No More Learning

The rule of the Sultan over subjects lacking rights; that of the English king over a people who rose up just 150 years later against King John; that of the Roman emperor, who was actually the presider over the more or less autonomous communities comprising the realm--all these governance- by-one are unique at the top as well as at the 'leveling' of the subjects that corresponds to it. And still the live motif of this correlation is com-
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? mon to them; the borderless distinctiveness of the immediate material phenomena still makes room for the same ideal line with which that correlation, admittedly a scientific abstract depiction in its purity and standardization, is drawn among them.
The same tendency of domination by means of leveling is clothed in phenomena of directly clashing surfaces. It is typical behavior when Philip the Good of Burgundy10 endeavored to suppress the freedom of the Dutch cities, but at the same time provided many individual corporations with very extensive privileges. Since these legal differences originated expressly from the free discretion on the part of the ruler, they mark all the more clearly the similarity of those being subjugated which the subjects face a priori. In the cited example, this is character- ized very well by the privileges being admittedly extensive in content but measured short in duration: the legal privilege was never lost to the source from which it flowed. This privilege, seemingly the opposite of leveling, is revealed as the heightened form of the latter that it assumes as a correlate of absolute personal control.
The rule by one is reproached for countless cases of absurdity that would reside in the purely quantitative disproportion between the singularity of the ruler and the multitude of those ruled over, that the unworthy and undeserving are set in a relationship of this party of one and of the other one in the relationship. Actually a very unique and consequential sociological causal formation resides in the solution of this contradiction. The structure of a society, in which only one rules and the great mass is allowed to be ruled, has within it only the normative meaning that the mass, i. e. the ruled element, includes only a portion of each personality belonging to it, while the ruling one gives over an entire personality to the relationship. The ruler and the one ruled-over hardly enter at all with the same quantum of their personalities into the relationship. The 'mass' is formed with many individuals uniting their personalities, biased impulses, interests, powers--while what every personality is as such stands above the level of this massification, i. e. is not embedded in what is actually controlled by this one person. It need not be emphasized that this new proportion that allows the full quan- tum of personality of the ruler to compensate for the multiplied partial
10 Philip the Good (1396-1467), sometime ally of England, conquered Holland in 1428 and ruled what is now Belgium, Luxembourg, most of The Netherlands, and parts of France by 1460--ed.
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? quantities of the governed personalities only assumes its quantitative form as a symbolic expression of need. The personality as such eludes every arithmetically comprehensible form so completely that when we speak of the 'whole' personality, its 'unity,' or a 'part' of it, we mean some inner quality that can only be had as a mental experience; we have hardly any direct expression for it, so that what is taken from a whole other order of things is as incorrect as it is indispensable. The whole dominance-relationship between one and many, and obviously not only the political, rests on that disassembling of the personality. And this application of it within domination and subordination is only a special case of its general importance for all interaction. One will have to say of even so close a union as marriage that one is never wholly married but even at best only with a part of the personality, as large as that part may be--just as one is never completely a citizen of a city, fellow worker, or church member. The separation among people that principally characterizes the governance of the many by one has been already recognized by Grotius, where he counters the objection, governing power cannot be acquired through purchase since it would concern free persons, with the distinction between private and public subjection. The subjectio publica (public subjection) does not carry the sui juris esse (existing in its own right) as does the subjection privata (private subjection). If a populus (people) is sold, not the individual persons but only the jus eos regendi, qua populus sunt (right of ruling them as they are a people) would be the object of the sale. It belongs to the highest duties of the political craft, including church politics, family politics, any power politics at all, to seek out and so to speak carve out those aspects of people with which they comprise a more or less leveled 'mass' that can stand next to ruler at the same height, separate from that which must be allowed their individual freedom, but which the whole personalities of the subordinated comprise together with it. The groupings are char- acteristically distinguished by the ratio between the whole personality and that quantity of it with which it merges into the 'mass. ' The degree of its governability depends on the difference of this quantity, and, in fact, in the way that a group can be dominated all the sooner and more radically by an individual, the single individual in the mass yields a small part of the whole personality to be the object of the subjection. Where the social unit incorporates so much of the personalities into itself, where they are interwoven so tightly into a whole, as in the Greek city states or the medieval municipalities, governance by one becomes something contradictory and unworkable. This principal relationship,
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? simple in itself, is complicated by the working of two factors: by the greatness or smallness of the subservient groups and through the degree to which the personalities differ from one another. The larger a group is, other things being equal, the smaller will be the compass of thought and interest, feeling and character in which individuals coincide and form a 'mass. ' To the extent that governance extends to what is com- mon to them, it will be borne more readily by the individuals according to the size of the group, and every basic trend in this direction on the part of governance by one is illustrated very clearly: The more people the one rules over, the less of each individual the one rules over. But secondly, it is now of crucial importance whether the individuals are differentiated enough in their mental structure to separate the elements of their being lying within and outside self-governing districts practically and perceptibly. Only if this coincides with the just mentioned art of governing, of distinguishing for oneself among the elements among the subordinate individuals open to control and those escaping it, will the opposition between governance and freedom, the disproportionate preponderance of the one over the many, be somewhat resolved. In such cases individuality can develop freely in very despotically governed groups. Thus the formation of modern individuality began in the des- potisms of the Italian Renaissance. There as in other cases, e. g. under Napoleon I, if the sovereign has a personal interest in them--hence those that are distant from the realm of political domination--all aspects of the personality through which one does not belong to the 'mass' are granted the greatest freedom. And it is thus conceivable that in very small circles, where the narrow confines of the blended existence and the thoroughgoing inner and outer solidarities again and again frustrate that separation and allow a, so to speak, false fusion, dominating rela- tionships develop very easily into an unbearable tyranny. This structure of the small circle unites frequently with the ineptitude of the dominant persons to make the relationship between parents and children often most unsatisfying. It is often the critical blunder of parents that they authoritatively impose on their children a life plan for everything, even in the things for which the children are not suited. Likewise, when the priest, from the area over which he is able to co-ordinate the community, wants to rule the private life of the believers on which they, seen from the religious community, are in any case individually differentiated. In all such cases there is lacking a proper selection of those essential parts that are suitable for the formation of the 'mass' and whose subjection to rule is easily borne and felt as proper.
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? The leveling of the mass, as such, established through the selection and combination of governable aspects of its individuals, is of the great- est significance for the sociology of power. It accounts for the fact, in connection with what was formerly stated, that it is often easier to rule over a larger than over a smaller group, especially if it has to do with decidedly different individuals, each additional one of whom reduces further the realm of all that is held in common: where such personalities are in question, the leveling threshold of the many, ceteris paribus, lies lower than that of the few, and the domination of the former thereby increases. This is the sociological basis for the observation by Hamilton in the Federalist: it would be the great popular mistake to want to increase the safeguards against the government of a few by multiplying members of congress. Beyond a certain number, the people's representation might indeed appear more democratic, but will in fact be oligarchical: the machine may be enlarged, but the fewer will be the springs by which its motions are directed. 11 And in the same sense a hundred years later one of the preeminent experts of Anglo-American party activity observed that a party leader would have to notice that as one climbed higher in power and influence, the more obvious it was by how few persons the world is governed. Herein lies also the deeper sociological meaning of the close relationship that exists between the authority of a political totality and its sovereign. Hence the legitimate authority for everybody developed from those coincident points that lie beyond their purely individual life-contents or life-forms, or seen in another way, beyond the total- ity of the single person. Authority is an objectively linking form for these supra-individual interests, qualities, elements of possession and existence, just as they find their subjective form or their correlate in the ruler of the whole. If indeed this particular analysis and synthesis
11 The expression, 'the machine. . directed,' is given in English by Simmel. Hamilton's or Madison's words: "The people can never err more than in supposing that by multiplying their representatives beyond a certain limit, they strengthen the barrier against the government of a few. Experience will for ever admonish them that, on the contrary, after securing a sufficient number for the purposes of safety, of local information, and of diffusive sympathy with the whole society, they will counteract their own views by every addition to their representatives. The countenance of the government may become more democratic, but the soul that animates it will be more oligarchic. The machine will be enlarged, but the fewer, and often the more secret, will be the springs by which its motions are directed. " Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, in Great Books of the Western World, general ed. , Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: William Benton; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952 [1787-88]), p. 181, #58--ed.
