The social Theory of Georg Simmel

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1024612627

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-166627

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Spykman, Nicholas J. http://d-nb.info/gnd/124229867

Title:: The social Theory of Georg Simmel

Place of publication:: Chicago

Publisher:: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Year of publication:: 1925

Scope:: XXIX, 297 S

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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126 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL war to peace is victory. Victories are more or less absolute and occur in different degrees of completeness. The type of victory that is of special importance for the succeeding peace is the one that results, not exclusively from the pre- ponderance of the one party, but in part at least from the resignation of the other. This confession of inferiority and acknowledgment of defeat before actual exhaustion is not always a simple phenomenon. It may be induced by vari- ous motives, such as a tendency toward self-humiliation, a feeling that it is worthier to yield than to speculate on an improbable chance, and a feeling that the confession of de- feat is a gift to the conqueror and, as such, a last act of strength. The termination of a conflict by compromise is com- pletely different from a termination by victory. The fact that certain conflicts can be terminated by compromise places them in a class by themselves separate and distinct from conflicts which must be fought for a victory. Con- ficts induced by hatred or revenge allow no compromise. In primitive times, conflicts fought for a single specific ob- ject could not be terminated if the object was indivisible. That this is none the less possible today is one of the great advances of civilization. It has resulted from the differen- tiation between the value of an object and the object it- self. Tt took the invention of exchange as a practical syn- thesis of gift and theft, the earliest forms of transferring values, to make this possible. Once this differentiation had been accomplished, the possibility was created of ter- minating conflicts about objects through an exchange of values. In contrast to compromise, which is an objective means of terminating conflict, conciliation is a purely subjective means. What is referred to here is not the sort of concilia- tion that often follows a compromise or any other termina-

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