Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/50

 38 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

definite sort of relationship to the environment ; a being in cor- relations, 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.

I. 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 one- sided 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 con- trast 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. Free- dom is no solipsistic being, but a sociological doing; not a condi- tion limited to the integrity of the agent, but a relation, even if always to be contemplated from the standpoint of the agent.