope and with a randomness unconcerned about unity. The principle of the group that was otherwise realized by its immediacy is transferred to the official, although perhaps not with the same consciousness and the same technical perfection. The moral regulation within Christianity offers a very clear example, where in the early period every community member was held to the same strict morality as the presbyter or the bishop. With the enormous expansion of Christianity, however, this became impractical; the members of the community fell back into the moral praxis accepted in the land. But it was expected of the officials of the church--and with success--that they preserve the special morality bound up with the nature of this religion. What was once the requirement for anyone to be received into Christianity now became the requirement for ordination. In this kind of phenomenon the conservatism of the officialdom rests on the deep social foundation, so that the societal function or rule is transferred on to it, those that were otherwise the responsibility of the whole group but could not be sustained by it in its development in breadth and variety, but requires a differentiated, specially designated apparatus. Thus the conservatism does not appear as a mere accident of officialdom but--admittedly making room for many regulations that are judged the same and contrarily--as the expression of its sociological meaning.
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is qualitatively more that the representatives accomplish in contrast to immediate group action rests expressly on its being quantitatively smaller. The Roman state was originally the whole of its citizenry organized in the popular assembly; and the later jurists say that only the difficulties of bringing the much increased populus into one place for the purpose of making laws made a senatum vice populi consuli38 advis- able. The unspecified character of the representing or leading apparatus is brought to expression most radically when it is not even elected, but the position is simply rotated. No examples of this are necessary here; this modality is particularly notable only somewhat in the case of the first English unions, the 'trade clubs' that needed a committee around 1800; its members, without special election, "named it in the order in which the names appears in the book. " Since the qualification of any one person for representation was most doubtful according to the mental standard of the worker, the mechanical rotation here clearly represents fully the overwhelming usefulness of the quantitative factor: that few act for the many.
Besides, the difficulty of locality is not only expressed in cases of a needed assembly of the total group; it also appears in economic exchange. As long as purchase and exchange occur only in immedi- ate meetings of producers and consumers, both are evidently very clumsy and inadequate and must often be extraordinarily hindered by the difficulty of this local condition. Meanwhile, as soon as the dealer steps in between, ultimately a class of dealers systematizes the commerce and makes available every possible connection between the economic interests and an incomparably closer and stronger cohe- sion of the group becomes evident. The insertion of a new apparatus that intervenes between the principal participants causes not a separation, as the sea often does between lands, but a bond. The unity of the group that consists in the bond of each member with the other mediated in some manner must become a much closer and more energetic one on the basis of the activity of the business class. Through the lasting effect of the business class, a system of regularly functioning, reciprocally balanced powers and relationship finally arises as a general form, in which the individual production and consumption fit only as an acci- dental factor, and which rises above this, like the state does over the individual citizen or the church over the individual believer. What is
38 Latin: people. . . senate as a consul of the people--ed.
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especially important for the preservation of the life form of the group in this and similar cases is this: that the member appointed to the work of the organization not be able to abandon the duty immediately when there is nothing to do--while the form of interaction contingent on the immediate interchanges of the members is paralyzed in many radical ways if that member stops once and thereby finds much greater dif- ficulties in resuming it. It also applies to the moments of strength of a monarchy: The monarch is always there, and in action, while the rule by the many wastes energy on the one hand and manifests complete lacunae in its active presence on the other. If the population was not gathered on the Pnyx39 or in Ding,40 the state activity slept and had to first be awakened, while the prince is always, so to speak, awake. As soon as the interaction has created an apparatus to support it, the potential for a resumption is embodied in it, even during every interruption of the interaction; and because of the primary immediacy of interaction, there arises a gap that perhaps no longer fills up, the bridge now remains yet to be walked over, it maintains unbroken the continuity of form and the chance in order to actualize it again at any moment. Finally, the following also applies to the social psychological motives that link the formation of social apparatus directly to the quantitative expansion of the group: as the sweep of what is common to all members is all the smaller, the more members there are whom it concerns, because, of course, the subjective as well as the objective diversity and distance among the individuals thereby increase. The common denominator in a very large group thus occupies a relatively unimportant place in the individual; its blending into the whole personality does not cover very much, and it is thus relatively easily dispensed with and turned over to structures beyond the sum of individuals.
2. Where the whole group of similarly oriented and similarly placed members must be mobilized for a particular purpose, there internal opposition inevitably arises, of whom each has a priori the same weight and for which each lacks the decisive authority. An adequate expres- sion of this situation then occurs when the majority never decides, but every dissenter either thwarts the solution generally or at least is not personally committed to a resolution. This danger confronts the development of the social apparatus on at least two sides, not only with
