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phenomena: isolation and freedom. The mere fact that an individual is in no sort of reciprocal relationship with other individuals is, of course, not sociological, but it also does not fill out the entire concept of isolation. This concept rather, in so far as it is emphasized and is essentially significant, signifies by no means merely the absence of all society, but rather the existence of society in some way represented and afterward inhibited. Isolation receives its unequivocal positive meaning as longdistance effect of society-whether as echo of past or anticipation of future relationships; whether as longing after society or as voluntary turning away from it. The isolated man has not the same characteristics as if he had been from the beginning the only inhabitant of the world; but socialization, even if it is only that with the negative coefficient, determines his condition also. The whole joy and the whole bitterness of isolation are merely various reactions upon socially experienced influences. Either is a reciprocal effect from which the one member, after production of definite consequences, is really excluded and further lives and further works only ideally in the mind of the other member. In this connection there is decided significance in the well-known psychological fact that the feeling of loneliness seldom occurs so decidedly and importunately in actual physical isolation as when one is conscious of being a stranger and without attachments among many physically quite adjacent peoplefor instance in a "society," in the crowded streets of a great town. For the configuration of a group much depends upon whether it favors or even renders possible such loneliness within its limits. Close and intimate communities do not permit such intercellular vacuums in their structure. As we speak, however, of a social deficit, which is produced in fixed proportions to the societary conditions-the anti-social phenomena of the miserable, the criminal, the suicides in like manner a given quantity and quality of societary life produces a certain number of temporarily or chronically solitary existences, which, to be sure, the statistician cannot so exactly as in these other cases express in arithmetical terms. In another way isolation becomes sociologically

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[With the connotations above indicated.-TR.]

significant, so soon as it ceases to consist in a relationship which is a play within an individual between himself and another definite group, or group-life in general; but is rather a pause or a periodic differentiation within one and the same relationship. This is important in relationships which from their fundamental idea are aimed at permanent negation of isolation, as in the chief instance of monogamous marriage. So far as in the structure of this relation the finest subjective shadings express themselves, there is an essential difference whether man and wife, with the complete happiness of life in common, have still preserved for themselves the pleasure in isolation, or whether their relation is never interrupted by devotion to solitude-either because the habit of being together has taken from solitude its charm, or because an absence of essential assurance of love makes such interruptions feared as dangers or as infidelities. Thus isolation, apparently confined to a single person, consisting in the negation of sociality, is really a phenomenon of very positive sociological significance; not merely from the side of the agent, in whom it presents, as a conscious affection, an entirely determinate relation to society, but also through the decisive characteristic which its occurrence, both as cause and as effect, lends to large groups as well as to the most intimate relationships.

Freedom, too, has among its many sociological meanings a phase which belongs in this connection. Freedom, too, appears in the first place as a mere negation of societary constraint, for every constraint is a restraint. The free man does not constitute a unity in connection with others, but he is such a unity of himself. Now, there may be a freedom which consists in this mere absence of relationships, in the mere absence of every limitation through other beings: a Christian or an Indian eremite, a solitary settler in the German or the American forests, may enjoy a freedom in the sense that his existence is entirely filled out with other than social contents; in the same way a collective structure, a house-community or a civic body, which exists in a completely insular way, without neighbors and without correlation with other structures. For a being, however, that is in correlation with others, freedom has a much more positive significance. It is a

definite sort of relationship to the environment; a being in correlations, which loses its meaning if there is no correlated party. In juxtaposition with this latter, however, freedom has for the deeper structure of society two highly important meanings.

