THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP 209

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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 directed
 against the whole group of the offender and executed by
the whole group of the victim. With the rise of a large inclusive
 political circle, absorbing the different kinship
groups, the blood feud disappeared. The rights of the particularistic
 groups were replaced by the rights of the superior
 authority of the larger group on the one hand, and the
rights of the single individual on the other hand. The collective
 responsibility of the kinship group was replaced by
the collective responsibility of the larger circle and the individual
 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 decline
 of the patriarchal family. When civil rights and duties
 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 increased
 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 common
 humanity. The ethics of the Stoics was, in comparison