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? of the individuals provides the basis for single-ruler sovereignty overall, from this it becomes understandable that sometimes an astonishingly small measure of exceptional qualities suffices to win domination over an entirety, that dominated, they submit with an acquiescence that would not be logically justifiable, given the opposing qualities between the ruling one and the subjugated when considered as whole persons. Where, however, the differentiation among individuals necessary for domination of the mass is lacking, the correspondingly modest demands on the quality of the ruler are also absent. Aristotle says that in his time no more legitimate single-rulers could arise because there were at that time simply so many similarly first-rate personalities in every state that no individual could any longer claim such superiority over others. The Greek citizen's interests and feelings were evidently so bound to the political whole, one's personality was so fully invested in the sphere of the universal, that it could not come to any differentiation, as it were, of political aspects, over against which one would have been also able to reserve an essential part of one's personality as private possession. With this constellation the single-ruler sovereignty presumes it inherently correct that the ruler is superior to every subject by authority of the whole personality--a requirement that is not at all in question where the object of domination is only the sum of those parts of individuals separated out and combinable into the 'mass. '
Next to this type of single-ruler sovereignty, whose completion results in the leveling of its subordinates on principle, stands the second, by which the group takes on the form of a pyramid. The subordinates put the ruler in successive gradations of power; strata going from the lowest mass to the top become increasingly smaller, and increasingly significant. This form of the group can be generated in two different ways. It can come from the autocratic power of an individual. This individual disperses the substance of that power--while maintaining the form and title--and allows it to slide downwards, whereby naturally then a little more remains with each stratum than with the next further away. Thus while the power gradually trickles through, a continuity and graduated arrangement of super- and subordinates must result, so long as no other events and conditions interfere in this process, distorting it. That is indeed how social forms are frequently produced in oriental states: the power of the highest rung crumbles, perhaps because it is internally indefensible, and the above-emphasized proportion between subjugation and individual freedom is not retained by it, perhaps because the personalities are too indolent and too ignorant of the skill
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? of ruling to protect their power. An altogether different character is borne by the pyramidal form of society when it results from the intention of the ruler; it means then not a weakening of one's power but rather its furtherance and consolidation. It is here thus not a matter of the quantity of power of the sovereignty that is dispersed to the lower levels, but rather that they are organized solely among themselves according to the degree of power and position. Thereby the, as it were, quantum of subordination remains the same as in the form of the leveled and takes on only the form of inequality among the individuals who have to bear it; in connection with that, there emerges then an apparently natural convergence of the elements to the sovereign as measured by their relative rank. From this, a great solidity of the whole structure can result, its load-bearing capacities streaming towards the pinnacle more securely and cumulatively, just as when they are of equal level. That the superior significance of the monarch radiates out, in certain respects, over the high-ranking person in that circle and pours over others who are close in relationship is not a reduction but rather an increase of the monarch's own significance. During the earlier English Norman period there was overall no permanent or obligatory council for the king; however the dignity and eminence of his rule itself produced it, in that he would in important cases accept consultation by a consilium baronum (council of barons). This dignity, apparently produced simply through its concentration to the highest degree in his personality, still needed a dispersal and expansion. Since it would be the case that although real enough with him, as his, the power was indeed that of only a single person and not of a place, he relied upon a majority for an assistance that, while it actually shared and somehow thus participated in his power and eminence, it reflected back on him with greater intensity and fuller effectiveness. And indeed before that: that the the penalty for the homicide of a vassal of the Anglo-Saxon king was especially high; that as oath helper the vassal had an especially high value; that his stablehand and the man in whose house he has a drink is raised through special legal protection above the mass--that belongs simply not only to the prerogative of the king, but this descending terrace of his prerogative is at the same time, as a construction from below, even a pillar of support for the latter; while he shares his superiority, it does not become less, but more. Then sovereigns also have in their hands awards and rewards of fine gradations in the form of a promotion in rank, which cost them nothing but which bind recruits even closer and more firmly to them. The great number of social ranks that the Roman
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? emperor created--from the slaves and the lowliest over the usually free, an almost continuous scale up to senator--appears to have been directly determined by such a tendency. In this respect the aristocracy of royalty is formally identical; it too makes use of the multi-layered arrangment of the subjects--as, e. g. , in Geneva still around the middle of the 18th century various gradations of the rights of the citizens existed, according to whether they were called citoyens, bourgeois, habitants, natifs, sujets. While as many as possible have still something under themselves, they all are interested in the preservation of the prevailing order. Frequently it has to do in such instances less with a gradation of real power than an essentially abstract superiority by way of titles and positions--however much this also develops into tangible consequences, apparent perhaps at its most crass in the fine gradations of classes ranked by the dozens in the activity of the Indian castes. Even when one such pyramid, arranged as a result of honors and privileges, again finds its pinnacle in the sovereign, in no way does it always coincide with the similarly formed structure of ranked power positions, prevailing perhaps nearby. The structure of a pyramid of power will always suffer from the princi- pal difficulty that the irrational, fluctuating qualities of the persons will never universally coincide with the rigorously logically drawn contour of individual positions--a formal difficulty of all orders of rank mod- eled from a given schema, which finds in these systems, topped off by a personal sovereign, nobody who gives credence to anything like the socialist propositions for institutions that they will put the most deserv- ing one into the leading superordinate position. Here as there, it comes again to that fundamental incommensurability between the schematic of positions and the internally variable essence of the human being, never exactly conforming to conceptually static forms--the difficulty still comes to this of recognizing the suitable personality for every posi- tion; whether someone deserves a specific position of power or not cannot, on countless occasions, even be shown until the person is in the position. It is this, intertwined with the deepest and most precious of human essence, that every placement of a person into a new position of authority or function, and when done based on the most stringent test and the surest antecedents, always contains a risk, always remains an attempt that can succeed or fail. It is the relationship of the person to the world in general and to life that we have to decide in advance, that is, produce by our decision those facts that need already actually to have been produced and known in order to make that decision more rational and certain. This general aprioristic difficulty of all human
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? activity becomes quite apparent especially with the construction of the scale of social power not arising immediately organically from the inherent powers of individuals and the natural relationships of society, but constructed arbitrarily by a dominating personality; this circum- stance will indeed hardly occur historically in absolute purity--at the most it finds its parallel in the socialistic utopias alluded to--however, it shows its peculiarities and complications certainly in the rudimentary and mixed forms that are actually observable. 12
The other way by which a hierarchy of power with an apex is generated goes in reverse. From an original relative equality of social elements, individuals gain greater importance, several especially power- ful individuals again distinguishing themselves from the aggregate of the former, until there evolves one or more leading roles. The pyramid of the super- and subordination in this case is built from the ground up. There is no need for examples of this process because it is found everywhere, albeit occuring by the most varied rhythms, most purely perhaps in the area of economics and politics, very noticeably however also in that of intellectual cultivation, in school rooms, in the evolution of the standard of living, in the aesthetic relationship, in the funda- mental growth of the military organization.
