No More Learning

The transition from an original organization of a group, based on blood and tribe relationship, into a more mechanical, rational, more political one is often marked by the division of the group that follows according to spatial principles. It is above all national unity that prevails in this. The danger to the state of clan-organization lies precisely in the indifference of its principle against spatial relationship. Solidarity based on kin relationships is entirely supra-spatial according to its motive and thus holds territorially based national unity as something incomprehen- sible. A political organization that is set up on the clan principle must disintegrate after any sizeable growth because each of its subdivisions has within itself too solid, too organic a solidarity all too independent of the common land. The interest of state unity requires, rather, that its subgroups, insofar as they are politically effective, are formed in accord with a principle of non-difference that is thus simply less exclusive than that of family ties. Since it is thereby raised to the same height over all its members, the distance between them, especially as far as they are supra-personal, must be limited in some way; the absoluteness of the mutual exclusion that is proper to the family relationship principle is not compatible with the relatedness of the position of all members of the
18 The phrase, 'not only Jews,' is inserted for clarification--ed.
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? state to one another, whom the state faces simply as a single absolute. Now, the organization of the state according to spatially delimited sectors corresponds most excellently with these requirements. Resistance against the interests of the community, which derives from the particularistic instinct of the self-preservation of groups unified through kinship, is not to be expected from them; they make it possible or necessary for the elements of genetically and qualitatively different kinds, if they are only locally based, still to be politically unified. In short, space as a basis of organization possesses that impartiality and regularity of behavior that makes it a correlate of governmental power with its characteristic behavior just as suitable to all its subjects. The most important example is the reform under Kleisthenes; it succeeded in breaking up the par- ticularistic influence of the aristocratic families in that it divided the whole Attic nation into spatially demarcated phylae and demes as bases of self-administration. Without such conscious intent and hence only in rudimentary arrangements this principle appeared in Israelite society after the invasion of Canaan. While the original constitution was still an aristocratic one despite many economic, social, and religious simi- larities, and while prominent individual clans and leading lineages still dominated the others, now membership by place became important at the expense of family membership. Local communities were formed from the individual families that each settled in a village, and elements that were foreign but belonged to the locality, especially the Canaanites who were to be found; city elders appeared along side family elders. And parallel to this development of the locality principle a series of phenomena indicated how the diffusing quality of the herding way of life gives way to a centralizing tendency: larger cities arose, surrounded by areas and villages that saw their focal point and protection in those cities. Now in the councils of elders the fame of the family is no longer decisive but the ownership of fortunes, which always suggests a political association, especially if the ownership of money begins to predominate, since commerce and the possession of money can achieve extensive power only in a moderately uniformly ordered community. Finally the kingdom appeared, which admittedly did not intervene deeply in the social conditions at first, but in any case centralized tax and military entities and, significant in the present context, divided the land into governorships19 that did not coincide with the old tribal divisions. In
19 Simmel uses the French word gouvernements--ed.
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? an entirely different guise the same theme nevertheless applies at a stage of the development of the English Hundreds. As is well known, these were an ancient Germanic arrangement of military drafts, with physiological units admittedly equalized according to a formula, but in any case of greater psychological closeness and having a greater esprit de corps, units that, it seems to me, had to be first based superficially and schematically as the idea of the population devolved upon the district that had to place one hundred men obligated to serve in the military, in accordance with the settlement. This tendency reached its conclusion at the climax of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, with its efforts at centraliza- tion: now the Hundreds are a geographically separate sub-district, the shires! The central monarchical, organizationally unified character of the Christian Church also appeared in contrast to the particularistic character of paganism in this form: The Christian saints, who performed the function of the old clan deities, no longer protected the familial enti- ties but local communities! The process mentioned above--the linking of inhabitants of flat country to cities--generally makes the form in question available for the development process. For while rural life favors a particular aristocratic existence and hence organization according to family relationships, the city is more inclined to the rationalist and mechanistic form of life. So the crystallization around a city thus suggests mechanical-localizing instead of physiological motives for organization on the one hand, and on the other hand it is obviously of a centralist nature and facilitates the gathering of social forces into unified action. At the beginning of modernity, the Swiss made the transition from the familial constitution to a parochial one with their dependence on efficient cities, while Dithmarchen20 achieved this transition only very imperfectly with many similarities of relationships, and probably lost its freedom around the middle of the sixteenth century on account of the backwardness of its constitution. As with the organization according to the principles of numbers, a mechanizing of social elements expresses itself among those who are internally related according to the principles of space, in contrast to the familial constitutions by which the individual groups have something of an autonomous unity of the living entity. But that characteristic of the parts is the condition for assembling into an extended whole and for the technique of governance that their higher unity exercises over its members.
20 Dithmarschen: a district in Schleswig-Holstein--ed.
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? However, it is not only the political but also the economic organization whose completion often falls apart by divisions by a spatial principle, just as these in other cases are very representative of the lower stages with respect to qualitative and dynamic principles. The differentiation of production in space appears in two typical forms. First, as the elimina- tion of migrant commerce. Not only did merchants wander since the most ancient times, but later the arms smiths and goldsmiths too, then in Germany also the masons, who understood originally foreign stone building here; before the invention of photography, portraitists in the nineteenth century often wandered from city to city in a similar manner. At this stage the demands that a specialized craftsperson from a fixed residential place could satisfy still thus formed no temporal continuity, but the craftsperson had to collect them independently of their spatial locations in order to take sufficient advantage of the craftwork. With the concentration of the population or with the growth of their needs, only the qualitative appeared in place of this, against the spatially bound, driven by need, localized, undifferentiated division of labor: the craftsperson, artist, or merchant sits in a shop or store and from there controls a sphere of customers from a certain radius as much as possible so that the producers of a certain area do not encroach on their preserves. Or the local differentiation occurs, for example already in ancient India, in a way that the representatives of the same craft settle together in a certain city quarter or in villages of craftspeople. Compared to the inorganic and accidental character of the wandering trades, here differentiation by spatial perspective serves the rational organic solidarity of the economy, and indeed as much at its primitive as its developed stages. The second economic form of local differentiation is only found at the latter stages, which sets about with the systematic dividing up of the markets among themselves as a somewhat large-scale cartel. Here it is especially the case that the place of the cartel members bears no necessary spatial relation to their respective market areas. For example, in international cartels customs or currency conditions could very well cause a particular market not to be partitioned for the one nearest to the area, but for producers living very far away. Thus the local division reached the peak of rationalization. For while the place of residence is relatively indifferent for the subjects themselves, in any event not decisive by itself for the configuration, it is now determined by the highest and ultimate point of the whole series of purposes and means, by the ultimate sale to the consumer. Where all preconditions within the teleological sequence have become fully compliant to their final goal, without allowing a determinant of one's own to occur, the
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? structure is so fully rationalized as to be logically imbued with the unity of the goal-oriented thinking. The way the organization achieved this is a local one, determined according to spatial market areas; but now even this spatial differentiation in its turn proceeds according to a purely rational perspective, independent of space.
