ment by the community as a whole; the organization of leaders and led through the personal superiority of certain members over the rest; the economic system through direct exchange between producers.[1]
These functions, at first exercised by the persons immediately interested, presently pass over to special functional groups. The previous reciprocities of the elements give place to a condition in which each element comes into relations with the newly developed organ. Otherwise expressed, while previously, where there was no structure of organs, the individual primary elements alone had a substantial existence, and its coherence was merely functional, now the coherence of organs gets an existence of its own, and, more than this, an existence not merely apart from all the members of the group in which the new organ belongs, but even separate from those individuals who are the immediate constituents of the organ itself. Thus the mercantile element in a society is a structure which has an existence for itself. As such it fulfills its function as medium between producers indifferent to all change of individuals within its structure. More evidently still an administrative department (Amt) exists as an objective organ through which the individual officials again also pass, and behind which their personalities often enough disappear. Thus the state as receiver of taxes appropriates to itself those sacrifices which one interested circle of citizens demands of others, but at the same time the state subjects each of those intrusted with this function of tax collection to the same liability to taxation. The church, in like manner, is an impersonal organism whose functions are undertaken and exercised, but not produced, by the individual priests. In short, what was once erroneously assumed to be true of physical life, viz., that it is something maintained by a peculiar vital spirit, instead of being, as we now know, a sort of reciproc-
- ↑ I will not assert that this logically primary condition has everywhere been the historical starting point of the further social development, yet in order to make clear the essential meaning of the division of labor among social organs the assumption of this primitive condition is permissible, even if it is only a fiction. In numberless cases it surely is not fiction.
