Georg Simmel

“ We are easily inclined to regard peace, harmony of interests, concord, as the essence of social self-preservation; all antagonism, on the other hand, as destructive of the unity which it is the essential aim to preserve, and as the fruitless consumption of force which might be used for the positive up-building of the group organism. ”

“ Complete morality contains what honor and law can only command and forbid. Fulfilled honor prohibits of itself what the law lays under penalty, but honor does not assure everything which morality demands, nor does the criminal law secure everything that morality and honor decree. From this series we may immediately conclude that honor corresponds, as a social requisite, to the needs of a somewhat contracted circle, between those of the largest civic group, which coerces its members by penal law, and those of purely personal life, which finds its norms only in the autonomy of the individual. ”

“ The secret society must seek to create among the categories peculiar to itself, a species of life-totality. Around the nucleus of purposes which the society strongly emphasizes, it therefore builds a structure of formulas, like a body around a soul, and places both alike under the protection of secrecy, because only so can a harmonious whole come into being, in which one part supports the other. ”

“ The mere fact that the one party has taken sides upon any open question is sufficient to make the opposing party take the other side. This power of party, as a mere form which shows itself in unbroken continuance throughout the most heterogeneous kinds of interests, is one of the weightiest obstacles to the unification of a group, and even to the performance of any group action at all. This production of the line of hostility occurs also not merely where it separates whole divisions of groups. It appears as well in the relations of individuals with each other. ”

“ War really appeals to those energies which are common to the discordant elements of the community. These are vital and fundamental in their nature. War brings them so forcibly into consciousness that its disturbances actually nullify the differences. Thus the condition which, so far as our present thought is concerned, makes war dangerous disappears in the presence of war. In case the attack is not sharp enough to overcome the enmities present in the group, war produces the above asserted effects. How often has war given the last blow to a state system suffering from internal disruption! ”

“ In the process of voting the individual places himself in subordination to a power of which he is a part, but in this way, that it is left to his own volition whether he will belong to the superior or the inferior, i.e., the outvoted party. We are not now interested in cases of this complex problem in which the superiority is entirely formal, as, for example, in resolves of scientific congresses, but only with those in which the individual is constrained to an action by the will of the party outvoting him, that is, in which he must practically subordinate himself to the majority. ”

“ The aristocracy has no such tendency, because every division of labor brings with it gradation of rank, and this is repugnant to the class consciousness and inimical to its unity. The peasant class does not have it, because it is not required or permitted by its technique. It is peculiar, however, that variability and division of labor, much as they essentially and in their personal agents depend on each other, with respect to the self-maintenance of the group, often work in direct opposition to each other. ”

“ From the standpoint of such superiority, secrecy is a concession to outsiders, a dependence of behavior upon consideration of them. Hence the “mask” which so many regard as sign and proof of their aristocratic soul, of disregard of the crowd, is direct proof of the significance that the crowd has for such people. The mask of those whose distinction is real is that the many can at best not understand them, that they do not see them, so to speak, even when they show themselves without disguise. ”

“ Herewith the enormous service is manifest which honor renders to the self-maintenance of the group, for what I called the honor of the group, represented by the honor of the individual, proves, on close examination, to be nothing else than the stability, the unity, and the durable character of the group. Honor demands from the individual those kinds of conduct which promote these ends of his society. Since conformity to this demand acquires, on the one hand, an ideal worth, so ideal and so powerful at the same time that honor is preferred to life ”

“ The relations of human beings to each other are so complex, so ramified, and so compact that it would be a wholly hopeless task to resolve them into their elements, and we are consequently compelled to treat them as unities rather than as self-existing structures. It is, therefore, only a methodological device to speak of the essence and the development of the state, of law, of institutions, of fashion, etc., as if each of these were a unified entity. ”

“ In passing to consideration of the relations which are characterized by the superiority of such a number of persons, I observe that monarchy is the type and the primary form of the superior and inferior relation in general. Monarchy is so expressive and effective that it continues to have a function even in those constitutions which arose from reaction against it, in constitutions which directly purposed to introduce in the place of monarchy a division of the sovereignty. ”

“ When logic poses, however, as independent knowledge, and, without reference to the real content of which it is a mere form, presumes to construct of itself a separate intelligence, it makes for itself a world which usually presents marked contrasts with the real universe. The logical forms abstracted and organized into a science are merely an organ for comprehension of the totality of things. ”

“ How is the boundary to be drawn, within the whole area of a person’s potential communicability, at which ultimately the reserve and the respect of another are to begin? The advantage of modern marriage—which, to be sure, makes both questions answerable only one case at a time—is that this boundary is not from the start determined, as was the case in earlier civilizations. In these other civilizations marriage is, in principle, as a rule, not an erotic phenomenon, but merely a social-economic institution. The satisfaction of the instincts of love is only accidentally connected with it. ”