The classic example of the combination of both ways in which a hierarchical super- and subordination of groups takes place is the feu- dal state of the middle ages. So long as the full citizens--the Greek, Roman, Old German--knew no subordination under an individual, there continued on the one hand full equality with those of their kind, on the other hand severe treatment against all of lower standing. This characteristic social form finds in feudalism--assuming all historical connecting links--likewise its characteristic antithesis, which filled in the cleft between freedom and unfreedom by a hierarchy of stations; the 'service,' servitium, binds together all the members of the kingdom among themselves and with the monarch. The monarchs relinquished from their own possessions, as their greater subjects for their part enfeoffed lesser subordinate vassals with land, so that a hierarchical structure of posi- tion, property, duty arose. However, the very same results were effected by the social process from the opposite direction. The middle layers
12 The phrase, 'in the rudimentary and mixed forms' translates in den rudimenta? ren und mit andern Erscheinungen gemischten Formen; literally, in the rudimentary and with-other- phenomena mixed forms'--ed.
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? emerged not only through contribution from above, but also through accumulation from below, while originally free, small landowners gave up their land to more powerful lords in order to receive it back as a fiefdom for them. Nevertheless, those landlords through the ever further acquisition of power, which the weak kingdoms could not restrain, grew from their lordly positions into monarchical power. Such a pyramidal form gives each one of its elements a double position between the lowest and the highest: all are superordinate and all are subordinate, dependent on the above and at the same time independent in so far as others are dependent on them. Perhaps this double sociological meaning of feudalism--whose dual genesis, through contribution from above and accumulation from below, it accentuated especiallly strongly--provided the contrariety of its consequences. In proportion as consciousness and praxis gave the independent or the dependent moment prominence to the middle-level powers, feudalism in Germany could lead to erosion of the highest sovereign power and in England could offer the crown the form for its all-encompassing power.
Gradation belongs to those structural and life forms of the group that result from the factor of quantity, that are therefore more or less mechanical, and historically precede the organic reality of group for- mation, which is based on individual qualitative differences; they are thereby certainly not absolutely separate, but continue to exist next to it and interwoven with it. There above all belongs the division of groups into subordinate groups whose social role is rooted in their numerical equality or at least numerical significance, as with the hundred; there belongs the determination of the social position exclusively according to the measure of property; there the structure of the group according to firmly established ranks, as feudalism above all manifested hierar- chy--the essence of civil and military offices. That first example of this formation already points to its characteristic objectivity or limiting principle. It is exactly in this way that feudalism, as it developed from the beginning of the German Middle Ages, broke up the old orders, the free and unfree, the noble and the humble, that depended on the diversity of the association of individual relationship. In the process there now arose 'service' as the general working principle--the objec- tive necessity that everyone in some way served someone higher, which authorized the distinction: whom and under which conditions. The essentially quantitative hierarchy of positions thus resulting was in many ways quite separate from the earlier cooperative positions of individuals. It is naturally not essential that this structure develop to its fullest in the
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? absolute sense because its formal significance is manifest inside every group, no matter whether it is identified entirely as such. Indeed, the household of the Roman slave had already been ordered precisely in this manner; the entire production process of the large slave economy independently managed by the villicus and procurator through all possible classifications all the way to the supervisor for every ten persons. Such an organizational form has a notable material vividness and thereby gives every member, simultaneously elevated and subordinated and thus positioned from two angles, a specifically determined sociologi- cal sense of their lives, as it were, which has to project itself onto the entire group as the boundaries and balance of their solidarity. For that reason, despotic or reactionary endeavors strive, in their fear before any solidarity among the oppressed, to get them organized hierarchically, sometimes even with unusual vigor. With noteworthy precise sensitivity to the power of domination and subordination to create social struc- ture13 and with understandable detail, the reactionary English ministry of 1831 forbade all unions
composed of separate bodies, with various divisions and subdivisions, under leaders with a gradation of rank and authority, and distinguished by certain badges, and subject to the general control and direction of a superior council.
Incidentally, this form is to be thoroughly differentiated from the others of simultaneous domination and subordination: that an individual is dominant in one rank or partially in some respect, but subordinate in another rank or some other respect. This arrangement has a rather distinct and qualitative nature; it tends to be an amalgam resulting from the specific establishment or fate of the individual, while predetermin- ing simultaneous domination and subordination in one and the same ranking much more objectively and then establishing it less ambigu- ously and more firmly as a social status. And, as I just emphasized, it is itself also of great cohesive value for the social structure, in that it thereby links up with the transformation of ascent in the latter eo ipso as a goal for one to strive for. Inside of freemasonry, for example, they maintained this motive, purely formally, for adhering to 'rank. ' Indeed, the fundamentals of the material--here, ritual--knowlege of the journeyman and master ranks is communicated to the 'apprentice';
13 The phrase 'to create social structure' translates Sozialisierungskraft--ed.
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? only such steps, so it is said, endowed brotherhood with a definite vigor, incited through the lure of novelty and promoting the aspiration of the new recruits.
These social structures, as they are formatively shaped through the domination by an individual, uniformly with regard to the components of the most diverse groups, can, evidently, as I have already pointed out, occur even with the subordination under a majority; however, the majority of the dominant--wherever these have coordinated with one another--is not characteristic of them, and it is therefore sociologically irrelevant whether the dominant position of one is by chance filled by a majority of persons. Indeed it needs to be remarked that monarchy is generally the prototype and primary form of the relationship of sub- ordination. With its fundamental place within the facts of domination and subordination, it goes right along with the other forms of organi- zation, the oligarchical and the republican--not only in the political meaning of this concept--but in its being able to offer them legitimate space inside its sphere, so that the imperium of the single ruler can encompass very well these types of secondary structures, while they themselves, wherever these are the most prominent and extensive, can be exercised only very relatively or in illegitimate ways. It is so materi- ally evident and imposing that it itself operates those very systems that arose precisely in reaction to it and as its abrogation. Of the American president it is claimed, as well as of the Athenian archon and the Roman consul, that, with certain qualifications, they were nevertheless simply the heirs of monarchical power, of which the kings were supposed to have been deprived by the appropriate revolutions. From the Americans themselves one hears that their freedom only consists precisely in both large political parties alternating control; each for its own part, how- ever, tyrannizes fully in monarchical fashion. Likewise they proceeded to prove by the democracy of the French Revolution that it is nothing more than an inverted kingdom fitted out with the same qualities as one. The volonte? ge? ne? rale of Rousseau, by which he counsels submis- sion without resistance, thoroughly contains the essence of absolute rule. And Proudhon claims that a parliament that has resulted from universal franchise is indistinguishable from absolute monarchy. The people's representative would be unfailingly, unassailably, irresponsibly nothing more in essence than the monarch. The monarchical principle is just as lively and prominent in a parliament as in a legitimate mon- arch. Actually the parliament does not even lack for the phenomenon of veneration that seems otherwise reserved quite specifically for the
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? single monarch. It is a typical feature that then still persists as a formal relationship among group elements, even when a change of the entire sociological trend seems to make it impossible. The peculiar strength of monarchy, which survives its death, so to speak, lies in the reality that it carries forth its tone in addition to structure, the meaning of which is precisely the negation of monarchy; this is one of the most striking things about this unique sociological formation, that it appropriates to itself not only materially different contents, but can even infuse itself into the spirit of its opposite as well as in the changed forms. So extensive is this formal significance of monarchy that it is preserved even explicitly where its contents are negated and exactly because they are negated. The office of the Doge in Venice was continually losing its power until finally it had none at all. However, it was anxiously conserved in order to hinder thereby exactly an evolution that might just bring an actual ruler to the throne. The opposition does not in this case destroy monarchy in order to consolidate power definitively in its own formation, but guards it precisely to prevent its actual consolida- tion. Both of these truly opposing cases are constant witnesses to the formative power of this form of rule.
