Georg Simmel

The Secret and

the Secret Society

As a stimulant for discussion of the concept of the public in architecture Excerpt from
Simmel, Georg (1950): Sociology
and urban planning W|C|B would like to refer to Georg Simmel’s Sociolo- Inquiries into the Construction of Social
gie: Inquiries Into the Construction of Social Forms. Here Simmel intro- Forms, ed. and trans. by Kurt H. Wolff,
Glencoe: Free Press, p. 307–375.
duces the “secret” as a constituent of public and private spheres. Below we
have put together a compilation of what we believe are the most important Available here: https://archive.org/
details/sociologyofgeorg030082mbp
paragraphs. The complete text is available in bookstores and in all univer-
sity libraries. You can also find a full English version on archive.org. Of
course, it is up to each author to what extent and whether they want to stu-
dy it. However, especially for architecture and urban planning we envisage
that studying Simmel will make it possible to regard the public sphere and
privacy less as characteristics of buildings and squares but instead look
at them as a cognitive and social relationship of the users initiated by ar-
chitecture, as a result of a “negotiation” (Lars Lerup).

„ […] Obviously, all relations which people have to one another are based on their
knowing something about one another. The merchant knows that his correspon-
dent wants to buy at the lowest possible price, and to sell at the highest possib-
le price. The teacher knows that he can tax the student with a certain kind and
amount of learning material. Within each social stratum, an individual knows
how much culture, approximately, he may expect of every other individual. Wit-
hout such knowledge, evidently, these and many other kinds of interaction could
not take place at all. One may say (with reservations which easily suggest them-
selves) that in all relations of a personally differentiated sort, intensity and nu-
ance develop in the degree in which each party, by words and by mere existence,
reveals itself to the other. How much error and mere prejudice may be contained
in all this knowledge, is another question. Yet, just as our apprehension of exter-
nal nature, along with elusions and inadequacies, nevertheless attains the truth
required for the life and progress of our species, so everybody knows, by and lar-
ge correctly, the other person with whom he has to deal, so that interaction and
relation become possible.

The first condition of having to deal with somebody at all is to know with whom
one has to deal. The fact that people usually introduce themselves to one another
whenever they engage in a conversation of any length or meet on the same social

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level, may strike one as an empty form; yet it is an adequate symbol of the mutual
knowledge presupposed by every relationship. We are very often not conscious of
this because, for a large number of relations, we need to know only that quite ty-
pical tendencies and qualities are present on both sides. The necessary character
of these tendencies is usually noted only when, on occasion, they are absent. […]

It is entirely legitimate that the theoretical conception we have of a particular

individual should vary with the standpoint from which it is formed, a standpoint
which is the result of the overall relation between knower and known. One can
never know another person absolutely, which would involve knowledge of eve-
ry single thought and mood. Nevertheless, one forms some personal unity out of
those of his fragments in which alone he is accessible to us. This unity, therefore,
depends upon the portion of him which our standpoint permits us to see. […] (P.
308)

If A and B have different conceptions of M, this by no means necessarily implies

incompleteness or deception. Rather, in view of the relation in which A stands to
M, A‘s nature and the total circumstances being what they are, A‘s picture of M
is true for him in the same manner in which, for B, a different picture is true. It
would be quite erroneous to say that, above these two pictures, there is the objec-
tively correct knowledge about M, and that A‘s and B‘s images are legitimated to
the extent to which they coincide with this objective knowledge. Rather, the ideal
truth which the picture of M in the conception of A approaches to be sure, only
asymptotically is something different, even as an ideal, from that of B. It con-
tains as an integrating, form-giving precondition the psychological peculiarity
of A and the particular relation into which A and M are brought by their specific
characters and destinies.

