Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/200

 to which the lord of the whole came to regard himself as merely an obedient agent. Accordingly it follows that morals and custom, instead of subjective preference, determine his acts, his decisions, his judicial judgments; that he no longer behaves as though he were absolute lord of the family property, but rather the manager of it in the interest of the whole; that his position bears more the character of an official station than that of an unlimited right. Thus the relation between superiors and inferiors is placed upon an entirely new basis. While in the first stage the latter constitute only a personal competence, so to speak, of the former, the objective idea of the family is now created. The family is thought of as standing above all the individual members. The guiding patriarch himself is, like every other member, subordinate to the family idea. He may give directions to the other members of the family only in the name of the higher ideal unity.

An example of formally similar development is furnished by the most recent times with their increasing preponderance of the objective and technical element over the personal. Many sorts of superiority and inferiority which formerly bore a personal character, so that in a given relation one party was plainly the superior and the other the inferior, are now so changed that they are both and equally subject to an objective purpose, and the subordination of the one to the other persists only as a technical necessity within this common relationship to the higher principle. So long as the relation of the wage-worker is looked on as a rental contract—the laboring man is hired or rented—so long does the relationship contain essentially an element of subordination of the laborer to the employer. This element is excluded however so soon as we regard the labor compact not as rental but as purchase of labor as an economic good. Then is the subordination which the relation demands of the laborer, as has been said, only a subordination “to coöperative progress, which for the entrepreneur, in so far as he performs any activity, is as essential as for the laborer.” The increased self-consciousness of the modern laborer must in part at least be