No More Learning

It is in this sociological form that in England the third estate first participated in matters of state. Since Henry III these were irrevocably bound to collaboration with the great barons, who, together with the prelates, had to approve funds; the combination of these estates against the king was powerful, indeed often superior. Nevertheless constant divisions, abuses, coups, and conflicts resulted, instead of a fruitful collaboration. And then both parties felt that a remedy could be found only by bringing in a third party: the subvassals and freemen, the earldoms and cities previously excluded from affairs of state. When their council representatives--the beginning of the lower house--were summoned, the third element exercised the double function: to make the government actually a counterpart to the totality of the state, and used it as an authority that helped the older parties to a certain extent to be objective with regard to the government and thereby funnel their strengths, heretofore consumed in opposition, more harmoniously into the united functioning of the state.
2. The tertius gaudens. The neutrality of the third element served or damaged the group as a whole in the combinations discussed so far. The mediator as well as the arbitrator wish to rescue the unity of the group from the danger of breaking up. Obviously their relatively superior position, however, can also be exploited for their own purely egoistic interests: while they conduct themselves at one time as mediator for the purposes of the group, on another they reverse and make the interactions between the parties and between them and the parties a means for their own purposes. Here it is never a matter of a structure already previously consolidated into whose social life this event would appear beside others; rather it is precisely here that the relationship between the parties and the impartial one is often first established ad hoc; elements that otherwise do not comprise any unity of interac- tion can get caught up in a dispute; a third, to whom both are equally unconnected beforehand, may spontaneously take the opportunity that this dispute offers a nonpartisan, and thus can produce a rather
the quantitative conditioning of the group 109
unstable interaction, the liveliness and formal richness of which for each element member stands entirely out of proportion to the fleetingness of its durability.
I would mention two apparent kinds of the tertius gaudens without going into detail, because the interaction within the group of three, whose typical formations are the present concern, does not character- istically stand out. Rather, a certain passivity either on the part of the two conflicting elements or on that of the third is characteristic of it. It can be arranged to the advantage of the third in such a way that both of the others are held in check, and the third can pocket a profit for which one of the two would have otherwise challenged the third. The dispute brings about here only a paralysis of powers that, were they able, would be turned against the third. The situation then actually cancels the interaction among the three elements instead of adding to it the kind without which the most obvious outcome for the three ele- ments cannot be gained. The deliberate effecting of this situation is a matter of the next configuration of three. Secondly the third can have an advantage only because the action of one combative party realizes this advantage for the sake of that one's ends, even without any initiative required on the part of the one advantaged. The model here is that the benefits and advances that one party allows to accrue to a third are designed to injure the opposing party. So the English worker-protection laws were originally passed in part because of the mere grudge of the Tories against the liberal manufacturers; in this way many charitable actions owe their origin to the competition for popularity. It is in a strange way precisely an especially petty and malicious disposition that, in order to aggravate a second, treats a third well: the indiffer- ence toward the intrinsic moral character of altruism cannot stand out more sharply than through such an exploitation of it. And it is doubly significant that one can achieve the goal of aggravating opponents by the benefits that one accords one's friends as well as those that one accords one's enemies.
The more fundamental formations arise here when the third for its part turns practically, supportively, generously to the one party (thus not only intellectually matter-of-fact, as the arbitrator) and thereby extracts its direct or indirect gain. Two main developments occur within this form: two parties are hostile toward one another and thus compete for the good will of the third, or two parties compete for the good will of the third and therefore are hostile toward one another. This difference is especially important for the further development of the constellation.
110 chapter two
To wit, an already existing hostility presses each party to seek the good will of the third; so the decision in this conflict will mean the addition of the third to the side of one party at the beginning of the struggle; conversely, where two elements independently of each other strive for the favor of a third, and this forms the basis of their hostility, their party-formation, the definitive granting of this favor--which in this case is thus an object, not a means of conflict--tends to put an end to this: the decision has been made, and further hostility has thereby become practically pointless. In both cases the advantage of neutrality with which the tertius originally stands over against them both, lies in the fact that those in that position can set their conditions for their decision. Where for whatever reason this proposal of conditions is denied them, then the situation also does not offer them the full benefit. So is it in one of the most common instances of the second type, the competition of two persons of the same gender for the favor of a person of the other. Here the decision of the latter depends in general not on that person's will in the same sense as that of a buyer between two competing suppliers or princes granting favor between competing petitioners; rather it is offered through existing feelings that do not obtain from will and from the outset do not place that person in any kind of a position for choos- ing. Therefore, of offerings whose significance is controlled by choice, we are talking here only of exceptional cases, and yet the situation of the tertius gaudens is taken fully for granted, its specific exploitation as a whole is nevertheless denied. The most encompassing example of the tertius gaudens is the buying public in an economy with free competition. The contest for customers gives it an almost complete independence from the individual supplier--although the supplier is dependent on the totality of buyers, a coalition of them would thus immediately reverse the relationship--and allows it to link its purchases to the satisfaction of its desires with regard to the quality and price of goods. The situation of the tertius gaudens has then still the peculiar advantage that the producers must yet try even to anticipate those conditions, to guess the unspoken or unconscious wishes of consumers, not at all to suggest or to accustom them to what is on hand. From the first mentioned case of the woman between two suitors, in which, because the decision depends on her being and not on her actions, the one choosing tends not to place any conditions and thus does not exploit the situation--leads a continuing series of phenomena up to that of modern consumption, from which the being of the personality is fully excluded and in which the advantage of those choosing goes so far that the parties take from them the increase
the quantitative conditioning of the group 111
of conditions even to its maximum. The latter is the farthest extreme to where the situation of the tertius gaudens can take this.
