Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/537

 THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONFLICT 519

sharper and more bitter than if no connection had ever existed. It is to be added that both parties have an interest in asserting their differences in contrast with the persisting tradition of simi- larity. It is of extreme importance for them to assert the unequivocal character of this difference. They are able to bring this about only by emphasizing the difference beyond its original importance. For this end of assuring the position, theoretical or religious dissent leads to a reciprocal accusing of heresy in every ethical, personal, subjective, or objective respect, which would not be at all necessary if precisely similar differ- ences occurred between strangers. Indeed, that a difference of convictions should at all run into hatred and struggle, occurs as a rule only in case of essential and original equality of the parties. The sociologically very significant phenomenon of "respect for the enemy" is usually absent when hostility has arisen where there was earlier community. Where so much similarity still exists that mistakes of identity and obliteration of boundaries are possible, the points of difference must be emphasized to an extent which is often not at all justified by the matter itself, but only by this danger. This was the case, for example, in the instance, cited above, of Catholicism in Berne. Roman Catholicism has no occasion to fear that its peculiarity is threatened by an external contact with a church so completely differentiated as the Reformed body. It could, however, be compromised by association with a body which is still so closely related with it as the Old Catholic church.

This illustration brings to view also the second type here in question, which in practice, to be sure, falls more or less into identity with the other. This is the case of that hostility, the intensity of which is based upon association and unity which is by no means always likeness. The occasion for separate dis- cussion of this type is that here, instead of the consciousness of difference, an entirely new motive emerges the peculiar phe- nomenon of social hatred, that is, of hatred toward a member of a group, not from personal motives, but because he threatens the existence of the group. In so far as such a danger threatens through feud within the group, the one party hates the other