B. The exercise of governance over people often documents its uniqueness in the special relationship to their spatial territory. We see the sovereignty of territory as an expression of sovereignty over people. The state governs over its territory because it governs all of its inhabitants. Seemingly one can certainly say more exhaustively that, on the contrary, the latter would be the case because the former holds true; since there is no more exceptionless encirclement of a population than those who are within the space itself--as geometrical theorems, just because they apply to space, must be applicable to all objects in space--sovereignty over territory seems to be the first and only adequate cause for the sovereignty over the people within it. Still this territorial sovereignty is an abstraction, a subsequent or anticipatory formula of personal governance in that it means, in addition to governance over the given people of the given places and at whatever places in the ter- ritory these or other people are to be found, they will always be subject in the same way. The idea of territorial sovereignty makes a continuum out of this endlessness of, so to speak, isolated possibilities; it anticipates with the unbroken form of space what can be realized here and there as concrete content. For the function of the state can only always be governing people, and governance over territory in itself would be non- sense. Seen conceptually, this is only the expression and, as a juridical fact, the result of the lack of exceptions by which the state governs the real and possible subjects within its borders. Of course there have been enough historical formations in which a political or individual power owned the ground and thereby derived governance over its inhabitants: as in feudal and patrimonial circumstances in which people are only elements of the land so that the sale of the latter under private law also makes them subjects of the new owner. Thus the Russian baronies in which the so and so many 'souls' belonged to the manor as such; the same theme carries over to a particular field, where the saying cujus regio, ejus religio holds. 21 But in reality governance over people still never
21 Cuius region, eius religio--Latin, "whose territory, that person's religion. " This was the formula for settling what religion would prevail after post-Reformation wars in Europe. It held in effect that the ruler's religion would also be that of the subjects--ed.
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? follows upon the ownership of an area in the same sense as the use of the products of the earth follows from its possession. Rather the asso- ciation between the two must always be first created by special norms or the exercises of powers, i. e. governance over persons must always be a particular purpose, an express intent, not a self-evident jurisdic- tion. But if that is the case, sovereignty over the land as a region of its people is unavoidably something secondary, a technique or a summary expression for personal governance about which alone it is immediately concerned, in contrast to the command over the land for the sake of its produce or other use. In the latter case, the ownership of the land is what is immediately essential, since the fructification obviously fol- lows it. Only the confounding of these two meanings of governance of a district can allow the misjudgment that here the sociological forma- tion determines the notion of space that would determine subservient relations within a group. Thus where, as in feudalism, the utilization of ground under private law is not in the foreground of consciousness, we also find the king described in no way as the king of the land but only of its inhabitants, e. g. in the ancient Semitic kingdom.
Not only the general fact of governance, however, but also its special formations flow into a spatial expression. As a result of the functional centralization that formed the essence of the Roman state, as well as later that of the French and English ones, the Roman Empire up to its end as a territory independent of the city could regard Paris and London in France and England the fixed seats of that centralizing power. The sociological form achieved the most consistent expression in spatiality in the Tibetan theocracy: The capital Lhassa has a large cloister in its city center, to which all the country roads lead and where the seat of government is located. Now on the other hand, the German state could no longer have an actual spatial center at all as the reorganization into a federated kingdom was decided upon after the Carolingians, but only a delicate and personal center. The absence of a fixed capital and the continuous moving about of the king was the spatially logical result of that political structure. The formal character of this association will be emphasized still more strongly with a change of political relationships, simply because it is a change that results in the relocation of the capital. The old condition, be it administrative or merely psychological, is so tightly associated with the capital that the new, more expedient way requires a relocation, and indeed it would not matter, except that it must be some place other than in the former place. Thus the capital was often relocated in the Scandinavian kingdoms as Christianity was
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? introduced, and in the Orient the accession of a new ruler often led to a consequent change in the capital: the spatial projection of the func- tional change. This is precisely the most indicative at the smallest scale because a spatially small relocation does not really amount to the least, but only marks the fact of change in general. Among African tribes, the headquarters is often the only settlement similar to a city, and in order to make the dependence of this structure on the person of the ruler quite perceptible, it is transferred a few kilometers if the ruler is changed. In these cases the city of the ruler seems like a garment that surrounds the ruler's person and only moves along in the same direction as an expansion of his personality itself as a radiation of its importance; the destiny of this city must thus follow that of the ruler. That this localizing of the sovereign power is a relative one, i. e. that it has its meaning in its relationship to the subjects' place of residence, is expressed quite well in a somewhat paradoxical phenomenon that is mentioned in reports on the Bechuana: If the families are dissatisfied with their chieftain, they do not drive him off but for their part leave the village so that it comes about that one morning the chieftain is found completely alone in the village--a negative form of spatial forma- tion that follows from the relationship of governance. In the way that space is concentrated or distributed, how the spatial points are fixed or changed, the sociological forms of relationship of governance congeals, as it were, into clear formations.
C. That social associations are transformed into certain spatial structures is exemplified in everyday life in the family and the club, the regiment and the university, the labor union and the religious community having their fixed locality, their 'house. ' All associations that own a house, as distinctive as their contents may be throughout the world, thereby manifest a common sociological qualitative differ- ence from such, so to speak, free-floating liaisons as friendships or support groups, groups temporarily working together or formed for illegal purposes, political parties and all the social formations seldom spilling over into praxis, that exist in the mere consciousness of com- mon convictions and parallel endeavors. Those larger structures, which admittedly are not as such firmly domiciled, form a third qualitative type within the same sociological category, whose individual elements nevertheless always possess a house: the general army of corps that each has barracks; the church as a union of all like-minded believers, which is subdivided into parishes; families in the broad sense as opposed to their individual households, and countless others. This is certainly
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? only one among many influences under which the physical state of a social interaction is expressed and which in turn helps embody it. But it is important that it be made clear not only that the central solidarity is expressed in so many peripheral points, but that the importance of that solidarity and of these points continually merge into one another: The actual structure of a social formation is in no way determined only by its chief social motive but by a great number of threads and knots within them, by stabilizations and fluctuations that show only gradual differences in effectiveness, that show everything in relationship to the socially decisive: the formation of a oneness from a many.
The community's 'house' is now understood not in the sense of mere property, in the way, as a legal person, it can also possess a second one or a piece of land, but as the locality that is the spatial expression of its social energy, as a place of dwelling or meeting. In this sense it does not actually have the house because it does not come into consideration here as an economically valued object, but that the house represents the thought of the society in that the latter is localized in it. Speech usage indicates that, if a house is named after a family, when church has the meaning as much of the building as the ideal community, when the university, club, or whatever, it manifests the same ambiguity. Along with the term sib, however, the ancient Indian (Sanskrit) word sabha, which originally meant the assembly of the village community, pertained to the community house in which these assemblages took place. The close connection between the union itself and its house appears most decisively in the communities of the unmarried men who appear to represent one of the earliest categorical organizations and are still found now in Micronesia and Melanesia and among some Native Americans and Inuit. 22 That is a community life prior to any family life that in fact excludes no individual activities of individual persons but provides one a common place for eating and sleeping, for play and romance adventures, and even their unmarried ones have their point of contact to form a social unity--to which higher relationships bear hardly any analogy. From this communalization it is obvious that the lodge, the 'manor,' the absolutely indispensable embodiment, this kind of class formation in general cannot occur if it does not achieve its basis, its point of crystallization and visible expression in a common house. Although the comparison of earlier and more developed eras
22 Indianern und Eskimos, as Simmel put it in the terminology of his day--ed.
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? in this respect meets with insurmountable difficulties, it seems to me as though the earlier era with its naive sensuality could have had a more active need compared to the abstract foreign kind to make the solidarity of such communities and their closure against the surround- ing structures explicit through the close unity of a lodge. The common lodge is the means and the material representation of that supra-local contact without which primitive epochs could not conceive of them- selves as having any internal solidarity at all. The common cemetery lies in the same formal setting. While the closest family includes such in its highest interest, the medieval worker associations always asked the Church authorities with whom they were associated for a common cemetery, and ultimately the worship center belonged where the person continually meets with God under the same rubric. The temple is still not only the gathering place of the faithful and hence the result and vehicle of their solidarity, but it is also the safeguard and extension of the fact that the Godhead has a spatial community with the faithful. Therefore, it has also been emphasized for good reason that the cult of pillars and stones that people fixed up is admittedly less poetic and obviously cruder than the worship of a spring or a tree, but that in reality the former includes a more intimate closeness between God and believer. For the deity dwells in the natural object, so to speak, on its own and without regard to the human person, who approaches the deity only subsequently and by chance; but if the deity consents to living in the work of the human hand, an entirely new relationship of the two is established; the human and the divine have each found a common place that needs both factors alike; the sociological relation- ship of the deity and the worshiper, and precisely only this, is invested in a spatial structure.
