The Idea of Justice in Political Economy [11]
demands of justice within these circles, as well as to a complete obtuseness of the same feeling beyond them. With a higher degree of culture these small communities lose, the individual and the greater communities gain in importance. Now the individual and now the community appears more in the foreground, and accordingly the consciousness of the community of interests will change in intensity. In the periods in which the individual's or the family's technical economic life still forms, without more extensive intercourse, without more elaborate division of labor, the centre of gravity in economics, the feeling of community in economic matters will recede. The further the division of labor progresses, the more inextricably will the threads of intercourse involve the individual in an insoluble social community, the more the whole production will assume the character of a general, not an individual concern. Then the common functions of the local and the national community will thrive, individuals will be more and more dislodged by social leaders. Every larger undertaking, whenever it unites continuously a certain number of men for a common economic purpose, reveals itself as a moral community. It governs the external and internal life of all participants, determines their residence, school, division of time, family life, to a certain degree their mental horizon, education and pleasure. The relations of those concerned necessarily exchange a merely economic for a generally moral character. And therefrom the conception arises; here a common production exists, hence a moral community. And that leads to the question: Is the relation between the participants, is the division of the products a just one? And similar considerations follow for whole industries, for whole social classes, and this all the more; the more frequently the employers and the laborers are organized into associations and societies. They also result for whole States and unions of States. The moral communities, which play a part in economics, follow sometimes purely economic purposes, sometimes other purposes, as above all do local communities and the State. The narrower their circle, the simpler and clearer their purpose, the more evident become the qualities, according to which moral judgment compares and classifies men. The more comprehensive they are, the more manifold their purposes, the more complicated becomes the question which qualities are concerned, the more fluctuating becomes the judgment of what is just, the more indispensable for customs and laws become conventional presumptions and standards in order to attain something definite at all. In times of primitive culture, in the small circles of economic and moral communities all men, or at least all men able to bear arms, may readily appear equal, and so it there appears just to give each the same allotment of land, the same share of booty. The guild sought to secure to each member as nearly as possible an equal share of profit. With higher culture begins the necessary discrimination. Formerly the greater allotments were often given to the bravest soldier and to the noble families, distinctions now become more general. All inherited preference is considered just, in the measure in which public sentiment values not the qualities of the single individual, but of families as a whole, a conception which decreases more and more with higher culture. Inherited wealth, as long as it appears necessarily and obviously coupled with its possessor, is under some conditions regarded as a just standard of the distribution of goods. So the distribution of public lands according to the possessions in cattle and real estate appeared quite just to many a day laborer and "kossaeth" in the eastern provinces of Prussia, while to one who knew the public land systems in France or southern Germany it seemed an outrageous injustice. For all community of production, labor is the most obvious standard; hence perhaps it is the most usual, most generally comprehensible. As soon as it becomes necessary to compare many