The history of any cooperative alliance, from that between states to that between family members, tends to offer an example of the other formation--conflict forcing the parties to compete for the help of the third who originally has no relationship to the issue. In the following variation the very simple typical course is still of special sociological interest. In order for the third to acquire that advantageous position, the power accrued need not necessarily possess a great quantity compared to the great power of each party. Rather, how great the power of the third must be for this is determined exclusively through the relationship that the powers of the parties exhibit among one another. Actually it obvi- ously depends only on its being enough to counterbalance one of them. Thus if the forces are about equal, a minimal increase is enough to be the decisive factor toward the one side. Hence the frequent influence of small parliamentary parties that they can never acquire through their own importance but only by way of the big parties being held roughly in a balance. Generally, where majorities decide, everything thus frequently hanging on a single vote, there is the possibility that completely unimportant parties put forth the most crass conditions for their support. Parallels can appear in the relationships of small states to large ones involved in conflict. It simply depends only on the forces of two antagonistic entities mutually paralyzing one another so that the position, however weak, of the yet unengaged third is given relatively unlimited power. Entities strong in themselves will naturally profit no less from this situation; what is, of course, made difficult in some forma- tions, e. g. inside of a definitively shaped party existence, is that precisely the large parties are frequently very firmly set in material respects and in their relation to one another, and therefore do not have that full freedom of decision-making that all the advantages of the tertius gaudens would offer them. Through entirely uniquely favorable constellations the Center party in the German parliaments has more-or-less evaded this limitation for the last hundred years. What extraordinarily strengthens its position of power, of course, is that its party ideology commits it to a definite direction with regard to only a rather small portion of the parliamentary decisions. With regard to all other decisions it can fully freely decide for itself, now one way, now another: it can speak out for or against protective tariffs, for or against labor-friendly legislation, for or against military demands, without being prejudiced by its party program. Consequently in all such cases it stands as a tertius gaudens
112 chapter two
among the parties, each of whom can endeavor to curry its favor. No landowner will seek the assistance of the Social Democrats for grain tariffs, since it is known that they must oppose them on party grounds; no Liberal will look or bargain for their aid against customs duties since it is known that they on party grounds approve of them anyway. In contrast, both can go to the Center party which on account of its freedom in this matter is free, even in principle, to grant their wish. On the other hand, what even from the very beginning is a strong factor in the situation of the tertius gaudens is that it frequently saves the tertius gaudens the trouble of having to develop real power. The advantages of the tertius gaudens will in fact flow from the situation indicated here not only in an actual conflict but even in a tense relationship and latent antagonism on the part of the other two; it works here through the mere possibility of siding with one or the other of them, even if that does not really happen. As for the change in English politics in early modernity, compared to the medieval era, this was always character- istic of it, to the extent that England no longer sought possessions and direct domination on the continent but always possessed a power that potentially stood between the continental powers. Already in the six- teenth century it was said that France and Spain would be the scales of the European balance; England, however, the tongue or the holder of the balance. 19 The bishops of Rome had already with great emphasis cultivated this rather formal principle in the history leading up to Leo the Great (440-461), in that they compelled the warring parties within the Church to grant to them the position of the decisive power. 20 Quite early on, bishops standing in dogmatic or other disputes with others had appealed for support to Roman colleagues, and the latter had in principle always taken the side of the petitioners. Consequently there was nothing left for the respective second party except to likewise turn to the bishop of Rome in order to not have him as an opponent from the beginning. The latter thereby obtained for himself the prerogative and tradition of an arbitrating authority. What can be termed the sociological logic of the situation of three, in which two are engaged in conflict, has here evolved from the perspective of the tertius gaudens with particular clarity and intensity.
19 "The tongue or the holder of the balance," English in the original--ed.
20 Dates for Leo the Great added--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 113
Now the advantage that accrues to the third from this--that of having an a priori identical, equally independent, and thereby even determining relationship with the other two--is not tied only to both of the others being in a state of opposition. It is instead enough that they have in general merely a certain distinctiveness, alienation, qualitative dualism towards one another; this is in fact the general formula for the type by which the enmity of the elements forms only one particular, albeit the most frequent, case. Especially notable, for example, is the following advantage of a tertius resulting from the mere duality. If B is obligated to A to perform a specifically defined duty, and this passes from B to C and D, among whom the performance is to be distributed, the temptation arises for A to impose, where possible, on each of the two just a little bit more than half, so that A benefits overall even more than before, given that the obligation was still in one hand. In 1751 the government especially in Bohemia had to prohibit, with division of peasant areas by the squirearchy, the imposition of a greater bur- den of service on each divided portion than would have been the case correspondingly before division. With the division of the obligation to the two the idea prevails that each individual has in any case less to accomplish than the former individual, on whom was the burden of the whole; the more precise appraisal of the amount goes back to before and can be thus easily transferred. Thus while here, so to speak, the mere numerical reality of the duality instead of the unity of the party produces the situation of the tertius gaudens, it rises in the following case above a duality determined by qualitative difference. The legal power of the English kings after the Norman conquest, unheard of in the Ger- manic middle ages, is explained by the fact that William the Conqueror indeed encountered the legal rights of Anglo-Saxon peoples, which in principle should have been respected, and likewise his Normans brought their native rights with them. However, these two legal structures did not fit together; they provided no unity for people's rights before the king, who through the singularity of his interest could shift between the two and largely annul them. In the disunion of nations--not only because they constantly fought with one another, but because their difference impeded an assertion of a law common to them--lay the basis for absolutism, and therefore his power sank steadily as soon as both nationalities actually fused into one.
The favorable position of the third generally disappears then in the moment in which the other two combine into a unity, i. e. the group- ing in the relationship at issue reforms from a triadic into a dyadic
114 chapter two
combination. It is instructive not only concerning the specific problem but group life in general that this outcome can occur even without personal unification or merging of interests: in that the object of antagonism is deprived of its subjective demands through the objective specification of the dispute. This seems to me to illuminate the following case especially well. Through modern industry leading to an ongoing interlocking of the most varied trades and perpetually presenting new tasks that belong historically to no existing craft, there is very frequently produced, especially in England, conflicts of competence between vari- ous categories of workers. In the large firms the shipbuilders are always in conflict with the joiners, the tinsmiths with the blacksmiths, the boil- ermakers with the metalworkers, the bricklayers with the tile workers, over for which of them a specific work would be fitting. Each trade immediately stops working if it believes that another one is encroach- ing upon the tasks entitled to it. The irresolvable conflict here is that fixed limitations of subjective rights are presumed to be objects that in their essence are continually in flux. Such conflicts between workers have often severely weakened their position before the entrepreneurs. The latter have a moral advantage, as a result of the workers' internal disputes, as soon as their workers go on strike and thereby do them immeasurable damage, and moreover they have it in their power to threaten every single trade with arbitrarily pushing the work in question off onto another. The economic interest of every trade in not allowing the work to be taken away rests on the fear that the competing worker might do it more cheaply and thereby eventually lower the standard pay scale for that work. It would thus be suggested as one way out that the trade unions might, in consultation with the combined entre- preneurs, set the pay scale for each kind of work and then leave it up to the entrepreneurs to choose which category of worker they want to employ for each existing work; then those left out need not fear any damage to their economic interests in principle. Objectifying the matter of conflict removes the advantage of the entrepreneurs in terms of wage pressure and playing the two parties against one another; even though choosing among the different unions remains with them, the choice is however no longer an advantage. The earlier undifferentiation of the elements of the workforce and of its material conditions has differenti- ated, and while the entrepreneur with regard to the former is still left in the formal situation of the tertius gaudens, the objective establishment the latter has eliminated the chances for its exploitation.
the quantitative conditioning of the group 115
Many of the kinds of strife mentioned here and in the next forma- tion must have contributed to producing or increasing the position of the medieval church among the emerging world powers of the Middle Ages. With the perpetual unrest and strife in the large and small political districts, the one stable power, already equally honored or feared by every party, had to gain an incomparable privilege. Countless times it is in general only the stability of the third party in the changing phases of strife, its unaffectedness by the issues of conflict around which the two parties oscillate up and down, that brings it its predominance and its possibilities of gain. The more violently and especially the longer lasting the conflict of the parties allows their positions to fluctuate, the more superior, respected, and opportunity-rich will steadfastness and persistence, ceteris paribus, shape the position of a third purely as formal fact. There is probably just no greater example of this constellation observed everywhere than the Catholic Church. For the overall char- acterization of the tertius gaudens with regard to all the church's forms, the most notable is the fact that the mere distinction of spiritual ener- gies that it and the others introduce into the relationship belong to the sources of its privileges. What I mentioned previously in general about non-partisans--that they represent more the intellectuality, and those in conflict, however, more the passion and drive--this gives them, where they want to exploit the situation egoistically, a dominating, so to speak, enthroned position at an ideal height and that external advantage that the dispassionate participant possesses amidst every complexity. And even where one spurns the practical exploitation of one's more impartial view and of one's powers, uninvolved from the very beginning but always available, the situation incorporates at least the feeling of a quiet ironic superiority over the parties who exert so much effort in a contest for a prize so unimportant to oneself.
