SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION 189
the actual group formation and the rise of a class consciousness
 has come much later. The number of entrepreneur
associations has none the less been increasing rapidly during
 recent years.
As long as the formal relationship between employer
and employee was not observed separate and apart from
the content of their activities, this differentiation could
not take place. In other words, as long as the main emphasis
 was on the fact that the ones were metal workers
and the others metal manufacturers, the stress was on the
common interest in the metal trade. They formed a small
social eircle between them, as in all other trades and industries.
 But once the emphasis was placed on the formal relationship
 between employers and employees, there developed
 a social differentiation which created two large
social circles intersecting all existing ones and placed in formal
 opposition in relation to each other.
The formation of a merchant class resembles in many
aspects the sociological genesis of the laboring class. Like
labor, the merchants form a group partly real, partly ideal.
They constitute an association of individual merchants
quite irrespective of their trade. In this case, however, the
differentiation of the general out of the more specific has
been facilitated by the fact that the form of the merchant’s
activity is more independent of its content. The activity
of the workman depends to a large extent on what he
makes. The concept of activity as independent of its content
 is therefore not easily formed. The activity of the
merchant is relatively independent of what he trades in.
It is buying and selling in all cases, and this fact has greatly
simplified the formation of the general concept and of the
general class.
A third example of the formation of a large superordinated
 circle out of smaller circles 1s the growth of the femi-