Georg Simmel

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sociology rests its whole right of existence as a separate science upon this abstraction of the forms of society, just as mathematics rests upon an abstraction of the mere spatial forms from material things, or as linguistic science rests upon the one abstraction of the forms of speech from the various linguistic representations in which men express themselves. ”

“ The most obvious way in which the persistence of the group depicts itself in the continuance of the ruler is in the heredity of the princely dignity. The physiological connection within the reigning family reflects the intricate connection within the group. The group perpetuates itself without intermission and as a matter of course from age to age. ”

“ This is the enormous advantage which society derives from the honor of its members, and for the sake of which society permits the individual to do things which are otherwise both by ethics and law positively forbidden. ”

“ In point of fact, most of the so-called sociological investigations belong within the field of one of these already existing sciences, for there is no content of life which would not be proper subject-matter of one or other of these. If, therefore, sociology is to have a peculiar and independent significance, its problems must consequently concern, not the contents of social life, but its form—the form which brings it to pass that all those contents which are treated by the special sciences are “societary.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ These facts have done the most to recommend the idea that the society, the unified group, is a structure of independent reality, which leads its life after peculiar laws and by virtue of peculiar forces, independent of all its individual components. In fact, when we consider the development and the characteristics of language, morals, church, law, political and social organization, that conception seems inevitable. ”

“ First, when the organ gains too vigorous independent life, and does not place the emphasis of its importance upon the worth of its service to the group, but upon its value to itself, the persistence of the organ may come into conflict with the persistence of the group. A relatively harmless case, but for that very reason one that quite clearly represents the type, is the bureaucracy. The bureaucratic body, a formal organization for exercising an extended administration, constitutes in itself a scheme which frequently clashes with the variable requirements of practical social life. ”

“ Every farsighted action of a large body must overcome the force of doubts, objections, antagonistic interests, and especially the indifference of individuals. The social organ that exists exclusively for this purpose, and which is composed of relatively few persons, is free from a large proportion of these obstructions. Such organs of the group promote its persistence, therefore, through an increased quickness and precision of social action, in contrast with which the movements of a whole group have an inflexible and dilatory character. ”

“ I see society rather wherever a number of human beings come into reciprocity and form a transient or permanent unity. In each such unification the phenomenon emerges which also determines the life of the individuals, viz., that at every moment destructive forces attack the life both from within and from without, and, if these alone operated, the unity would soon be resolved into its elements or transformed into other combinations. ”

“ All these factors combine to expose a society without differentiated organs not merely to the disintegrating and destructive forces which every social structure develops in itself, but also to powerful individual forces, in confronting which such a society is defenseless. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Accordingly honor is one of the most thorough means of maintaining the existence and specific significance of the group.
From such recourse of social self-preservation to individual persons, to a material substance, to an ideal conception, we pass now to the cases in which social persistence takes advantage of an organ composed of a number of persons. The objective principle in which unity manifests itself again exhibits societary character. Thus a religious community embodies its coherence and its life principle in its priesthood ”

“ While now the persistence of the group rests, on the one side, upon the immediate relations of individuals to individuals, and in so far the individual may unfold all the powers of intellect with which he is endowed, this is not absolutely true in those matters in which the group has to act as a unity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Otherwise expressed, while previously, where there was no structure of organs, the individual primary elements alone had a substantial existence, and its coherence was merely functional, now the coherence of organs gets an existence of its own, and, more than this, an existence not merely apart from all the members of the group in which the new organ belongs, but even separate from those individuals who are the immediate constituents of the organ itself. Thus the mercantile element in a society is a structure which has an existence for itself. ”

“ In our knowledge of physical organisms we have succeeded in thinking beyond the idea of a vital power that seemed to sway over the separate organs, and to compose a new entity in addition to them. We have, in part at least, substituted for this conception the reciprocal action of the organs. In like manner we must attempt in the social sciences to approach nearer and nearer to the individual operations which produce the social structure, however far we may be obliged to stop short of complete analysis. ”

“ At this point the justification must appear for speaking of the society as a special unity over and above its individual elements. These phenomena of the self-preservation of societies are by no means identical with the instinct of self-preservation in the individual members. The latter, on the contrary, calls for quite different treatment; it employs quite different forces from those that preserve the group to which the individual belongs ”

“ Thus, for illustration, we act like a party waging war, who secures an ally, but first furnishes that ally with all the military resources which he is to use. Think, for instance, of the idea of the gods, whom men first endowed with all sorts of qualities, worthinesses, and excellencies reflected from human souls. ”

“ The preservation of the identical selfhood of the group through a practically unlimited period gives to the group a significance which, ceteris paribus, is far superior to that of the individual. The life of the individual, with its purposes, its valuations, its force, is destined to terminate within a limited time, and to a certain extent each individual must start at the beginning. ”

“ So long as exchange and purchase take place only when producers and consumers are actually in each other’s presence, the transactions are evidently clumsy and imperfect, and the difficulties of these local limitations must be contended with continually. So soon, however, as the trader intervenes, and finally a mercantile class systematizes exchange and brings into existence every sort of relationship between people with economic interests, the whole coherence of the group becomes immeasurably closer and stronger. ”

“ The subject-matter of sociology is, therefore, the forms or ways in which human beings exist beside, for, and with each other. The purposes for the sake of which these socializations come into being—economic and social, [2] religious and criminal, sexual and military, political and ethical, etc.—will be treated by other sciences. ”

“ This very fact, however, often entangles the group in a conflict of typical sociological significance, and for the reason that the group thus assisted in its self-preservation is only a portion of a larger civic society containing it. Almost all sorts of human association, whatever be their specific content and character, have to work to secure the coöperation in social unity of certain parts that persist in following a certain egoistic impulse. ”

“ In general, social interest takes care further that, in groups that are still unstable, conflict and selection go before the acquisition of sovereignty. Wherever the form in which the group maintains itself is already established and secure, the personal element may withdraw in favor of the formal principle. That species of sovereignty may now gain the front rank which best expresses the continuity and theoretical eternity of the group life so formed. ”

“ Only when the guidance of group action is intrusted to an organization consisting of relatively few persons can specific talent be enlisted for its direction. Within a group acting as an undifferentiated mass such endowment and special knowledge as only the few may possess must at best fight their way to influence in each particular case. Within a differentiated organ, on the other hand, such endowment and knowledge have, in principle at least, uncontested influence. ”

“ Society consists rather of the sum of all the ways and means of combination that appear among its elements. It cannot be said that “society” must exist before all these separate relations make their appearance in society. Any single relation may be eliminated, to be sure, since in the societies known to us there are always enough remaining relations. If we try to project our thought beyond all these relations, however, there remains no society at all. ”

“ The sociological technique of self-preservation operates again in higher potency in the regulation of certain associations that, even in case of the dissolution of the association, its property shall not be distributed among its members, but shall revert to some union for similar purposes. Self-maintenance is concerned in such case, not with the physical existence of the group, but with its idea, which is incarnated in the group that becomes its heir, the continuity of which is just as well provided for through the transference of its property to that group. ”

“ Since now socialization only occurs among human beings for the sake of such purposes, we shall discover the laws of social forms only by collecting such societary phenomena of the most diverse contents, and by ascertaining what is common to them in spite of their diversity. ”