This sociological unity that generally leads to its localization in a fixed place and structure even appears through a purely gradual increase in its power and closeness to bring it about that those who are part of it are now not permitted to leave this locality. In reality it is reversed: precisely because the group still does not feel that its unity and its inner force over every member is adequately established, it attains an only external bonding. At least the relationship to the locality, as well as its opposite, can arise from two entirely opposed social forces: the liberality by which the modern state allows its citizens to move around, whether in order to distance themselves from it completely or to enjoy the rights of membership even at a distance, demonstrates the height and strength with which its being-for-itself was established over its individual
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? members; in contrast the local diffusion of the family, as opposed to its being permanently centered in the home location, is nevertheless the symptom of the gradual weakening of the family principle. Now by virtue of coercive rules that would bring about the cohesion of the group through the binding of individuals to the environing location as the external vehicle of the group's unity, it is essential that one would create no rule that is not observed on the spot. That is a quite general feature of earlier circumstances, especially in pre-monetary economies, since the capacity for social abstraction, which makes the balance of rights and duties independent of spatial proximity, is still lacking; and the money economy is the effect as well as the cause of that capacity. Insofar as I am referring to the earlier consideration of these same facts from the viewpoint of spatial 'fixedness,' I will give only two instructive examples. The Charter of St. Quentin that Philip Augustus23 granted to that commune in 1195 reveals considerably many urban freedoms, unconditional legislative and taxation rights of the commune, local court, etc. However the citizens are expressly obligated to a regular stay in the city and may stay outside it for only certain specified seasons. And the other: as long as the guilds in Frankfurt were in essence independent of the council, a civil law was not necessary for guild membership. Indeed, whoever left the city could still retain guild privileges. Only since 1377, as the guilds were subject to the Council, could no one be accepted into a guild who had not already been a citizen and whoever surrendered citizenship rights lost at the same time any guild membership. Thus the former case is characteristic since it clearly contrasts the freedom of the commune against the freedom of individuals. While the totality already obtained self determination and internal freedom of movement, one did not know the continuance of this totality apart from securing the bonding of the members to its locality. The second example reveals the power of locality still more strongly as the embodiment of the unity of the group. The unity of the guild, maintained by a mere material motive, is relatively indifferent toward communal unity and thus toward the question of the places of residence of their individual members. But as soon as the more formal-functional, not the social character of the city, is established on a particular individual content over someone, it is immediately crystallized into the requirement of the local connection. The technical-content point of view of the guild is supra-local in itself
23 Philip Augustus II, King of France 1180-1223--ed.
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? and thus in proportion to its governance gives the individual greater freedom of movement than the purely social freedom of city govern- ment; this does not come about as easily as with an abstract unity, but requires the spatial-concrete unity that it realizes through the force of place. From here it is a transitional phenomenon, when the 1192 city law of Brabant indeed demands of the citizens that they swear fidelity to the duke and the city, but allows them to leave unhindered after a stay of a year and a day. Although the actual relationships are not dif- ferent than in the previous type, through this explicit emphasis a new point of view comes into effect: for rights, honor, or protection, which one enjoys by virtue of membership in the community, the individual would owe service in return that is waived in this case through a cer- tain length of residence. The whole as such thereby faces its elements with obligations and grants, as between two parties; the city as a unity achieves a being-for-itself, and to this extent the distance from the indi- viduals becomes greater and the physical-local bond, with which alone the earlier stage realizes its sociological unity, becomes dispensable. And this spatial expression of the relationship between the individual and the group remains the same in meaning when different life conditions of the group as a whole clothe it with the exact opposite appearance. Among nomadic peoples, some Arabs, and the Rekabites who were close to the Israelites, it was legally forbidden to own fields or to build a house. Here just the local establishment of the interests of the individual led to the loss of the association with the migratory nation. Here the life form of spatial disconnection thus expresses the sociological unity, just as the opposite of that does so if it is locally established.
D. Finally the empty space gains a significance as something more empty, in which particular sociological relationships of a negative as well as positive kind are expressed. Thus it is not a matter of the con- sequences of a given spatial interval for interaction in which the latter exists, but of such spatial determinations as consequences of other social conditions. In early times, peoples often had the need for their borders not also immediately being the borders of other peoples, but to have a desert region directly connected to it. Under Caesar Augustus one also sought to secure the imperial border by, for example, depopulating the regions between the Rhine and the limes (boundary forts): Such tribes as the Usipetes and Tenkteri had to resettle, partly, on the left shore and partly move more deeply into interior of the land. While the desert region was still imperial territory, from the time of Nero on there also had to be uninhabited land beyond the Roman boundaries. Thus the
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? Suevi already created earlier a desert around their territory, and the Isarnholt lay between the Danes and the Germans, the Sachsenwald between the Slaves and Germans, etc. Native American tribes too held that an extra stretch of land belonging to no one should lie between any two lands. The need for protection of individual groups is of course the cause of this, and hardly in any other relationship is space used as pure distance, as an expanse lacking in quality. As a rule a weakness or incapacity leads to taking these measures just as it occasionally drives the individual into loneliness. The sociological significance of this is that the defense thus attained will be paid for with the corresponding total relinquishment of the offense, and the idea of the whole being expressed in the saying, "Do nothing to me, I also do nothing to you. " This scheme prevails not only between persons who do not watch each other at all but also remains as a downright, positive, and conscious maxim for countless relationships among those who share all kinds of things with one another, directly occasioning provocations and begin- nings of various frictions. In external effects, this fits in with another general maxim, "As you do to me, I do to you," while internally it is exactly opposite in nature. The latter principle, although the action of the speaking party toward the other would be directed to the other, nevertheless manifests an aggressive quality, at least being prepared for any eventuality. The first principle, in contrast, although it takes the initiative, proves exactly the opposite of the offensive and the pre- paredness insofar as, through one's own laying down of weapons, one wants to allow oneself just the same stance that one allows the other. In multiple cases in which the Maxim, "Do me no harm, I also do you none," determines the conduct; there is nothing purer and clearer than deserted territory that places a border around a group; here the inner tendency is completely embodied in the spatial form.
The principle that is the opposite of the deserted border also rep- resents the opposite stance: quaeque terrae vacuae, eas publicas esse,24 as Tacitus expresses it; this was occasionally asserted by both the ancient Germans and recently by the American settlers with respect to the Native Americans. It openly manifests a fundamental difference in the forms of relationship of two groups, whether the empty area between them should belong to none or potentially to both, insofar as anyone who wants it can take hold of it and thus admittedly will often unleash