39 Meeting place of the Athenian assembly--ed.
40 Old Teutonic tribal assembly--ed.
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respect to the externally suitable action, but also for the inner form and unity of the group. First, an office, a commission, a delegation etc. , will have greater expertise than the generality of other persons; it will thus be those frictions and oppositions that originate from a shear lack of expertise that will be reduced from the outset. The consistency of action that everywhere originates from an objective knowledge of circumstances and from the exclusion of vacillating subjectivity will thus be all the more characteristic of groups, the more the management of its particular undertakings falls under an apparatus specifically desig- nated for them: thus expertise actually means already being unified in principle; while there are countless subjective errors, but with objectively correct presentation, all must arrive at the same result. Not so obvious is the meaning of the second one, with every related point. The lack of objectivity that so often hinders unity in the action of the collective is not always the result of a mere lack of know how, but often also of the very far-reaching sociological fact that the factions that split the group in some important area carry this division even into decisions that would not be a factional matter at all according to objectively tangible criteria. The formal reality of the division competes with objective insight as basis for decision. Among the daily and countless examples of this is a particularly consequential type, which the splitting of a group into centralist and particularistic tendencies brings with it. For there are, perhaps, few issues for which an importance would not be gained for those tendencies, quite beyond their inherent meaning and the objec- tive basis of reacting to them. In certain controversies about poverty, perhaps, this appears all the more blatantly as partisan politics should be removed from this area because of its social-ethical character. At the beginning of the new German Empire, however, it was dealt with as a matter of whether a highest authority for poverty should settle only inter-territorial disputes or also the cases inside each of the individual states--the objective usefulness of one or the other regulation did not come into the discussion so much as rather stating the stand of the parties on particularism or unity. And objective usefulness did not even remain the decisive factor, as a 'yes' or 'no'; the party acted on its conviction in principle wholly apart from any objective justification. But the party must still consider how this 'for' or 'against' relates to the growth of its power in the immediate situation, how this or that will affect a personality important in the party, etc. The latter, by which every inner linkage between the stand of the party and its actual activity is preserved, is, as it were, an irrelevance of the second order; it still
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rises in this way to one of the third order: the form of the party often generally makes the decision result no more out of a practical motive than out of an irrelevant motive, but in a question that does not affect the party problem as such the decision is 'yes' only because the oppo- nent decided for 'no,' and vice-versa. The line that divides the parties over a vital issue is drawn through all other issues possible, from the most general to the most specific in character, and indeed only because one may no longer be pulling in the same direction as the opponent on the main issue at all, and the bare fact that the opponent decided for one side of any one divide was already enough for oneself to seize upon the opposite side. Thus the Social Democrats in Germany voted against pro-labor rules simply because they were favored by the other party or by the government. Partisan polarization becomes, as it were, an a priori of praxis of that kind that every problem surfacing at all immediately divides into 'for' or 'against' along the existing party lines so that the divide, once it has taken place, grows into a formal necessity of remaining divided. I will mention only two examples for the different kinds. As the matter of spontaneous generation emerged in nineteenth century France, the Conservatives were passionately interested in its refutation and the Liberals for its affirmation. Similarly the different directions of literature correspond to the issue of popular aesthetic education in different places, among other things. And even if some remote relationship of the individual decision to the whole world view of a party were to be found, the level of the passion and intransigence for each individual would be given only because the other party simply represents the other position; and if a coincidence had committed the one party to a degree for the opposite position, the other one would have taken the corresponding reverse one, even if it were actually unsympathetic toward it. And now the other kind: As the German Liberal Party split into two groups in the Reichstag on May 6, 1893, because of the military bill, the state parliamentary factions remained together until July. In the October state parliamentary elections, the same people who had worked together up to then suddenly acted as opponents. In the newly opened parliament a difference of opinion was maintained by no side in any question to be determined by the parliament; but the separation nevertheless continued to be maintained. The pointlessness of such factional forms is especially manifest, but also especially often, when the contrasts within a small group appear due to circles based on personal interests and are then replicated in the largest group's issues over which admittedly the same people decide,
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but would make decisions from completely different points of view. In German agricultural districts, it was thus frequently observed that the farmers and the workers voted in parliamentary elections differently than the large landholder only because the latter is opposed to their preferences in local communal issues.
In addition to all that, what sets parties sharply against each other comes in and takes effect everywhere that a larger mass of people-- which is precisely not seized by a momentary impulse--must resort to the rules. For inevitably factions will be formed in it whose power is not overcome by objective facts and is revealed at least in delaying tactics and annoyances, exaggerations and obfuscations. This power of the party as a pure form that appears in a continuous progression through the most heterogeneous areas of interest is one of the greatest obstacles to unity, indeed to realizing the actions of a group action at all. The transfer to special apparatus of group issues that are too prominent should remedy the disruption and obstruction. While these issues are constructed from the outset from the point of view of an objectively defined purpose, this is immediately further removed psychologically from the other interests and opinions of people. These groups as such simply exists only ad hoc, and it frees in the consciousness of the indi- vidual the hoc; the objective very sharply from all matters, from what is irrelevant, makes it more difficult for the amalgamations, either deliber- ate or nai? ve, to come with objectively irrelevant provisions. The activity of the apparatus thereby becomes much more unified, vigorous, and purposeful; the group achieves self-preservation to the extent that the waste of energy ceases, that lies in those intermixtures and the mutual paralysis of energies following from them and that is unavoidable in the immediate undifferentiated management of group issues throughout the group. Obviously this advantage is not without a downside. Admit- tedly, it is likely that officials, acting so to speak not on their own but on the basis of the idea of the group, will act out of duty, but also that they will act only out of duty. With the same objectivity that controls their undertaking and decisions, they will also limit the amount of their expenditure of energy and their subjective personhood, as they must not allow these to influence their actions in official matters nor use their reserve of energy more widely since it is objectively standardized. And the more thoughtful aspects of the personality also become more valuable; the warm-heartedness, the unconditional devotedness, and the gener- osity in not distinguishing between one's own interests and those of strangers will be turned off by the objectification of the apparatus. As
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objectivity is everywhere the correlate of the division of labor, so what is praised as the objectivity of the official as such is simply the result of the differentiation with which officialdom grew up around objectively specialized purposive view points freed from the amalgamation, and therefore the divisions, of collective life.