3. Divide et impera. 21 In these combinations of triadic patterns it is a matter of an existing or emerging dispute between two elements from which the third derived advantage; it is time now to consider separately that nuance, although not always in reality defined in this way, where the third deliberately creates the dispute in order to gain a command- ing situation. It is also to be mentioned here in advance that the triad, of course, represents just the smallest number of participants necessary
21 Latin: "Divide and conquer"--ed.
? 116 chapter two
for this formation and thus may serve as the simplest schema. It is here thus a matter of two elements originally united with each other over against a third or dependent on one another, and the third knowing to set the powers united against oneself into activity against one another; the outcome then is that either they hold each other in check so that one can pursue one's advantage undisturbed by the two or they so weaken each other that neither of them is able to mount a resistance to the superior power of the third. I will now characterize several steps on the scale in which one can order the relevant phenomena. The simplest then is where a superior power hinders the unification of elements who are not yet at all striving positively towards such a unification, but who nevertheless could perhaps do it. To this belongs, above all, the legal prohibitions of political associations, both altogether as well as of link- ages between associations that are permitted to exist separately. For the most part there is not any definitively substantiated fear, nor any kind of demonstrable danger to dominating powers from such combinations. Rather the form of association as such is feared because it could possibly incorporate a dangerous content. Pliny the Younger says expressly in his correspondence with Trajan that the Christians are dangerous because they form such a cooperative society; otherwise, however, they are fully harmless. 22 The experience that revolutionary tendencies or even those directed towards change of the existing tendencies must take the form of union of as many interests as possible leads to the logically false but psychologically very understandable converse, that all associations have a tendency to be directed against the powers that be. The prohibition is thus founded, so to speak, on a possibility of the utmost: not only are the combinations, forbidden from the very beginning, merely possible and frequently do not even exist in the desire of those thus kept apart, but the dangers, for the sake of which the interdiction results, would even be just a possibility on the part of the realized combination. In the form of this prohibition against association the divide et impera emerges thus as conceivably the most sublimated prophylaxis of the one element against all eventualities from the combining of others. This preventa- tive form can be immediately replicated formally where the majority, which stands over against the one, consists of the various elements of power of one and the same personality. The Anglo-Norman kingdom took care that the manors in the feudal era were scattered as widely
22 Pliny the Younger, Letter 10, to Trajan--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 117
possible: several of the most powerful vassals were long-established in 17 to 21 shires. Because of this principle of local division the jurisdictions of the crown's vassals could not be consolidated into large sovereign domains as on the continent. So we hear about earlier apportionments of lands among the sons of lords: the portions were to have been laid out as haphazardly as possible in order to forestall complete secession. The idea of the unified state seeks thus to preserve its domination by splitting up every territorial portion which, if it were spatially enclosed, could easily secede.
The prophylactic hindering of association now acts more pointedly of course when a direct striving for the latter exists. Under this schema belongs--indeed complicated with yet other motives--the phenomenon of employers in general adamantly refusing, in wage and other contested issues, to deal with intermediaries who do not belong to their own work force. 23 Thereby they impede not only the workers from strengthening their position through alliance with a personality who has nothing to fear or expect from the employers, but they hamper as well the unified action of the work force of a different enterprise which, for example, is working for thoroughgoing implementation of a single wage scale. While the intermediary is rejected who could concomitantly negoti- ate for several labor groups, the employer prevents the threatening prospect of unified workers; in relation to the existing efforts for such a possibility, this is sensed as so important for their position that busi- ness associations sometimes require of each of their members as a duty under their bylaws this isolation of their work forces in disputes and negotiations. In the history of the English union federations, principally in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, one sees an extraordinary development, as the exploitation of this 'divide'24 by the entrepreneurs was stopped by an impersonal authority. They began, namely, from both sides to attach a validity to the decisions of the impartial arbiter, called in for disputes, beyond the specific case. Consequently there was now, instead of many, just one universal rule over the, albeit still individu- ally led, negotiations of the employers with their own workers, and this is evidently an intermediate step towards the collective bargaining agreement inside the whole industry, inclusive of all interests, in which
23 The German is die Arbeiterschaft, which means "working class" or the "work force"; Simmel seems to be using it here in the sense of a particular craft or the workers associated with a specific industry--ed.
24 In English--ed.
? 118 chapter two
the practice of the 'divide' ceases to exist. Constitutional rulers attempt to go beyond that mere prophylaxis to prevent, by divisions of parlia- ment, the formation of troublesome majorities. I will mention only an example that is of interest principally because of its radicalism. Under George III, the English court engaged in the practice of declaring all party entities as such actually inadmissible and incompatible with the welfare of the state. And through the principle that only the individual person and that person's individual qualification could hold political office; while laws and general directives were described as the specific achievements of that multiplicity, 'men, not measures,' were required. 25 So the practical significance of individuality was played against the actions of majorities, and by somewhat contemptuously identifying the social plural with abstract generality, the dissolution of it into its atoms was sought as allegedly what is alone real and functional.
The division of elements takes on an active form rather than a pro- hibitive wherever the third establishes jealousy between them. By this what is not yet meant are the cases in which the third lets the other two annihilate each other in order establish a new order of things at their expense; rather here it is often a matter of conservative tendencies in that the third wants thereby to preserve already existing prerogatives; so a feared coalition of both the others is hindered by means of jealousy between them from the first signs of its emergence or minimal devel- opment. A special refinement of this technique appears to have been made in a case reported from ancient Peru. It was a general practice of the Incas to divide a newly conquered tribe into two roughly equal halves and to install a director into each of the two, and in fact with a small difference in rank between both. This was actually the most suitable means to elicit between these chieftains a rivalry that would not allow any united action against the rulers on the party of the subservient realms to develop. A position of complete equality as well as one of great difference would more likely result in a unification: the former because then an actual bisecting of the leadership rather than any other relationship would have led to eventual action, and because, where it nevertheless would have been required of the subordination, equal pairs most easily conform to that technical necessity; the latter because with the inequality the leadership of the one would have encountered no resistance. The slight difference in rank allows it least to come to
25 "Men, not measures" in English. Quotation marks added--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 119
an organic and gratifying relationship in the feared unification here because the one with more would have without doubt demanded absolute privilege, the one with less however not being great enough to suggest the same ambition.
The principle of unequal apportionment of anything of value in order to so arouse jealousy as a means of divide et impera is a commonly favored technique, against which certain social conditions once more offer in principle similar protection. The Australian aborigines were stirred up against one another through unequally apportioned offerings in order to govern them more easily. But this always failed because of the communism of the hordes who immediately distributed every gift, no matter who received it, among all the members. Next to jealousy it is mistrust above all that is used as a psychological means for the same purpose, and which, in contrast to the former, renders it possible to restrain even larger crowds from conspiratorial alliances. To its greatest effect, this was used by the Venetian government on the grandest scale through the staged demand to the citizens for denunciation somehow of anyone suspect. No one knew whether one's closest acquaintance was in the service of the state inquisition, and so revolutionary plans, which presuppose mutual trust on the part of a great number of people, were cut off at the root; consequently in later Venetian history open revolt is as good as non-existent.
