Georg Simmel - Table of Contents

Georg Simmel, the unknown sociologist

1. Georg Simmel, the Unknown Sociologist
Lost somewhere between Comte, Marx, and Parsons

2. Georg Simmel: Individual and Mass
Humans are social, in the individual and the mass

3. Georg Simmel: Social Humans at Play
Away from goal-oriented activity, we humans can be purely sociable.

4. Georg Simmel: 18th and 19th Century View of Freedom
Equality and freedom combined, or fighting each other

5. Georg Simmel: Numbers and Social Life
With numbers we organize on abstract rather than kinship principles

6. Georg Simmel: The Individual and the "Dyad"
The Dyad is the individual as part of a two-person social relationship

7. Georg Simmel: Expansion of the Dyad
When the Dyad expands to three, there are three kinds of relationship

8. Georg Simmel: Subordination under an Individual

A monarch is both revered and resented

9. Georg Simmel: Subordination under a Plurality
Living under a group is best when the rulers are not in conflict

10. Georg Simmel: Subordination under a Principle

Living under a principle is both liberating and enslaving

11. Georg Simmel: Degrees of Domination

The quest for freedom is also a quest for domination. It's complicated

12. Georg Simmel: Knowledge, Truth and Falsehood

We act based on our knowledge of facts and people, but our knowledge is full of error

13. Georg Simmel: Types of Relationships by Reciprocal Knowledge
The personal vs. the objective; "Confidence" vs. "Discretion"

14. Georg Simmel: Secrecy

Meaning not just privacy and modesty, but the deliberate attempt to hide stuff

15. Georg Simmel: The Secret Society
The whole point of a secret society is the "protection" of invisibility for the members as members

16. Georg Simmel: Faithfulness and Gratitude

Faithfulness is the glue that binds society -- and relationships -- together

17. Georg Simmel: The Negatives of Collective Behavior
The bigger the group the fewer the things in common, and the more coercion needed

18. Georg Simmel: The Stranger
The person who comes today, stays for tomorrow, and imports stuff into society

19. Georg Simmel: The Metropolis and Mental Life
The calculating nature of metropolitan life tends "to transform the world into an arithmetic problem" 

20. Georg Simmel: Wrapup

Brief rundown on Simmel's ideas

Georg Simmel: Wrapup

Georg Simmel was a German sociologist and contemporary of Max Weber, also a German sociologist. But his work is independent of Weber and clearly not "influenced" by Weber like 20th century sociologists.

So Simmel is clearly a 19th century voice, commenting on the world that the 19th century created. But his great virtue is that he doesn't have a political ax to grind, like Marx and the Fabians. He doesn't regard social hierarchy as prima facie as scandal. Nor does he descant on the horrors of objectification as the Marxists do with "reification" and "commodification."

So let's review Simmel's ideas, as developed in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff.

Groups and Lowest Common Denominator. People are at their best as individuals, at their worst in a group. That's because a group must define itself by what the members have in common.

Sociability as Play. We tend to think of pure sociability as "superficial" and we sneer at the professional hostess. But sociability is sociation as play, and play is how humans learn things. So maybe sociability is how humans learn to be social.

18th and 19th Century Freedom. Simmel describes the 18th century idea of freedom as the idea of "freedom in general" and the 19th century idea of freedom as the freedom to be different. The thing is that freedom, any freedom, immediately permits the strong to exploit the weak and the clever to outpace the stupid.  We used to worry about aristocratic privilege; now we worry about economic inequality.

The Sociology of Small Numbers. Simmel starts with the isolated individual, then moves to the "dyad" of two people -- friends, business partners and married man and wife -- and the "triad" of three people where the question usually involves various two-against-one scenarios.

Numbers and Groups. Once you get beyond the sociation of the kindred you see numbers appearing, particularly in the notion of the "Hundred," a subdivision used in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere.

Subordination. However we may long for freedom and equality, social relations almost always means the domination of one person by another. Simmel looks at three kinds of social domination: subordination under a monarch, under a plurality, and under a principle. He makes the important point that we humans are very seldom held under complete coercive domination. It's just that, most of the time, we judge the price of freedom too high to take advantage of it.

The Secret. One of the most important qualities of social life is that we don't tell everything to the other people we know.  We hold back, and not just the guilty secrets. In fact discretion and privacy are a vital part of social life. It starts with the fact that we cannot know what another person is thinking.

Faithfulness and Gratitude. They are both pretty important as the social glue that goes beyond the mere performance of promises.

Objectivity in Modern Life. Marx makes a scandal out of "reification" and the way that production for use becomes production for exchange. But Simmel shows that objectification is inevitable as society develops from face-to-face relationships to the global exchange economy. We naturally treat objects like money and products as if they have a life of their own. We do it because it works.

The Stress of Modern Life. The "intensification of nervous stimulation" is the defining aspect of life in the city. It provokes everyone to cooperate with the rest of society yet also work hard at individuating from the mass. Modern life is a constant battle between "individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself". It is the conflict between the 18th century "general human being" and the 19th century "qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability." We want to be equal to our fellows, and we want to be special as well.

Back to the beginning: The Unknown Sociologist.

Georg Simmel: The Metropolis and Mental Life

Back in the old days primitive man fought like mad just to provide for his bodily existence, writes Georg Simmel in George Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. But now modern man must take arm against a sea of troubles "to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

The 18th century commanded each individual to take arm against the old hierarchies in state and religion and economics; the 19th century commanded us to seek "functional specialization" in our work and compare ourselves with others. Nietzsche saw life as a ruthless struggle between individuals; socialism saw the complete suppression of all competition.

[I]n all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism.

What we have, in the metropolis, is "the intensification of nervous stimulation... and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions." It requires an intellectual response to life different than the tenor of rural life "which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships."

This intellectuality is symbolized by the money economy. In the exchange economy of the metropolis everything "is reckoned with as a number."

Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and quantity to the question: How much?

 In rural affairs, producer and consumer are acquainted.

The modern metropolis, however, is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer's actual field of vision.

The calculating nature of metropolitan life tends "to transform the world into an arithmetic problem" even to the necessity of promptness and "the punctual integration of all activities and mutual relationships into a stable and impersonal time schedule."

These traits must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign trains and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without.

It is precisely this that thinkers like Nietzsche and Ruskin hated.

The neverending stimulation of metropolitan life has provoked a defense mechanism, the "blasé attitude," which deals with stimulation by refusing to react to the turmoil and intensification of experience of the urban experience. Thus, to the eyes of "small town people", the city dwellers seem "cold and heartless."

Against this is the fact that the metropolis "grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions." Small-town life sets up external and internal barriers against individual independence and expression that can only be overcome in the larger stage of the metropolis, its division of labor, and its geometrical expansion of horizons.

The objectivating spirit of the metropolis has yielded up amazing advances "in things and in knowledge, in institutions and in comforts" but also a "retrogression" of the spirit. This provokes some to extremes of individuality, "summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core... to exaggerate this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself."

Thus the metropolis provokes both "individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself". There is a conflict between these two, the 18th century "general human being" and the 19th century "qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability."

The external and internal history of our time takes its course within the struggle and in the changing entanglements of these two ways of defining the individual's role in the whole of society. It is the function of the metropolis to provide the arena for this struggle and its reconciliation.

Next: Wrapup. 