Every relationship between persons gives rise to a picture of each in the other;
and this picture, obviously, interacts with the actual relation. The relation cons-
titutes the condition under which the conception, that each has of the other, takes
this or that shape and has its truth legitimated. On the other hand, the real inter-
action between the individuals is based upon the pictures which they acquire of
one another. […] (P. 309)

This same dualism also causes sociological relationships to be determined in a

twofold manner. Concord, harmony, coefficacy, which are unquestionably held
to be socializing forces, must nevertheless be interspersed with distance, compe-
tition, repulsion, in order to yield the actual configuration of society. The solid,
organizational forms which seem to constitute or create society, must constantly
be disturbed, disbalanced, gnawed at by individualistic, irregular forces, in order
to gain their vital reaction and development through submission and resistance.
Intimate relations, whose formal medium is physical and psychological nearness,
lose the attractiveness, even the content of their intimacy, as soon as the close re-
lationship does not also contain, simultaneously and alternatingly, distances and
intermissions. Finally, and this is the decisive point: although reciprocal know-
ledge conditions relationships positively, after all, it does not do this by itself alo-

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ne. Relationships being what they are, they also presuppose a certain ignorance
and a measure of mutual concealment. […] (P. 315)

Confidence, evidently, is one of the most important synthetic forces within society.
As a hypothesis regarding future behavior, a hypothesis certain enough to serve
as a basis for practical conduct, confidence is intermediate between knowledge
and ignorance about a man. The person who knows completely need not trust;
while the person who knows nothing can, on no rational grounds, afford even
confidence. […] (P. 318)

The merchant who sells grain or oil needs to know only whether his correspon-
dent is good for the price. But if he takes him as his associate, he must not only
know his financial standing and certain of his very general qualities, but he must
have thorough insight into him as a personality; he must know whether he is
decent, compatible, and whether he has a daring or hesitant temperament. Upon
such reciprocal knowledge rest not only the beginning of the relationship, but also
its whole development, the daily common actions, and the division of functions
between the partners. […] (P. 319 f.)

Acquaintance in this social sense is, therefore, the proper seat of ‘discretion.’ For,
discretion consists by no means only in the respect for the secret of the other,
for his specific will to conceal this or that from us, but in staying away from the
knowledge of all that the other does not expressly reveal to us. It does not refer
to anything particular which we are not permitted to know, but to a quite gene-
ral reserve in regard to the total personality. Discretion is a special form of the
typical contrast between the imperatives, ‘what is not prohibited is allowed,’ and
‘what is not allowed is prohibited.’ Relations among men are thus distinguished
according to the question of mutual knowledge of either ‘what is not concealed
may be known’ or ‘what is not revealed must not be known.’

To act upon the second of these decisions corresponds to the feeling (which also
operates elsewhere) that an ideal sphere lies around every human being. Alt-
hough differing in size in various directions and differing according to the person
with whom one entertains relations, this sphere cannot be penetrated, unless the
personality value of the individual is thereby destroyed. A sphere of this sort is
placed around man by his ‘honor.’ Language very poignantly designates an insult
to one‘s honor as ‘coming too close’: the radius of this sphere marks, as it were, the
distance whose trespassing by another person insults one‘s honor.

Another sphere of the same form corresponds to what is called the ‘significance’
of a personality. In regard to the ‘significant’ [‘great’] man, there is an inner com-
pulsion which tells one to keep at a distance and which does not disappear even in
intimate relations with him. The only type for whom such distance does not exist
is the individual who has no organ for perceiving significance. For this reason, the
‘valet’ knows no such sphere of distance; for him there is no ‘hero’; but this is due,
not to the hero, but to the valet. For the same reason, all importunity is associated
with a striking lack of feeling for differences in the significance of men. The indivi-

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dual who fails to keep his distance from a great person does not esteem him high-
ly, much less too highly (as might superficially appear to be the case) ; but, on the
contrary, his importune behavior reveals lack of proper respect. The painter often
emphasizes the significance of a figure in a picture that contains many figures by
arranging the others in a considerable distance from it. In an analogous fashion,
the sociological simile of significance is the distance which keeps the individual
outside a certain sphere that is occupied by the power, will, and greatness of a
person. […] (P. 320 – 322).

The question where this boundary lies cannot be answered in terms of a simple
principle; it leads into the finest ramifications of societal formation. For, in an ab-
solute sense, the right to intellectual private-property can be affirmed as little as
can the right to material property. We know that, in higher civilizations, material
private-property in its essential three dimensions, acquisition, insurance, increa-
se is never based on the individual‘s own forces alone. It always requires the con-
ditions and forces of the social milieu. From the beginning, therefore, it is limited
by the right of the whole, whether through taxation or through certain checks on
acquisition. But this right is grounded more deeply than just in the principle of
service and counterservice between society and individual: it is grounded in the
much more elementary principle, that the part must sustain as great a restriction
upon its autonomous existence and possessiveness as the maintenance and the
purposes of the whole require.