3. If these advantages that are produced by the construction of an apparatus for the action of the total group for its own self-preservation, the, as it were, tempo and rhythm of the group-sustaining processes, they are thus extended further onto their qualitative features. Now here at first that psychological pattern is decisive, which has already become so often important for us: The collective action of the crowd will always stand, in an intellectual sense, at a relatively low level; for the point on which a great number of individuals unites must lie very close to the level of the one that stands lowest among them; and, moreover, since every high standing one can climb downward but not every low standing one can climb up, the latter and not the former determines the point at which both can meet: what is common to all can only be the possession of the one that possesses the least. This rule, which is of the highest importance for all collective behavior--from a street mob to scholarly associations--of course possesses no mechanically uniform validity. The level of the persons of high standing is not simply a more of the same qualities of which the low standing one has less, so that under all circumstances the former would possess what the latter possesses, but the latter does not possess what the former possesses. Rather, the superior person is distinguished in kind so much from the subordinate one in some respects that the former cannot at all negotiate on this point, either in reality or understanding: If the valet does not under- stand the hero, so also the hero does not understand the valet. Only the metaphorical spatial expression of high and low standing permits a belief in a purely quantitative difference, so that the higher person would need only to subtract the surplus in order to be on a par with the lower person. Also at the same time with the existence of so general a difference, which cannot pass into a unity through the suppression and paralysis of a quantitative majority, no really collective action can occur. It is possible here to go through something of that externally with another, but that happens only with energies or portions of the personality that are not those of the real personality. If a majority should actually act in unison, it will only happen along those lines that makes a descent from a higher level to a lower level possible. Thus it is already to err on the side of optimism for one to describe such a social level
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as the 'average'; the character of a group action must gravitate toward not the average and not toward the midpoint between the highest and lowest elements, but toward the lowest. This is an experience affirmed at all times--from Solon on, who said of the Athenians, individually each one would be a sly fox but in the Pnyx41 they are a herd of sheep, to Frederick the Great, who declared his generals to be the most rea- sonable of people if he spoke with each of them alone, but were sheep heads when gathered into a council of war; then Schiller summarized this in the epigram: passably clever and intelligent people in corpore42 turn into one fool. That is not only the result of that fatal leveling downward to what the cooperation of a crowd causes. There is also the fact that the leadership will shut off the most spirited, radical, most vocal members in an assembled crowed, but not the most intellectually important, who often lack passionate subjectivity and the suggestive power to make them go along. "Now because the intelligent withdraw and are silent," says Dio Chrysostom43 to the Alexandrians, "the eternal strife, the unbridled talk, and suspicions arise among you. " Where it is a matter of excitement and expression of emotions, this norm does not apply since a certain collective nervousness is produced in a crowd that is gathered together--a being swept away with emotion, a reciprocally produced stimulation--so that a temporary elevation of individuals over the average intensity of their feelings may occur. Thus when Karl Maria von Weber44 said of the general public, "The individual is a donkey and the whole is still the voice of God"--so is this the experience of a musician who appeals to the sentiment of the crowd, not to its intel- lectuality. Rather it remains set at that below average level at which the highest and lowest can meet and which is empirically open to a considerable elevation probably in the area of emotion and impulses of desire, but not at that of the intellect. Now while the preservation of the group on the one hand rests on the immediate relationships of one individual to another and in these every person rests on the col- lectivity, everyone overall develops one's own intellect, this is absolutely not the case in those matters, on the other hand, where the group has
41 Meeting place of the Athenian assembly--ed.
42 Latin: as a body--ed.
43 Greek philosopher, circa 40 to circa 120 C. E. , known to have dressed in rags and
performed manual labor, and as one who spoke truth to power.
44 Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826), German composer, pianist, and conduc-
tor--ed.
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to act with unity. One can call the former the molecular movements of the group, the latter the molar; in the former a substitution of the individual in principle is neither possible nor necessary; in the latter both are the case. The experience of the large English labor unions--to take one example from countless ones--has shown that mass gatherings often embraced the most foolish and pernicious decisions (hence the 'aggregate meetings' were called the 'aggravated meetings'), and most of them were undone at the pleasure of the assemblies of delegates.