Indeed, the antitheses that it forces together devolve even into one and the same phenomenon. There monarchy has interest in the monar- chical institution even where it lies entirely outside of its immediate realm of influence. The experience, which all such widely divergent manifestations of a specific social form mutually rely on and which secure this form, so to say, reciprocally, appears to become evident in the most varied relationships of domination, most distinctively with aristocracy and monarchy. For that reason a monarchy is coincidentally indebted to it whenever it weakens, for specific political reasons, the monarchical principle in other countries. The nearly rebellious opposi- tion that the government of Mazarin14 experienced from the populace as well as from the direction of Parliament led to French politics being blamed for undergirding the uprisings in neighboring countries against their governments. The monarchical idea would thereby experience a weakening that would reflect back upon the instigators themselves who intended to defend their interests through those rebellions. And
14 Mazarin (Giulio Mazarini), successor to Cardinal Richelieu as chief minister of France, as a foreigner and dominant political force met with opposition from the French nobility--ed.
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? vice-versa: when Cromwell rejected the title of king, the royalists were on that account saddened. Because however unbearable it would have been for them to see the king's murderer on the throne, they would have welcomed the elemental reality, as a preparation for the Restoration, that there was once again a king. But on such utilitarian justifications, consequently borrowed for expansion of the monarchy, the monarchical sentiment still functions with regard to certain phenomena in a man- ner that is directly opposed to the personal advantage of its bearer. When during the reign of Louis XIV the Portuguese rebellion against Spain broke out, he nevertheless said of it: "However bad a prince may be, even so, subjects revolting is always criminal. " And Bismarck claims that Wilhelm I would have felt an 'instinctively monarchical disapproval' against Bennigsen15 and his earlier activities in Hannover. Because however much Bennigsen and his party may have done also for the Prussification of Hannover, such behavior of a subject towards its originating (Guelphic) dynasty would have gone against his sense of princely prerogative. The internal power of monarchy is great enough to incorporate even the enemy in principled sympathy, and to oppose the friend, as soon as one enters into a personally fully necessary fight against any one monarch, on a level of feeling fully as deep as if against an enemy.
Finally features emerge of a type, not yet touched upon at all, when the existing similarity or dissimilarity, in any other respect, becomes a problem between dominant and subordinate, nearby or distant. It is crucial for the sociological formation of a group whether it prefers to subordinate itself to a stranger or one of its own, whether the one or the other is useful and worthwhile for it, or the contrary. The medieval lord in Germany originally had the right to name any judges and lead- ers from the outside to the court. Finally, though, the concession was often obtained that the official had to be named from the circle of the serfs. Exactly the opposite was in force when the count of Flanders, in 1228, made a specially important pledge to his "beloved jurors and citizens of Ghent" that the judges and executive officers installed by him and his subordinate officers shall not be drawn from Ghent or be married to a Ghent. To be sure, this difference has above all the reasons for its intentions: the outsider is unaligned, the insider more prejudiced. The first reason was evidently decisive for this desire of the
15 Evidently Alexander Levin von Bennigsen (1809-1893)--ed.
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? citizens of Ghent, as mentioned, for them to be guided by the earlier practices of free Italian cities, often using judges from other cities to protect themselves from the influencing of legal formulations by family loyalties or internal party allegiance. From the same motive such bril- liant rulers as Louis XI16 and Matthias Corvinus17 named their high- est possible officers from the outside or even from low ranks; another effective justification was advanced yet in the 19th century by Bentham for the reason that foreigners make the best civil servants: they would simply supervise most scrupulously. The preference for those nearby or for those who are similar appears from the very beginning to be a bit of a paradox, although it can lead to a peculiarly mechanical similia similibus, as is reported of an old Libyan clan and more recently of the Ashanti: that the king would rule over the men, and the queen--who is his sister--over the women. Exactly the cohesion of the group, which I stress as the result of its subordination under their own kind, is con- firmed by the phenomenon that the central power seeks to dismantle that immanent jurisdiction of subordinate groups. Still in the 14th century in England the idea was widespread that one's local commu- nity would be the competent judge for each person, but Richard II18 then decided precisely that nobody could be a judge of the court or release people from gaol in one's own county! And the correlate of the cohesion of the group was in this case the freedom of the individual. Also during the decline of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms judgment by peers, the Pares, was highly prized as protection against the arbitrary will of royal or noble governors.
So there are definite rational reasons of practical usefulness for choosing subordination under one's peers or under foreigners.
However, the motives for such a choice are not exhausted by this category, but additionally there are instinctive and intuitive, as well as abstract and indirect; and there has to be even more, since the former often assigns the same weight to the trappings of both: the greater understanding of the person on the inside and the greater impartiality of the one coming from the outside may often offset one another, and there needs to be
16 King Louis XI of France (1461-1483) had no use for royal trappings and sur- rounded himself with associates of lowly birth--Ed.
17 Matthias Corvinus (Mathew Corwin, in English; 1443-1490), King of Hungary 1458-1490, King of Bohemia after 1469, Duke of Austria after 1486; he had an army of mercenaries and was rumored to have sounded out public opinion by mingling with commoners--ed.
18 Richard II, 1377-1399--ed.
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? some other authority to decide between them. Making itself felt here, always important for every sociological formation, is the psychological antinomy: that we are drawn on the one hand to those similar to us and on the other hand to those opposite us. In which case, in which area the one or the other will work, whether in our whole nature the one or the other tendency wins out--that appears to belong to the rather primary nature of the individuals themselves according to their sober assessments. Opposites complete us, like people strengthen us; opposites intrigue and stimulate us, like people comfort us. With quite different measures the one or the other obtains for us a feeling of legiti- mation of our being. When however we experience one of the specific phenomena as advisable for us over against the other, the other repels us; those different seem antagonistic to us, those like us seem boring; the different become for us a challenge that is too much, the similar a challenge that is too little; it is as difficult to find a place for the one as for the other--there, because points of contact and similarity with us are missing; here, because we experience them either as the same as us or, yet worse, even as superfluous to us. The internal variety of our relationships to an individual, but also to a group, depends fundamen- tally on there being some kind of correspondence between most or a majority of their and our characteristics; that these characteristics be, in part, similar, in part, heterogeneous; and in both cases attraction as well as repulsion are generated, in whose interplay and combinations the entire relationship runs its course; a similar result occurs when one and the same relationship, for example, which seems to have an unassailable commonality and inevitability, triggers in us, on the one hand, sympathetic and, on the other, antipathetic feelings. So a social power similarly constructed will be advantaged in its own realm, on the one hand, not only on account of the natural sympathy for the supposed relationship, but also because the stimulation of the principle has to be to its advantage. On the other hand, though, the opposite is generated by jealousy, competition, the desire just to be the only agent of the principle. This is especially obvious in the relationship of mon- archy to aristocracy. On the one hand, the aristocracy's principle of heredity is inextricably relevant to monarchy; on its account a party alliance is formed with them; a platform is established on it and thereby advantaging it; on the other hand, the monarchy cannot often toler- ate a status existing next to it, even a hereditary one by which its own right is privileged; it must desire that every one of its own members be specially privileged. So the Roman Empire originally privileged the
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? senatorial aristocracy and guaranteed them their heritability--however, after Diocletian it was overshadowed by a civil-service aristocracy in which every member achieved the high position by way of personal advancement. Whether in such typical cases attraction or repulsion of the similar is given greater weight is decided apparently not only from utilitarian motives but from those deep dispositions of the soul for the value of the similar or that of the dissimilar.
