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How is Society Possible? .....................................................................................................................................1

Georg Simmel..........................................................................................................................................1

Kant could propose and answer the fundamental question of his philosophy, How is nature possible?, only

because for him nature was nothing but the representation (Vorstellung) of nature. This does not mean merely

that "the world is my representation," that we thus can speak of nature only so far as it is a content of our

consciousness, but that what we call nature is a special way in which our intellect assembles, orders, and

forms the senseperceptions. These "given" perceptions, of color, taste, tone, temperature, resistance, smell,

which in the accidental sequence of subjective experience course through our consciousness, are in and of

themselves not yet "nature;" but they become "nature" through the activity of the mind, which combines them

into objects and series of objects, into substances and attributes and into causal coherences. As the elements

of the world are given to us immediately, there does not exist among them, according to Kant, that coherence

(Verbindung) which alone can make out of them the intelligible regular (gesetzmassig) unity of nature; or

rather, which signifies precisely the beingnature (NaturSein) of those in themselves incoherently and

irregularly emerging worldfragments. Thus the Kantian worldpicture grows in the most peculiar reJection

(Wiederspiel), Our senseimpressions are for this process purely subjective, since they depend upon the

physicopsychical organization, which in other beings might be different, but they become "objects" since

they are taken up by the forms of our intellect, and by these are fashioned into fixed regularities and into a

coherent picture of "nature." On the other hand, however, those perceptions are the real "given," the

unalterably accumulating content of the world and the assurance of an existence independent of ourselves, so

that now those very intellectual formings of the same into objects, coherences, regularities, appear as

subjective, as that which is brought to the situation by ourselves, in contrast with that which we have received

from the externally existent i.e., these formings appear as the functions of the intellect itself, which in

themselves unchangeable, had constructed from another sensematerial a nature with another content. Nature

is for Kant a definite sort of cognition, a picture growing through and in our cognitive categories. The

question then, How is nature possible?, i.e., what are the conditions which must be present in order that a

"nature" may be given, is resolved by him through discovery of the forms which constitute the essence of our

It is at once suggested that it is possible to treat in an analogous fashion the question of the aprioristic

conditions on the basis of which society is possible. Here too individual elements are given which in a

certain sense always remain in their discreteness, as is the case with the senseperceptions, and they undergo

their synthesis into the unity of a society only through a process of consciousness which puts the individual

existence of the several elements into relationship with that of the others in definite forms and in accordance

with definite laws. The decisive difference between the unity of a society and that of nature, however, is this:

the latter according to the Kantian standpoint here presupposed comes to existence exclusively in the

contemplating unity (Subject), it is produced exclusively by that mind upon and out of the sense materials

which are not in themselves interconnected. On the contrary, the societary unity is realized by its elements

without further mediation, and with no need of an observer, because these elements are consciously and

synthetically active. The Kantian theorem, Connection (Verbindung) can never inhere in the things, since it is

only brought into existence by the mind (Subject), is not true of the societary connection, which is rather

immediately realized in the "things" namely, in this case the individual souls. Moreover, this societary

connection as synthesis, remains something purely psychical and without parallels with spacestructures and

their reactions. But in the societary instance the combining requires no factor outside of its own elements,

since each of these exercises the function which, with respect to the external, the psychic energy of the

observer supplies. The consciousness of constituting with the others a unity is the whole unity in question in

the societary case. This of course means, on the one hand, not the abstract consciousness of the unity concept,

but the innumerable singular relationships, the feeling and knowing about this determining and being

determined by the other, and, on the other hand, it quite as little excludes an observing third party from

performing in addition a synthesis, with its basis only in himself, between the persons concerned, as between

special elements. Whatever be the tract of externally observable being which is to be comprehended as a

unity. the consummation occurs not merely by virtue of its immediate and strictly objective content, but it is

determined by the categories of the mind (Subject) and from its cognitive requirements. Society, however, is

