Group autonomy can signal both empowerment and degradation simultaneously

Evidence

Freedom can always have the two aspects, of representing an esteem, a right, a power, on the one hand, and an exclusion and a contemptuous indifference on the part of the higher power, on the other. It is therefore no negative case to the argument presented here, if the autonomous jurisdiction enjoyed by medieval Jews in case of legal quarrels among one another, appears to have embodied a certain degradation and neglect. — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 6891

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s social-control-of-trust material: autonomy granted by a higher power can itself encode subordination.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely two-sided concept — freedom-as-power vs. freedom-as-neglect — that resists one-sentence compression and reframes how to read any granted autonomy.