Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/528

510 and security—all this makes the legal controversy rest upon a broad basis of community and consensus between the opponents. It is really a unity of a lesser degree which is constituted by the parties to a compact or to a commercial transaction, a presupposition of which is the recognition, along with the antithesis of interests, that they are subject to certain common, constraining, and obligatory rules. The common presuppositions, which exclude everything that is merely personal from the legal controversy, have that character of pure objectivity to which, on its side, the sharpness, the inexorableness, and the absoluteness of the species of struggle correspond. The reciprocity between the dualism and the unity of the sociological relationship is accordingly shown by the judicial struggle not less than by the war game. Precisely the most extreme and unlimited phases of struggle occur in both cases, since the struggle is surrounded and maintained by the severe unity of common norms and limitations.

Finally, this emerges on all hands where the parties are moved by an objective interest; that is, where the struggle interest, and consequently the struggle itself, is differentiated from the personality. Under such circumstances two alternatives are possible: the struggle may turn about purely objective decisions and may leave everything personal undisturbed; or it may draw in the persons from their subjective side without thereby affecting the contemporary objective interests common to the parties. The latter type is illustrated by the saying of Leibnitz, that he would become a follower of his deadly enemy if he could learn something from him. That this situation may compose and modify enmity is so evident that at present only the opposite consequence can be in question. It is certainly true that the hostility which runs its course in an objective sphere under definite terms of obligation and understanding has, so to speak, a definiteness of outline and a security of its right. The knowledge of such delimitation assures us that personal antipathy will not cross the boundaries thus drawn. The assurance which we derive only from such differentiation may, under certain circumstances, lead to an intensification of the enmity; for where the enmity thus confines