“ It is the essence of the human that the condition of the existence of its separate factors is the existence of their opposites. The manifoldness of formations, of changes, of contents, is so essential for the self-preservation of the group, not only because in each limited period the unity of the group stands out in contrast with the passing variations, but especially because the unity always recurs as the same, while the formations, the changes, the contents, from which it is distinguished are each time different. ”

“ He has no longer the feeling that he is a subject person. He regards himself only as servant of an objective economic technique, within which the element that as entrepreneur or leader is superior to himself works no longer as a personal superior, but simply as a technical necessity. Inasmuch as the laborer is no longer hired as an entire person, but rather a quantitatively defined service is stipulated, he is freed as a man from the relation of inferiority. He now belongs to the relationship only as a factor of the process of production, thus in so far coördinate with the leader. ”

“ The often essentially meaningless, schematic constraint of the ritual of the secret society is therefore by no means a contradiction of its freedom bordering on anarchy, its detachment from the norms of the circle which contains it. Just as widespread existence of secret societies is, as a rule, a proof of public unfreedom, of a policy of police regulation, of police oppression; so, conversely, ritual regulation of these societies from within proves a freedom and enfranchisement in principle for which the equilibrium of human nature produces the constraint as a counter-influence. ”

“ They rather serve to exemplify the principle which alone, in my opinion, can found an independent science of sociology, viz., the abstraction of socialization, as a form of existence with and for others, from the concrete conditions, interests, emotions, which make up the content of that form. Neither hunger nor love, neither labor nor the religious sentiment, neither technique nor the contents of intelligence, are in and of themselves alone social in character; but the coexistence and reciprocal influence of human beings make them factors actual and effectual. ”

“ These two forms of superiority and subordination dominated by a higher principle, with their very different consequences, emerge in the most various social spheres and with the most manifold complications. In all the countless cases in which an objective idea, an abstract unity, manifests itself in hierarchical organization, this double relationship of the individual is to be found. He is clothed with the dignity and importance of that principle, and he therewith enters into a relationship of superiority to all those over whom the principle has power. ”

“ For the church the eternity of her tenure was a symbol of the eternity of the principle in which her coherence was founded. The dead hand secured for such associations an impregnable defense and rallying point, an invaluable means of group maintenance. This character of the dead hand was supported further by the fact that the possessions of such corporations were chiefly real estate. In contrast with all movable property, especially with money, property in land has a stability, an indestructibility, a fixity which renders it the most appropriate content for the “dead hand” form of tenure. ”

“ In the case of a small group, which wants to maintain and develop itself within a larger circle, there will be certain limits to this policy, so long as it has to be pursued before all eyes. No matter how bitterly a public society may antagonize other societies of a larger organization, or the whole constitution of the same, it must always assert that realization of its ultimate purposes would redound to the advantage of the whole, and the necessity of this ostensible assertion will at all events place some restraint upon the actual egoism of its action. ”

“ In the case of bureaucracy, as in that of legal formalism, this conversion of an organ into a self-governing totality is the more dangerous because it takes the appearance and offers the pretext of being always for the sake of the whole. The attitude of the army sometimes fulfills this sociological form. This organ of group maintenance must, for technical reasons, be itself, so far as possible, an organism. To develop its professional qualities, particularly its close inner coherence, there is need of sharp distinction between it and other social classes. ”

“ By this method we discover, for example, as such forms, superiority and inferiority, the erection of hierarchies, competition, division of labor, imitation, representation, and countless other types of human socialization. Only after all their separate forms, from their most primitive to their most developed types, have been inductively determined and psychologically interpreted, can we gradually solve the riddle: “What is society in its essence?” For society is surely not a structure so unitary that a single exhaustive definition is possible. ”

“ So long as the relation of the wage-worker is looked on as a rental contract—the laboring man is hired or rented—so long does the relationship contain essentially an element of subordination of the laborer to the employer. This element is excluded however so soon as we regard the labor compact not as rental but as purchase of labor as an economic good. Then is the subordination which the relation demands of the laborer, as has been said, only a subordination “to coöperative progress, which for the entrepreneur, in so far as he performs any activity, is as essential as for the laborer.” ”

“ Among all the limitations of the individual, those that come from association in secret societies always occupy an exceptional status, in contrast with which the open limitations, domestic and civic, religious and economic, those of class and of friendship, however manifold their content, still have a quite different measure and manner of efficiency. It requires the comparison with secret societies to make clear that the demands of open societies, lying so to speak in one plane, run across each other. ”

“ It can never properly be asserted of a group, therefore, that at any given moment a new generation begins. The departure of the older and the entrance of the younger elements proceed so gradually and continuously that the group seems as much like a unified self as an organic body in spite of the change of its atoms. If the substitution of elements took place all at once and suddenly, in such a way as to affect the group throughout, it could scarcely be said that in spite of the disappearance of individuals the group maintains its unitary selfhood. ”