The things in nature are, on the one hand, more widely separated than souls. In the outward world, in which

each entity occupies space which cannot be shared with another, there is no analogy for the unity of one man

with another, which consists in understanding, in love, in common work. On the other hand, the fragments of

spatial existence pass into a unity in the consciousness of the observer, which cannot be attained by

community of individuals. For, on account of the fact that the objects of the societary synthesis are

independent beings, psychic centres, personal unities, they resist that absolute merging in the soul of another

person, to which the selflessness (Selbstlosigkeit) of soulless things must yield. Thus a collection of men is

really a unity in a much higher, more ideal sense, yet in a much lower degree than tables, chairs, sofa, carpet

and mirror constitute "the furniture of a room," or river, meadow, trees, house, "a landscape," or in a painting

In quite a different sense from that in which it is true of the external world, is society "my representation" (

Vorstellung), i.e., posited upon the activity of consciousness. For the soul of another has for me the same

reality which I myself have, a reality which is very different from that of a material thing. However Kant

insists that objects in space have precisely the same certainty as my own existence, in the latter case only the

particular contents of my subjective life can be meant; for the basis of representation in general, the feeling of

the existing ego, is unconditional and unshakable to a degree attained by no single representation of a

material externality. But this very certainty has for us, justifiably or not, also the fact of the thou; and as cause

or as effect of this certainty we feel the thou as something independent of our representation, something

which is just as really for itself (genau so fur sich ist) as our own existence. That this foritself of the other

nevertheless does not prevent us from making it into OUr representation, that something which cannot be

resolved into our representing still becomes the content, and thus the product of our representationthis is the

profoundest psychologicoepistemological pattern and problem of socialization. Within our own

consciousness we distinguish very precisely between the fundamentality of the ego (the presupposition of all

representation, which has no part in the never wholly suppressible problematics of its contents) and these

contents themselves, which as an aggregate, with their coming and going, their dubitability and their

fallibility, always present themselves as mere products of that absolute and final energy and existence of our

psychic being. We must carry over to the other soul, however, these very conditions, or rather independence

of conditions, of our own ego, although in the last analysis we must represent that soul. That other soul has

for us that last degree of reality which our own self possesses in distinction from its contents. We are sure that

the case stands the same way with the other soul and its contents. Under these circumstances, the question,

How is Society possible? has a wholly different methodological bearing from the question, How is nature

possible? The latter question is to be answered by the forms of cognition, through which the mind synthesizes

given elements into "nature." The former question is answered by the conditions residing a priori in the

elements themselves, through which they combine themselves actually into the synthesis "society." In a

certain sense the entire contents of this book, as developed on the basis of the principle announced, may be

regarded as the material for answering this question. The book searches out the procedures, occurring in the

last analysis in individuals, which condition the existence of the individuals as society. It does not treat these

procedures as temporally antecedent causes of this result, but as partial processes of the synthesis which we

comprehensively name "society. "But the question must be understood in a still more fundamental sense. I

said that the function of achieving the synthetic unity, which with reference to nature resides in the observing

mind, with reference to society passes over to the societary elements themselves. The consciousness of

constituting society is not to be sure, in the abstract, present in the individual; but everyone always knows

that the others are connected with himself, although this knowing about the other as the associated, this

recognizing of the whole complex as a society usually occurs with reference to particular concrete contents.

Perhaps, however, the case is not different from that of "the unity of cognition" (die Einheit des Erkennens),

according to which we proceed indeed in the processes of consciousness, arranging one concrete content with

another, yet without having a separate consciousness of the unity itself, except in rare and late abstractions.

Now, the question is: What lies then, universally and a priori at the basis, what presuppositions must be

operative, in order that the particular concrete procedures in the individual consciousness may actually be

processes of socialization; what elements are contained in them which make it possible that the product of the

elements is, abstractly expressed, the construction of the individual into a societary unity? The sociological

apriorities will have the same double significance as those "which make nature possible," on the one hand

they will more or less completely determine the actual processes of socialization, as functions or energies of

the psychical occurrence, on the other hand they are the ideal logical presuppositions of the perfect

although in this perfection never realized society. A parallel is the use of the law of causation. On the one

hand it lives and works in the actual cognitive processes. On the other hand it builds up the form of the truth

as the ideal system of completed cognitions, irrespective of whether that truth is realized or not by that

temporal, relatively accidental psychical dynamic, and irrespective of the greater or lesser approximation of

