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 180 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

upon whom the whole rested. The precise balancing of the quantity consequently becomes a secondary matter, and may thus easily be omitted. While here, therefore, as it were, the mere numerical fact of the duality, instead of the unity, of the party produces the situation of the tertius gaudens, in the follow- ing case it arises from a duality that is determined by qualitative differences. The juridical prerogative of the English king after the Norman conquest, which was something unknown to mediaeval Germany, is to be explained as follows : William the Conqueror encountered existing rights of the Anglo-Saxon population, which had to be respected in principle, and at the same time his Normans brought with them their peculiar rights; but these two legal complexes did not harmonize. They pro- duced no unity of popular rights as opposed to the king, who could, by means of the unity of his interest, interpose between the two and to a considerable extent annul them. In the cleavage between the nations not merely because they were in constant friction with each other, but because their very diver- gency forbade their uniting upon a law to be maintained in com- mon was the pillar of absolutism, and consequently its power steadily declined so soon as the two nationalities actually dis- solved into a single one.

The favored status of the third party disappears, as a matter of course, at the moment in which the two others come together in a unity; that is, the grouping reverts in the respect that is now in question from the triad to the dyad type. It is instructive not merely with reference to the special problem, but as to group life in general, that this result may also occur without personal unification or consolidation of interests, while the object of antagonism is withdrawn from the conflict of subjective deter- mination through objective fixation. The following case seems clearly to illustrate this generalization. Since modern industry leads to incessant interpenetration of the most numerous occu- pations, and constantly sets new tasks which do not belong historically to existing occupations, it produces, especially in England, very frequent conflicts about prerogative between the different classes of laborers. In the great industries the ship-