The most blatant form of divide et impera, the unleashing of actual conflict between two elements, can have its objective in the relation- ship of the third to the two as well as to objectives lying outside them. The latter occurs, for example, where one of the three claimants to an office understands how to incite the other two against one another so that through the gossip and slander each of them puts into circulation about the other, they mutually destroy each other's chances. In all cases of this type the art of the third manifests itself in the magnitude of the distance the third knows to keep from the action being instigated. The more one steers the conflict by pulling on invisible strings, the more one knows how to apply the fire so that it burns further without one's additional involvement and oversight, the more, then, not only will the conflict of the two others be carried on more pointedly and directly to their mutual ruin, but the more also the prize at issue, that held between them, or the objects otherwise desired by the third seem to fall into the third's lap as if by themselves. The Venetians were also masters of this technique. In order to usurp the holdings of nobles on terra firma, they had the means to distribute noble titles to younger people or those
120 chapter two
not of noble birth. The indignation of the older ones and nobles over that always provided an occasion for brawls and breaches of the peace between both parties, whereupon the Venetian government would, all according to legal form, confiscate the holdings of the guilty persons. In precisely such cases, where the uniting together of the divided ele- ments against the common oppressor would be of the most obvious utility, it becomes patently clear that, as a general condition for divide et empera, hostilities do not in any manner require only the collision of real interests for their basis. If only some kind of need for hostility in general, an antagonism that seeks only its object, exists in the soul, it can easily succeed in substituting some other opponent entirely instead of that opponent against whom the animosity would have meaning and purpose. Divide et impera requires of its artist the evocation--through baiting, slander, flattery, arousal of expectations, etc. --of that general condition of excitation and combativeness in which the suggestion of an opponent, not at all really obvious as such, can suffice. In this way the form of conflict can be entirely disengaged from its content and rationale. The third, who would actually benefit from the hostility of the other two, can remain, as it were, invisible between them, so that the collision of the two does not impact the third but occurs recipro- cally between them themselves.
Where the purpose of the third does not lie in an object but in the direct domination over the other two elements, two sociological perspectives are fundamental. 1. Certain elements are formed in such a way that they can be combated successfully only through similarly formed ones. The desire for their subjection finds no immediately suitable point of attack; so it remains only to keep them, so to speak, divided among themselves and divisions involved in a struggle they can conduct with identical weapons until they are sufficiently weakened enough to fall prey to the third. Of England it was said, they could conquer India only through Indians, just as Xerxes had recognized that Greece is best fought through Greeks. Precisely those dependent on one another through the common identity of interests know best one another's weaknesses and points of vulnerability, so that the principle of the similia similibus26--the annihilation of some kind of condition by
26 Latin: "likes with likes," in the sense of "fighting fire with fire" or "it takes one to know one"--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 121
the stimulation of a similar one--can be repeated here to the greatest extent. While one best achieves mutual advancement and unification with a certain measure of qualitative differentiation, because through this there arises completion, coalescence, organically differentiated life--the mutual destruction seems best effected with qualitative similarity, of course apart from so great a quantitative preponderance of power on the part of the one party that the relationship of the qualities becomes of no overall consequence. The whole category of enmities that culmi- nate in sibling conflict derives its radically destructive character just as much from experience and knowledge as from the instincts originating in the root unity which make available to each the weapons that are most deadly against just this opponent. What forms the basis of the relationship of the similar to each other--the knowledge of the external situation and empathy with the inner--that is obviously likewise the means for the deepest injuries that exclude no attack possibility and leads, since it is in its essence mutual, to the most thorough annihila- tion. For this reason the combat of likes through likes, the division of the opponent into two qualitatively homogeneous parties, is one of the most thoroughgoing realizations of the divide et impera. 2. Where it is not possible for oppressors to get their business done exclusively through the sacrifice of the victims themselves, where they must themselves intervene in their struggle, the schema is very simple: they support the one just as long as needed to squash the other, whereupon they then have the other as an easy prey. This support will in any case be at its most functional for the one who is already the stronger. This can take the more negative form of the more powerful being spared by one ele- ment in an oppressing complex of them. So Rome in its subjugation of Greece indeed maintained the most obvious reserve against Athens and Sparta. This tactic must elicit resentment and jealousy on the part of one, arrogance and confidence on the part of the other, a split that makes the prey easygoing for the oppressor. This method of those with the will to rule: to sponsor the stronger of two actually equivalent interests facing them until they have ruined the weaker and then with an about face to confront and to subjugate the one now isolated--this method is no less favored in the founding of empires than in the fisticuffs of street youths, no different in the administration of political parties through a government than in the economic competition among, say, three elements: a very powerful financier or manufacturer and two less significant but troublesome and unequal competitors facing off against
122 chapter two
one another. In this case the first, in order to hinder a countervailing coalition of the other two, enters into a price or production arrange- ment with the stronger of them that secures a considerable advantage for that one and through which the weaker one is crushed. Once this is done, then the powerful one can dump the former confederate and drive the latter, who now has nothing left to fall back on, into the ground through predatory pricing or some other method.
I will proceed to an altogether different type of those sociological formations that are conditioned by the quantitative determination of their elements. In the configurations of two and three, it was a matter of the intra-group life with all its differentiations, syntheses, and antitheses, that unfolds with this minimum or maximum number of members. The question did not involve the group as a whole in its relationship to another or to a larger one of which it is a part, but the intrinsic reciprocal relationship of its components. But now, in contrast, we inquire as to the significance evident in the determination of quantity towards the outside, indeed its most essential function, in that it makes the distribution of a group into subgroups possible. The teleological sense of this is, as already highlighted above, the easier overseeing and directing of the entire group, often a first organization, more cor- rectly: its mechanization; considered purely formally, the possibility is thereby given to guard the formation, character, arrangements of divi- sions of the whole, independent of the quantitative development of the whole itself: The components with which the administration bargains remain qualitatively always the same sociologically, and the increase of the whole changes only their multiplier. This is, for example, the immense benefit of the numerical division of armies; their increase proceeds thereby with relative technical ease, in that it is effected as an ever repeated formation of the numerically and thus organizationally already fixed cadres. This advantage is evidently linked to a numerical determination in general, but not to specific numbers. Meanwhile in this regard one of the number groups already mentioned above became historically of especial importance for social distributions: ten and its derivatives. For this combination of ten members for communal tasks and responsibilities, which appears in many of the most ancient cultures, the number of fingers was without a doubt particularly decisive. With a total lack of arithmetical skill one has in the fingers a first principle of orientation for ascertaining a large number of units, for making their divisions and groupings clear. This general, often enough accentuated meaning of the principle of fives and tens is, however, still utilized espe-
the quantitative conditioning of the group 123
cially for social application: by the fingers having a relatively mutual independence and independent movement, but still being inseparably linked together (in France one says of two friends, ils sont unis comme deux doigts de la main)27 and obtaining their actual sense only in being together--they thereby offer a very apt picture of the social union of individuals. The unity and particular joint effectiveness of those small subgroups of the larger collectivities could not be any more clearly symbolized.