It is a mere question of terms whether investigation of these conditions of the socializing process shall be

called epistemological or not, since that structure which arises from these conditions, and which has its norms

in their forms, is not cognitions but practical processes and real situations. Nevertheless what I now have in

mind, and what must be tested as the general concept of socialization by its conditions, is somewhat

epistemological, viz., the consciousness of associating or of being socialized. Perhaps it should be called a

knowing rather than a cognizing (besser ein Wissen als ein Erkennen). For in this case the mind does not

immediately confront an object of which it gradually gains a theoretical picture, but that consciousness of the

socialization is immediately its vehicle or inner significance. The matter in question is the processes of

reciprocation which signify for the individual the fact of being associated. That is, the fact is not signified in

the abstract to the individual, but it is capable of abstract expression. What forms must be at the basis, or what

specific categories must we bring along, so to speak, in order that the consciousness may arise, and what

consequently are the forms which the resulting consciousness i.e., society as a fact of knowing must

bear? We may call this the epistemological theory of society. In what follows, I am, trying to sketch certain

of these a priori effective conditions or forms of socialization. These cannot, to be sure, like the Kantian

categories, be designated by a single word. Moreover, I present them only as illustrations of the method of

1. The picture which one man gets of another from personal contact is determined by certain distortions

which are not simple deceptions from incomplete experience, defective vision, sympathetic or antipathetic

prejudice; they are rather changes in principle in the composition of the real object. These are, to begin with,

of two dimensions. In the first place we see the other party in some degree generalized. This may be because

it is not within our power fully to represent in ourselves an individuality different from our own. Every

reconstruction (Nachbilden) of a soul is determined by the similarity to it, and although this is by no means

the only condition of psychical cognition (sic) since on the one hand unlikeness seems at the same time

requisite, in order to gain perspective and objectivity, on the other hand there is required an intellectual

capacity which holds itself above likeness or unlikeness of beingyet complete cognition would nevertheless

presuppose a complete likeness. It appears as though every man has in himself a deepest

individualitynucleus which cannot be subjectively reproduced by another whose deepest individuality is

essentially different. And that this requirement is not logically compatible with that distance and objective

judgment on which the representation of another otherwise rests, is proved by the mere fact that complete

knowledge of the individuality of another is denied to us; and all interrelations of men with one another are

limited by the varying degrees of this deficiency. Whatever its cause may be, its consequence at all events is a

generalization of the psychical picture of the other person, a dissolving of the outlines, which adds to the

singularity of this picture a relationship with others. We posit every man, with especial bearing upon our

practical attitude toward him, as that type of man to which his individuality makes him belong. We think him,

along with all his singularity, only under the universal category which does not fully cover him to be sure,

and which he does not fully cover. This latter circumstance marks the contrast between this situation and that

which exists between the universal idea and the particular which belongs under it. In order to recognize the

man, we do not see him in his pure individuality, but carried, exalted or degraded by the general type under

which we subsume him. Even when this transformation is so slight that we cannot immediately recognize it,

or even if all the usual cardinal concepts of character fail us, such as moral or immoral, free or unfree,

domineering or menial, etc. in our own minds we designate the man according to an unnamed type with

Moreover this leads a step farther down. Precisely from the complete singularity of a personality we form a

picture of it which is not identical with its reality, but still is not a general type. It is rather the picture which

the person, would present if he were, so to speak, entirely himself, if on the good or bad side he realized the

possibility which is in every man. We are all fragments, not only of the universal man, but also of ourselves.

