Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/188

 of social classes because marked superiorities and inferiorities in the relations between subjects come into real as well as psychological competition with his own supremacy. Thus we see in a large portion of European history, so long as feudalism and the legal differences of estates prevailed, that the struggles of the lower orders for legal equality were aided by the princes. The overlords sought to diminish the privileges of the nobility, because as rulers they elevated themselves to a more lofty and more equal eminence over an equalized society. But there is concealed in this relation between autocracy and the leveling of the ruled another social factor of great significance. This factor may be indicated as follows: The structure of a society in which a single person rules and the great mass obeys is to be understood only through the consideration that the mass, that is the ruled, includes only a portion of the personality belonging to the individuals concerned, while the ruler invests his whole personality in the relationship. Lordship over a developed society does not consequently differ so very much from rule over a horde, since the individuals build into the structure of the mass only fragments of their personality and reserve the remainder. There are wanting therefore in the mass, as the ruled subject, the resources, adaptabilities, the accommodations, the developments of power which the whole individual possesses through the unity and presence of his total psychical energy. Apart from consideration of this difference, this devotion of a mere fraction of individuality to the mass, the frequent facility of its subserviency is not to be understood.

Wonder has often been felt over the irrationality of the condition in which a single person exercises lordship over a great mass of others. The contradiction will be modified when we reflect that the ruler and the individual subject in the controlled mass by no means enter into the relationship with an equal quantum of their personality. The mass is composed through the fact that many individuals unite fractions of their personality,—one-sided purposes, interests and powers, while that which each personality as such actually is towers above this