24 Latin: Whatever lands are empty are public--ed.
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? conflict, which the other mode wants precisely to avoid. Typically, this difference in form is important. An object's belonging from the outset to neither of the separate parties can be self-consistent as well as develop into a more legal settlement, so that neither should seize it and at the same time either first seizing it would respectively be justified. Purely personal relationships proceed in accordance with this difference already. There often exists between two people an object or area of theoretical or emotional interest that they do not touch as if by tacit agreement, be it because this touching would be painful or because they fear a conflict on account of it. This does in no way always originate from mere sensitivity in feelings, but also from cowardice and weakness. Here people leave a region between themselves, as it were, empty and deserted, while a forceful seizure that does not shun the first shock25 can develop that region for productiveness and new combinations. There- fore, there is an entirely different nuance, wherein it is mutually felt; and therefore a pre-eminence, respect, and a favorable productiveness of it follows the first encroachment upon the avoided territory as the wage of the courageous. In children's play it is likewise observed that any object that is a taboo for all, that rivalry or cooperation over it must not extend, so to speak, to non-public property, in contrast to the things that are held as public property, and the first one who wants, or who succeeds, can seize it. Economically inclined personalities sometimes leave some possibilities unrealized--in the exploitation of workers, the expansion of business lines, the attracting of customers--because they fear an all too violent clash, the increased strength of which they do not feel; while a stronger competitor, abandoning this foregone protec- tion, actualizes any already existing strengths and chances of their area and looks at everything previously not made use of as public property, in the sense that anyone who comes first should take as much from or do as much with it as possible. Finally in the realm of business in general, insofar as it is considered under the category of morality: Since a social organization never has adequate laws and forces at its disposal to constantly force morally wished-for behavior from its members, it relies on them to willingly refrain from exploiting gaps in its laws. A sphere of reserve against what is used by others surrounds the decent person, a sphere of refraining from egoistic practices that the unscru- pulous engage in without further ado, since indeed such practices can
25 Simmel uses the French, choc--ed.
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? be prohibited only through inner moral impulses. Hence the frequent defenselessness of the moral person; one simply does not want to fight with the same weapons and about the same rewards as the rogue who seizes upon all already existing advantages as soon as it can be done without obvious risk. Thus there is among people an ideal vacuum, so to speak, into which the immoral persons enter and from which they profit. The substantive as well as the sociological essence of the whole social sphere is determined according to the extent to which it pushes through the renunciation of egoistic opportunities between individu- als, securing each from the attacks of each, or whether the general behavior is governed according to the slogan: What is not forbidden is allowed. In the endless variety of all these phenomena, such a formal equality in difference within behavioral styles becomes palpable. The contrast between the principle of the border desert and the one that says that the terrain owned by no one would be open to occupation by anyone is thus stripped of its accidental and superficial character, in accordance with the basic idea. It appears as the clear embodiment, as the example realized in space of a typical functional mutuality of relationships between individuals or groups.
The neutrality of uninhabited territory gains an entirely different meaning when it enables the territory to serve a positive purpose: its function that had been up to now that of separation can also become that of connecting. Encounters of peoples that would be impractical on the territory of one or the other can sometimes still take place on the neutral territory, and the permanent form of that will be an unin- habited region belonging to no one, especially in primitive times. For where there are inhabitants, their impartiality and hence the security of each of the parties coming together is never permanently guar- anteed, and above all a mental framework that clings completely to what is physical and concrete cannot probably imagine the neutrality of a territory better than thinking that no one even lived there. From here, where it indicates a shear absence, there is a further way to the neutrality as a general, wholly positive manner of relationships--and thus it will directly cleave to pieces of space--that indeed produces a totally determined possibility of relationships but which are still wholly indifferent by themselves. Out of all the potentialities of life, space is generally the impartiality that has become visible; almost all other con- tents and forms of our environment, through their specific properties, somehow have other meanings and opportunities for one or the other person or party, and only space reveals itself to every existence without
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? any prejudice. Often, the uninhabited terrain belonging to no one, which is simply, so to speak, pure space and nothing more, generally nourishes this neutrality of space for practical utilizations. Thus this is the given place for the economic commerce of primitive groups who actually live in a constant, at best latent state of war and mistrust of one another. Economic commerce as exchange of objective values is indeed a principle of neutrality and of position beyond any factional- ism from the outset; even among Native American tribes who depend on war, the merchants can circulate freely from one to the other. The neutral zone, which can be thought of as nothing else because it is unoccupied, is thus everywhere found to be a correlate of the neutral exchange of merchandise and is especially accentuated, for example, in earliest England.
Here the talk is admittedly of "the boundary place between two or more marks": this would have been recognized as "a neutral territory where men might meet" for commercial exchange "if not on friendly terms, at least without hostility. "26 So, actually, it is a matter here of the boundary at which the meeting takes place, so that none of the parties needs to leave their own territory; but just as we, when we speak of the 'present,' do not mean the exact present, but compose it on this side and on the other side of these simple points out of a piece of the past and a piece of the future, so that the border region for practical activity everywhere could open up a narrower or wider zone or to stretch ourselves to one like that, so that each party, if it crosses the border of its own mark, would still not encroach upon that of the other party. Thus the neutral space is classified as an impor- tant sociological type. Also where two parties always find themselves in conflict, it will be important for their development if each of the parties can meet with the other without entering upon their territory, thus without a supposition either of hostile attack or of surrender. In addition, if there was such a possibility for meeting without one of the two needing to leave one's standpoint, objectification and differentiation are thus introduced, which separate the object of conflict, about which an understanding or commonality is possible in the consciousness of the parties, from those interests that lie beyond it and that bring with them the more raw or impulsive mental states in the hostility. There belong, for example, quite commonly, at the stage of higher inner cul- ture, the personal sides of the individuals with principled antagonisms
26 The words inside the quotation marks appear in English in Simmel's text--ed.
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? and principled personal interests in personal enmity. There belong especially the spheres of sociability, the church, political life, art, and science, insofar as public peace prevails among them, and beginning in fact with their circuit in the intellectual sense up to the localities that are set aside for them. An unforeseeable number of examples show us areas where commerce, meetings, and material contacts of the kind possible between opposed parties, so that the conflict does not come to words, without having to give up the conflict, so that one in fact goes out from the border that otherwise separates us from the opponent, but without crossing over into it, but rather remains beyond this separation. While the empty, unoccupied border area between two tribes functions as a neutral zone for commercial or other traffic, it is the simplest such structure in its purely and most clearly negative character, which serves as a means for this unique differentiated form of relationship among antagonistic elements and in which it is embodied, so that, in the end, empty space itself is revealed as a vehicle and expression of sociologi- cal interaction.
CHAPTER TEN
THE EXPANSION OF THE GROUP AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUALITY1
The themes, around which the inquiries of this book are collected into chapters, have been up to now generally individual concepts in the field of sociology, which have made room for a great variety, and often con- trast, of the historical forms and form types that these concepts present. The summaries required for the practical purpose of classification had an inner rationale only to the extent that the manifestations and reflec- tions generally contained the concept in question: the content of the individual chapters was not laid out in an integrated thesis, the evidence of which grew gradually, but rather in a sum of propositions that were grouped together under their titles. The inquiry that follows now should exemplify another type: it serves the demonstration of a single type, although in many modifications, packages, and mixtures of the context that emerges; not an idea but a statement is their common element. Instead of pursuing a singular abstracted form in the phenomena, in which it may be found and whose content is established by them in no particular order, here a certain correlation and mutually determined development of forms of social interaction will now be discussed.