This also applies to the inner sphere of man. In the interest of interaction and so-
cial cohesion, the individual must know certain things about the other person. Nor
does the other have the right to oppose this knowledge from a moral standpoint,
by demanding the discretion of the first: he cannot claim the entirely undisturbed
possession of his own being and consciousness, since this discretion might harm
the interests of his society. […] (P. 322 – 324)

The intention of hiding, however, takes on a much greater intensity when it cla-
shes with the intention of revealing. In this situation emerges that purposive hi-
ding and masking, that aggressive defensive, so to speak, against the third person,
which alone is usually designated as secret. The secret in this sense, the hiding of
realities by negative or positive means, is one of man‘s greatest achievements.
In comparison with the childish stage in which every conception is expressed at
once, and every undertaking is accessible to the eyes of all, the secret produces an
immense enlargement of life: numerous contents of life cannot even emerge in the
presence of full publicity. The secret offers, so to speak, the possibility of a second
world alongside the manifest world; and the latter is decisively influenced by the
former.

Whether there is secrecy between two individuals or groups, and if so how much,
is a question that characterizes every relation between them. For even where one
of the two does not notice the existence of a secret, the behavior of the concealer,
and hence the whole relationship, is certainly modified by it. […] (P. 329)

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Among children, pride and bragging are often based on a child‘s being able to say
to the other: ‘I know something that you don‘t know’ and to such a degree, that
this sentence is uttered as a formal means of boasting and of subordinating the
others, even where it is made up and actually refers to no secret. This jealousy
of the knowledge about facts hidden to others, is shown in all contexts, from the
smallest to the largest. British parliamentary discussions were secret for a long
time; and, as late as under George III, press communications about them were
prosecuted as criminal offenses explicitly, as violations of parliamentary privile-
ges. The secret gives one a position of exception; it operates as a purely socially
determined attraction. It is basically independent of the content it guards but, of
course, is increasingly effective in the measure in which the exclusive possession
is vast and significant. (P. 332 f.)

The secret puts a barrier between men but, at the same time, it creates the temp-
ting challenge to break through it, by gossip or confession and this challenge ac-
companies its psychology like a constant overtone. The sociological significance
of the secret, therefore, has its practical extent, its mode of realization, only in
the individual‘s capacity or inclination to keep it to himself, in his resistance or
weakness in the face of tempting betrayal. […] All these elements which determine
the sociological role of the secret are of an individual nature; but the measure in
which the dispositions and complications of personalities form secrets depends, at
the same time, on the social structure in which their lives are placed. The decisive
point in this respect is that the secret is a first-rate element of individualization.
It is this in a typical dual role: social conditions of strong personal differentiation
permit and require secrecy in a high degree; and, conversely, the secret embodies
and intensifies such differentiation. (P. 334 f.)

Every democracy holds publicity to be an intrinsically desirable situation, on the

fundamental premise that everybody should know the events and circumstances
that concern him, since this is the condition without which he cannot contribute
to decisions about them; and every shared knowledge itself contains the psycho-
logical challenge to shared action. It is a moot question whether this conclusion
is quite valid. If, above all individualistic interests, there has grown an objective
governing structure which embodies certain aspects of these interests, the formal
autonomy of this structure may very well entitle it to function secretly, without
thereby belying its ‘publicity’ in the sense of a material consideration of the inte-
rests of all. Thus, there is no logical connection which would entail the greater va-
lue of publicity. On the other hand, the general scheme of cultural differentiation
is again shown here: what is public becomes ever more public, and what is pri-
vate becomes ever more private. And this historical? development is the expres-
sion of a deeper, objective significance: what is essentially public and what, in its
content, concerns all, also becomes ever more public externally, in its sociological
form; and what, in its inner meaning, is autonomous the centripetal affairs of the
individual gains an ever more private character even in its sociological position,
an ever more distinct possibility of remaining secret. (P. 337)