The particular type under discussion here devolves from the wholly general type of this sociological problem. Time and again it is a matter not of a rationalized sentiment whether one feels more humbled by subordination to someone near at hand or someone at greater distance. Thus the whole social instinct and sense of life of the Middle Ages is seen in the fact that the appointments of the guilds with public author- ity in the 13th century required at the same time the subordination of all workers of the same trade under it: because it would have been unthinkable that a commercial court would be required for anyone who was not a comrade of the legal community doing the deciding sit over people. And just the opposite and hard-to-explain feeling, because of no obvious single advantage, leads several Australian tribes to not elect their own chiefs, but to have them elected by neighboring tribes--as also with several primitive peoples common currency is not manufactured by them themselves but must be introduced from the outside so that now and then one finds a kind of industry, producing specie (mussel shells etc. ) that is exported as their money to distant places. On the whole--qualified by various modifications; the lower a group is situated as a whole, the more each single member is accustomed to subordina- tion--a group will even more grudgingly allow one on the same level as they to dominate them; the higher a group as a whole is situated, the more likely it is to subordinate itself to a peer. Domination by equals is difficult for the former because each is positioned lowly; for the latter more easily because each is highly placed. The acme of this sentiment was furnished by the House of Lords, which was not only recognized by all the peers as their sole judge, but in the year 1330 once explicitly rejected the insinuation when it wanted to pass judgment on yet other people as though they were peers. So decisive, therefore, is the ten- dency to grant the power of judgment only to one's equals that it even becomes retrogressively operative; logically incorrect but throughout deeply psychological and understandable, they conclude: because our equal is judged only by us, so everyone we judge becomes in some sense our equal. Just as here such a distinctive relationship of subordination
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? as that of the judged to one's judge, so is a definitive coordination is felt, as sometimes conversely coordination is felt as subordination. And conceptually here the dualtiy repeats itself--dissociation as well as involvement--ostensibly rational grounds and dark instincts. Medieval city dwellers, with their rights under the aristocracy but positioned over the peasants, expediently rejected ideas of a universal equality of rights, because they feared that equalization would cost them more, to the advantage of the peasants, than it would secure for them from the aristocracy. Not uniquely, this sociological type is encountered: that a midlevel social stratum can achieve higher elevation only at the price of aligning itself to the lower--this equalization, however, feels like such a reduction in rank for itself that it prefers to forego the elevation that could be won only in this way. Thus the Creoles in Latin America experienced unequivocally fierce jealousy toward the Spaniards from Europe, but even stronger disdain for Mulattoes and Mestizos, Negroes and Indians. The Creoles would have had to align wthemselves with them in order to acquire for themselves equality with the Spaniards, and given their racist feelings, this alignment would have felt like such a demotion that, for that reason, they preferred relinguishing equality with the Spaniards. Yet more abstractly and instinctively, this forma- tive combination is stated in Henry Sumner Maine's expression: the principle of nationality, as it is often advanced, would seem to mean that human beings of one race act unjustly towards those of another when they should have common political dispositions. Wherever thus two different national characters exist, A and B, A then appears subor- dinate to B as soon as the same constitution is expected for the former as for the lattter, and furthermore even if identical contents throughout defines no lower position or subordination.
Finally the subordination under the more distant personality has the very important significance that it in the same measure is the more suitable in so far as the circle of subordinates is made up from het- erogeneous members, foreign or hostile to one another. The elements of a majority, subject to a superior, operate like the particular ideas that belong under a universal concept. This must be even higher and more abstract, that is, the further it is from each particular concept, the more different are all those concepts from one another which it has to encompass uniformly. The most typical case, presenting itself in identical form in the most varied realms, is the handling from above of conflicting parties who choose a referee. The farther this one is from the party-like interestedness from the others--while, analogous to the
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? higher concept, it must somehow have inherently and accessibly that which both sets up the strife as well as the potential reconciliation--the more readily will the parties submit to its decision. There is a threshold of difference beyond which the meeting of the conflicting parties might find a point of uniform agreement however far such a point is. Looking back at the former history of the commercial court of arbitration in England, it is to be emphasized that the same thing is excellently served in the interpretation of work contracts and laws. These, however, would be seldom the reason for larger strikes and lockouts alongside of which it would be a question whether workers or employers preferred to change the working conditions. Here, though, where it is a ques- tion of new foundations of relationship between the parties, the court is irrelevant; the discrepancy between the interests has become so wide that the arbitration courts would have to be infinitely high over them to span it and effect a settlement--however imaginable concepts are with such heterogeneous contents, no such universal concept is to be found that would allow them to strike a bargain based on what they share in common.
Further, in the case of conflicting parties who might submit to the higher authority of the arbitration court, the parties having to be coor- dinated is of decisive importance. Should some kind of a dominant and subordinate relationship already hold between them, it becomes far too easy for the relationship of the judge to one of them to pro- duce a disturbing impartiality for that one; even if the judge is quite distant from the material interests of both parties, often the judgment will favor the dominant, sometimes though also the subordinate party. Here is the region of class sympathies that often are entirely subcon- scious since they have developed perpetually with the whole thought and feeling of the subjects, and they form, as it were, the a priori that shapes the judge's ostensibly purely objective deliberation of the case and manifests interconnections with their congruent perspectives so that, in spite of the endeavor to avoid it, most of the time lead not to actual objectivity and balanced judgment but to its exact opposite. Furthermore, the belief that the judge is biased--especially where the parties are of very different ranks and power, and even if the judge is not so biased--is enough to make the entire proceedings illusory. The English chamber of arbitration often calls a foreign manufacturer as an arbitrator for conflicts between workers and employers. Ordinarily, however, if the decision turns out against the workers, they accuse the judge of favoring the judge's class, however irreproachable the judge's
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? character may be; on the other hand, if perhaps a parliamentarian is called, the manufacturers assume then a partiality for the largest class of voters. Thus a fully satisfying situation will result only with full par- ity for both parties--indeed because the superior ones will otherwise exploit the advantage of their position to get a personality whose deci- sions will be convenient for them. Therefore we can on the other hand conclude: The naming of an impartial arbitrator is always a sign that the conflicting parties are together achieving at least some coordina- tion. Precisely on account of the voluntary English court of arbitration, where workers and employers submit contractually to the decision of the judge, who may be neither employer nor worker, the equalization granted to the workers by the employers on their part could move the latter to relinguish assistance from their kind for the settlement of the conflict and entrust it entirely to this outsider. Finally an example of the greatest material difference can tell us that the more the shared relationship of several elements to a superior assumes or produces a coordination between these elements--in spite of all otherwise existing distinctions, unfamiliarities, conflicts--the higher the dominant power will stand above them. For the importance of religion for forming societ- ies in wider circles, it is obviously very important that God is located at a definite distance from the believers. The, as it were, immediate proximity with believers where the divine principles of all totemistic and fetishistic religons, but also the old Jewish God, are located makes such a religion quite unsuited for ruling wide circles. The incredible height of the Christian concept of God first makes the homogeneity of the heterogeneous before God possible; the distance from him was so immeasurable that the differeneces between human beings is thereby dissolved. That did not hinder an intimate relation of the heart to God, for here dwelled those aspects of humanity in which presum- ably all human distinctions fade, which, however, crystallized into this purity and this unique existence only by way of the influence of that highest principle and, as it were, the relationship to it. But perhaps the Catholic Church could only create a world religion precisely so that it interrupted this direct immediacy and, as it inserted itself into the breach, rendered God as well itself highly unreachable in this relation- ship to the individual.