We are onsets not merely of the type human being in general, not merely of the type good, bad, etc., but we

are onsets of that not further in principle nameable individuality and singularity of our own selves which

surrounds our perceptible actuality as though drawn with ideal lines. The vision of our neighbor, however,

enlarges this fragment to that which we never are completely and wholly. He cannot see the fragments merely

side by side as they are actually given, but as we offset the blind spot in our eye so that we are not conscious

of it, in like manner we make of these fragmentary data the completeness of an individuality. The practice of

life is more and more insistent that we shall form our picture of the man from the real details alone which we

empirically know about him; but this very practice rests upon those changes and additions, upon the

reconstruction of those given fragments into the generality of a type and into the completeness of this ideal

This procedure, which is in principle attempted, although in reality it is seldom carried through to

completeness, operates only within the already existing society as the apriori of the further reactions which

develop between individuals. Within a sphere which has any sort of community of calling or of interests,

every member looks upon every other, not in a purely empirical way, but on the basis of an apriori which this

sphere imposes upon each consciousness which has part in it. In the circles of officers, of church members, of

civil officials, of scholars, of members of families, each regards the other under the matter of course

presuppositionthis is a member of my group. From the common basis of life certain suppositions originate

and people look upon one another through them as through a veil. This veil does not, to be sure, simply

conceal the peculiarity of the individual, but it gives to this personality a new form, since its actual reality

melts in this typical transformation into a composite picture. We see the other person not simply as an

individual, but as colleague or comrade or fellow partisan; in a word, inhabitant of the same peculiar world;

and this unavoidable, quite automatically operative presupposition is one of the means of bringing his

personality and reality in the representation of another up to the quality and form demanded of his sociability

The same is evidently true of members of different groups in their relations with one another. The plain

citizen who makes the acquaintance of an officer cannot divest himself of the thought that this individual is

an officer. And although this being an officer may belong to the given individuality, yet not in just the

schematic way in which it prejudges his picture in the representation of the other person. The like is the case

with the Protestant in contrast with the Catholic, the merchant with the official, the layman with the priest,

etc. Everywhere there occur veilings of the outline of reality by the social generalization. This in principle

prohibits discovery of that reality within a group which is in a high degree socially differentiated.

Accordingly man's representation of man is thrown out of true by dislocations, additions and subtractions

from all these categories, which exert an a priori influence, since the generalization is always at the same time

more or less than the individuality. That is, the individual is rated as in some particulars different from his

actual self by the gloss imposed upon him when he is classified in a type, when he is compared with an

imagined completeness of his own peculiarity, when he is credited with the characteristics of the social

generality to which he belongs. Over and above all this there sways, as the principle. of interpretation in

cognition, the thought of his real solely individual equation; but since it appears as though determination of

this equation would be the only way of arriving at the precisely founded relationship to the individual, as a

matter of fact those changes and reshapings, which prevent this ideal recognition of him, are precisely the

conditions through which the relationships which we know as the strictly social become possible somewhat

as with Kant the categories of reason, which form the immediately given into quite new objects, alone make

2. Another category under which men (Subjecte) view themselves and one another, in order that, so formed,

they may produce empirical society, may be formulated in the seemingly trivial theorem: Each element of a

group is not a societary part, but beyond that something else. This fact operates as social apriori in so far as

the part of the individual which is not turned toward the group, or is not dissolved in it, does not lie simply

without meaning by the side of his socially significant phase, is not a something external to the group, for

which it nolens volens affords space; but the fact that the individual, with respect to certain sides of his

personality, is not an element of the group, constitutes the positive condition for the fact that he is such a

group member in other aspects of his being. In other words, the sort of his socializedbeing

(VergesellschaftetSeins) is determined or partially determined by the sort of his notsocialized being. The

analysis to follow will bring to light certain types whose sociological significance, even in their germ and

nature, is fixed by the fact that they are in some way shut out from the very group for which their existence is

significant; for instance in the case of the stranger, the enemy, the criminal, and even the pauper. This applies,

however, not merely in the case of such general characters, but in unnumbered modifications for every sort of

individuality. That every moment finds us surrounded by relationships with human beings, and that the

content of every moment's experience is directly or indirectly determined by these human beings, is no

contradiction of the foregoing. On the contrary the social setting as such affects beings who are not

completely bounded by it. For instance, we know that the civil official is not merely an official, the merchant

not merely a merchant, the military officer not merely an officer. This extrasocial being, his temperament