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The secret is a sociologyical determination characteristic of the reciprocal rela-
tions between group elements; or, rather, together with other relational forms,
it constitutes their relationship as a whole. But it may also characterize a group
in its totality: this applies to the case of ‘secret societies’. As long as the existence,
the activities, and the possessions of an individual are secret, the general sociolo-
gical significance of the secret is isolation, contrast, and egoistic individualizati-
on. The sociological significance of the secret is external, namely, the relationship
between the one who has the secret and another who does not. But, as soon as a
whole group uses secrecy as its form of existence, the significance becomes inter-
nal: the secret determines the reciprocal relations among those who share it in
common. Yet, since even here there is the exclusion (with its specific nuances) of
the non initiates, the sociology of the secret society is confronted with the compli-
cated problem of ascertaining how intra-group life is determined by the group‘s
secretive behavior toward the outside. I do not preface this discussion by a sys-
tematic classification of secret societies, which would have only an external, his-
torical interest; even without it, essential categories will emerge by themselves.
The first internal relation typical of the secret society is the reciprocal confidence
6 among its members. (P. 345)

This is quite possible, however, for a societal unit. Its elements may live in the
most frequent interactions; but the fact that they form a society a conspiracy or a
gang of swindlers, a religious conventicle or an association for engaging in sexual
orgies can essentially, as well as permanently, be a secret.

In this type, then, it is not the individuals, but the group they form, which is con-
cealed. It must be distinguished from another type, where the formation of the
group is completely known, while the membership, the purpose, or the specific ru-
les of the association remain secret. Examples are many secret orders among na-
ture peoples; also the Freemasons. Secrecy protects this type less than it does the
former, since what is known always offers points of attack for further penetrati-
on. On the other hand, such relatively secret societies often have the advantage of
a certain elasticity. Since their existence is manifest to a certain extent from the
beginning, they can bear further revelations more easily than can those societies
whose very life is secret, and whose mere discovery frequently spells destruction
their secret usually rests on the radical alternatives of All or Nothing. (P. 346)

Corresponding to this protective character as an external quality, there is in the

secret society, as already noted, the internal quality of reciprocal confidence
among its members the very specific trust that they are capable of keeping si-
lent. According to their content, associations rest upon premises of various kinds
of confidence: confidence in business ability, in religious conviction, in courage,
love, decency, or in the case of criminal groups in the radical break with moral
concerns. But as soon as the society becomes secret, it adds to the trust determined
by its particular purpose, the formal trust in secrecy. This, evidently, is faith-in-
the-person of a sociologically more abstract character than any other, since every
possible common content may be subject to it. […]

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For this reason, secret societies offer a very impressive schooling in the moral
solidarity among men. Their rudimentary forms begin with any two persons who
share a secret; their diffusion in all places and at all times is immense and has
hardly ever been appreciated even quantitatively. For, in the confidence of one
man in another lies as high a moral value as in the fact that the trusted person
shows himself worthy of it. Perhaps it is even more free and meritorious, since the
trust we receive contains an almost compulsory power, and to betray it requires
thoroughly positive meanness. By contrast, confidence is ‘given’; it cannot be re-
quested in the same manner in which we are requested to honor it, once we are its
recipients. (P. 347 f.)

Another means for placing discretion upon an objective basis was applied by the
secret order of the Gallic Druids. The content of their secrets lay, particularly, in
spiritual songs which every Druid had to memorize. But this was so arranged
above all, probably, because of the prohibition to write the songs down that it
required an extraordinary long time, even up to twenty years. By means of this
long period of learning before there was anything essential that could have been
betrayed, a gradual habituation to silence was developed. The fascination of dis-
closure did not assail the undisciplined mind all at once, as it were; the young
mind was allowed to adapt itself slowly to resisting this fascination. The rule ac-
cording to which the songs could not be written down, however, was more than
a mere protective measure against the revelation of the secrets it is part of much
more comprehensive sociological phenomena. The individual‘s dependence upon
personal instruction, and the fact that the exclusive source of the teaching was
within the secret order not deposited in any objective piece of writing these facts
tied every single member with incomparable closeness to the group, and made
him constantly feel that, if he were severed from this substance, he would lose his
own and could never find it again anywhere.

