The local community functioned as an individual against the state

Evidence

These two interests began to separate after the middle of the twelfth century; royal jurisdiction then came to be executed by judicial commissions that rode large circuits, and their administration was obviously of a more general, locally unconstrained sort, while the interests of the community were protected by the growing significance of the local jury. Here the community, in its purely internal interests, played the role of the individual in our correlation; it was a social individual whose judicial life had once run its course along with that of the political state-collectivity, but which later gained a purer autonomy of being with which it then stood along side of, or in opposition to, the equally more purely elaborated law of the large collectivity. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 682

Categorization

• QUESTION: Nice demonstration that ‘individuality’ in Simmel’s scheme is positional, not personal — could sharpen the essay’s use of civil inattention as a scale-independent concept.
• XREF: connects to: Residents’ proprietary attitudes toward public places can deter crime there; Welfare is the only public institution acting on individuals but for the community’s sake — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 411; American states’-rights parties invoked individual freedom while defending intermediate circles. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 633 (+9 more)

Related

• Residents’ proprietary attitudes toward public places can deter crime there (similarity 0.81)
• English Commons members originally represented local groups, not the whole people (similarity 0.81)
• American states’-rights parties invoked individual freedom while defending intermediate circles. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• The state precedes the individual because humans achieve their full purpose only within society #contradicts (0.70) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 802
• Written constitutional rights fail when the community collectively opposes them #complicates (0.60)
• An individual’s exclusion from society enables their social participation #complicates (0.55) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 178
• Citizenship depends on community recognition, not just legal status #corroborates (0.55)
• In each political community, he thought, one will find a sovereign—a person or a determinate group whom the rest obey habitually, but who is not in the habit of obeying anyone else. The legal… #complicates (0.50)
• Criminalized communities, not individual acts, determine who ends up imprisoned #corroborates (0.50)