The individual peculiarity of the personality and the social influences, interests, and relationships by which one is bound to one's social circle manifest a relationship in the course of their two-sided development, which appears as a typical form in the most different temporal and substantive sectors of social reality: that individuality of being and doing increases, in general, to the extent that the social circle surrounding the individual expands. From the many ways in which this expansion occurs and which supports the correlation just highlighted, I mention first those that go on in the proceedings of previously separate circles. If we have two social groups, M and N, that are distinctly different from each other in both their characteristic properties and opposing beliefs, but each of which consists of homogeneous and tightly inter- related elements, a quantitative expansion brings about an increasing
1 A portion of this chapter is taken from my Sozialen Differenzierung, Chapter III.
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differentiation. The originally minimal differences among the individu- als in external and internal structures and activity are intensified through the necessity of earning an ever more contested living through ever more unique means; competition develops in numerical proportion to the specialization of individuals who participate in it. As different as the starting point of this process would have been in M and N, so must these gradually become similar to one another. However, there is only a relatively limited and very slowly multipliable number of essential human formations available. The more of them there are in a group, i. e. the more dissimilar the components of M become from one another and those of N from one another, the more probable it is that an ever growing number of structures will be produced in one group that are similar to those in the other. The deviation on all sides from the norm valid in itself until then for each complex must necessarily produce a similarity of the members of one group to those of the other group-- at first qualitatively or ideally. This will therefore happen, of course, because among the social groups that are still so different, the forms of differentiation are the same or similar: the relationships of simple competition, the uniting of many who are weaker against a stronger, the greedy impulse of individuals, the progression in which individual relations grow once they are established, the attraction or repulsion that appear between individuals on the basis of their qualitative dif- ferentiation, etc. Leaving aside all interest-based connections with respect to content, this process will often lead to real relationships among members of two or more groups, who came to resemble one another in this way. This is observed, for example, with the international sympathy that aristocrats have for one another and that is independent of the specific content of the issues that would otherwise determine attraction and repulsion. In the same way--through specialization inside each individual group that was originally independent of other ones-- sympathies also arise, however, at the other end of the social scale, as was evident with the internationalism of social democracy and how it has been the affective basis of the early skilled worker associations. Once the process of social differentiation has led to the division between high and low, the purely formal fact of a specific social standing brings the members of the most diverse groups who are characterized by it into internal and often also external relationship. With such a differ- entiation of the social group, the urge and inclination will grow, will reach out over its original limits in spatial, economic, and mental rela-
the expansion of the group 623
tionships, and will set in place, next to the initial centripetalism of the individual group, a centrifugal tendency as a bridge to other groups, with a growing individualization and hence the onset of a repulsion of its members. While originally, for example, the spirit of strict equality prevailed in the guilds, which on the one hand limited the individual to that quantity and quality of production that all the others achieved, and on the other hand sought to protect the individual through rules of sale and exchange to prevent being surpassed by others, it was still not possible to maintain this condition of non-differentiation for the long term. The master, made wealthy by some circumstance, no longer wanted to conform to the limits, sell his own product only, have no more than one trading post and a very limited number of assistants, and the like. But while he won his right to all this, in part after sharp conflict, a two-part result had to come about: First the original homo- geneous mass of guild fellows had to differentiate with a growing divi- sion between rich and poor, capitalists and workers. Then, once the principle of equality was so broadly broken so that one could have another one work for him and choose his market freely according to his personal ability and energy, based on his knowledge of circumstances and his calculation of chances, those personal qualities also had to increase with the possibility to develop himself, to promote himself, and to lead to ever sharper specialization and individualization within the brotherhood and ultimately to its breakup. But on the other hand, a major extension beyond the previous market area became possible through this transformation; through the producer and dealer, formerly united in one person, being differentiated from one another, the dealer gained an incomparably freer mobility, and previously impossible commercial connections were realized. Individual freedom and the enlargement of business remain interrelated. Thus is indicated by the co-existence of the guild restrictions and large industrial concerns, as we had it around the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, the necessity of always allowing the large businesses the freedom of production and commerce, which one could or would limit collectiv- istically to the groups of smaller and narrower firms. It was thus in a twofold direction that the development from the narrow homogeneous guild circles set out and would prepare the way for their dissolution in this two-ness: first the individualizing differentiation and then the expanding out, making distant connections. Consequently the differ- entiation of the English guild members into dealers and actual workers
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appears most strikingly in the trades that make 'articles of foreign demand,' such as tanners and tool makers. The division that is inter- woven as a correlate with this expansion does not only involve the content of the work, but also the social control over it. So long as the small primitive group is self sufficient, there is still continuing equality even in a particular technical division of labor, so that each works for the group itself, each activity is socially centripetal. But as soon as the confines of the group are broken up and it enters into the exchange of special products with another one, there arises within it the differen- tiation between those who make products for the foreign market and those who make products for domestic consumption--two wholly opposed directions of inner life. The history of the emancipation of serfs reveals a similar process in this connection, for example in Prus- sia. The hereditarily subservient serfs, as they existed in Prussia up to about 1810, were in a unique intermediate position with respect to the land and the lord; admittedly the land belonged to the lord, but still not in a way that the farm worker did not have certain rights to it. Admittedly, on the other hand, he was subject to forced labor on that land, but worked next to the land assigned to him for his own interest. With the end of serfdom a certain part of his previously too limited rights to owned land was converted into full and free property, and the noble of the estate was dependent on wage laborers who were now recruited mostly from the owners of smaller properties bought from him. Thus while under the earlier condition the farmer joined in him- self the partial qualities of owner and worker for an outside interest, he now appeared sharply differentiated: one part became a pure owner, the other a pure worker. But with the free movement of persons thus started, the establishment of more distant relationships was elicited; thus not only did the lifting of an external bond to the soil come into consideration, but also the status of the worker as such, who is soon employed everywhere; on the other hand, it made the alienation of free property by sale and thus commercial relationships, resettlements, etc. , possible. Thus the observation set forth in the first statement is justified: Differentiation and individualization loosen the bond to the closest in order to create a new one--real or ideal--with the more distant.
A relationship fully corresponding to this is found in the world of animals and plants. With our domesticated animals (and the same holds for agricultural plant species) it is to be noted that the indi- viduals of the same subspecies differ from one another more sharply
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than is the case with the individuals of a corresponding species in the wild; but in contrast, the species of a family are closer to one another as wholes than is the case with uncultivated species. The increasing formation through breeding thus produces on the one hand a starker appearance of individuality within the same species, and on the other hand an approach toward the distant, a progression going beyond the originally homogeneous group of a similarity to a greater universality. And it is completely in accord with this if it is made certain for us that the domesticated animals of uncivilized people bear the character of a particular species much more than do the varieties maintained among civilized people; for they have not yet come to the point of training that diminishes the differences of the subgroups with more extended taming while increasing that of the individuals. And here the develop- ment of animals corresponds to that of their masters: In accord with the picture of primitive cultural conditions that we tend to make for ourselves (here the idea can remain in a certain ambiguity without harm), the individuals of the tribes have a greater qualitative similarity and a more solid practical unity; the tribes as totalities face one another as strangers and hostile: the closer the synthesis within each tribe, the more severe the antithesis toward the foreign tribe. With the progress of culture, the differentiation among individuals grows and the resemblance with the foreign tribe increases. An Englishman who had lived many years in India told me that it would be impossible for a European to come any closer to someone born there where castes might exist, but where no caste divisions prevailed, it would be easy. The closed nature of the caste, through such a clear homogeneity within as well as a clear line of separation from above and below, evidently prevents the development of what one must call the human-in-general and what makes a relationship with the foreign race possible.
It is completely in keeping with this that the broadly uncultivated masses of one civilized people are more homogeneous among them- selves as opposed to those of another people who are distinguished by sharper characteristics than both are among the cultivated people of both groups. Within the culture, that synthesis-antithesis relationship is repeated when the ancient German guild system set about binding the guild fellows very closely together in order to set the guild communi- ties strictly apart. The modern association, the goal-oriented group, in contrast, binds the fellows together only so much and imposes an equality on them only to the degree that its firmly re-written pur- pose requires and leaves them complete freedom in other matters and
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tolerates every individuality and heterogeneity of their general per- sonalities; but in exchange, it strives for a comprehensive union of all associations through the intricate division of labor, the leveling through a legal equality and money economy, and the solidarity of interests in the national economy. In these examples is indicated what the course of inquiry will make manifest everywhere: that the non-individuation of members in the narrower circle and the differentiation of members in the wider is manifest in the groups that coexist side-by-side, just as in the sequence of stages through which the development of a single group undergoes.