and the deposit of his experiences, his interests and the worth of his personality, little as it may change the

main matter of official, mercantile, military activities, gives the individual still, in every instance, for

everyone with whom he is in contact, a definite shading, and interpenetrates his social picture with

extrasocial imponderabilities. The whole commerce of men within the societary categories would be

different, if each confronted the other only in that character which belong; to him in the role for which he is

responsible in the particular category in which he appears at the moment. To be sure, individuals, like

callings and social situations, are distinguished by the degree of that Inaddition which they possess or admit

along with their social content. The man in love or in friendship may be taken as marking the one pole of this

series. In this situation, that which the individual reserves for himself, beyond those manifestations and

activities which converge upon the other, in quantity approaches the zero point. Only a single life is present,

which, so to speak, may be regarded or is lived from two sides: on the one hand from the inside, from the

terminus a quo of the active person; then on the other hand as the quite identical life, contemplated in the

direction of the beloved person, under the category of gis terminus ad quem, which it completely adopts.

With quite another tendency the Catholic priest presents in form the same phenomenon, in that his

ecclesiastical function completely covers and swallows his beingforhimself. In the former of these extreme

cases, the Inaddition of the sociological activity disappears, because its content has completely passed over

into consideration of the other party; in the second case, because the corresponding type of contents has in

principle altogether disappeared. The opposite pole is exhibited by the phenomena of our modern civilization

as they are determined by money economy. That is, man approaches the ideal of absolute objectivity as

producer, or purchaser or seller, in a word as a performer of some economic function. Certain individuals in

high places excepted, the individual life, the tone of the total personality, has disappeared from the function,

the persons are merely the vehicles of an exchange of function and counterfunction occurring according to

objective norms, and every thing which does not fit into this sheer thingness (Sachlichkeit) has also as a

matter of fact disappeared from it. The Inaddition has fully taken up into itself the personality with its

special coloring, its irrationality, its inner life, and it has left to those societary activities only those energies,

Between these extremes the social individuals move in such a way that the energies and characteristics which

are pointed toward the inner center always show a certain significance for the activities and inclinations

which affect their associates. For, in the marginal case, even the consciousness that this social activity or

attitude is something differentiated from the rest of the man, and does not enter into the sociological

relationship along with that which he otherwise is and signifieseven this consciousness has quite positive

influence upon the attitude which the subject assumes towards his fellows and they towards him. The apriori

of the empirical social life is that the life is not entirely social. We form our interrelationships not alone under

the negative reservation of a part of our personality which does not enter into them; this portion affects the

social occurrences in the soul not alone through general psychological combinations, but precisely the formal

fact that influence exerts itself outside of these determines the nature of this interworking.

Still further, one of the most important sociological formations rests on the fact that the societary structures

are composed of beings who are at the same time inside and outside of them: namely that between a society

and its individuals a relationship may exist like that between two partiesindeed that perhaps such

relationship, open or latent, always exists. Therewith society produces perhaps the most conscious, at least

universal conformation of a basic type of life in general: that the individual soul can never have a position

within a combination outside of which it does not at the same time have a position, that it cannot be inserted

into an order without finding itself at the same time in opposition to that order. This applies throughout the

whole range from the most transcendental and universal interdependencies to the most singular and

accidental. The religious man feels himself completely encompassed by the divine being, as though he were

merely a pulsebeat of the divine life; his own substance is unreservedly, and even in mystical identity,

merged in that of the Absolute. And yet, in order to give this intermelting any meaning at all, the devotee

must retain some sort of self existence, some sort of personal reaction, a detached ego, to which the resolution

into the divine AllBeing is an endless task, a process only, which would be neither metaphysically possible

nor religiously feelable if it did not proceed from a selfbeing on the part of the person: the being one with