With regard to those social structures that are characterized by domi- nation of a majority, of a social totality over individuals or other totalities, it is noticeable from the outset that the consequence for the subordinates is very uneven. The most that the Spartan and Thessalonian slaves
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? wanted was to become slaves of the state instead of individuals. In Prussia, before the emancipation of the serfs, they were by far better off on demesnes of the state than were the private peasants. In the large, modern business enterprises and warehouses, where there is practi- cally no individuality, but they are either corporations or they possess the same impersonal techniques of management, the employees are better situated than in the small businesses where they are exploited by the owners. This relationship repeats itself wherever, instead of the difference between indivduals and collectives, it has to do with that between smaller and larger collectives. The destiny of India is better under the British government than under the East India Company. At the same time it is of course irrelevant whether this larger collective stands under a single ruler, particularly when the technique practiced by the superior carries the character of superindividuality in the wid- est sense: the aristocratic rule of the Roman Republic oppressed the provinces at a distance far harder than Caesarism, which was much more just and objective. To belong to a larger realm also tends to be better for those in service positions. The large manors that arose in the seventh century in the kingdom of France in many cases created an entirely new advantageous situation for the subordinate population. The large estate permitted an organization and differentiation of the working personnel among whom there emerged qualified individuals doing highly valued labor and were thus permitted, although still not free, to climb socially within the estate. It is entirely in this manner that state penal laws frequently come to be milder than those of the liberated realms.
Now, however, as indicated, a number of phenomena run counter to this. The allies of Athens and Rome and the territories that had formerly been subject to individual Swiss cantons were as gruesomely oppressed and exploited as would have hardly been the case under the tyranny of a single sovereign. The same corporation that, because of the technique of its operation, exploits its employees less than the private entrepreneur, in many cases, was allowed, when it has to do with compensation or benefits, to operate less liberally than the private person who is not accountable to anybody with regard to costs. And regarding the specific impulses: the cruelty that was exercised for the pleasure of the Roman circus-goer, who often demanded even more extreme intensification, would probably not have been perpetrated by many of them if the offender had stood individual-to-individual, right before them.
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? The principal reason for these various consequences of plural or majority rule over their subordinates lies above all in the character of the objectivity that it bears, in the suspension of certain feelings, sentiments, impulses that are effective only in the individual behavior of subjects but not as soon as they operate collectively. Now as the case may be, the position of the subordinate--within the given relationship and its specific contents, affected favorably or unfavorably by the objectivity or by the individual subjectivity in the character of the relationship--will produce those differences. Wherever subordinates in their situation have need of charitable and selfless grace from the rulers, they will suffer at the objective rule of a majority; with relationships where the situation is served expediently precisely only by legality, impartiality, functionality, this is just what this ruler will desire. It is significant for this reason that the state legally convicts the criminal, but cannot pardon, and even in republics takes care to keep the right of pardon reserved to individual persons. Most effectively this stands for the material interests of com- munity, which will lead to the greatest possible advantages and least amount of sacrifice following purely objective principle. A cruelty, as it may be exericised by individuals for the sake of cruelty, lies by no means in the currently obvious harshness and ruthlessness, but only in a fully consequential functionality--just as also the brutality of the people of sheer wealth, in so far as they operate under the same point of view, which appears to them typically not at all blameworthy because they are conscious only of a strictly logically driven activity.
Indeed this objectivity of the collective behavior, in many cases purely negative, means that certain norms that otherwise hold for the single personality are nullified, and is then only a form for concealing this nullification and soothe the conscience about it. Every individual involved in decision-making can retreat behind it, provided it was simply a general decision, and mask one's own desire for gain and brutality, provided it was only in pursuit of the advantage of the totality. That the possession of power--and certainly on the one side the especially quickly acquired, on the other side the especially enduring--leads to its misuse holds for individuals only with many and illuminating excep- tions; when, however, it does not hold for corporate bodies and classes, then only especially fortunate circumstances prevented it. It is rather noteworthy that the disappearance of the individual subject behind the totality of the system also then promotes relatively increased power for the individual, even if the subjugated party is also a collective. The psy- chological reproduction of suffering, the essential vehicle of compassion
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? and leniency, is easily negated if no identifiable or visible individual has to bear it, but only a totality without, as it were, any subject. So it has been noted, the English polity in its entire history is supposed to have been characterized by an extraordinary justice towards persons and an similarly great injustice towards totalities. It is only through an appreciation of that strong sentiment for the rights of individuals that the psychology behind the treatment of dissenters, Jews, Irish, Indians, in earlier periods also the Scots, can be understood. The submersion of the forms and norms of personality in the objectivity of the collective being is what also defines the suffering of totalities, then, as business- as-usual. Objectivity functions, to be sure, in the form of laws; where it is not essential, though, and personal conscientiousness is stalled, it is frequently demonstrated that the latter is simply not a collective- psychological trait; and this is even more decisive when the object of action, because it too has the same nature of a collective, does not at all offer any stimulus for that personal trait to unfold. The abuses of force, for example, in the American city governments would hardly require their enormous dimensions if the ruling groups were not corporations and the dominated not collectives; it is therefore significant that one believed these abuses could sometimes be controlled by increasing the power of the mayor--so that there would be someone who could be made personally responsibile!