It has perhaps not been sufficiently noted how much, in more mature cultures, the
objectification of the spirit promotes the growing independence of the individual.
So long as immediate tradition, individual teaching, and, above all, establishment
of norms through persons in authority, determine the individual‘s intellectual life,
he is wholly integrated with his surrounding, living group. It alone gives him
the possibility of a fulfilled and spiritual existence; the direction of all channels,
through which his life-contents flow to him, runs only between his social milieu
and himself; and he feels this at every moment. But, once the labor of the spe-
cies capitalizes its results in the form of writing, in visible works, in enduring ex-
amples, this immediate, organic flow between the actual group and its individual
member is interrupted. The life process of the individual no longer continuously
binds him to the group without competition from any other quarter: it can now
feed on objective sources which need not be personally present. The fact that this
supply actually orginates in, processes of the social mind, is relatively irrelevant.
These processes are not only quite remote, having occurred in generations which
are no longer connected with the present feeling of the individual, although his
supply is the crystallization of actions by these past generations. Above all, how-
ever, it is the objective form of this supply, its separateness from subjective per-

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sonality, that opens a super-social source of food to the individual. His spiritu-
al content, both in degree and kind, thus comes to depend much more markedly
upon his capacity to absorb, than upon any allotted offering. The particularly
close association within the secret society (to be discussed later in greater detail),
which has its affective category, so to speak, in specific ‘trust thus suggests that,
where the secret society has as its core the transmission of intellectual contents, it
is fit for it to avoid the written fixation of these matters. (P. 350 f.)

In these questions concerning techniques of keeping secrets, it must not be forgot-

ten that the secret is not only a means under whose protection the material purpo-
ses of a group may be furthered: often, conversely, the very formation of a group
is designed to guarantee the secrecy of certain contents. This occurs in the spe-
cial type of secret societies whose substance is a secret doctrine, some theoretical,
mystical, or religious knowledge. Here, secrecy is its own sociological purpose:
certain insights must not penetrate into the masses; those who know form a com-
munity in order to guarantee mutual secrecy to one another. If they were a mere
sum of unconnected individuals, the secret would soon be lost; but sociation offers
each of them psychological support against the temptation of disclosure. Sociati-
on counterbalances the isolating and individualizing effect of the secret which I
have emphasized. All sorts of sociation shift the needs for individualization and
socialization back and forth within their forms, even within their contents as if
the requirement of an enduring mixture were met by the employment of elements
constantly changing in quality. The secret society compensates for the separating
factor inherent in every secret by the simple fact that it is a society.

Secrecy and individualization are so closely associated that sociation may play
two wholly different roles in regard to secrecy. Sociation may be directly sought,
as has just been emphasized, in order to compensate, in part, for the isolating
consequences of continuing secrecy in order to satisfy within secrecy the impulse
toward communion which the secret destroys in regard to the outside. On the
other hand, secrecy greatly loses in significance whenever, for reasons of content,
individualization is fundamentally excluded. The Freemasons stress their wish of
being the most general society, the union of unions/ 1 the only group which re-
jects all particularistic elements and wants to appropriate only what is common
to all good men. Hand in hand with this ever more decisive tendency, there has
developed among them the growing indifference toward the secret character of
the lodges, which have come to be limited to mere external formalities. It is thus
not contradictory for secrecy to be sometimes favored, sometimes dissolved, by
sociation. (P. 355 f.)

[…] it quite characteristically claims to a greater extent the whole individual, con-
nects its members in more of their totality, and mutually obligates them more
closely, than does an open society of identical content. Through the symbolism of
the ritual, which excites a whole range of vaguely delimited feelings beyond all
particular, rational interests, the secret society synthesizes those interests into a
total claim upon the individual. By means of the ritual form, the particular purpo-
se of the secret society is enlarged to the point of being a closed unit, a whole, both

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sociological and subjective. […]

The same conditions, finally, involve still another motive in the sociology of the ri-
tual in secret societies. Every secret society contains a measure of freedom, which
the structure of the society at large does not have. Whether the secret society, like
the fehme, supplements the inadequate judicature of the political community; or
like the conspiratory or criminal band, rebels against its law; or like the Mys-
teries, stands beyond the commands and prohibitions of the general society the
singling-out, so characteristic of the secret society, always has a note of fredom:
the society lives in an area to which the norms of the environment do not extend.
(P. 360)