The basic idea may be turned into the generalization that in every person, all things being equal, there exists an invariant proportion, as it were, between the individual and the social that only changes form: The narrower the circle is to which we are committed, the lesser freedom of individuality we have. Thus this very circle is something individual; it cuts itself off just because it is smaller, with a sharper boundary, in relation to the others. And correspondingly: If the circle in which we act and to which we maintain our interest broadens, there is thus more room in it for the development of our individuality; but as parts of this whole we have less uniqueness, this whole as a social group is less individual. It is therefore not only the relative smallness and closeness of the community but also, or above all, its individualistic coloration to which the leveling of its individuals corresponds. Or put into a short formula: The elements of a differentiated circle are undifferentiated, and those of an undifferentiated circle differentiated. Of course, this is no sociological 'law of nature' but only, so to speak, a phenomenologi- cal formula that is intended to conceptualize the usual succession of courses of events that usually occur together; it indicates no cause of the phenomena, but the phenomenon whose entire underlying general association is represented in every individual case as the outcome of very diverse causes, although they represent in their combination the same formative forces of unconnected causes.
The first aspect of these linkages--the non-differentiation among the members of differentiated groups--portrays in a way the social pattern of Quakerism, which leads back precisely to the innermost motivations. As a whole, as a religious principle of the most extreme individualism and subjectivism, it binds the members of the community to the most uniform and democratic kind of life and existence, eliminating all individual differences as much as possible; however, it thus lacks any understanding of higher governmental unity and its purposes, so that
the expansion of the group 627
the individuality of the smaller group on the one hand excludes that of the individuals, while on the other it excludes commitment to the large group. And now this is represented in the individual this way: in what is a community matter, in worship gatherings, each is allowed to step up as a preacher, speak what and when one pleases; in contrast, the community watches over personal matters, so that, for example, no marriage takes place without the consent of a committee established for inquiring into the case. Thus they are individual only in what is common, but socially bound in what is individual. Both sides of that form are exemplified in the differences between the political forma- tions of the northern and southern states of the United States, and in fact most clearly in the time before the Civil War. From the outset, the New England states in North America had a strongly local social trait; they formed 'townships' with a particular bond of the individual to the duties toward the whole, while this whole was comparatively very small but very independent. In contrast the southern states, settled more by individual adventurers who had no particular inclination toward 'local self-government,' very soon formed very extensive 'coun- ties' as administrative units; indeed the actual political importance for them lies in the state as a whole, while a New England state is merely a 'combination of towns. ' The more abstract, more colorless general state formation that joined them together corresponded to the more independent, almost anarchic, inclinations of the individual personali- ties of the South, while the more strictly regulated personalities of the North were inclined toward the cultivation of narrower urban cultures that possessed, however, quite strong individual coloration and autono- mous characteristics.
One could speak, with all the above-mentioned reservations, of a quota of the tendency toward individualization and one toward non- differentiation that is determined by the personal, historical, and social environment and that remains the same, whether it is brought to frui- tion by the purely personal formation or by the social community to which the personality belongs. We lead, so to speak, a double or, if one will, halved existence: one time as an individual inside the social circle, with a perceptible separation from its other members, but then also as a member of this circle, in disengagement from what does not belong to it. Now if a need for individualization as well as a need for its opposite lives in us at all, it may be realized on both sides of our existence. For the plus in the satisfaction that something of the instinct for differentiation gains in the sense of the personality, as opposed to
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the membership in the group, becomes a minus corresponding to the differentiation of the personality itself that gains the same quality in being united with its group members as a purely social being; i. e. , the increased individualization within the group goes hand in hand with a reduced individualization of the group itself, and vice-versa, if a par- ticular amount of instinct is to be satisfied. As a Frenchman remarked concerning the desire for clubs in Germany,
c'est elle qui habitue l'Allemand d'une part a` ne pas compter uniquement sur l'Etat; d'autre part a` ne pas compter uniquement avec lui-me^me. Elle l'empe^che de s'enfermer dans ses inte? re^ts particuliers et de s'en remettre a` l'Etat de tous les inte? re^ts ge? ne? raux. 2
It is also implied in this negative form of expression that there is a tendency toward the most general and one toward the most individual, but that both are not satisfied here by being differentiated into radi- cally separated special structures; the club, however, would represent a mediator that is adequate for the dualistic quantum of instinct that exists in a certain amalgamation.
This is used as a heuristic principle (i. e. , not thereby portraying the actual causes of phenomena but only claiming: they occur as though such a twofold instinct dominated them and would counterbalance its realization in the separate sides of our nature); thus we have therein a most general norm according to which the different magnitudes of social groups only offer the chance of the most frequent opportunity; meanwhile that opportunity is realized by other circumstances. Thus we notice in certain circles, for example, indeed perhaps among peoples, an extravagant, exaggerated, capricious impulsivity; even a slavish bondage, to fashion is very prevalent. The madness that one person perpetrates is mimicked robotically by all the others. Others, in contrast, with a more sober and soldierly patterned form of life that is not on the whole nearly as colorful, nevertheless have a much stronger instinct for individuality and distinguish themselves within their uniform and simple lifestyle much more sharply and clearly from one another than those who lead a colorful and unsteady lifestyle. Thus the whole has a very individual character on the one hand, but its parts are very
2 French: "This is what accustoms the German not to rely only on the state on the one hand, and on the other hand not to rely only on oneself. It keeps one from being enclosed in one's own particular interests and leaving all general interests to the state"--ed.
? the expansion of the group 629
similar to one another; on the other hand the whole is less colorful, less given to an extreme, but its parts are markedly differentiated from one another. As a form of social life, fashion is already in and of itself an eminent case of this correlation. The adornment and accentuation that it confers on the person nevertheless comes to the latter only as a member of a class that stands out as a whole from other classes through adopting the new fashion (as soon as the fashion has come down to these others, it will be abandoned by the person for whom a new one arises); the spread of the fashion means the inward leveling of the class and its elevation over all others. Meanwhile, for the moment, here it depends principally on the correlation that is associated with the scope of the social circle and tends to link the freedom of the group to the individual's being tied down; the coexistence of being communally tied down with political freedom, as we find in the Russian constitution of the pre-czarist era, provides a good example of this. Especially in the epoch of the Mongolian war, there was a great number of territorial units in Russia, principalities, cities, and village communities that were held together with one another by no unitary state bond and thus in general enjoyed great political freedom; but in turn the individual's being tied down to the local community was the narrowest thinkable, so much so that no private property existed at all in earth and soil, but only the commune owned these. The lack of binding relationships with a wider political circle corresponds to being narrowly enclosed in the circle of the community, which denies the individual any personal property, and often, certainly, personal mobility as well. Bismarck once said that a more restrictive provincialism prevailed in a French city of 200,000 inhabitants than in a German one of 10,000, and gave as a reason for this that Germany consisted of a large number of small states. Evidently the rather large state allows the commune a mental independence and insularity, and when, at a minimum, relatively small community feels like a totality, every assessment of minutiae must take place, which is just provincialism. In a smaller state the commune can feel more like a part of a whole; it is not so self-sufficient, does not have so much individuality, and therefore, more readily escapes that internally oppressive leveling of the individual, the result of which, according to our psychological sensitivity toward differences, must be a mental aware- ness of the smallest and pettiest goings-on and interests. As a rule one can protect individuality in only two ways within a narrow social circle: either by leading it (hence strong individuals sometimes like to be 'the foremost person in the village') or by existing in it only superficially,
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but in essence keeping independent of it. But this is only possible either through a great strength of character or through eccentricity, since precisely that stands out particularly frequently in small towns.