Mass behavior, which I illustrated with the Roman circus crowd, is offered as an exception to the objectivity of the actions of a large number, which in reality presents only a deeper confirmation of the rule. Namely, there exists a fundamental difference between the effective nature of a collective as one homogeneous structure, an abstraction, as it were, embodying a specific structure--economic co-operative, state, church, all combinations that actually or for all practical purposes are to be viewed as legal persons--on the one side, and that of a collective as an actually co-existing aggregation on the other. In both cases the resulting dissolution of the individual-personal differentiation leads in the first to the emergence of opportune traits transcending the individual, if you will; in the other, however, lying below the individual. Inside a physically proximal crowd there are countless suggestions and nervous influences going back and forth, robbing individuals of their repose and independence of thought and action, so that the most fleeting stimula- tions often rise up in the crowd, avalanche-like, to the most excessive impulses, and the higher, discriminating, critical functions are as good as turned off. For that reason, one laughs at jokes in the theater and in
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? assemblies that would leave one quite cold in a room; for that reason, the manifestations of spiritualism work best in 'circles'; for that reason, parlor games usually achieve the greatest joyful outcome, however low one is feeling; thus the rapid essentially quite unfathomable changes of mood in a mass; thus the countless observations over the 'stupidity' of collectives. 19 I attribute the paralysis of the higher character traits, this inability to resist being swept away, as stated, to the incalculable number of influences and impressions that crisscross in a crowd from person to person, strengthening, recoiling, distracting, reproducing. From this con- fusion of minimal stimuli below the threshold of consciousness emerges, on the one hand, besides the costs of clear and consequential mental activity, a great nervous excitement, in which the darkest, most primi- tive, normally controlled instincts of nature awaken, and on the other hand, a hypnotic paralysis that allows the crowd to go along with every suggestive impulse leading to the extreme. Add to that the power-rush and the individual lack of responsibility for single persons in a currently teaming crowd whereby the moral inhibitions of low and brutal drives fail. The cruelty of crowds is sufficiently explained by that, be it Roman circus-goer or medieval Jew-baiter or American Negro-lyncher, and the ugly lot of those that are subject to a corresponding submissive crowd. To be sure, the typical duality here shows itself in the consequences of this social relationship of subordination: the impulsivity and sug- gestibility of the crowd can lead them opportunely to follow stimuli to magnanimity and enthusiasm, to which likewise the individual alone would otherwise not rise. The last reason for the contradictions inside this configuration is, to put it this way, that no permanent and change- less but rather a variable and haphazard relationship exists between the individuals with their situations and requirements, on the one side, and all the super- and subindividual entities and internal-external states of consciousness that accompany rallies, on the the other. When thus the abstract social units--factual, cold, consequential--act as an individual, when conversely tangible crowds--impulsive, senseless, extreme--move collectively as if each individual were acting separately, each of these cases can be of such a variety that it can be more favorable or, on the contrary, less favorable for the subordinated. The randomness, frankly, is not at all random, but rather the logical expression of the incom- mensurability between the situations of specific individuals, whom and
19 More about this in the chapter on self-preservation.
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? whose needs it concerns, and the entities and dispositions that rule the cooperation and coexistence of the many or that serve them.
With these subordinations under a majority the individual elements of the majority were coordinated with one another, or at least they functioned here with respect to matters to be considered as though they were coordinated. There arises then new phenomena as soon as the dominant majority does not act as a unity of homogeneous elements; the dominated can thereby be either in conflict among themselves, or they can form a hierarchy in which one superior is subordinated to another. I should consider initially the first case, whose types allow us to point out the variety of consequences for the subordinates.
If someone is totally subject to several persons or groups, so much so that there is no spontaneity to exert in the relationship but complete dependence on every one of the superiors--suffering will be particularly severe under conflicts among the latter. For each one will lay complete claim to the subordinates and their powers and services and will hold them, nevertheless, responsible for whatever they do or allow as a result of coercion by the others as though it were voluntary. This is the situa- tion of the 'servant of two masters'; it plays out in any situation, from children standing between parents in a state of conflict to the situa- tion of a small state always dependent on two powerful neighboring states, and in case of conflict, then, the one caught between will often be made responsible by each for whatever the dependent relationship compels to be done for the other. If this conflict is fully internalized within the circle of the individual subordinates, it functions like ideal, moral powers that place their demands on the subjectivity of the people themselves, so the situation appears as a 'conflict of duties. ' That external conflict flows, so to say, not from the subjects themselves but only onto them; however, this conflict crops up in the soul leading the moral consciousness to strive for two different sides, to be obedient towards two mutually exclusive powers. Thus while this in principle excludes the will of the subject, and, whenever this occured, could as a rule be completed quickly, there is precisely underlying the conflict of duties the fullest freedom of the subject which alone can carry the recognition of both claims as morally obligatory. In the mean time this opposition apparently does not hinder the conflict of the two from obtaining both forms of obedience to the demanding powers at the same time. As long as a conflict is purely external, it is worst when the personality is weak; if, however, it becomes internal, it will become most destructive when the personality is strong. With the rudimentary
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? forms of such conflicts, through which our life moves, both large and small, we are accustomed to that sort of thing; we come to terms with them so instinctively through compromises and division of our obliga- tions that they, for the most part, do not even become conscious as conflicts. Where this occurs, however, an insolubility of this situation, according to its pure sociological form, tends to become visible, even if its fortuitous contents also permit a disentanglement and reconcili- ation. Since as long as the strife of elements continues, wherein each raises full claim to one and the same subject, no division of one's powers will be enough for those demands; indeed, in general not even a relative solution through such division will be possible, because one must show one's true colors, and the individual action stands before an uncompromising pro or contra. Between the religiously cloaked claim of the family group, which required the burial of Polyneices, and the state law that forbids it, there is for Antigone no differentiating compromise; after her death the internal conflicts she feels are just as difficult and irreconciled as at the beginning of the tragedy, and prove thereby that no behavior or fate whatsoever of those subjugated can remove the conflict they project into it. And even where the collision does not take place between those powers themselves, but only inside the doubly obedient subject, and so seems rather to be mediated by way of a division of the subject's work between them--it is only the happy accident from the consequences of the contents of the situation that makes the solution possible. The prototype is here: Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God; but if one needs for a godly work precisely the coin that Caesar demands? The sheer reciprocal estrangement and disorganization of the authorities, on which an individual is contemporaneously dependent, is sufficient to turn one's situation basically into one full of contradictions. And this even the more so, the more the conflict is internalized in the sub- ject and arises from the ideal demands that draw life from one's own conscientiousness. In both examples drawn above the subjective moral emphasis rests indeed fundamentally on the one side of the opposi- tion, and on the other the subject is more subservient by way of an external inevitability. If, however, both demands are from the same inner gravity, it is of little help, with the firmest conviction, whether we decide for one or divide up our strengths between them. Since the unfulfilled--whether whole or in part--in spite of everything, continues to have an effect with its emphasis on wholeness, its unfulfilled amount makes us fully responsible for it, even if it was outwardly impossible to
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? satisfy it, and even if under the given circumstances this solution was the most morally correct. Every actual moral demand has something absolute that is not satisfied with a relative fulfillment that is alone recognized as real by another one. Here, too, where we are under no other authority than personal conscience, we are not better off than in the external case of the mutually conflicting relationships that grant us no leeway in favor of the other. Also internally we find no peace, as long as a moral necessity remains unrealized, no matter whether we have a clean conscience with regard to it, provided that we, because of the existence of another one--that likewise produces a sense of its possible realization--could not give it more than we did.
