SPATIAL RELATIONS OF SOCIAL FORMS 155 
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of the central administration. The history of the Ger- 
manic tribes is full of illustrations of this type of develop- 
ment. 
The Spartans solved the antinomy between the agra- 
rian character of their state, which predisposed it toward 
an aristocratic, decentralized type of structure, and the 
centralization which was required by their military organ- 
ization in an interesting fashion. They left their agricul- 
tural estates in the hands of managers and lived in spatial 
proximity in the city. Something similar occurred, al- 
though in a different form, among the French nobility 
under the ancient régime. As long as the nobles had lived 
on the land, they had been practically autonomous on their 
own estates. The increasing centralization of the ancient 
régime robbed them on the one hand of their judicial and 
administrative independence, but, on the other hand, it 
drew them to Paris. 
The correlation is therefore between spatial proximity 
or local compactness and centralization on the one hand, 
and local dispersion and decentralized autonomy on the 
other hand. It is a correlation that can be found in groups 
with democratic tendencies as well as in groups with aristo- 
cratic tendencies, and is therefore an illustration of a de- 
termination of sociological forms by purely spatial rela- 
tions.t 
Movement of Groups and Group Elements 
The correlations so far referred to have been correla- 
tions between social forms and fixed spatial relations. The 
next question is: What forms of organization do we find in 
wandering groups, and what kinds of formation result if 
not the group as a whole, but only certain elements, lead a 
wandering existence? 
. Ibid., pp. 668-70.