Still most recently the Czech Omladina secret society was constituted according to the principle of five: the very leadership belonged to several "Hands," which consisted of one thumb each, i. e. the uppermost leader and four fingers. 28 How strongly one sensed precisely the number ten as consistently belonging together inside of a larger group is demonstrated perhaps also by the custom reaching back into early antiquity of the decimation of military divisions dur- ing insurgencies, desertions, etc. Precisely ten was simply considered a unity that for purposes of punishment could be represented by an individual; or experience roughly concurs that a ringleader tends to be found on average somewhere among ten. The division of a whole group into ten numerically similar parts, though obviously leading to a completely different result and wholly without a factually practical relation to the division into ten individuals, still seems to me to derive psychologically from this. As the Jews returned from the second exile, 42,360 Jews with their slaves, they were divided in such a way that a dwelling in Jerusalem took a one-in-ten drawn lot; the remaining nine tenths went to rural lands. These were decidedly too few for the capital city, which is why they also had to be equally concerned about an increase in the population of Jerusalem. The power of the principle of ten as a basis for social division seems here to have worked blindly against practical necessity.
27 French: They are united as two fingers of a hand--ed.
28 Seen from another and more general perspective, the division according to the
number of fingers belongs to the typical tendency to use phenomena of available, clearly natural rhythm for these social purposes, at least in name and symbol. A secret political society under Louis Philippe called itself the Seasons. Six members under the leader- ship of a seventh, called Sunday, formed a week, four weeks a month, three months a season, four seasons the highest unit standing under a commander-in-chief. With all the play-like character, this naming activity still probably had a feeling as though one hereby participated in a form of unity replicated from the different components indicated by nature itself. And the mystical coloring, to which secret societies are so inclined, will have favored this symbolic representation with which one could intend to link a power of cosmic design to the designated structure.
? 124 chapter two
The group of a hundred, derived from that principle, is primar- ily and essentially also a means of division, and admittedly the most important historically. I have already mentioned that it became the direct conceptual substitute for division in general, so that it remains the very name for the subgroup even when this contains many fewer or more members. The hundred appears--perhaps most decisively in the great role that it plays in the administration of Anglo-Saxon England--as it were, as the idea of the subgroup in general, whose internal meaning is not altered by its outward incompleteness. Conse- quently it is right to note that the group of a hundred in ancient Peru always with due diligence voluntarily paid their tribute to the Incas, even when they had been reduced to a fourth of their population. The basic sociological reality here is that these communal associations were experienced as entities apart from their members. But now since the tax obligation, it seems, did not apply to the association as such but to its hundred participants--so the assumption of this obligation by the remaining twenty-five shows all the more sharply how necessarily from nature the unity of a hundred was felt more than precisely one hundred. On the other hand it is unavoidable that the division into groups of a hundred penetrates many kinds of organic relationships of elements and aggregates of elements--of the familial, the neighbor, the friendship type--because it always remains a mechanical technical principle, teleologically, not naturally, driven. Occasionally then the decimal division comes close to being more organic: thus the medieval German imperial army is formed according to nationalities; neverthe- less we also hear of a division of the army by thousands, which then had to cut through and prevail over that more natural ordering deter- mined by a terminus a quo. 29 Yet the strong centripetal force that rules the formation into hundreds suggests its meaning is to be sought not only in its purpose of division, which is something external to it and with which it serves the larger encompassing group. Now apart from that, it is found as a matter of fact that the hundred-count of members, purely as such, lends a special significance and dignity to the group. The nobility among the Epizephyrian Locroi30 traced its descent back to noble women from the thusly named "hundred houses" that had been involved in the founding of the colony. By the same token the original
29 Latin: point of origin--ed.
30 An ancient people in the South of Italy--ed.
? the quantitative conditioning of the group 125
settlements by which Rome is supposed to have been founded included a hundred Latin people, a hundred Sabine, and a hundred brought together from various components. The hundred-count of members apparently lends the group a certain style, the precisely delimited strict outline, over against which each somewhat smaller or somewhat larger number appears rather vague and less complete in itself. It has an inner unity and system that make it especially suitable for that construction of myths of origin, a peculiar union of mystical symmetry and rational sense, while all other numbers of members of groups are felt as random, not as holding together from within in the same manner, furthermore not unalterable according to their own structure. The particularly adequate relationship with our categories of understanding, the easy survey of a hundred-count that makes it so suitable as a principle of division, appears here as a reflection of an objective feature of the group that comes directly from its numerical determination.
This qualification just mentioned arises completely from what was discussed up till now. With the combinations of two and three, quantity determined the particular inner life of the group, but it does not do it so much as a quantity; the group does not manifest all those phenomena because it had this size as a whole, but rather it was a matter of the determination of each single element through its interaction with one or with two other elements. It is entirely otherwise with all the derivatives of the finger count: here it was a matter of the basis for synthesis in the easier oversight, organization, manageability, in short, not actually in the group itself, but in the subject who has to deal with it theoretically or practically. A third meaning of the quantity of members is now finally pertinent, in that the group possesses, objectively and as a whole--thus without differentiation of individual positions of the elements--certain characteristics only below or only over a definite amount. Quite gen- erally this was treated already above in the distinction between the large and the small group; now however it is a question whether the characteristics of the whole group come from particular numbers of members--whereby obviously the patterns of interaction among the individuals constitute the real and decisive process; but now they do not constitute the object of inquiry in the singularity of the individuals but their being combined into a picture of the whole. The facts that point to this significance of the quantity of the group belong entirely to a single type: obligations having to meet legal prescriptions concerning the minimum or maximum size of associations that are required for certain functions or rights. The basis for this is evident. The specific qualities,
126 chapter two
the combinations, evolve on the basis of their membership number, and of course what the legal prescriptions about that require would always parallel what is associated with the same number, provided that there were no psychological differences among people and if the workings of a group followed from its size as closely as would the dynamic workings of a material mass in motion. The unavoidable individual differences of the members, however, renders all exact and prior determinations completely illusory: they can allow the same amount of power and rashness, of concentration or decentralization, of self-sufficiency or need for leadership to emerge that appear in circumstances determined by a group at one time, a second time to be sure by one much smaller, a third time by one much greater. However, the legal prescriptions that have those qualities of associations as a basis for regulation cannot technically cope with such oscillations and paralyzations through the random human material, but must specify membership counts as an average to which they link rights and duties of associations. Basically the assumption must be that a certain common spirit, a certain mood, power, tendency would arise among a number of associated people when and only when this number has reached a certain level. Depend- ing on whether this outcome is desired or abhorred, one will demand a minimum number or permit only a maximum. I will first cite some examples only for the latter. In the early Greek era there were legal specifications that the crew of boats should amount to no more than five men, in order to prevent their turning to piracy. Out of fear of the leagues of skilled workers the cities of the Rhineland in 1436 decided that no more than three skilled workers were allowed to go about dressed alike. Generally one most often encounters political prohibi- tions having this intent. Most frequently overall political prohibitions of this sense occur. In 1305 Philip the Fair prohibited all assemblies of more than five persons, whatever estate they were and whatever form they would take. Under the ancient re? gime twenty nobles were not even allowed to join in a discussion without the king specifically granting it. Napoleon III forbade all associations of more than twenty persons not specifically allowed. In England the conventicle act under Charles II made all religious meetings of more than five persons in a house subject to penalty, and the English reaction at the beginning of the nineteenth century forbade all meetings of over fifty persons without notice being given well in advance. During states of siege often no more than three or five people were allowed to gather in the street, and some years