Georg Simmel: The Stranger

By the notion of "The Stranger" we are not talking about the person who is here in the community today and gone tomorrow. We are talking, according to George Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, about "the person who comes today and stays tomorrow."

[H]is position in the group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.

We are not talking about people living on another planet; we are talking about people living in the community who are not quite of it. The stranger's relation to the community "involves both being outside it and confronting it."

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

The archetypal stranger is the trader, for he brings "products that originate outside the group" and probably lives outside it. Because trade sees opportunities that the local person does not, it is suitable for the stranger and suitable for a group like the European Jews, and the stranger is typically not "an owner of soil." This status alone makes him a stranger.

His activity in intermediary trade and finance also evokes mobility, one who comes in contact with many individuals and becomes less "organically connected" with "kin, locality, and occupation". This mobility and extensive contact also creates objectivity, for "the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given." This objectivity, and standing apart, is often abused by persons wishing to blame someone for an uprising or other social disaster.

We relate to the stranger through general features such as nation, occupation. But with our intimates with more specific qualities. This is notable in erotic relationships, where "lovers think that there has never been a love like theirs". But estrangement "usually comes where this uniqueness vanishes from the relationship."

The peculiar situation of the stranger is illustrated by the medieval Beede in German cities. For the Christian this tax "changed with the changes in his fortune" while for the Jew it was fixed as a head tax. Locals were treated as individuals; strangers were all alike.

The stranger is a member of the community; yet he is held at a distance. There is in the stranger a peculiar tension between "nearness and distance."

Next: The Metropolis and Mental Life.

Georg Simmel: The Negatives of Collective Behavior

When you get a big mass action, such as a revolution, writes Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, the result is almost always destructive. The reason is quite simple. When you bring together all kinds of divergent groups, you usually get dispersing and destructive consequences.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

Simmel puts this idea into the form of a principle:

[A]s the size of a group increases, the common features that fuse its members into a social unit become ever fewer. [Thus] a smaller minimum of norms can, at least, hold together a large group more easily than a small one.

The point is that the larger the group the harder it is to control it from the center, and the more that the center "is left only with a prohibitive function... with the restriction of freedom rather than its direction." Polytheism and monotheism demonstrate this principle: the particular qualities of polytheistic gods make a large unified religious community impossible. Thus Islam, in unifying numerous polytheistic Arab tribes, became the simplest of the monotheisms.

[T]he larger the group... the less does the observance of the norm characterize the individual and the less important it is for him -- whereas its violation, on the whole, has consequences which are especially grave, which single out the individual from the group.

This applies especially to intellectual matters, being based on logic, which "cuts through the variety of world views" and creates "common ground" for all discussion. Yet logic is merely negative; "it is only a norm against which we must not sin".

The violation principle applies also to ordinary social conventions. To observe them is nothing; to violate them is a big deal.

Greeting somebody in the street proves no esteem whatever, but failure to do so, conclusively proves the opposite. The forms of courtesy fail as symbols of positive, inner attitudes, but they are most useful in documenting negative ones, since even the slightest omission can radically and definitely alter our relation to a person.

Next: The Stranger

Georg Simmel: Faithfulness and Gratitude

Faithfulness, writes Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, is the glue that binds society together. Not self-interest, coercion, duty, or love could keep society together without an intermixture of faithfulness. And yet you can never tell the effect of faithfulness because "its practical effect always consists in replacing some other feeling."

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

But what is faithfulness? What is "faithful love?" Simmel defines it this way:

Faithfulness might be called the inertia of the soul. It keeps the soul on the path on which it started, even after the original occasion that led it onto it no longer exists.

To Simmel faithfulness is an affective factor, "a specific psychic state, which is directed towards the continuation of the relationship as such, independently of any particular affective or volitional elements that sustain the content of this relation." I understand this to mean that we are not talking about an affective quality called "faithful love." We are talking about two affective qualities: faithfulness and love. One might say, perhaps, that while the original feeling that started a relationship starts to dissipate the feeling of faithfulness towards the relationship develops.

As an example of encouraging faithfulness, Simmel cites a 19th century French program of temporary assistance to unmarried mothers that would agree to keep their babies and not give them up to orphanages. It was found that once the mother had kept the baby for any length of time she would not later give it up.

Again:

[F]aithfulness... has the significance that, by virtue of it, for once the personal, fluctuating inner life actually adopts the character of the fixed, stable form of a relation.

 Then there is gratitude, which is no less important than faithfulness, and even more hidden. Only its "external insignificance... has apparently concealed the circumstance that the life and the cohesion of society would be unforeseeably changed without this phenomenon." It is a supplement of the legal forms of exchange, giving and receiving, into a realm beyond what can be enforced by legal coercion.

This is particularly important in the modern economy because of its objectification of giving and receiving into the exchange of commodities. Simmel echoes Marx, but without the moral music:

Exchange is the objectification of human interaction... This objectification, this growth of the relationship into self-contained, movable things, becomes so complete that, in the fully developed economy, personal interaction recedes altogether into the background, while goods gain a life of their own.

Gratitude moves in the reverse direction, personalizing what is experienced as objective. It is the "moral memory of mankind"; it connects today with "what has gone before... [It] effects the return of a benefit where there is no external necessity for it." Again: "gratitude actually consists, not in the return of a gift, but in the consciousness that it cannot be returned", that a relation goes beyond any "finite return gift or other activity."  And we can understand why this is so. The first gift "has a voluntary character than no return gift can have." What indeed can be given in return but gratitude?

The obligation that colors giving explains whey many people (i.e., men) do not like to receive gifts. They understand that gifts bind people to each other, and they wish, as independent individuals, to be free of such bonds.

In Simmel's view, gratitude is even more powerful as a social glue than faithfulness. There are many relationships that can do without faithfulness, but gratitude is forever.

This atmosphere of obligation belongs among those "microscopic," but infinitely tough, threads which tie one element of society to another, and thus eventually all of them together in a stable collective life.

Next: The Negatives of Collective Behavior

Georg Simmel: The Secret Society

Secrecy is part of every personal and group relationship, but in some relationships the secret "may characterize a group in its totality". We are talking here about "secret societies." In normal circumstances a secret promotes "isolation, contrast, and egoistic individualization." This applies also to the secret society, but in addition the "secret determines the reciprocal relations" among the members that share the secret.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

In a secret society, writes George Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, the secret inspires "confidence" in its members, and this is important because the whole point of a secret society is the "protection" of invisibility. An individual can hide a secret, but not himself; a secret society -- a "conspiracy, a gang of swindlers" or even a group for "sexual orgies" -- can remain itself a secret; the group not the members is concealed.

We are not talking here about groups like the Freemasons, which merely have secret rules.

Secret societies are typically new movements just aborning, that need the protection of secrecy, and sometimes old movements about to expire or be trampled out of existence. For instance, when Christianity was new it often resorted to secrecy; when Christianity triumphed then it was pagan groups that crept into the shadows.

But the confidence factor is just as important. The difficulty of keeping a secret means that he that keeps it for my sake is trustworthy, and implies a great moral strength. Thus secret societies "offer a very impressive schooling in the moral solidarity among men."

Since the keeping of the secret is paramount for a secret society, it typically instructs "the novice in the art of silence." Simmel tells us how the Moluccans, the Pythagoreans, and the Druids did it.

Now we come to an idea about the difference between a small intimate culture and the large impersonal culture. Simmel observes that face-to-face relations promote a complete integration of the individual "with his surrounding, living group."

