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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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economic advantage of the individual is represented competitively by the economic disadvantage of all others.
But the signs of decay in the paternal family go hand in hand with no less pronounced symptoms of decay in the conditions of profitable economic individualism. The diminished importance of cultivated family sentiments cannot therefore give rise to intensified individualistic sentiments. It is, on the contrary, towards a quite opposite result that the decay of a social group, which has, as we saw, stood for intensified economic individualism, seems to point. Social sentiments, inhibited by self-defence and mistrust in individualistic societies, where they seek refuge in the family, will no longer require for their free development the shelter of a closed corporation. Sentiments of companionship and brotherhood will no longer be artificial ideals, hypocritically professed as insincere formulas, and impossible of realisation in a competitive society, but will be the natural reactions to economic conditions. The cultural development of discriminating personal sentiments which has taken place in individualistic societies will probably not altogether disappear with the economic foundations of that individualism. The sentimental attachment which has become superadded to sexual attraction, instead of resting upon the crude basis of common economic interests, will tend, to rest more on mental and intellectual grounds of sympathy. If arbitrary and objectionable claims of parental authority and possessive rights on children are weakened, that by no means signifies that social sentiments towards the old or towards the very young must be enfeebled. Primitive societies where the familial group has no institutional sentimental prestige, are marked in general by greater care and tenderness towards the aged and towards children than societies where those sentiments are enforced as a familial duty. Between the intelligent and benevolent care of children, where that care is the common interest of the whole community, and the misdeeds perpetrated in the name of parental education, there is no comparison. Individualism is often defended on the score of realism in respect of supposed characters of "human nature". To a large extent social individualism has had the effect of stifling and inhibiting, much rather than of developing and cultivating, the spontaneous reactions of human sentiment.
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 379. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_Jahrgang_2_Heft_3.pdf/61&oldid=- (Version vom 9.6.2022)