With the subordination under external conflicting or estranged pow- ers, the position of the subordinate certainly becomes a fully different one as soon as the subordinate possesses even some spontaneity, has some of its own power to insert into the relationship. Here the situa- tion comes in the most diverse arrangements: duobus litigantibus tertius gaudet--which the previous chapter treated. Here would be advanced only several of its applications in the case of the subordination of the tertius and also in the event that there exists no strife, but only mutual estrangement of the higher authorities. 20
The availability of some amount of freedom of the subordinates is a condition that is apt to lead to an incremental process that sometimes goes all the way to a dissolution of the subordination. A fundamental difference of the medieval serfs from vassals consists in that the former had and could have only one lord; the latter, however, could take land from various lords and give them the oath of service. Through this possibility, to go into various feudal relationships, the vassal gained in relation to the single feudal lord a firm footing and independence; the essential subordination of the vassal's position became thereby rather considerably equal. A formally similar situation was created for the religious subject by polytheism. Although such subjects are aware of being ruled over by a plurality of divine powers, nevertheless they can--perhaps not entirely logically, to be sure, but at this level actually psychologically--turn from the inaccessible or powerless god to another, richer in opportunities; still in contemporary Catholicism believers turn away from a saint who has not rewarded their special adoration, in order to devote themselves to another--although they could not
20 Latin: duobus litigantibus tertius gaudet, while two argue, the third rejoices--ed.
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? deny, in principle, the continuing power that the former also has over them. In so far as subjects have at least a certain choice between the authorities over them, they gain, at least perhaps for their sense of wholeness, a certain feeling of independence from each one, which is denied them wherever the identical sum of religious dependence is united inescapably in a single conception of God. And this is also the form in which modern persons gain a definite indpendence in the economic realm. They are, especially in the large cities, absolutely more dependent on the sum total of their suppliers than are the people in more natural economic circumstances. However, because they possess nearly an unlimited possibility of choosing among suppliers, with also the possibility to change from one to another, they have then a freedom that is not to be compared to that of those in simpler or small-town relationships.
The same determinate form of relationship arises when the diver- gence of the dominant groups unfolds one after another instead of simultaneously. Here now the most varied adaptations offer themselves relative to the historical contents and special conditions in all of which dwells the same form-phenomenon. The Roman senate was formally very dependent on the senior officials. Since, however, they had short term limits and the Senate in contrast kept its members permanently, the power of the Senate thus became in fact far greater than one would get from a reading of the official relationship to those bearers of power. In basically the same way the power of the Commons against the English Crown has grown since the 14th century. The dynastic parties were still able to determine the elections, in the sense of royalism or reform, in favor of York or of Lancaster. But amidst all these proofs of the rul- ers' power, the House of Commons still persisted as such and acquired thereby, precisely because of those oscillations and changes in the wind among the highest regions, a firmness, power and independence that perhaps it would never have won with undisturbed unity in the move- ments of the highest ranks. Correspondingly the increase in democratic consciousness in France was derived from the reality that, since the fall of Napoleon I, changing government powers quickly followed one after another, each incapable, insecure, wooing the goodwill of the masses, whereby every citizen then correctly came to a consciousness of personal social significance. Although citizens were subordinated by every single one of these governments, they began nevertheless to feel their own strength because they formed the permanent element in the midst of all the change and conflict of the governments.
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? The power against the various concomitant elements, which accrues to an element of a relationship by the mere fact of its endurance, is such a universal, formal consequence that its exploitation through any kind of relationship of subordination may be understood only as a specific case. It holds no less for the dominant parties: from the enor- mous advantage that 'the state' and 'the church' already gain through their mere stability relative to the short life of that of the dominated, to such a singular fact: that the frequency of puerperal fever in the Middle Ages extraordinarily raised the sovereignty of the man in the house. Since the consequence of that was that the strongest men had several wives consecutively and thereby concentrated the head-of-the- household power, as it were, into one person while the power of the housewife was distributed among several sequentially.
Without exception the phenomena of domination and subordination seemed to facilitate entirely opposed consequences for the dominated. Overall, however, closer inspection has allowed us to recognize the grounds of this opposition based on the same general type, without having to give up the nature of the form for whatever contents it offered up. The situation is not different with the second combination now under consideration: that a plurality of dominant authorities, instead of being estranged or hostile to one another, are among themselves even dominant and subordinate. Decisive here is whether the subordinate actually possesses an unmediated relationship to the highest ranked of the superiors above or whether the intermediate authority, still domi- nating the subordinate, is still subordinate to the highest and separates the former from the latter, and thus by itself de facto represents the dominant elements. Cases of the first type were created by feudalism, in which those who were oppressed by the greater vassals remained, yet, simultaneously the oppressed under the highest noble houses. A rather pure picture hereof is provided by English feudalism at the time of William the Conqueror, described by Stubbs:
All men continued to be primarily the king's men and the public peace to be his peace. Their lords might demand their service to fulfil their own obligations, but the king could call them to the fyrd, summon them to his courts, and tax them without the intervention of their lords, and to the king they could look for protection against all foes. 21
21 Simmel quotes in English. Stubbs presumably is William Stubbs, author of The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development (3 vols. ), 1873-78--ed.
? domination and subordination 173
? Thus the situation of the subordinate to a higher dominant group is a favorable one if the latter is also subordinate to an even higher, against which the former has a defense. This is also the actual natural result of the social configuration here before us. Since, as a rule, some kind of opposition and jurisdictional dispute among adjacent elements in the hierarchy of dominant groups is taking place, the intermediate element is often in conflict with the higher as well as with the lower ones. And the fact that common opposition also binds together otherwise most diverse elements with no other means for unity is one of the typical formal rules that prove true universally for all areas of social life. A nuance hereof becomes especially important for the problem before us: already in the early Orient it is the glory of a ruler to take up the cause of the weaker who are oppressed by a stronger--if only because the ruler is thereby shown to be the stronger of the strong. In Greece it is found that a heretofore ruling oligarchy, one and the same personal- ity, is denounced with the label of a tyrant, whom the lower masses honor as their liberator from tyranny, just as happened with Euphron of Sikyon. It is hardly necessary to reiterate the frequency with which the motif--that the lower masses are supported by the ruler in their struggle with the aristocracy--recurrs in history. Indeed even where this direct relationship between the highest and the lowest ranks of the social scale does not exist for the purpose of keeping down the middle level, where instead the lowest and the middle both are oppressed by the highest, the mere fact that this happens to the middle level as well results in minimally a psychological emotional relief for the lowest rank. With some African and Asian peoples polygyny is so designed that only one of the wives counts as the actual, first or legitimate wife, and the others have a subordinate or servant position in relation to her. Even then, though, her position is in no way better against the husband; for him she is just as much a slave as the others. Without a doubt such a situation--that in which the relationship between two dominant groups stands under the same burden from above as that of the subordinates themselves--makes the burden, as human beings in general are disposed, more tolerable for the latter. Human beings tend to extract some satisfaction from the oppression of one's oppressor; with some feeling of superiority they tend to empathize with the ruler of their ruler, even wherever this sociological constellation means not in the least any real relief from the burdens on them.
Now wherever the form or content of the social structure excludes contact between the highest and lowest levels and thus excludes any
174 chapter three
? shared opposition to the middle, and there is a unidirectional continuity between the top and bottom, the way opens up for a typical sociological event that one can identify as a shifting of the burden. Over against the simple case that a more powerful one uses the position for the exploitation of a weaker, what this has to do with here is the stronger parties transfering any decline of their position, against which they can- not defend themselves, onto a defenceless party and seeking thereby to preserve the status quo ante. The retailer shifts the difficulties that arise through the desires and moods of the public onto the wholesaler, the wholesaler onto the producers, the producers onto the workers. In every hierarchy a new burden or demand moves along the line of least resis- tance, which finally, albeit not necessarily upon immediate appearance or at the first stage, tends to be constantly towards those below. This is the tragedy of the lowest people in every social order. They have to suffer not only under the deprivations, strains, and setbacks, the sum total of which simply characterizes their situation, but every new burden that higher levels meet with at any given point is passed down, whenever in any way technically possible, and stops only with them. The Irish agrarian conditions offer a very pure example.