The circles of social interests surround us concentrically: the more closely they enclose us, the smaller they must be. But now the person is never a purely collective being and never a purely individual one; of course it is a matter here, therefore, of only a 'more' or a 'less,' and only particular aspects and determinants of existence, in which the development of a prevalence of the 'more' is manifest in a prevalence of the 'less,' and vice-versa. And this development will be able to have stages in which the affiliations to the small as well as the larger social circles appear next to one another in a characteristic sequence. Thus while commitment to a narrower circle is less favorable in general for the survival of individuality as such than its existence in the largest possible generality, it is psychologically still to be noted that within a very large cultural community the membership in a family promotes individualization. The individual is not able to escape the whole; only insofar as one yields a portion of one's absolute 'I' to a few others and is joined together with them, can one still maintain the feeling of indi- viduality and, in fact, do so without an exaggerated insularity, bitterness, and strangeness. Even while one expands one's personality and interests around those of a series of other persons, one is also set against the rest of the whole in a, so to speak, broader mass. Admittedly wide latitude is allowed for individuality in the sense of eccentricity and the unusual of every kind by a family-less life in a wide circle of wider playing field; but for differentiation, which then benefits the greatest whole and emerges from the strength but not from the lack of resistance against one-sided instincts--for this membership in a narrower circle inside the widest is often of benefit, admittedly often only as a preparation and transition. The family, whose meaning at first is one of Realpolitik and with cultural progress is increasingly one of ideal-psychology, on the one hand offers its members as an individual collectivity a provisional differentiation, at least in the sense of absolute individuality, and on the other hand it offers it a protective area within which individuality can develop, until it is ready for the widest universality. Membership in a family in higher cultures represents a blending of the characteristic importance of the narrow and wider social group where the rights of individuality and of the widest circle are asserted simultaneously. With respect to the animal world, the entirely similar observation was made already, that the inclination toward forming families stands in inverse relationship to
the expansion of the group 631
the formation of larger groups; the monogamous and even polygamous relationship has such an exclusivity; the care for the offspring preoccu- pies the elders so much, that the formation of broader societies suffers because of that among those kinds of animal. Thus organized groups are relatively rare among birds, while wild dogs, for example, among which complete sexual promiscuity and mutual distance between the sexes after the act prevail, mostly live in closely united packs; among the mammals, among which both familial and social instincts prevail, we always notice that in times of the dominance of these instincts, thus during the time of mating and reproduction, the social ones decrease significantly. Also the narrower the union of the parents and children in a family is, the smaller the number of children; I will mention only the instructive example that within the classes of fish whose offspring are left completely to themselves, the eggs are cast off by the millions, while the brooding and nesting fish, among whom the beginnings of familial unity are thus found, produce only a few eggs. This is why it has been asserted that social relationships among the animals did not evolve out of marital or parental relations but only sibling-like ones, since the latter allowed the individual much greater freedom than the former, and they therefore dispose the individual to join tightly in the larger circle that is offered right away among the siblings, so that being enclosed in an animal family was considered the greatest hindrance to an association with a larger animal society.
That unique twofold social role of the family--one to be an expansion of the individual personality, an entity in which one feels one's own blood coursing and appears closed off from all other social entities and enclosing us as a member, but then to represent a complex in which the individual is set off from all others and forms a selfhood over against an object--this twofold role inevitably causes a sociological ambigu- ity in the family; it allows the family to seem like a unified structure that acts like an individual, and thus assumes a characteristic position in larger and largest circles as soon as a middle circle appears that is inserted between the individual and the large circle positioned around it. The evolution of the family, at least as still seems recognizable in a series of points, repeats the pattern within itself, according to which it appears first as the enclosing circle that separates the life-periphery of its individuals, but itself is of greater independence and unity; but then contracts into a narrower formation and thus becomes suitable to play the role of the individual in social circles considerably widened beyond that first one. As the matriarchal family was supplanted by the sway
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of male power, it was not at first so much the fact of procreation by the father that represented the family as one, but rather the dominance that he exercised over a particular number of people, under which were found and united under a single reign not only his offspring but people adopted, purchased, in-laws, their whole families, etc. The more recent family of pure blood relationship, in which parents and children form an independent household, differentiated out from this original patriarchal family later. Of course this was with far smaller and more individual a character than the expansive patriarchal family. That older group could be self-sufficient, if need be, both in maintaining itself and in military activity; but if it once individualized in small families, the uniting of the latter into a now expanded group, the supra-familial community of the state, was now possible and necessary. The platonic ideal state only extended this developmental trend since it suspended the family altogether and instead of this middle structure allowed only the individual to exist on the one hand and the state on the other.
Incidentally it is a typical difficulty with sociological inquiry, which finds in that twofold role of the family its clearest example where a larger and a smaller group do not confront each other simply so that the position of the individual in them is allowed to be compared with- out further ado; but where several ever widening circles build on one another, there the relationship can be visibly altered, insofar as a circle can be the wider one relative to a narrower one, and the narrower one can be wider relative to a third. Within the largest, still generally effective circles around us, all circles involved with it have this double meaning: they function on the one hand as unions of an individual character, often directly as social individualities, and on the other hand they function in accord with their being elements of a complex of a higher order, which perhaps still include in themselves beyond their individuals further complexes of a lower order. It is always precisely the intermediate structure that manifests the relationship in question--inner cohesion, outer repulsion--with regard to the more general higher structure and the more individual deeper one. The latter is a relative individual in relation to those just as it is a collective structure in rela- tionship to still other ones. So where, as here, the normal correlation is sought among three stages described by their size--the primary individual member, the narrower circle, and the wider one--there possibly one and the same complex will be able to play all three roles under the circumstances, according to the relationship into which it enters. This does not thoroughly reduce the hermeneutic value of stat-
the expansion of the group 633
ing this correlation, but on the contrary provides its formal character to be accessible in every substantive particularity.
Of course there are enough social configurations in which the value of individuality and the need for it sharpens exclusively for the indi- vidual person, where each complex of several brings these features to the fore under all circumstances as the principal other authority. But on the other hand, it was already shown, however, that the meaning and instinct of individuality never stops at the boundary of the indi- vidual person, that it is something more general, more a matter of form, that can apply to a group as a whole and to individuals precisely as members of it, as soon as there is only something more extensive, something confronting it toward which the collective structure--now relatively individual--can be something conscious for itself and can gain its singular or indivisible character. Thus the phenomena that seem to contradict the correlation asserted here are explained as the following from the history of the United States. The anti-federalist party (which was first called the Republican), then the Whigs, and then the Demo- cratic Party defended the independence and sovereignty of the states at the expense of the centralizing and national regime--but always with an appeal to the principle of individual freedom, the noninvolve- ment of the whole in the affairs of the individual. Individual freedom from precisely the relatively large circle is not thereby an occasion for a contradiction of the relationship, since the feeling of individuality here had penetrated the narrower circle that also encloses many individuals; these latter thus exercised the same sociological function here as single individuals do otherwise.
The boundary between the spheres that the instinct for individual- ity meets and the ones that this same instinct needs is thus not fixed in principle because it can extend from the position of the person to an indeterminant number of concentric structures around the person; one time its strength appears in any one sphere filled by it defining a neighboring one instantly as other and anti-individualistic, and at another time precisely by the need for separation not appearing so quickly and the neighboring sphere also still being of an individualistic shade. The political attitude of the Italians, for example, is on the whole regionalistic: Every province, often enough every city, is extraordinarily jealous of its uniqueness and freedom, often under a complete con- trast against another and completely unconcerned with the value and right of the whole. Apparently, in accord with our general formula, it would have to be concluded that the members inside these separate
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individualized sectors would be attuned collectivistically toward one another and toward equalization. But this is not the case at all; on the contrary the families among themselves and then again the individuals among themselves are driven by an extreme independent and separat- ist force. Here, as in the American case, there are, however, the three layers of our correlation: the single individual, smaller circles of them, and a large all-encompassing group. But there is no cause for that characteristic relationship between the first level and the third under a common contrast against the second, since this second becomes in practical consciousness an aspect of the first. Here the feeling of indi- viduality has exceeded, as it were, the dimensions of the individual and has taken with it that social side of the individual that as a rule is constituted for the individual as the non-self.