God is conditional in its significance upon the being other than god. Beyond this converging toward the

transcendental, the relationship to nature as a whole which the human mind manifests throughout its entire

history shows the same form. On the one hand we know ourselves as articulated into nature, as one of its

products, which stands alongside of every other as an equal among equals, as a point which nature's stuff and

energies reach and leave, as they circle through running water and blossoming plants. And yet the soul has a

feeling of a something selfexistent (eines Fursichseins) which we designate with the logically so inexact

concept freedom, offering an opposite (ein Gegenuber und Paroli) to all that energy an element of which we

ever remain, which makes toward the radicalism which we may express in the formula, Nature is only a

representation in the human soul. As, however, in this conception, nature with il its undeniable peculiarity

(Eigengesetzlichkeit) and hard reality is still subsumed under the concept of the ego, so on the other hand this

ego, with all its freedom and selfcontaining (Fursichsein), with its juxtaposition to "mere nature," is still a

member of nature. Precisely that is the overlapping natural correlation, that it embraces not ione "mere

nature," but also that being which is independent and often enough hostile to "mere nature," that this which

according to the ego's deepest feeling of selfishness is external to the ego must still be the element of the ego.

Moreover, this formula holds not less for the relationship between the individuals and the particular circles of

their societary combinations; or if we generalize these combinations into the concept of societaryness in the

abstract, for the interrelation of individuals at large. We know ourselves on the one side as products of

society. The physiological series of progenitors, their adaptations and fixations, the traditions of their labor,

their knowledge and belief, of the whole spirit of the past crystilized in objective formsall these determine

the equipment and the contents of our life, so that the question might arise whether the individual is anything

more than a receptacle in which previously existing elements mix in changing proportions; for although the

elements were also in the last analysis produced by individuals, yet the contribution of each is a disappearing

quantity, and only through their generic and societary merging were the factors produced in the synthesis of

which in turn the ostensible individuality may consist. On the other hand we know ourselves as a member of

society, woven with our lifeprocess and its meaning and purpose quite as interdependently into its

coexistence (Nebeneinander) as in the other view into its succession (Nacheinander). Little as we in our

character as natural objects have a selfsufficiency, because the intersection of the natural elements proceeds

through us as through completely selfless structures, and the equality before the laws of nature resolves our

existence without remainder into a mere example of their necessity quite as little do we live as societary

beings around an autonomous center; but we are from moment to moment composed out of reciprocal

relationships to others, and we are thus comparable with the corporeal substance which for us exists only as

the sum of many impressions of the senses, but not as a selfsufficient entity. Now, however, we feel that this

social diffusion does not completely dissolve our personality. This is not because of the reservations

previously mentioned, or of particular contents whose meaning and development rest from the outset only in

the individual soul, and finds no position at large in the social correlation. It is not only because of the

molding of the social contents, whose unity as individual soul is not itself again of social nature, any more

than the artistic form, in which the spots of color merge upon the canvas, can be derived from the chemical

nature of the colors themselves. It is rather chiefly because the total lifecontent, however completely it may

be applicable from the social antecedents and reciprocities, is yet at the same time capable of consideration

under the category of the singular life, as experience of the individual and completely oriented with reference

to this experience. The two, individual and experience, are merely different categories under which the same

content falls, just as the same plant may be regarded now with reference to the biological conditions of its

origin, again with reference to its practical utility, and still again with reference to its aesthetic meaning. The

standpoint from which the existence of the individual may be correlated and understood may be assumed

either within or without the individual; the totality of the life with all its socially derivable contents may be

regarded as the centripetal destiny of its bearer, just as it still may pass, with all the parts reserved to the

Therewith, therefore, the fact of socialization bring; the individual into the double situation from which I

started: viz., that the individual has his setting in the socialization and at the same time is in antithesis with it,

a member of its organism and at the same time a closed organic whole, an existence (Sein) for it and an

existence for itself. The essential thing, however, and the meaning of the particular sociological apriori which

has its basis herein, is this, that between individual and society the Within and Without are not two

determinations which exist alongside of each other although they may occasionally develop in that way,

and even to the degree of reciprocal enmity but that they signify the whole unitary position of the socially

living human being. His existence is not merely, in subdivision of the contents, partially social and partially

individual, but it stands under the fundamental, formative, irreducible category of a unity, which we cannot