But once the labor of the species capitalizes its results in the form of writing, in visible works, in enduring examples, this immediate, organic flow between the actual group and its individual member is interrupted.

The connection between the individual and the group is no longer subjective, it is objective. In this notion Simmel parallels the Marxian scandal about "reification" and "commodification" but without the implication of a Fall from primitive innocence.

Simmel expands on the notion of objectivity. Writing, he writes, "is opposed to all secrecy." That is why, we may say, that we talk of "publishing" a book, for all the world to see. Once you write something down it is objective and timeless.

Given the unprotected nature of written communication, the private letter is a particularly interesting form of communication, starting with the idea that indiscretion concerning letters is considered "particularly ignoble." A letter is, on the one hand, an "objectification of its content" and on the other, because addressed from one person to another, "personal and subjective".

The secret may be merely a means to keep an association protected while it seeks material ends, or the secret may be a secret knowledge that the society protects to keep it from the masses. Either way, sociation is needed to protect the secret. But the development of a society may change the attitude towards secrecy, as in the Freemasons, which preserve the idea of secrecy while becoming indifferent towards it. Secrecy is a two way street. Some may seek it for protection; others seek isolation for protection.

Like all other forms of sociation, secret societies have hierarchy. Indeed, writes Simmel, they do it with "great finesse and thoroughness." The need to preserve secrecy demands this, and since the society has a purpose, the hierarchy, and its will to power, must be carefully designed to project power and preserve secrecy. In the degenerate forms of secret hierarchy, such as in the Freemasons, it reaches for the fantastical.

Secret societies are also famous for their devotion to ritual. In this they are probably no different than other institutions, such as "the military organization and the religious community" which aim to "claim the individual wholly" and use ritual to bind members into a total form of life within the community. Another need for the rigor of ritual is that the secret society is autonomous, a community separate from society; it must replace the stability and lawfulness of normal society with its own laws and stability.

The fact of secrecy makes the secret society interesting. For a start, it must always be a society self-consciously within another society and self-consciously apart from that society. It does not form and grow spontaneously, it is necessarily "conscious and intentional." Then, it must have secret signs so that members can make themselves know to each other -- even in another town -- without betraying the society. They need to hide their society from the general run of people, but also be able to recognize each other.

The forming of a special group, separate from society, also feeds the urge towards aristocracy. As well as satisfying the feeling of superior specialness, secrecy hides the "numerical insignificance of the ruling class" and uses it to appear "fearsome, mighty, threatening." The aristocratic individual, separate from a group, "despises all concealment", for if he were to hide himself behind a "mask" he would concede the "importance of the multitude."

It is notable that the gradual initiation of group members "by degrees" into secret societies helps preserve the secret, it provides a "buffer region against non-initiates". The separation of the secret society allows it to be completely self-motivated and egoistic, whereas non-secret associations always have to pretend to work for the good of all. The secret society also stands at one end of the inclusiveness/exclusiveness axis. Some associations include almost everyone; other exclude almost everyone, and the secret society tends towards the exclusive. The separation from the outside assists in internal cohesion because not only are loyalties focused on the inside but are not divided by other associations. Overall then, the secret society sets up a separate social entity with strong centralization, even to the extent of a secret hidden leader unknown to the members, and a de-individualization and equalization of the members. And there is the invitation to irresponsibility. A man may easily do things he would hesitate to do when a member of a secret cabal.

Needless to say, central governments hate secret societies, indeed, special associations of any kind, and it is easy for the general society to image that secrecy hides dangers. Indeed it is natural for governments to view secret societies as competitors of the state. So "every group that is politically rejected, is called a secret society."

Next: Faithfulness and Gratitude.

Georg Simmel: Secrecy

It's one thing to respect other peoples' privacy; it's another thing to deliberately hide stuff from other people, to go beyond privacy and modesty to deliberate secrecy, writes Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff.

The secret in this sense, the hiding of realities by negative or positive means, is one of man's greatest achievements... [T]he secret produces an immense enlargement of life; numerous contents of life cannot even emerge in the presence of full publicity. The secret offers, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside the manifest world; and the latter is decisively influenced by the former.

It is clear that a secret changes the relationship between two people or groups, and it is evident that the occasion of secrecy has changed in modern times: what once was public has become secret, and vice versa.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

We often think of secrecy as evil and shameful -- "the immoral hides itself for obvious reasons" -- but sometimes a "noble individual... conceals his best" for various reasons.

We can understand the use of secrecy for strategic reasons, but should not forget the fascination with secrecy, of knowing something (and thus possessing something) that others cannot. The secret seems to have "special value." This is revealed in the child's boast "I know something that you don't know" and in the fact that revealing British parliamentary discussions used to be a criminal offence. The converse is true: people often think there is some mystery in "superior persons" and "superior achievements;" they long to know their secret ingredient.

How does a secret get revealed? Often enough, in betrayal, when the secret is "dissolved." In consequence there is a constant tension in secrecy, where "the external danger of being discovered" is woven with an internal angst, the fear of being discovered. There is, therefore, in the arc of every secret, a constant interplay between "concealing and revealing."

The question of secrecy is nowhere more revealing than in the modern society of individualism and the money economy. It used to be that few secrets were possible in the small face-to-face community, but the secrets of government as to debts, taxes, and the armed forces were absolute. Today, in the large money economy, secrets are everywhere. Personal wealth is easy to hide, its abstractness and complications make is hard to understand, and its "effect-at-a-distance" allows its "complete withdrawal" from local eyes. And personal privacy has become a social good.  Meanwhile public affairs are supposed to be transparent on the view that "everybody should know the events and circumstances that concern him."

Secrecy "operates as an adorning possession". A "noteworthy person" exists partly in what is concealed. And yet the function of physical adornment is "to lead the eyes of others upon the adorned" in the same way as a secret makes someone special.

Next: The Secret Society.

Georg Simmel: Types of Relationships by Reciprocal Knowledge

The thing about the "other" is that you don't know everything about him, and you don't want to know. And even in groups, people don't know everything about each other. So Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff devotes a chapter to the different kinds of groups and relationships between members of the groups.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

One type of group where the members know very little about each other is a political interest group. The members make monetary contributions to the group, but they are "psychologically anonymous" to each other. They don't need to know each other's personality; they don't want to know. This "increasing objectivization" is characteristic of our age.

This question of incomplete knowledge about other people in this objectivizing age raises the issue of "confidence" in other people. "[C]onfidence is intermediate between knowledge and ignorance about a man." If you know everything about a person you don't need confidence; if you know nothing, forget it. This is characteristic about the whole of modern society; we know only what we need to know about another party, whether in business, in scholarship, in politics. We only need to know what we "have to know for the sake of the relationship [we] wish to enter."

The point is that in modern society, the personal and the subjective is often replaced by the objective, even in personal relationships where "among educated strata" people relate only as "acquaintances." We know only what is appropriate to know about the other, and the deliberate "staying away" from other knowledge about someone is termed "discretion." There is a boundary, different with different people, beyond which we do not go. The question is what "the individual must know" about the other: the businessman in a long-term contract; the master employing a servant, the "superior who advances a subordinate." The telling opposite of discretion is indiscretion, the violation of boundaries, by betraying a secret thought, or prying into other peoples' lives, or taking advantage of the "slips and helplessnesses of the other."