the quantitative conditioning of the group 127
ago the Berlin supreme court decided that an 'assembly' in the legal sense, which would thus require police notification, would hold with the presence from eight persons. Purely in the economic realm this is borne, for example, in the English law of 1708--enacted under the influence of the Bank of England--that the legal associations inside the finance industry were permitted to include no more than six partners. The conviction must be widespread on the part of the governing that only inside of groups of a given size is found the courage or impru- dence, the spirit of venture or contagious impulse to certain actions that one simply prefers not to allow to rise. Most clearly this is the motive behind laws of morality: when the number of participants at a banquet, fellow riders in an elevator, etc. is limited, because experience has shown that in a larger mass the sensual impulses more easily win the upper hand, the infection from the bad example progresses there more rapidly, the feeling of individual responsibility is disabled. The opposite direction, on the same basis, is taken by the regulations that require precisely some minimum number of participants for a specific legal effect. Thus any collective business enterprise in England can be incorporated as soon as it has at least seven partners; thus everywhere the law requires a certain, though extraordinarily varying minimum, number of judges for making a valid judgment, so that for example in many places some panels of judges were simply called the seven. With regard to the former phenomenon, it is assumed that only with this number of partners would there be adequate guarantees and effective solidarities, without which laws of incorporation are a danger to the national economy. In the second example the prescribed minimum number seems then to function in such a way that the errors and extreme opinions of individuals balance one another and thereby the collective opinion would arrive at what is objectively correct. This mini- mum requirement emerges especially strongly in religious formation. The regular gatherings of Buddhist monks of a certain area required the presence of at least four monks for the purpose of religious inculcation and a kind of confession. 31 This number thus made up the synod, as it were, and then everyone had, as a member of the same, some kind of a significance other than an individual monk, which is what he simply
31 Beichte--"Confession" in the sense of the Catholic sacrament of Reconcilia- tion--ed.
? 128 chapter two
was, as long as only about three met. So Jews are always supposed to pray together with at least ten. So, according to the Lockean constitu- tion of North Carolina,32 any given church or religious community is supposed to have been permitted to start if it was comprised of at least seven members. The power, intensity, and stability of the spirit of the religious community is in these cases then anticipated only from a certain number of members reciprocally maintained and increased. Summarizing: where the law specifies a minimum number, trust works in support of the multiplicity and mistrust against the energies of iso- lated individuals; where a maximum number is set, just the opposite, mistrust works against the multiplicity, and is not directed against its individual components.
Now, however, a prohibition may be linked to a maximum or a permission to a minimum--the legislators will have not doubted that the results they fear or desire are on average bound uncertainly and entirely to the established range; but the arbitrariness of the set limit is in any case here unavoidable and justified, just as in determining the age at which someone assumes the rights and duties of adulthood. Certainly the inner capacity for this appears in some earlier, in others later, in no one at the stroke of the minute set by law; however, actual practice can win the established standards that it needs only in so far as it carves a continuous series into two sections at one point for the purposes of the law. The completely different treatment of those sec- tions can find no precise justification in their objective nature. For this reason it is so extraordinarily instructive that in all determinations, for which the examples given above are chosen, the specific character of human beings, over whom the directive applies, enters not at all into consideration, even though it governs every individual case. But it is not something tangible, and only the number as such still holds. And, to express the deep feeling for it prevalent everywhere, it is essential that it would be the crucial factor, if somehow the individual differ- ences would not cancel out their effects, that these effects nevertheless be contained more certainly in the final total phenomenon.
32 The philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) assisted Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, in drawing up a constitution for the North American colonial province of Carolina, 1672-1673--ed.
? CHAPTER THREE DOMINATION AND SUBORDINATION
Broadly speaking, no one is particularly concerned that one's influence might affect the other, but rather that this influence, this affecting of the other, would react back on one, the determining one. For this reason, there is for sure a reciprocal action along with that abstract desire to dominate that is thereby satisfying--that the behavior or suffering, the positive or negative condition of the other, manifests itself to the sub- ject as the product of the subject's will. This so-to-say solipsistic exercise of a dominating power, whose significance for dominant people exists exclusively in the consciousness of one's effectiveness, is indeed primarily a rudimentary sociological form, and on the strength of it there is as little social interaction as between an artist and the artist's sculpture, which nevertheless also acts back on the artist with the consciousness of one's power of creation. Meanwhile the desire to dominate--even in this sublimated form whose practical significance is not actually the exploitation of the other but rather merely the consciousness of its possibility--in no way signifies the most extreme egoistical ruthlessness. Because the desire to dominate wants so very much to break the inner resistance of the subjugated while egoism is concerned only with the outward show of victory, it always has a kind of interest in the other person; the other is a value for that desire. Now where egoism is not immediately a desire to dominate, but instead the other is of absolute indifference for it and is a simple instrument over which one's own purposes takes precedence, even the last shred of mutuality in social interaction is eclipsed. That the absolute exclusion of every specific interest of one party invalidates the concept of society is seen, relatively speaking, in the determination by the lawyers of the late Roman period that the societas leonina is simply no longer to be understood as a social contract. 1 And in the same sense it has been said of the lower workers in the modern giant businesses whose jobs are eliminated by effective
1 Deriving from the fable of the lion entering into a hunting partnership with other animals but keeping the prey to itself, the societas leona was a partnership in which all profits would go to only one of the partners--ed.
? 130 chapter three
? competition in the struggle with other entrepreneurs: the difference in the strategic position between them and their employers is so over- whelming that the work contract simply ceases to be a 'contract' in the usual sense of the word because one is unconditionally at the mercy of the other. In this respect, the moral principle--to never use a person merely as a means--certainly appears as the formula for every social interaction. Where the significance of the one party sinks to a point at which one of the 'I's no longer enters the relationship with any salient influence, one can speak of society as nothing more meaningful than the relationship between the carpenter and the carpenter's bench.
Now the elimination of all spontaneity within a situation of subor- dination is in reality considerably less common than the freely offered popular expressions suggest with such notions as 'coercion,' 'having- no-choice,' 'absolute necessity. ' Even in the most oppressive and cruel relations of subjugation there always yet remains a substantial measure of personal freedom. We do not become conscious of it ourselves only because testing it in such cases requires a sacrifice that we commonly consider entirely unacceptable for us. The 'unlimited' coercion that the cruelest tyrant actually exercises over us is always altogether limited; that is to say, limited so that we want to avoid the threatened punishment or special consequences of the insubordination. Precisely viewed, the relationship of dominance and subordination annihilates the freedom of the subjugated only in the case of direct physical coercion; otherwise it tends simply to demand a price we are not typically inclined to pay for the realization of freedom. It can increasingly narrow the circle of external influences in which it realizes itself, but, except for the use of physical coercion, never to the point of completely disappearing. The moral aspect of this examination is not our concern here, but rather the sociological: social interaction--i. e. , action reciprocally determined and undertaken occurring only from personal positions exists even in those cases of dominance and subordination, and this generates therefore yet another sociological form, in which 'force,' as usually understood, is used by one party to rob the other of every spontaneity and thereby every true 'action' that would be one side of an interaction.