Now the fact that the first and the third members in the three-member structure in general point to one another and form a common anti- thesis--in all the most different meanings of this word--to the middle member is revealed no less in the relationships of the subjects to those levels than in the objective relationships. An individual's personally ardent commitment tends to be aimed at the narrowest and widest circles, but not at the middle one. Perhaps, anyone who is devoted to a family will also be devoted to a fatherland, perhaps also to a completely general idea such as 'humanity' and the demands associated with a concept of it, perhaps also to a city and its honor in times when 'the city' constituted the widest practical circle of life. But for intermediary structures it will hardly occur either for a province or for a voluntary association; it may happen for one person or for very few who com- prise a family circle, and then again for a very great number--but, for the sake of a hundred people hardly anyone becomes a martyr. The psychological meaning of the purely spatial 'nearby and distant' coincides completely with the metaphorical meaning of it if it places the entirety of the 'nearby' and the entirety of the 'distant' precisely under a category that is the same in practice. On the one hand, the innermost interest of the heart is linked to that person whom we con- tinuously have in view and to whom our daily life is bound, and on the other hand is linked to someone from whom a wide insurmount- able distance separates us, stirred up just as much by an unsatisfied longing for someone, while a relative coolness, a lesser stirring up of the consciousness, occurs for someone who is admittedly not so near but still also not insuperably distant. The exact same form is realized
the expansion of the group 635 by the fact observed by a noted authority on North America, that the
county there has little importance:
. . . it is too large for the personal interest of the citizens: that goes to the township. It is too small to have traditions which command the respect or touch the affections of its inhabitants: these belong to the state. 3
This 'meeting of the extremes' also holds for negative preferences. The Indian caste is endogamous; but within it there is again a very narrow circle in which marriage is prohibited. Thus the possibility of marriage exists here--and elsewhere still very frequently, indeed, in a certain sense maybe always, at least for the holding of weddings--only in the narrower circle: It is excluded in both the widest and the narrowest. And now this pattern of correlation is manifest once more in historical succession: The power and scope with which the guild once controlled the individual is now no longer valid for this type of circle, but on the one hand is valid for only the narrower circle of the family, and on the other for the wider circle of the state.
That the most individual and broadest formations, relatively speak- ing, relate to one another that way, as it were over the head of the middle formation--that is the underpinning, achieved at this point, of the fact, evident in the preceding and in the following, that the large circle favors individual freedom and the smaller limits it. The idea of individual freedom covers all kinds of things, through the variety of meanings of our differentiated provinces of interest, from, for example, the freedom of choosing a spouse to the freedom of economic initiative. I will cite an example for precisely each of these two. In times of rigid group separation into clans, families, occupational and birth strata, castes, etc. , there tended to be only a relatively narrow circle available in which the man or wife could marry, compared to the advanced or liberal situation. But as far as we can examine these circumstances and make judgments with certain analogies with the present, the choice of the individuals was not difficult at all; it corresponded to the lesser differentiation of persons and marital circumstances that the individual man could be matched by external propriety without much specific internal direction and exclusivity by both sides, matched with almost any girl from the relevant circle. Advanced culture altered this situation
3 Simmel is quoting James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (1888), Vol. I, Part II, Ch. 49, section v (Reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995)--ed.
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in two ways. The circle of potential spouses has widened extraordinarily through the mixing of strata, the elimination of religious barriers, the reduction of parental authority, freer movement in both the local and social senses, etc. But in turn the individual selection is a much more restricted one; the reality and direction of the wholly personal inclina- tion, the consciousness that among all persons these two are meant for one another and only for one another--this became a shocking devel- opment even for the business class of the eighteenth century. A deeper meaning of freedom arises here: Individual freedom means freedom that is limited by individuality. A uniqueness of a being corresponding to the individual arises out of the uniqueness of that individual's nature, which can fulfill and free the individual. The correlate of the clarity of the individual's needs is that there would be a largest possible circle of possible objects of choice; because the more individual are the wishes and inner necessities, the more unlikely it is that they will find their satisfaction in one narrowly bounded area. In the earlier situation, in contrast, there was much less limitation from the fixed nature of per- sonalities: The individual was much freer from himself concerning what choice one wished to make, since instead of a decisive differentiation there was a rough equivalence of all the choices under consideration; so the circle of these potential choices did not need to be considerably great. Thus admittedly the relatively undeveloped situation socially hemmed in the individual, but with this was joined the negative free- dom of non-differentiation, that liberum arbitrium4 given by the shear equivalency of the possible selections; under more advanced conditions; on the contrary, the social possibilities are much expanded, but they are limited by the positive meaning of freedom, in which every selection is, or at least ideally should be, the clearly determined expression of a unique kind of personality. And now in the general societal meaning of freedom: Feudalism produced nothing but narrow circles that bound one individual to another and limited the one with the duty toward the other. Therefore under the feudal system there was room neither for national enthusiasm or public spirit nor for individual entrepreneur- ialism or private industriousness; the same relationships that did not allow at the highest level the formation of a cultural unity of a social kind hindered the exercise of individual freedom at the lower level.
4 Latin: free choice The term was used historically in theological arguments about the human ability to do good, but commonly translated rather inaccurately as free will.
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But precisely because of that it remains thoroughly relevant and deeply delineated in concept if the 'free' person in the feudal era is one who stands under the law of the land, i. e. under the law of the widest circle; one who is bound, unfree, belongs to a feudal body, i. e. one's right derives from this narrower circle and in exclusion of the wider one. Now if freedom swings also to the extreme and if, as I indicated above, the largest group allows for an extreme education or miseducation of individualism, misanthropic isolation, grotesque and moody forms of life, it creates greater room for the crassly selfish way of life; this is still only the consequence of the wider group making fewer claims on us, being less concerned about the individual, and thus hinders less the outgrowth of the most perverse instincts than the smaller circle does. Here the size of the circle carries some blame, and it is a matter more of developments, so to speak, outside than inside the group; the larger group gives the members greater potential for these developments than does the smaller one.
In general, the meaning of individuality diverges in two directions; one is the one laid out above, the freedom and responsibility for one- self that suits the person in broad and turbulent social environments, while the smaller group is a 'narrow' one in a double sense--not only in its reach but in the restriction that it places on the individual, the control that it exercises over one, the small range of opportunities and changes that it allows one. The other meaning of individuality, however, is the qualitative: that each individual is separated from others, that one's being and activity with regard to form or content or both suits only that person and that this being different has a positive meaning and value for one's life. The formulations that the principle or ideal of individualism has undergone in modern times differ according to the emphasis placed on its first and second meanings. In general, the eighteenth century strove for individuality under the form of freedom, the emancipation of personal abilities from impositions of any kind, communal or ecclesiastical, political or economic. But nevertheless the assumption was valid that individuals freed from all socio-historical bonds would seem essentially the same, that 'the human as such,' with all the qualities and perfections of human nature, would be contained in every person and would need to be freed from every bond that deforms and misleads. The fact that people, as soon as they gain free- dom, use it in order to differentiate themselves, to dominate or to be enslaved, to be better or worse than others, in short to develop every difference of individual potential--this escaped that individualism for
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which 'freedom and equality' were two peacefully compatible, indeed mutually necessary values.