otherwise express than through the synthesis or the contemporariness of the two logically antithetical

determinations articulation and selfsufficiency, the condition of being produced by, and contained in,

society, and on the other hand, of being derived out of and moving around its own center. Society consists not

only, as we saw above, of beings that in part are not socialized, but also of others that feel themselves to be,

on the one hand, completely social existences, on the other hand, while maintaining the same content,

completely individual existences. Moreover these are not two unrelated contiguous standpoints, as if, for

instance, one considers the same body now with reference to its weight and now with reference to its color;

but the two compose that unity which we call the social being, the synthetic category as the concept of

causation is an aprioristic unity, although it includes the two, in content, quite different elements of the

causing and of the effect. That this formation is at our disposal, this ability to derive from beings, each of

which may feel itself as the terminus a quo and as the terminus ad quem of its developments, destinies,

qualities, the very concept of society which reckons with those elements, and to recognize the reality

corresponding with the concept (Society) as the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of those vitalities

and selfdeterminings that is an apriori of empirical society, that makes its form possible as we know it.

3. Society is a structure of unlike elements. Even where democratic or socialistic movements plan an

"equality," and partially attain it, the thing that is really in question is a like valuation of persons, of

performances, of positions, while an equality of persons, in composition, in lifecontents, and in fortunes

cannot come into consideration. And where, on the other hand, an enslaved population constitutes only a

mass, as in the great oriental despotisms, this equality of each always concerns only certain sides of

existence, say the political or the economic, but never the whole of the same, the transmitted qualities, of

which, personal relationships, experiences, not merely within the subjective aspect of life but also on the side

of its reactions with other existences, will unavoidably have a certain sort of peculiarity and untransferability.

If we posit society as a purely objective scheme, it appears as an ordering of contents and performances

which in space, time, concepts, values are concerned with one another, and as to which we may in so far

peRform an abstraction from the personality, from the Egoform, which is the vehicle of its dynamic. If that

inequality of the elements now presents every performance or equality within this order as individually

marked and in its place unequivocally established, at the same time society appears as a cosmos whose

manifoldness in being and in movement is boundless, in which, however, each point can be composed and

can develop itself only in that particular way, the structure is not to be changed. What has been asserted of the

structure of the world in general, viz., that no grain of sand could have another form or place from that which

now belongs to it, except upon the presupposition and with the consequence of a change of all being the

same recurs in the case of the structure of society regarded as a web of qualitatively determined phenomena.

An analogy as in the case of a miniature, greatly simplified and conventionalized (stilisiert), is to be found for

the picture of society thus conceived as a whole, in a body of officials, which as such consists of a definite

ordering of "positions," of a preordination of performances, which, detached from their personnel of a given

moment, present an ideal correlation. Within the same, every newcomer finds an unequivocally assigned

place, which has waited for him, as it were, and with which his energies must harmonize. That which in this

case is a conscious, systematic assignment of functions, is in the totality of society of course an inextricable

tangle of functions; the positions in it are not given by a constructive will, but they are discernible only

through the actual doing and experiencing of individuals. And in spite of this enormous difference, in spite of

everything that is irrational, imperfect, and from the viewpoint of evaluation to be condemned, in historical

society, its phenomenological structure the sum and the relationship of the sort of existence and

performances actually presented by all the elements of objectively historical society is an order of elements,

each of which occupies an individually determined place, a coordination of functions and of functioning

centers, which are objective and in their social significance full of meaning if not always full of value. At the

same time, the purely personal aspect, the subjectively productive, the impulses and reflexes of the essential

ego remain entirely out of consideration. Or, otherwise expressed, the life of society runs its coursenot

psychologically, but phenomenologically, regarded purely with respect to its social contents as though each

element were predetermined for its place in this whole. In the case of every break in the harmony of the ideal

demands, it runs as though all the members of this whole stood in a relation of unity, which relation, precisely

because each member is his particular self, refers him to all the others and all the others to him.