This relationship at a distance clearly defines modern friendship and marriage. Although they would seem to require total immersion in the other in fact the relationship is usually differentiated. Maybe one friendship is based on affection, another on intellectual aspects, or religion. Such relationships require that people do not look beyond their mutual spheres of interest, in observance of appropriate discretion. In modern marriage, the question of confidence and discretion is difficult, because modern marriage is not a fixed "social and economic institution" but more freely erotic.  Of course, the "conventional or material motive" is still strong, but "the sociological idea of modern marriage is the commonness of all life-contents". A marriage may result in a happy and vital union, or the opposite when anticipated unity is disappointed. In fact, despite the idea of complete union, marriage, like other relationships in the modern age, needs "only a certain proportion of truth and error... and a certain proportion of distinctness and indistinctness in the image of our life-elements." We can give only what the other "may accept" and indistinctness and unclarity may be needed to keep mutual attractiveness alive. Confidence and discretion are needed to make modern marriage work.

Next: Secrecy

Georg Simmel: Knowledge Truth and Falsehood

In order to live and thrive as social animals we humans have to have knowledge about each other, writes Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. That knowledge can be expressed by the price of a merchant's goods, his knowledge of his customers, by the teacher challenging her students, knowing their capabilities. Of course, we do not know the full truth about other people; much of other people is hidden from us. Failing perfection, we assemble a "personal unity" out of the "fragments" that other persons permit us to see, knowing also that often they deliberately conceal parts of themselves. Still, we know enough to get on.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

The interaction between individuals is "based upon the pictures which they acquire of one another." But it is the very interaction between individuals under which the conception each has of the other takes shape and is legitimated. In science this is called circular logic; but between people it is life. We act based upon our overall knowledge of people and reality, yet our knowledge is shot through with error and distortion. Not only is complete truth impossible but untruth, even the Noble Lie and conscious self-deception, seems necessary in order to maintain life. It seems "we obtain the exact amounts of error and truth which constitute the basic of the conduct required of us, error and truth are psychologically coordinate".

The question of truth and deception have particular importance in relation to "the inner life of the individual with whom we interact. He may, intentionally, either reveal the truth about himself to us, or deceive us by lie and concealment." Our own inner lives, anyway, are a "chaotic whirling of images and ideas" of which we are rarely conscious, and we are even more selective about what we reveal of our inner life to others. "Whatever we say... is never an immediate and faithful presentation of what really occurs in us... but is a transformation of this inner reality... stylized by selection and arrangement." All interactions between humans necessarily lie somewhere on a line between "sincere revelations and mendacious concealments."

So we come to the lie, "the fact that the liar hides his true idea from the other." This is particularly important in modern society. No doubt lies have always been a part of human interaction, but in the primitive face-to-face society it is much harder to bring off. In our modern society of strangers we are less able to evaluate the truth of others' discourse, yet we rely enormously "upon the faith in the honesty of the other", for instance in the economy and its credit system, in science where scientists take for granted the ideas of other scientists. The lie in the modern world is a big deal, "for modern life is a "credit economy" in a much broader than economic sense."

Yet the lie also is permissible. The intellectually stronger tend to club the intellectually weaker with the lie, and the retail trade uses the arts of of the lie in boosting its merchandise. And even the most intimate relations, defined by nearness, "lose the attractiveness, even the content of their intimacy, as soon as the close relationship does not also contain, simultaneously and alternatively, distances and intermissions." All "relationships... presuppose a certain ignorance and a measure of mutual concealment". The lie thus occupies the aggressive end of a whole spectrum of social actions "attained by mere secrecy and concealment."

Thus social humans do not just live by communication and cooperation; social relations also necessarily involve distance, concealment, and at the extreme, the lie.

Next: Types of Relationship and Reciprocal Knowledge

Georg Simmel: Degrees of Domination

We moderns worship at the altar of freedom and equality, but Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff warns us that domination and subordination are an inescapable part of being social. In almost every relation, one person is a little less equal that the other.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

Simmel has previously gone into excruciating detail about "superordination and subordination" by type, that is, subordination to an individual, to a group, to a principle. Now he looks at the degree of subordination or domination.

But first he examines a peculiar case, that of superordinates without subordinates. He means a group of people that does not even think about subordinates. Examples are the Spartans, that just called themselves homoioi, or similar ones. Their subordinates were subject peoples, and they never talked about them. Plato speaks about the"born king" who is kingly whether or not he has a kingdom to rule. In the Salvation Army, everyone is an officer, and the Freemasons are all "sovereigns and born princes of the whole order." Whether such people live in the real world or an imagined world is a separate question.

Another question is the relation of superordination and freedom. People in a subordinate position naturally long for a liberation from that domination, and they often express their longing as a desire for freedom. We may describe this a desire for "equality with the superior". The proletarian naturally wants to climb up a rung to equality with the bourgeois. But then what? What happens next is a struggle for supremacy, a desire to be superior, for, as Simmel says, we want not only freedom, but "to use it for some purpose." In other words, domination. A peculiar instance of this drive for superiority is for an elite group to have its own laws. It may seem like domination for a group to subject its members to special laws, but that specialness or separation is a measure of the group's freedom and contributes to the sense among its members of their superiority.

However, a successful drive for freedom among a coalition of groups will immediately expose disagreement: As soon as feudalism was abolished in Bohemia in 1848 the differences between the poor peasants and well-to-do peasants came to the fore. The stronger group in a coalition may appropriate most or all of the gains from a political struggle for freedom.

In other words, "the quest for freedom... has, as its correlate or consequence, the quest for domination". But both "socialism and anarchism deny the necessary character of this connection." They argue that super-subordination will disappear once society is organized as the "coordination of all elements." Of course, it is almost impossible to implement such a plan because nothing "can eliminate natural difference among men" nor eliminate the need for "leaders and executors." But it might be possible to eliminate the feeling of "degradation and oppression" in the subordinates. Simmel suggests that this is possible by a "differentiation of objective and subjective life-elements, whereby subordination is preserved as a technical organizational value" that is not felt subjectively as degradation. Thus people may perform as subordinates at work but greet their boss as an equal in social situations. The elimination of degradation is also achieved by rotation of offices in small organizations and by short terms and term limits for elected offices.

Another way in which super-subordination is diminished is by the normal operation of democracy in which ordinary people, who have no expertise in governing, are supposedly the source of power, while the magistrates and representatives are the servants of the people. A similar threading of power was achieved in Britain after the Glorious Revolution. The clergy, opposed to parliamentary power, was given power over marriages and testaments and sanctions over Catholics; in return it recognized "that the divine world order had room for a parliamentary world order." Similarly in a bureaucracy the superior is often dependent upon the technical knowledge of the subordinate.

In general, we can view social domination in part as a form of the "objective organization of society." But domination also expresses "differences in personal qualities among men." We can imagine that social domination begins with purely personal qualities, such as force, piety, skills, that define superiority. As objective government structures developed the king had to be perfect: King David was said to be "singer and warrior, a layman and a prophet" and had the skills to meld secular power with "spiritual theocracy." But the development of the state and the division of labor makes the personal omnipotence of the ruler unnecessary, and develops into an objective form where the position not the person defines super-subordination. Outside of politics it is clear that the mere possession of money implies a certain social position. The modern economy creates an abundance of positions for which many people are qualified, while creating remarkable opportunities for the exceptionally gifted.

Against this tendency, socialism proposes a completely centralized and articulated hierarchy and presupposes, by its doctrines of equality, that all are equally qualifies for positions. It ought to implement a system of appointment to positions by lottery. And yet the existence of a cenralized government hierarchy destroys the principle that all are equal.