In view of the enormous role of relations of domination and sub- ordination, it is of the greatest importance for the analysis of social existence to be clear about this spontaneity and complicity on the part of the subordinate subject in view of the frequent concealment of them in the more superficial way of looking at things. What one, e. g. , calls 'authority' presupposes in large measure, as is typically recognized, a
domination and subordination 131
? freedom of those subject to the authority; it is, even where it seems to 'crush' them, not based on coercion and pure resignation alone. The peculiar creation of 'authority' that is significant for the life of the community in its varying degrees--rudimentary as well as fully devel- oped, passing as well as durable forms--seems to come about in two kinds of ways. A personality excelling in eminence and power earns, by way of its greater proximity or even greater distance, a faith and trust, a decisive gravity in its judgments, that bears the character of an objective authority; the personality has won a prerogative and axiom- atic trustworthiness for its decisions that towers over the ever variable, relative, critically vulnerable value of subjective personality, at least by comparison. As a person operates 'authoritatively,' the quantity of that person's importance is turned into a new quality, has taken on for its milieu, as it were, the aggregate condition of objectivity. The same thing can occur in reverse: a power transcending the individual--state, church, school, the organizations of family or military--by virtue of its nature invests a single personality with a prestige, a rank, a power of the final-say that would never develop by virtue of someone's own character. 'Authority'--the essence of which is that a person makes decisions with that reliability and command of recognition that befits logically only the transpersonal, objective axiom or deduction--has here devolved, as it were, from above onto a person, while in the former case it grew from the qualities of the person, as by generatio aequivoca. 2 At the point of this conversion and transfer the more-or-less volun- tary faith of those subject to the authority has now manifestly to be brought into action. Since that transformation from the transpersonal to the esteemed personality provides the latter with yet only minimal advantage over the verifiable and rational, it is completed by the ones faithful to authority themselves; it is a sociological event requiring also the spontaneous cooperation of the subjugated people. Indeed, that one experiences an authority as 'oppressive' is itself an indicator of the actually presupposed and never entirely eliminated independence of the other.
Authority is distinguished from that nuance of superiority known as prestige. With prestige, the factor of extra-subjective importance, the identification of a personality with an objective power or norm, is missing. The power of the individual is fully decisive for leadership;
2 Latin: spontaneous generation--ed.
? 132 chapter three
? it remains as such not only consciously, but in contrast to the typical leader who always manifests a certain mixture of personal and addi- tional objective factors, prestige emanates just as much from the purely personal factors as does authority from the objectivity of norms and powers. Although this superiority finds its essence especially in 'enthu- siasm,' in the unquestioning devotion of individuals and masses--more so than in authority whose higher but cooler normative structure leaves room for a critique even by the obedient--it still appears nevertheless as a type of voluntary homage to the superior person. Perhaps, in fact, a deeper freedom of the subject lies in the acknowledgment of author- ity, as in the enchantment felt from the prestige of a prince or a priest, of a military or spiritual leader; nevertheless, for the feeling of the led it is different. We cannot often defend ourselves against authority; the e? lan, however, with which we follow the prestigious individual contains a persistent consciousness of spontaneity. Simply because the devo- tion here applies only to the wholly personal, it appears also to issue only from the ground of personality with its irrepressible memory of freedom. Certainly people endlessly deceive themselves regarding the degree of freedom present in any kind of action because, to be sure, the conscious idea with which we account for that inner reality feels so clear and certain to us; however one interprets freedom, one will be able to say that some degree of it, albeit not the amount believed, exists wherever the feeling and conviction of it exist. 3
Yet a more positive activity persists on the part of the ostensibly merely passive elements in relationships such as these: the speaker before the assembly, the teacher before the class--the one at the head of the group here appears solely to be dominant for the present; nevertheless those who find themselves in such a situation understand the influential and controlling feedback from this mass who appear merely docile and controlled by the leader. And this is not only with regard to moments of immediate opposition. All leaders are also led, just as in countless instances the master of the slave is led by the slaves. "I am their leader,
3 Here--and analogously in many other cases--it does not depend at all on defining the concept of prestige, but rather on establishing the existence of a certain variety of human social interaction, fully indifferently with regard to its label. The presentation merely starts in an expedient manner frequently with the concept that offers the best linguistic fit for the relationship to be uncovered in order generally just to point it out. This gives the appearance of a simple act of definition, not that the substance for a concept should here be found, but rather that an actual content should be described that sometimes has the chance of being covered by an already existing concept.
? domination and subordination 133
? therefore I must follow them," said one of the greatest German party leaders with regard to his following. At its crassest this shows itself with the journalist who offers content and direction for the opinions of a silent multitude, but who, at the same time must thoroughly hear, combine, surmise what then the actual tendencies of the multitude are--what it wishes to hear, what it wants confirmed, with regard to what it desires to be led. While the public is seemingly subject only to the suggestion of the journalist, the journalist is in reality likewise at the mercy of the public. A most complicated interaction, whose spontaneous powers on the two sides indeed possess very different forms, hides itself in this case behind the appearance of the pure superiority of one element over against the passive docility of the other. In personal relationships where the whole content and meaning is allocated exclusively by one party for service to the other party, the full extent of this submission is often tied to that other party itself submitting to the first party, albeit in another stratum of the relationship. Thus Bismarck states his view regarding his relationship to Wilhelm I:
A certain measure of submission is determined by the law, a greater by political conviction; where it goes beyond that, it requires a personal feeling of reciprocity. My attachment had its primary basis in a faithful commitment to royalty; but in the particularity of this case, it is indeed only possible under the influence of a certain reciprocity--between lord and servant.
Hypnotic suggestion, perhaps, offers the most characteristic instance of this type. A prominent hypnotist has emphasized that with every hyp- nosis there occurs an influence, not easy to specify, of the hypnotized on the hypnotist and that without this the effect would not be achieved. Whereas the phenomenon here proffers the unconditional influence by the one and the unconditional being influenced on the other side, this also involves an interaction, an exchange of influences, that turns the pure one-sidedness of dominance and subordination back into a sociological form.
