16 September

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by the master, of the son by the father, or of the wife by the husband, is only a first step towards the social link. Thanks to the development of civilization, the possessed becomes more and more a possessor, and the possessor a possessed, until, by equality of right, by popular sovereignty, and by the equitable exchange of services, ancient slavery, now mutualized and universalized, makes each citizen at once the master and the servant of every other. At the same time, the ways of possessing one’s fellow citizens, and of being possessed by them, grow in number every day. Every new administration or industry which is created sets to work new administrators or industrialists on behalf of those who are administered by them or who consume their products, and who in this sense gain a real right with respect to them, a right which they did not previously have, while they themselves conversely have come, by this new two-sided relation, to belong to these industrialists or administrators. We may say the same of any new opportunity. When a newly opened railway brings produce from the sea to a small town far inland for the first time, the domain of the town’s inhabitants has grown to include the fishermen who are now part of it, and the clientele of the fishermen, correspondingly, has grown to include the townspeople. As a subscriber to a newspaper, I possess my journalists, who possess their subscribers. I possess my government, my religion, my police force, just as much as my specifically human form, my temperament, and my health; but I also know that the ministers of my nation, the priests of my confession or the police officers of my county count me as one of the flock they guard.” Gabriel Tarde