1. For the social man freedom is neither an aboriginally given matter-of-course condition, nor a property gained once for all and of constantly equal texture. Rather has every single principal claim, which ever engages the energy of the individual in a definite direction, properly the tendency to go on indefinitely; almost all relationships-civic, partisan, domestic, friendly, erotic-exist, as it were, by themselves upon an inclined plane, and weave their demands, if we leave them to themselves, over the whole man. They are surrounded, in a way which often has an uncanny effect upon the feelings, by an ideal sphere, from which we must expressly set off a reserve of energies, devotions, and interests to be withheld from their claims. It is, however, not merely the extensiveness of the claims through which the social egoism of every societary formation threatens the freedom of its elements, but the relentlessness with which the quite onesided and unlimited claim of once existing correlations asserts itself. Every such correlation is wont to press its rights with pitilessness and indifference against other interests and duties, whether they are harmonious or completely incompatible with it; and by this character of its behavior it limits the freedom of the individual not less than by its quantitative extension. In contrast with this form of our relationships, freedom appears as a continuous process of emancipation, as a struggle not merely for the independence of the ego, but also for the right to enter voluntarily at any moment even into dependence, as a struggle which must be renewed after every victory. Unrestraint as a negatively social attitude is thus in reality almost never a permanent possession, but an incessant self-detachment from constraints, which continually either limit in reality or attempt ideally to limit the living-unto-himself of the individual. Freedom is no solipsistic being, but a sociological doing; not a condition limited to the integrity of the agent, but a relation, even if always to be contemplated from the standpoint of the agent.

men.

2. As on its functional side, so also on the side of its content, is freedom something quite different from the putting-off of relationships, or from immunity of the individual's sphere from the impact of contiguous spheres. This follows from the very simple thought that man not merely wants to be free, but wants to use his freedom for some purpose. This use, however, is in large measure nothing else than the control and use of other For the social individual, that is, for the individual who lives in regular reciprocal relationships with others, freedom would in countless cases be entirely without content and purpose, if it did not make possible, or did not consist in, the extension of his will over those others. Our idiom quite correctly characterizes certain brusquenesses and arbitrarinesses when it says that one "takes liberties with another" (sich eine Freiheit gegen iemanden herausnimmt), and in the same way many languages have used their word for freedom in the sense of "right" or "privilege." The negatively social character of freedom as a relationship of the agent to himself is thus enlarged in both directions to a very positive character. Freedom consists in great measure in a process of liberation, it raises itself above and beyond a constraint, and gets meaning, consciousness, and value only as reaction against the same; and it consists not less of a power-relation to others, of the possibility of making oneself count within this relation, of making others tributary or subject, in all of which relations to others freedom begins to find its value and its application. The meaning of freedom, which is confined to the agent in and of himself, is thus only like the watershed between these two social meanings of the term, namely that the agent is bound by others and binds others. This meaning, so to speak, shrinks to nothing for the sake of disclosing the real meaning of freedom, viz., even where it is represented as a quality of the individual, still as this two-sided sociological relationship.

Since, however, it is so often complex and indirect connections through which such apparently individual realities, seemingly belonging so far from society, as isolation and freedom, actually exist as forms of sociological relationship, yet the

sociological formation which is methodologically simplest is that between two elements. . It furnishes the scheme, the germ, and the material for countless more complex formations; although its sociological significance by no means rests merely upon its extensions and its multiplications. It is rather itself a socialization, in which not only many forms of socialization realize themselves, purely and characteristically, but the limitation to a duality of the elements is, indeed, the condition under which alone a certain series of forms of relationship can emerge. The typically sociological nature of the same appears then not only in the fact that the greatest manifoldness of the individualities and of the combining motives does not alter the similarity of these formations, but rather that these sometimes occur quite as typically between pairs of groups-families, states, combinations of various sorts-as between pairs of single persons.

The peculiar conferring of characteristics upon a relationship through the duality of persons concerned in it is exhibited by everyday experiences. For instance, how differently a common lot, an undertaking, an agreement, a shared secret binds each of two sharers, from the case when even only three participate. The specific character of this difference is determined by the fact that the relationship, as a unity composed of its individuals, as a special structure beyond these, has a different bearing upon each of its participants from that of a more complicated structure to each of its members. However it may appear to third parties as an independent, superindividual unity, yet, as a rule, that is not the case for its participants, but each regards himself in antithesis only with the other, but not with a collectivity extending beyond him. The social structure rests immediately upon the one and the other. The departure of each single individual would destroy the whole, so that it does not come to such a superpersonal life of the whole that the individual feels himself independent; whereas, even in the case of an association of only three, if one individual departs, a group may still continue to exist.

There are, nevertheless, exceptions to this character of the dual groupings, the most decisive of which seems to appear in

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