The secret element in societies is a primary sociological fact, a particular kind

and shading of togetherness, a formal quality of relationship. In direct or indirect
interaction with other such qualities, it determines the shape of the group mem-
ber or of the group itself. Yet, from a historical standpoint, the secret society is a
secondary phenomenon; that is, it always develops only within a society already
complete in itself. To put it differently: the secret society is characterized by its
secrecy in the same way in which other societies (or even secret societies them-
selves) are characterized by their superordination and subordination, or by their
aggressive purposes, or by their imitative character; but, that it can develop with
these characteristics is possible only on the condition that a society already exists.
Within this larger circle, it opposes it as a narrower one; whatever the purpose
of the society, this opposition has, at any rate, the sense of exclusion. Even the al-
truistic secret society, which merely wants to render a certain service to the total
group and intends to disband after achieving it, evidently considers temporary
separation from this total group a technique unavoidable in view of its purpose.

Among the many smaller groups which are included in larger ones, there is none
whose sociological constellation forces it to emphasize its formal self-sufficiency
to the same extent as it does the secret society. Its secret surrounds it like a bound-
ary outside of which there is nothing but materially, or at least formally, opposite
matter, a boundary which therefore fuses, within itself, the secret society into a
perfect unity. (P. 362)

The separateness of the secret society expresses a value: people separate from
others because they do not want to make common cause with them, because they
wish to let them feel their superiority. This motive leads everywhere to group for-
mations, which evidently are very different from those undertaken for objective
purposes. By joining one another, those who want to distinguish themselves give
rise to the development of an aristocracy, which strengthens and (so to speak)
enlarges their position and self-consciousness by the weight of their own sum.
Separation and group formation are thus connected through the aristocratizing
motive. In many cases, this connection gives separation itself the stamp of so-
mething ‘special’ in an honorific sense. Even in school classes, it can be observed
how small, closely integrated cliques of classmates think of themselves as the elite
over against the others who are not organized merely because of the formal fact

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of constituting a special group; and the others, through their hostility and envy,
involuntarily acknowledge this higher value. In these cases, secrecy and mystifi-
cation amount to heightening the wall toward the outside, and hence to strengthe-
ning the aristocratic character of the group. This significance of the secret society
as the intensification of sociological exclusiveness in general, is strikingly shown
in political aristocracies. Secrecy has always been among the requisites of their
regime. In the first place, by trying to conceal the numerical insignificance of the
ruling class, aristocracies exploit the psychological fact that the unknown itself
appears to be fearsome, mighty, threatening. (P. 364 f.)

This exclusion of everything outside the group is a general formal-sociological

fact, which merely uses secrecy as a more pointed technique. It attains a particu-
lar nuance in the plurality of degrees in which it is customary for initiation into
the secret society, down to its last mysteries, to take place. The existence of such
degrees threw light earlier upon another sociological feature of the secret society.
As a rule, before he is even accepted into the first degree, the novice must give a
solemn promise of secrecy concerning everything he may experience, whereby
the absolute, formal separation, achievable by secrecy, is effected. Yet, inasmuch
as the actual content or purpose of the society becomes accessible to the neophyte
only gradually whether this purpose is the perfect purification and sanctification
of the soul through the consecration of the mysteries, or the absolute suspensi-
on of every moral barrier, as among the Assassins and other criminal societies
the material separation is achieved differently, in a more continuous, relative
manner. In this material respect, the neophyte is still closer to the status of non-
participant, from which testing and education eventually lead him to grasp the
totality or core of the association. This core, evidently, thus gains a protection and
isolation from the outside far beyond those by means of the oath upon entrance.
It is seen to (as has already been shown in the example of the Druids) that the still
untried neophyte does not have much he could betray: within the general secrecy
that encompasses the group as a whole, the graduated secrecy produces an elastic
sphere of protection (as it were) around its innermost essence. (P. 366 f.)