I offer yet again from the legal field several instances of domina- tion and subordination whose seemingly purely one-sided relationship manifests without difficulty the actual presence of interaction. When with absolute despotism sovereigns attach the threat of punishment or the promise of reward to their commands, this means then that they themselves are willing to be bound by their decrees: subordinates shall have the right on their part to require something of them; despots bind themselves by that established punishment, however severe it may be,
134 chapter three
? to not inflict one even more severe. Whether afterwards they actually allow the promised reward or the limitations on punishment to operate or not is another question. The basic idea of the relationship is certainly that the dominating one fully controls the subordinate, yet a claim is guaranteed to the subordinate that the subordinate can assert or even renounce: so that even this most categorical form of relationship would definitely still include some kind of spontaneity for subordinates. In one peculiar permutation, the legitimation of the interaction inside an apparently purely one-sided and most passive subordination becomes effective in one medieval theory of the state: the state is so founded that people would be mutually obliged to submit to one common leader; the ruler--also obviously unlimited--is appointed on the basis of a contract of the vassals among themselves. Here the idea of reciprocity descends from the sovereign relationship--into which the equal sided theories are transferred from the contract between sovereign and people--to the ground of this relationship itself: the duty towards the prince is felt as the very formation, expression, technique of a relationship of mutuality among the individuals of the nation. And when, as with Hobbes, the sovereign, lacking any policy for conflict with the subjects, can be in breach of contract simply because the sovereign did not conclude any kind of contract with them, the counterpart to this is that the subjects, when they revolt against the sovereign, are thereby also not breaking any contract entered into with the sovereign; rather, the contract broken is that that the members of society have concluded among themselves to allow this sovereign to rule. The suppression of the element of mutuality accounts for the observation that the tyranny of the whole over its own members is worse than the tyranny of a prince. For this reason, and by no means only in the realm of politics, the fact that the whole is conscious of its member not as one in opposition to itself but rather as one of its own, included as a part of the whole, often results in a singular ruthlessness towards the member, a ruthlessness altogether different from the personal cruelty of a sovereign. Every formal opposition, even when it comes from substantial subjugation, is an interaction that always in principle includes some restriction on every member and departs from it only in individual exceptions. Where the domination manifests that particular ruthlessness, as in the case of the whole that has its member at its disposal, there is lacking then precisely that opposition whose form contains a spontaneity for both parties and thereby a limitation on both.
domination and subordination 135
? The original Roman concept of law expressed this is quite splendidly. Law demands, according to its pure meaning, a submission that leaves subjects without any kind of room for spontaneity or counteraction. That this was somewhat involved in legislation, indeed, that it yielded to the law currently in force is, for all that, of no importance; in this case it simply disassembled itself into the subject and object of legislation, and the rule of law going from subject to object is not thereby changed in its meaning, so that both co-exist at the same time in one physical person. Nevertheless, the Romans in their concept of law directly indicated an interaction. Law, to wit, means originally contract, though with the meaning that its conditions are established by the proponent, and the other party can accept or reject them only in their entirety. So the lex publica populi romani4 initially states that the king proposed it, the people accepted it. With that, the concept, which appears most definitively to exclude the reality of social interaction, nevertheless indicates it by its linguistic expression. This drives a wedge, as it were, in the preroga- tive of the Roman king that only he is to be permitted to speak to the people. Such a prerogative means to be sure the jealously exclusive unity of his sovereignty--as analogously in Greek antiquity complete democracy marked the right of everyone to speak to the people--but it implies, after all, the recognition of the importance that speech has for the people and that the people themselves thus have. It implies that the people, despite receiving only that one-sided operation, were yet a party to the contract, were indeed kept in reserve as the only party with whom to contract.
With these preliminary remarks only the actual sociological, socially constructing character of domination and subordination would have been shown, especially for the instances in which, instead of a social, there seemed to be a merely mechanical relationship: the position of the subordinated as one of no spontaneity whatsoever, a servicing object or instrument for the one dominating. Surely in several ways these remarks have succeeded at least in making visible, under the one-sided picture of influence, sociologically decisive social interaction.
The types of domination can be categorized, for the present purely superficially, for the sake of discussion, according to a threefold schema: by an individual, by a group, by an objective power, be it social or
4 Latin: public law of the Roman people--ed.
? 136 chapter three
? imaginary. I will now discuss several of the sociological implications of these possibilities.
The subordination of a group under one person leads above all to a very pronounced unification of the group and, to be sure, near uniformity in both of the characteristic forms of this subordination: first, namely, when the group forms with its head an actual inner unity, when the sovereign mobilizes the group's energies in their character- istic orientation, integrating them so that domination means actually only that the will of the group has acquired a unified voice or body. But, second, also when the group feels itself in opposition to its head, forming itself into a society in opposition. With regard to the former case, every survey across the fields of sociology shows immediately the immeasurable advantage of a single head for the concentration and energy-efficient management of the group's powers. I want to cite two substantively very heterogeneous manifestations of common subordination in which it is immediately obvious how indispensable it is for the unity of the whole. It is for this reason that the sociology of religions in principle distinguishes between whether a unification of the individuals of a group occurs in such a way that the shared God as the symbol and the consecration of its collective self, as it were, grows out of this--as is the case in many primitive religions--or whether it is the conception of God in its turn that brings together the otherwise disunited or barely cohering elements into a unity. The extent to which Christendom realized this latter form requires no explanation, not even as individual sects find their special and especially strong bond in the absolutely subjective and mystical relationship to the person of Jesus, which every individual possesses as an individual and, for that matter, fully independently from every other person and from the community. Moreover the claim was made by the Jews: in contrast to the religions developing at the same time, where the relationship is first of all of every companion with every other one and only then is the whole united with the divine principle, the common covenant relationship to the Lord--i. e. , directly concerning everyone--would be perceived there as the actual strength and meaning of the national solidarity. Medieval feudalism frequently had opportunity to duplicate this formal struc- ture based on the immensely interwoven personal dependencies and 'servanthood'--most markedly perhaps in the associations of vassals, bound court and house servants, who stood in a narrow, purely personal relationship to the prince. The associations that these formed had no more substantive basis than the serfs coming from village communities
domination and subordination 137
? on neighboring land; the persons were used for a variety of services, had variously appropriate property, and formed nevertheless narrowly closed associations without the consent of which no one could enter them or could be dismissed from them. They had developed their own family and property law, even possessed among themselves freedom of contract and trade, penalties exacted for violations of the domestic peace--and for this tight unity they had absolutely no other foundation than the identity of the lord whom they served, who represented them outside the land and acted on their behalf in common law proceedings. Just as in the case of religion, subordination is here under an individual power and not, as in many particularly political instances, the result or the expression of an existing organic community or community of interest; rather the domination of one lord is the cause in this case of an arranged solidarity, otherwise not achievable through some special relationship. It is by the way not only the similarity, but also the very dissimilarity in relationship of inferiors to the dominating leader that gives such a characteristic social form its stability. The variation in distance or nearness to that ruling head creates an arrangement that is for that reason no less firm and structured on account of the inner surface of these distances often being jealousy, repulsion, arrogance. The social level of each Indian caste is established according to its relationship to the Brahmin. Would the Brahmin accept a gift from one of their followers? a glass of water from the follower's hand without hesitation? with difficulties? would it be rejected in disgust? That the distinctive rigidity of the caste system binds itself in this manner is thus noteworthy for the present question of form because the mere fact of an absolute head here is determinative as a purely ideal factor for each member and thereby of the totality of their relational structure. That that highest plateau is occupied by a great many individual persons is entirely irrelevant because the sociological form of its impact is here exactly the same as that of the individual person: the relationship to 'the Brahmin' is decisive. So the formal characteristics of subordination under a single person can operate as well with a multiplicity of superior individuals.