A related problem applies to any aristocracy, or rule by the "best." Artists commonly prefer aristocracy, where internal excellence is revealed in outer appearance.  Yet who is to determine the "best?" Neither the breeding of the best nor a free struggle for position has yielded the best, so perhaps the lesser evil of a general equality is best. Or maybe, failing any method of selecting the "best" and granting the necessity of government, perhaps the "best" superordinate is the "subjectively adequate individual." This is not as scandalous as it seems. Elections of the "medieval English parliament seem to have been conducted with astonishing negligence and indifference." All that mattered was that someone was elected from each district.

Earlier, Simmel has written that absolute coercion is rare; there is always some degree of freedom even for the most abject slave. Now he notes the ubiquity of some level of coercion in social relations, for instance in marriage laws. The coercion may make life unbearable, but it may also encourage people to make their life in common "at least as bearable as possible." There is in human life a constant drama between freedom and subordination, and the routine coercions of social life bring them into focus.

In the final analysis there is a basic problem in super-subordination, that "there are always more people qualified for superordinate positions than there are such positions." Moreover many people appointed to superior positions are less capable than those left behind as subordinates. It is telling that modern government and its perfect hierarchy tends to presuppose an infallibility in its functionaries that contrasts with the inadequacy of its actual executives. In fact, the absence of constant disaster indicates that many people of average ability can do the jobs of a governing hierarchy. In Athens, as today, people are more interested in personal qualities such as friendliness and caring about people like me than objective qualifications when selecting their representatives. Yet once elected, we accord our representatives respect. Even in the 17th and 18th century it was assumed that the subject, permanently in need of royal guidance, immediately acquired the necessary insights and public spirit on being appointed to public office.

Next: Knowledge, Truth and Falsehood

Georg Simmel: Subordination under a Principle

For most of human experience we have been ruled by people. But in the modern era we are ruled also by "principle," by laws and ideas. This has an important consequence, according to Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff.

The individual who is subordinate to an objective law feels himself determined by it; while he, in turn, in no way determines the law, and has no possibility of reacting to it in a manner that could influence it -- quite in contrast to the most miserable slave, who, in some fashion at least, can still in this sense react to his master.

Nevertheless, modern man regard subordination to a principle as "the more dignified situation." But Simmel cites 16th century princes who "often met with considerable resistance" from rule "by administrative bodies... that is more nearly by laws." Aristotle and Plato both recommend government by law, but Plato recognizes that a ruler stands above the law and that the welfare of the community may require that he "act even against the laws laid down by him."

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

There are principles other than law, for instance patrimony, as implemented in imperial Russia. This can result in "humiliatingly harsh... subordination", such as the peasant belonging to the land, and the child belonging to the father not because he fathered it but because the mother belongs to him.

Subordination under a principle raises an interesting question. A principle seems to have a dual influence, both as "an impersonal order to which we simply have to submit" and something that "our most private and internal impulses" impose on us.

But the principle is not just an objectivity "enthroned in an ideal realm above society and the individual." One can also think of society "as the third element, which solves conflicts between the individual and objectivity" whether objectivity is an abstract principle or a fact of nature. Thus the market economy mediates between the individual and nature; and breaks down the idea that a cultural value must either "spring from an individual" or come down from Heaven.

Simmel introduces two penetrating examples of society interposing between individual and objectivity. The first example is the attempts of the state to control the market as it emerges from local and informal production relationships. It "supplies the individual with a norm" before he comes to understand the norm as it presents itself in the interplay of market prices and relationships. This social function also works in the intellectual sphere. Individuals pick up "traditional, authoritative conceptions which are 'accepted by all'" without confronting reality in the raw or really understanding it. Indeed, individuals may prefer not to know the reality of nature and reality without the comfortable sheen that society gives it.

Finally, Simmel takes a look at the effect of subordination to a principle on actual people: superordinates and subordinates. It is important to remember that usually the personal superordination/subordination came first, gradually giving place to an objective ideal in which the superordinate "exerts his power" as the "representative of this ideal, objective force." Simmel relates the development of the power of the pater familias among the Aryans. Originally his power was unlimited, subject only to his whim and advantage. But then it developed into a "feeling of responsibility" to the family. The father became subject to the idea of the family, merely an "executor and obeyer." Thus the "commander subordinates himself to the law which he has made." We also see this in the modern economy where everyone, from the CEO to the line worker, seems to be "the servant of an objective, economic procedure." The interplay of the personal and the objective is illustrated in the notion of employment at will. This minimizes the personal subjection of worker to management, since the worker can leave at will, whereas a long-term contract implies a bond, or personal subjection. But the same senior manager at a large business that bullies his subordinates around will "exhibit serviceable and devout" behavior to the firm's clients.

The introduction of objective principle into social life creates wonders of social interactions and complexities that are absent from simple personal super- and subordination.

Next: Degrees of Domination.

Georg Simmel: Subordination under a Plurality

The most obvious way in which people are dominated is under a monarchy, the rule of one, as Georg Simmel writes in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. But there are other forms of social domination, including the subordination under a "plurality", or a group rather than a single individual, and here the domination reflects the characteristics of the superordinate group.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

Generally, the larger the superordinate group, the better the subordinates get treated, but not always. The deciding factor is that the personal and subjective is likely to be more important in a domination by an individual, and the objective more important in a domination by a group. The individual superordinate may be cruel or merciful, but the group superordinate will go by the book.

The foregoing assumes that the superordinate group acts homogeneously; things change when this group loses its homogeneity, either by conflict or by hierarchy. Under two warring masters the subordinate tends to "suffer severely", as a small state suffers when two large neighbor states are in conflict, or when a child suffers under two conflicting parents. Typically, there is no way out of this kind of situation, as when Antigone wrestles with the burial of her father, required by her family and forbidden by the state. Curiously, we are so used to these sorts of situations and are so used to them that we seldom experience them as conflicts. We try to compartmentalize things, rendering unto Caesar and unto God, but what if the demands conflict? This is what modern women call a dilemma.

A different situation obtains when the superordinates are not in conflict. In this case the subordinate has more room for maneuver, and can take advantage of the situation. The relationship is similar to the tertius gaudens described above in the expansion of the dyad. Thus the medieval vassal, who owed feudal loyalty to several lords, had more freedom that a bondsman. The situation is similar for a polytheist believer, who can turn from one god to another. Likewise, modern man in the city gains a certain degree of independence in the city where he can change supplier (or employer) much more easily than in a village or a small town.

A different situation obtains where the superordinates are arranged in a hierarchy, which occurs under feudalism. Under William the Conqueror, the English were both "the king's men" and subordinate to their particular lord, and the subordinate could take advantage of conflicts between his direct lord and the king. The middle rank, therefore, finds itself in conflict both with its superordinate and its subordinates. But it is also true that pressures can be transmitted all the way up and down the hierarchy. A retailer unable to sell a product pushes back against his wholesaler and so on up the supply chain. A English lord owning an estate in Ireland might increase the rent to a "head farmer", and provoke an increase, with markups, through several middlemen to the poor peasant actually tilling the field. On the other hand, a nobility interposed between state power and the individual can shield the individual from the worst excesses of state power.

