Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/51

 NUMBER AS DETERMINING FORM OF GROUP 39

2. As on its functional side, so also on the side of its content, is freedom something quite different from the putting-off of relationships, or from immunity of .the individual's sphere from the impact of contiguous spheres. This follows from the very simple thought that man not merely wants to be free, but wants to use his freedom for some purpose. This use, however, is in large measure nothing else than the control and use of other men. For the social individual, that is, for the individual who lives in regular reciprocal relationships with others, freedom would in countless cases be entirely without content and purpose, if it did not make possible, or did not consist in, the extension of his will over those others. Our idiom quite correctly char- acterizes certain brusquenesses and arbitrarinesses when it says that one "takes liberties with another" (sich eine Freiheit gegen iemanden herausnimmi}, and in the same way many languages have used their word for freedom in the sense of "right" or "privilege." The negatively social character of freedom as a relationship of the agent to himself is thus enlarged in both directions to a very positive character. Freedom consists in great measure in a process of liberation, it raises itself above and beyond a constraint, and gets meaning, consciousness, and value only as reaction against the same ; and it consists not less of a power-relation to others, of the possibility of making oneself count within this relation, of making others tributary or subject, in all of which relations to others freedom begins to find its value and its application. The meaning of freedom, which is confined to the agent in and of himself, is thus only like the watershed between these two social meanings of the term, namely that the agent is bound by others and binds others. This meaning, so to speak, shrinks to nothing for the sake of disclosing the real meaning of freedom, viz., even where it is represented as a quality of the individual, still as this two-sided sociological relationship.

Since, however, it is so often complex and indirect connec- tions through which such apparently individual realities, seem- ingly belonging so far from society, as isolation and freedom, actually exist as forms of sociological relationship, yet the