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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THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP 209 - ) AS a] n ls ~t 4 t n re Q The correlation appears again in the development from blood feud to public justice. The blood feud was based on a strong internal solidarity of externally clearly separated and autonomous kinship groups. The revenge was direct- ed against the whole group of the offender and executed by the whole group of the victim. With the rise of a large in- clusive political circle, absorbing the different kinship groups, the blood feud disappeared. The rights of the par- ticularistic groups were replaced by the rights of the supe- rior authority of the larger group on the one hand, and the rights of the single individual on the other hand. The col- lective responsibility of the kinship group was replaced by the collective responsibility of the larger circle and the in- dividual responsibility of the single person. Public justice and the immediate social restraint of the individual by the larger group replaced the blood feud and the restraint of one small group by the other. An entirely similar development is manifest in the de- cline of the patriarchal family. When civil rights and du- ties in war and peace came to apply to the son as well as to the father, there began a gradual disintegration of the patria potestas. The results were on the one hand an in- creased power of the larger group over the individuals, on the other hand an increased liberty of the individual and a greater independence of the despotic ties of the small circle. The subjective reflex of this correlation appears in the field of philosophy, ethics, and religion in the form of a high valuation of the individual on the one hand and a tendency to cosmopolitanism on the other hand. The philosophy of the eighteenth century was individualistic and humanistic. It stressed the rights of the individual, but conceived them as the “rights of man,” as the rights of a member of a com- mon humanity. The ethics of the Stoics was, in comparison

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