Another question is that of voting. Should a dissenting group be forced to accede to a majority vote? If a minority is forced to accede to a majority vote, then it is violated by the majority. But if a rule of unanimity is required then the majority is violated by a minority that prevents action by its negative vote. The question turns upon whether the community feels that the "homogeneous will of the group" requires the agreement of each individual, or whether it obtains from the decision of the majority. This problem is best understood in the working of parliamentary democracy. "The representative feels himself to be the delegate of the whole people" even though he was elected only by a majority of those voting. In Rousseau, the group member "can want nothing else than the will of the group". Therefore the dissenting individual is "mistaken" in opposing the volonté générale.

So it is that when a group decision has been made the individual "must positively participate in the action which was decided against his will and conviction."

In this way, outvoting, far from being only the simple practical violation of the one by the many, becomes the most poignant expression of the dualism between the autonomous life of the individual and the life of society[.]

 Next: Subordination under a Principle.

Georg Simmel: Subordination under an Individual

Although we all live in the dream of freedom and equality, the truth is that in real life we relate to others in an unequal relationship. We are at least either slightly subordinate to them or slightly super-ordinate to them. In our modern age there is a tendency to regard all unequal relationships as scandalous, but Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff looks at the whole question of unequal relations are natural and social. All social relationship involves some sort of inequality.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

Now the point to keep in mind about domination is that no domination is complete. If it were, "it would annul the very notion of society." Only when "direct physical violation" is involved is there total domination; otherwise the question is merely a question of the price of freedom. Our submission to domination merely demonstrates that the price is more than we are willing to pay. Thus "coercion" is always a relative affair.

In other words, "Relationships of superordination and subordination play an immense role in social life." Take the question of "authority." In some cases a "person of superior significance or strength" may enjoy "an overwhelming weight" of power through his personal qualities. In other cases, it is the institution -- "state, church, school, family, or military" -- that "clothes a person with a reputation" for dignity and power way beyond his individual qualities. There is, in addition, a reciprocity between leader and led, which is shown in the case of the popular journalist, who must lead his readers where they want to go.

There are, writes Simmel, three kinds of subordination: under an individual, a group, or a principle. In this post we shall investigate subordination under and individual.

Subordination under an individual can be looked at in two ways. First of all there is the notion that the "will of the group has found a unitary expression or body" under its superordinate leader. Secondly, there is the resentment of the leader by the led; "the group feels itself in opposition to its head and forms a party against him." These two forces that seem in opposition are in fact both necessary, for

Man has an intimate dual relation to the principle of subordination. On the one hand he wants to be dominated. The majority of men... seeks the higher power which relieves them of responsibility... But no less do they need opposition to the leading power[.]

Thus, in politics, no matter how much people argue and conflict they have a common interest in limiting the power of the government, even in spite of the practical necessity of a strong government.

Of course, subordination under an individual does not always lead to unity. The oppression of dissidents by a central government does not necessarily unite them; the children of different mothers in a harem "are always hostile to one another."

How to unite the quarreling factions? One method is a "higher tribunal", usually an intellectual resolution of differences; alternatively the ruler can set the quarreling factions to work on a common task. Christianity, of course, subordinates all beings alike "to the divine principle." Another method is leveling, the tyrant's policy of equalizing all his subjects and preventing the emergence of any rival centers of power. The conversion of Rome from a republic to an empire reduced the Romans to the level of the peoples the republic had subjugated.

It is much easier for a single individual to dominate a large group than a small group. This is because in a large group people devolve into a "mass" but retain their individuality in a small group. Large legislatures may seem more democratic, but Alexander Hamilton pointed out that a large legislature will be run by the few.

A different dynamic applies when the ruler faces not a levelized mass but a pyramid. In this case, of course, the "power of the highest echelons withers" unless designed by the intention of the ruler, as we see in the articulation of a great army. The basic problem of a pyramid organization is that people do not always match their position in the organization, and it is hard to judge their suitability until they actually occupy their position.

But a pyramid can also grow from the bottom up, as in elective politics and business and "intellectual culture" where superior individuals move upwards in the pyramid of power. Many times downwards pushing and upwards pushing power coexist, as in feudalism, where individual small landowners might subject themselves to a local lord, and the lords use the power thus obtained to increase their power relative to the monarch.

Rule by one has an irresistible luster; the republic in the United States has its glorious president, and the republican France is ideally ruled by Rousseau's monarchical volonté générale. And even as the power of the Doge of Venice declined over the years, the Venetian elite kept the illusion of monarchy alive to prevent the emergence of a real ruler.

Yet the success of rule by one depends on the right distance of the ruler from the governed. In a small group it need not be great. But in a large group, such as a universal religion, the ruler cannot be high enough, in Heaven, so that the distance between ruler and ruled extinguishes the differences between the faithful.

Next: Subordination under a Plurality

Georg Simmel: Expansion of the Dyad

The two person, or two group "dyad" is a particularly important social grouping, according to George Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. But what happens when you expand the dyad to three people, to the "triad?"

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

"The appearance of the third party.. [means an] abandonment of absolute contrast." In Simmel's view, it introduces three kinds of group formations. The third person might be a non-partisan mediator; he might be a "tertius gaudens" or someone who benefits from a two person quarrel; and he might even be someone who uses a dispute between two people to divide and conquer them. Let us look at each in turn.

The Non-partisan and the mediator. In many cases the addition of a third person can weld the two-person dyad together; the child "closes the circle by typing the parents to one another." But just as significant is the non-partisan mediator.

The non-partisan shows each party the claims and arguments of the other; they thus lose the tone of subjective passion which usually provokes the same tone on the part of the adversary.

In other words, the non-partisan "deprives conflicting claims of their affective qualities" and forces the parties to view a dividing issue more objectively than in pure adversary combat. "[A]ntagonism of the will is reduced to intellectual antagonism." Notice though that the mediator is not an arbitrator; he does not decide the issue; only the parties can do that. But the mediator must be viewed by both sides as neutral, either because he is equally close to each party, or equally distant.

Another impartial third element is the arbitrator, to whom the two parties render up the power to decide their issue. This requires not just a joint faith in the neutrality of the arbitrator, but "confidence in the objectivity of [his] judgment" beyon mere mediation.

As an example of mediation, Simmel offers the British King Henry III. His relations with the barons and prelates descended into constant conflict, and both parties came eventually to resort to a third element previously "kept out of state matters." We are talking about the beginning of the House of Commons.

The Tertius Gaudens. Here we have a third party that "draws advantage from the quarrel of two others", he is literally the third who rejoices at their difference. This party is similar to the third element that divides and conquers, discussed below, but does not need to be active in splitting the two parties. He may merely befriend one party to annoy the other. But the iconic case is two parties competing for the favor of another, as in two suitors for one woman. On the largest scale, the tertius gaudens is played out in the competition between producers for the favor of the consumer. Notice that the advantage of the consumer only applies when the producers do not collude with one another. In politics, the position of a third party is not as absolute, because a political party is not free to abandon its declared positions on the issues of the day; there is often only a narrow room for maneuver between two parties competing for the favors of a third party. A similar situation occurs in demarcation disputes between labor unions on a job site. If unions bid for their workers to do the job then the lowest bid wins. But if the unions collude to decide what pay should apply to each job then their basic interest, high pay, is preserved from attack by the employer.