From this point, then, the apriori is visible which should be now in question, and which signifies to the

individual a foundation and a "possibility" of belonging to a society. That each individual, by virtue of his

own quality, is automatically referred to a determined position within his social milieu, that this position

ideally belonging to him is also actually present in the social whole this is the presupposition from which,

as a basis, the individual leads his societary life, and which we may characterize as the universal value of the

individuality. It is independent of the fact that it works itself up toward clear conceptional consciousness, but

also of the contingent possibility of finding realization in the actual course of life as the apriority of the law

of causation, as one of the normative preconditions of all cognition, is independent of whether the

consciousness formulates it in detached concepts, and whether the psychological reality always proceeds in

accordance with it or not. Our cognitive life rests on the presupposition of a preestablished harmony

between our spiritual energies, even the most individual of them, and external objective existence, for the

latter remains always the expression of the immediate phenomenon, whether or not it can be traced back

metaphysically or psychologically to the production of the reality by the intellect itself. Thus societary life as

such is posited upon the presupposition of a fundamental harmony between the individual and the social

whole, little as this hinders the crass dissonances of the ethical and the eudaemonistic life. If the social reality

were unrestrictedly and infallibly given by this preconditional principle, we should have the perfect society

again not in the sense of ethical or eudaemonistic but of conceptual perfection. More fully expressed, we

should have, so to speak, not the perfect society, but the perfect society. So far as the individual finds, or does

not find, realization of this apriori of his social existence, i.e., the thoroughgoing correlation of his individual

being with the surrounding circles, the integrating necessity of his particularity, determined by his subjective

personal life, for the life of the whole, the socialization is incomplete; the society has stopped short of being

This state of the case comes to a definite focus with the category of the vocation (Beruf). Antiquity, to be

sure, did not know this concept in the sense of personal differentiation and of the society articulated by

But what is at the basis of this conception was in existence even in antiquity; viz., that the socially operative

doing is the unified expression of the subjective qualification, that the whole and the permanent of the

subjectivity practically objectifies itself by virtue of its functions in the society. This relationship was realized

then on the average merely in a less highly differentiated content. Its principle emerged in the Aristotelian

dictum that some were destined by their nature to [Greek word omitted], others to [Greek word omitted].

With higher development of the concept it shows the peculiar structure that on the one hand the society

begets and offers in itself a position (Stelle) which in content and outline differs from others, which, however,

in principle may be filled out by many, and thereby is, so to speak, something anonymous; and that this

position now, in spite of its character of generality, is grasped by the individual, on the ground of an inner

"call," or of a qualification conceived as wholly personal. In order that a "calling" may be given, there must

be present, however it came to exist, that harmony between the structure and the lifeprocess of the society

on the one side, and the individual makeup and impulses on the other. Upon this as general precondition

rests at last the representation that for every personality a position and a function exists within the society, to

which the personality is "called," and the imperative to search until it is found.

The empirical society becomes "possible" only through the apriori which culminates in the "vocation"

concept, which apriori to be sure, like those previously discussed, cannot be characterized by a simple phrase,

as in the case of the Kantian categories. The consciousness processes wherewith socialization takes place

unity composed of many, the reciprocal determination of the individuals, the reciprocal significance of the

individual for the totality of the other individuals and of the totality for the individual run their course under

this precondition which is wholly a matter of principle, which is not recognized in the abstract, but expresses

itself in the reality of practice: viz., that the individuality of the individual finds a position in the structure of

the generality, and still more that this structure in a certain degree, in spite of the incalculability of the

individuality, depends antecedently upon it and its function. The causal interdependence which weaves each

social element into the being and doing of every other, and thus brings into existence the external network of

society, is transformed into a teleological interdependence, so soon as it is considered from the side of its

individual bearers, its producers, who feel themselves to be egos, and whose attitude grows out of the soil of

the personality which is selfexisting and selfdetermining. That a phenomenal wholeness of such character

accommodates itself to the purpose of these individualities which approach it from without, so to speak, that

it offers a station for their subjectively determined lifeprocess, at which point the peculiarity of the same

becomes a necessary member in the life of the whole this, as a fundamental category, gives to the

consciousness of the individual the form which distinguishes the individual as a social element!