In practice, sociological autonomy presents itself as group egoism: the group

pursues its own purposes with the same inconsiderateness for all purposes out-
side itself which, in the case of the individual, is precisely called egoism. Usually,
to be sure, this inconsiderateness is morally justified in the consciousness of the
individual members by the fact that the group purposes themselves have a super-
individual, objective character; that it is often impossible to name any particular
individual who profits from the group‘s egoistic behavior; and that, as a matter
of fact, this behavior often requires the group members‘ selflessness and sacrifi-
ce. But the point here is not to make any ethical valuation, but only to stress the
group‘s separation from its environment, which is brought about or characte-
rized by the egoism of the group. However, in the case of a small circle, which
intends to preserve and develop itself within a larger one, this egoism has certain
limits as long as it exists publicly. (P. 367 f.)

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Within certain political, religious, and status limits, everybody is considered im-
mediately as ‘belonging’ so long as he satisfies certain external conditions, which
are usually not a matter of his will, but are given with his existence itself. All
people, for instance, who are born within the territory of a given state, are mem-
bers, unless particular circumstances make ex- ceptions of them, of the (often very
complex) civic society. The member of a given social class is included, as a matter
of course, in the social conventions and forms of connection of this class, unless he
becomes a voluntary or involuntary outsider. The extreme case is the claim of a
church that it includes all mankind; and that, if any individuals are excluded from
the religious association, which, ideally, is valid also for them, it is only through
historical accident, sinful stubbornness, or God*s special intention. (P. 368)

Here, as everywhere else, the intensified seclusion against the outside is associ-
ated with the intensification of cohesion internally: we hgive here two sides, or
external forms, of the same sociological attitude. A purpose which occasions an
individual to enter into secret association with others, excludes almost always
such an overwhelming part of his general social circle from participation, that
the potential and real participants gain rarity value. He must keep on good terms
with them because it is much more difficult to replace them here than (other things
being equal) in a legitimate association. Furthermore, every discord inside the
secret society brings danger of betrayal, which usually both the self-preservation
of the individual and that of the group are interested in avoiding.

Finally, the isolation of the secret society from the surrounding social syntheses
removes a number of occasions for conflict. Among all the bonds of the individual,
the bond of secret sociation always has an exceptional position. In comparison
with it, the official bonds familial, civic, religious, economic, through rank and
friendship no matter how varied their contents, touch contact surfaces of a very
different kind and measure. Only the contrast with the secret societies makes it
clear that their claims criss-cross one another, because they lie (so to speak) in
the same plane. Since these claims openly compete for the individual‘s strength
and interests, individuals collide within any one of these circles: each individual
is simultaneously claimed by the interests of other groups. (P. 369 f.)

A certain English politician found the basis for the strength of the English cabinet
in the secrecy which surrounds it: everybody who has ever been active in public
life, he suggested, knows that a small number of people can be brought to agree
the more easily, the more secret are its negotiations.

Corresponding to the outstanding degree of cohesion within the secret society is

the thoroughness of its centralization. The secret society offers examples of uncon-
ditional and blind obedience to leaders who although, naturally, they may also be
found elsewhere are yet particularly remarkable in view of the frequent anarchic
character of the secret society that negates ail other law. The more criminal its
purposes, the more unlimited, usually, is the power of the leaders and the cruelty
of its exercise. (P. 370)

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In the North American House of Representatives, actual decisions are made in
the standing committees, with which the House is almost always in agreement.
But the transactions of these committees are secret; thus, the most important part
of legislative activity is hidden from the public. In large measure, this seems to
extinguish the political responsibility of the delegates, since nobody can be held
responsible for uncontrollable procedures. Inasmuch as individual contributions
toward a particular decision remain hidden, the decision appears to be made by
some super-individual authority. Here, too, irresponsibility is the consequence or
the symbol of the intensified sociological deindividualization, which corresponds
to the secrecy of group action. This also holds for all directorates, faculties, com-
mittees, administrations, etc., whose transactions are secret: the individual, as a
person, disappears as the quasi-nameless group member, and with his disappea-
rance as a person disappears the responsibility that cannot be imagined to inhere
in a being whose concrete activities are intangible. This one-sided intensification
of general sociological features is confirmed, finally, by the danger with which
society at large believes, rightly or wrongly, secret societies threaten it. (P. 374 f.)”

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