Divide and Conquer.  In any three-element relationship the opportunity exists for the third element to take advantage of a quarrel between two others. In "divide and conquer" we deal with the situation where "the third element intentionally produces the conflict in order to gain a dominating position." There are many examples of this strategy, beginning with the prohibition by a sovereign ruler of any associations, thus heading of any combinations of people that might form a head of rebellion. The Anglo-Norman kings made sure that the estates of each feudal lord were widely scattered to make it difficult for any lord to become sovereign in a single contiguous district.  Similarly, employers often refuse to negotiate with a combination of employee unions. They prefer to negotiate with each one separately. The Incas liked "to divide a newly conquered tribe in two" and place a supervisor over each, with "slightly different ranks." This encouraged rivalry between the supervisors and prevented united action against the Inca. There are two basic strategies for divide and conquer. One is to get the two parties to fight each other. Where this does not work, then the third party combines with one other "long enough for the other to be suppressed, whereupon the first party is an easy prey for him."

It is easy to see why "two's company but three's a crowd."

Next: Subordination under an Individual

George Simmel: The Individual and the "Dyad"

We think of sociology as the individual and society. But Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated by Kurt H. Wolff takes us to a more basic consideration, the individual and the "dyad", or the individual as part of a two-person social relationship.

But first, consider the situation of the "isolated" individual. Actually, we are not talking here about an individual that is "physically alone" as one might be on a walk in the mountains. The feeling of isolation is much more intense

when one is a stranger, without relations, among many physically close persons, at a "party", on a train, or in the traffic of a large city.

In other words, isolation is not the aloneness of an individual; it is the separation of the social individual from the rest of society. "As a conscious feeling on the part of the individual, it represents a very specific relation to society."

But then there is freedom, which seems at first glance to be closely related to isolation, but it is decisively different. On the one hand we can see that society -- as  "the state, the party, the family... friendship or love -- quite naturally... would extend their claims over the whole of man." Against this relentless pressure to conform to the expectations of others, "freedom emerges as a continuous process of liberation" for personal independence and also the right to remain dependent. On the other hand "the individual does not just want to be free, but use his freedom for some purpose", including "the extension of his will over others."

Thus we see that "isolation" and "freedom" are not external to the notion of humans as social individuals, but particular instances of genuinely human "sociation." The "dyad", the relation between two individuals or two groups is equally social. And the dyad has a particular characteristic unlike the isolation or freedom of the individual or a group of three or more people; if one person drops out of the dyad, it ceases to exist. The point is that any large group can be immortal; but the dyad cannot.

Simmel writes at length about the characteristics of the dyad. He starts with triviality. We tend to value things that are unique and rare, and undervalue things that are routine and commonplace. Clearly, a dyadic relationship, with its daily repetition of the commonplace, can descend into triviality, and "the tone of triviality frequently becomes desperate and fatal."

Then there is intimacy. For Simmel intimacy refers to the "ingredients that its participants contribute to [the relationship} and to no other" if they are regarded to be essential, forming the "affective structure" which the two show to each other and to nobody else. It is clear that intimacy is closely related to the exclusive nature of the dyad; intimacy withers as soon as a third element is introduced into the relationship.

Obviously the iconic case of the dyad is a monogamous marriage, and yet is isn't. For marriage typically leads to children, and then the dyad is broken. And marriage does not exist in isolation as merely two people. There is the family in general, the children, and the fact that marriage is "socially regulated and historically transmitted." Men and women are not just confronted by each other in marriage, but by the collectivity itself.

There is another curious characteristic of the dyad. It does not permit the two members to slough off duties and responsibilities to the larger group, as when people expect society to do what is properly their own responsibility. In a dyad there is a "co-responsibility for all collective actions." You can push a responsibility on the other member, but the other member can push right back. You can't hide behind the group or blame the group, because the other person cannot be fooled. In other words, it is hard to be a "free-loader" in a dyad.

Simmel now considers the "expansion of the dyad," or what happens when you introduce an additional member into a two-person relationship. It could intensify the relationship, or it could distract it. And it could provoke jealousy. Once you introduce a third member into a dyad it becomes possible to overrule a member with a majority of the others. This is fine if you are a person with "strong individuality" that wants to fight rather than blend in. It's not fine for the "decided individual" that will avoid groups "where it might find itself confronted by a majority." Also, as soon as you expand a dyad into a group you risk the lowering of individuality to the group level that is particularly evident in crowds.

Thus the decisive change for a dyad is the first additional member: the first child to a marriage, but not the subsequent child. And the same applies to bigamy(!). The addition of the third wife is nothing compared to the addition of the second wife. Notice that in Rome there were two Consuls, not three. Yet there is a different relation between two political parties, where "who is not for me is against me." But when two parties dissolve into a single mass movement there is no room for opposition or disagreement. There is only "yes" and "no" for the whole collectivity.

Next: Expansion of the dyad.

Georg Simmel: Numbers and Social Life

We moderns like to think that we invented numbers. Back in the old days life was organic and natural, centered around the family and the village collective. But Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated by Kurt. H. Wolff reminds us that enumeration was not an invention of the absolute monarchs and their bureaucracies. Numbers in social life go further back than that.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

But the point of numerical subdivision is the one proposed in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. Numerical subdivision replaces subdivision by kinship and tribe. In the Germanic tribes, they divided the whole into Hundreds, that is 100 men, and this became a subdivision also in Britain. Even today, members of Parliament that wish to resign their seats are appointed steward to the Chiltern Hundreds.

The point is that in numerical subdivision a society starts to organize itself on abstract principles rather than kinship principles. It is the first step towards the abstract social structure that we have today.

Another interesting question is the numerical minimum for a social gathering we call a "party." When two or three people gather formally, it "never constitutes a 'party.' But we do have one when we invite say, fifteen of our closest friends." The number in question is the decisive factor, and society has recognized the importance of number when "sumptuary laws prescribed the exact number of persons" allowed to escort a couple at their wedding. And so the question arises:

How many soldiers make an army? How many participants are needed to form a political party? How many people make a crowd?

We think of our present age as uniquely obsessed with number. But number has been important for quite a while.

Next: The individual and the "dyad".

Georg Simmel: 18th and 19th century views of freedom

Society want to be an organic whole of which "individuals must be mere members." But the individual rebels against total absorption into the whole, writes Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt. H Wolf.

The individual strives to be rounded out in himself, not merely to help round out society.

This conflict between the whole and the individual is insoluble. The individual's striving for wholeness appears as egoism, compared to the altruism of serving society. But society itself "is an egoism that does violence to the individual". Thus comes freedom, to referee a boundary both for society and for the individual. The 18th century and the 19th century offered different ways in which freedom could be understood and implemented.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

In the 18th century the old social forms -- the old aristocratic privileges, the "despotic control of commerce," the "still potent survivals of the guilds, the intolerant coercion by the church, the feudal obligations of the peasantry" -- seemed "an unbearable limitation" on peoples' energies. Thus it invented freedom from obligation and coercion and equality to level the ranks.

But the freedom of the individuals to pursue their energies immediately creates problems.  The 18th century idea of freedom assumed equality between individuals and the abolition of ranks, but individuals are not equal. Freedom allows the powerful to accumulate power, the moneyed to accumulate money, and the clever to outshine the stupid. This is what socialism was invented to cure.

"[S]ocialism" does not refer to the suspension of freedom. Rather, socialism suspends only that which, at any given degree of freedom, becomes the means for suppressing the freedom of some in favor of others. This means private property.

 There is an "antimony between freedom and equality" that only Goethe seems to have seen.

Equality, he said, demands submission to a general norm; freedom "strives toward the unconditional." "Legislators or revolutionaries," he pointed out, "who promise at the same time equality and freedom are fantasts or charlatans."

