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 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