How then did the 18th century not grasp this problem? It is because of Kant, who posited an abstract and idealistic ego which is really identical in every man. And then there is Kant's categorical imperative:

Act in such a way that the principle governing your will could at the same time be valid as the principle of a general legislation.

The 18th century "based equality upon freedom, and freedom upon equality."

This ideal broke up in the 19th century into two tendencies: "toward equality without freedom, and toward freedom without equality." The first is obviously socialism.

The second tendency is a new individualism. The individual that had broken "the rusty chains of guild, birth right, and church" now wanted "to distinguish himself from other individuals."

The important point no longer was the fact that he was a free individual as such, but that he was this specific, irreplaceable, given individual...

This new individualism might be called qualitative, in contrast with the quantitative individualism of the eighteenth century... At any rate, Romanticism perhaps was the broadest channel through which it reached the consciousness of the nineteenth century.

Simmel summarizes all this in a majestic paragraph that still resonates unabated with us a century later.

[T]he doctrine of freedom and equality is the foundation of free competition; while the doctrine of differentiated personality is the basis of the division of labor. Eighteenth-century liberalism put the individual on his own feet: in the nineteenth, he was allowed to go as far as they would carry him. According to the new theory the natural order of things saw to it that the unlimited competition of all resulted in the harmony of all interests, that the unrestricted striving after individual advantages resulted in the optimum welfare of the whole.

Simmel looks to a higher form in which the two ideas of "personality as such and of unique personality as such, are not the last words of individualism."

Next: Numbers and social life

Georg Simmel: Social Humans at Play

If we think of humans as social animals, then our social actions can be considered as a deadly serious part of being human.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

But Georg Simmel in a chapter on "Sociability" in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff looks at social relations without a purpose, occasions when humans gather in social gatherings that have no purpose other than sociability. Simmel analyzes this sort of social interaction as "sociability as the play-form of sociation." You can think of the relation of sociability to sociation as "similar to that of the work of art to reality."

When people are engaged in the serious business of social cooperation with an objective purpose they restrain their personalities in the cause of furthering their interests, and so in business and commerce, rules of amiability, refinement, and cordiality apply.

But where no interest in involved, similar restraint or "tact" is still needed to regulate interpersonal relations. At a social gathering one is expected to leave behind "the purely and deeply personal traits of one's life" and things like "[w]eatlh, position, erudition, fame, exceptional capabilities and merits" are expected to be de-emphasized as a part of good manners.

Sociable man is a curious phenomenon. On the one hand he presents himself "only with the capacities, attractions, and interests with which is pure human-ness provides him. On the other hand, however, sociability also shies away from the entirely subjective and purely inwardly spheres of his personality." Displays of extremes of character are not appropriate. So pure sociability enacts "sociability thresholds," the one where individuals start to interact from objective motives and the other where "their entirely personal and subjective aspects make themselves felt."

There is, thus, an aspect of sociability that makes it a democracy of equals, and something that is played in a game where "the pleasure of the individual is closely tied up with the pleasure of others." It is a game where people act as if all were equal, and each honored in particular.

Simmel reviews specific examples of pure sociability, starting with "coquetry... the play form of eroticism", in which people play at eroticism without ever quite reaching an erotic acceptance or refusal. There is "conversation" where people "talk for the sake of talking" but without an object in view. There is the rehearsal of ethical questions, experiencing the friction between the individual and the collective and also the formation and splitting up of groupings, which can all be done in pure sociability without consequence.

Many social groupings start out with objective purposes and then relax into pure sociability, such as the brotherhoods of knights in the early German Middle Ages, that eventually relaxed into  "purely sociable aristocratic associations." And there was the courtly society of the French ancien régime where the once-powerful French aristocracy was reduced at the court of Versailles to enacting a work of art: "imitating the reality of the models, of things outside of art itself."

Pure sociability, or "society," has a reputation of superficiality. 

Yet it is precisely the more serious person who derives from sociability a feeling of liberation and relief. He can do so because he enjoys here, as if in an art play, a concentration and exchange of effects that present all the tasks and all the seriousness of life in a sublimation[.]

No doubt that is why women have in recent centuries organized salons where serious people can go to enjoy sociable interactions without risking the dread consequence of real life.

Next: 18th and 19th century views of freedom

Georg Simmel: Individual and Mass

When we talk about human individuals, it is easy to think that we are talking about isolated humans in their non-social activities. We think that, of course, because a century and a half of left-wing thought is founded on that assumption, that individuals acting as individuals are not really social.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

But Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, discussing "The Social and the Individual Level," is quick to puncture that idea. If we are to think of an individual just doing the bare minimum, such as obeying the law and "obeying the norms adequate to secure the continuation of the group... he would be an ethical abnormality, an utterly impossible being." In other words, when we talk about humans we may talk of humans as individuals or as members of a group. But we are always talking about humans as social beings.

But there is an important difference between a human in the mass and a human considered as individuals.

The first part of his nature can evidently consist only in more primitive elements... [that exist] in all individuals.

Individual qualities, on the other hand, are those "which constitute his private property, as it were, and which lift him out of everything that he may have in common with others." The point is that both these qualities are human and social. The only reason we don't think of them that way is that the left has diligently worked to make individual qualities and actions scandalous.

Simmel then goes on for pages about the consequence of the mass interaction being "more primitive". The "necessity to oblige the masses... easily corrupts the character. It pulls the individual away from his individuality and down to a level with all and sundry." So humanity in the mass tends towards the lowest common level of its members.

Thus Simmel rounds his arguments with quotes from Schiller and Heine.

[I]n Schiller: "Seen singly, everybody is passably intelligent and reasonable; but united into a body, they are blockheads." The fact that individuals, in all their divergencies, leave only the lowest parts of their personalities to form a common denominator, is stressed by Heine: "You have rarely understood me, and rarely did I understand you. Only when we met in the mire did we understand each other at once."

You can immediately see why Simmel hasn't become the go-to sociologist for all and sundry. His analysis of the social consequences of individual social action and mass social action just do not square with the needs of the modern ruling class.

The modern ruling class, in its revolutionary or its rational expert model, wants to sequester all higher and evolved individuality into its own care. And it wants the masses to be obedient and dependent. The model of universal freedom and individual equality dispersed throughout the population, with individuals using their unique qualities that lift them out of the mass, cannot advance their power project.

The whole concept of the modern authoritarian welfare state is based on brilliant experts devising one-size-fits-all universal programs in which humans are reduced into the mass, mechanical cogs in the machinery of government, designed and implemented by the better sort. As we have seen in the rollout of Obamacare, the ruling class knows what's best and must do what it takes, in deceit and misdirection, to advance its goals in the teeth of opposition from the "stupid" voters.

On the other hand you can see that the conservative-libertarian model of responsible individualism really focuses on encouraging individuals to develop and utilize their better qualities, and they can only do that, as social beings, by contributing to society. Good ideas, good products, good services developed by superior minds are encouraged. Yet they are in fact mass products for mass consumption by the masses.

Imagine that. Modern organic developed society can blend individual and mass to benefit everyone: the superior individual with the idea that nobody else has thought of, and the ordinary mass man that just goes with the flow and gladly enjoys the achievements of the exceptional individual.

The point is that the achievements of individuals are not selfish; they almost always have a social component. For humans are social animals; almost everything that humans do is social.

Next: Social humans at play.