Roses: A Social Hypothesis

Georg Simmel and the Paradox of Equality and Distinction

This short fairy tale by Simmel, ‘Roses: A Social Hypothesis’ (‘Roses’), was published in 1897 in the avant-garde Munich journal Jugend, indicating only ‘G.S.’ as the author. It complements the selection from Jugend covering the period 1901–2, translated by Thomas Kemple ( Simmel and Kemple, 2012 ), and constitutes a key example of Simmel’s excursions into less conventional styles of writing, including poems, anecdotes, aphorisms and fairy tales. It is often referred to in the German-language literature as well as occasionally by German readers writing in English, and it is perhaps the most frequently cited example of his Jugend writings, translated into English here for the first time. ‘Roses’ stands out for its thoughtful reflections on the paradoxical relationship between the pursuit of equality and the desire for distinction.

The story is both simple and complex. The inhabitants of a town or village somewhere are happy enough, the land produces as much as they need. There is, however, a distinction, a ‘terrible inequality’, relating to an otherwise superficial concern, the presence or absence of roses on people’s land. In the past the distinction had attracted no particular interest. However, the fact that the owners of roses kept improving and refining them starts to stir feelings of envy and resentment among the non-rose owners. An ‘agitator’ emerges, expressing the view that people should not submit to the whims of chance in the allocation of roses, the possession of which is a fundamental human right. A second rebel praises the virtues of covetousness, declaring that ‘the era of dumb humility was over’. A third critic points out that the botanical nature of roses is such that there exists a long-term law of the rate of rose-accumulation to rise, destined ultimately to overwhelm the rose-owners, so that all their property will become available to the masses. Nonetheless, ‘this unavoidable process of expropriation could be facilitated and accelerated’.

A revolution breaks out, resulting in the victory of the Egalitarian Party, securing ‘peace, equality, and happiness’, with everyone now able to grow roses. However, this state of happy equality is short-lived: differences soon emerged in people’s rose production, which again stirs something deep in the human soul, a disposition meaning that ‘life, no matter at what heights or depths it flows, seems to us so empty and indifferent when it lacks internal distinctions, so that one fears the uninterrupted bliss of paradise to be an equally unbroken boredom’. The realization arises among the citizens that ‘the world-historical mistake’ they had made was to think ‘that the reason for joy or suffering was to be found in the having or not having of objects’. On the contrary, ‘it is not whether I have it or not that determines my feelings – it is whether others have it or not’. The pursuit of equality is in many respects a Sisyphean endeavour organized around successive revolutions against the inevitable ‘continuing remnant of inequality’.

It is most often referred to as an early articulation of the concept of relative as opposed to absolute deprivation and inequality, However, it is more nuanced than that, engaging profoundly with conceptions of equality, inequality and injustice. The three revolutionary positions, for example, are references to Rousseau, Nietzsche and Marx. It is significant that the conflict is over roses, something with no utility or value beyond the existence of a distinction between those with and those without them. Alongside the asceticism of ‘Abstain! You shall! You must! Abstain!’ in Goethe’s Faust, he observes the parallel existence of its opposite, ‘Desire! You must desire!’

Simmel illustrates the ways in which questions of any sort of distinction often become framed, from above as well as from below, as questions of inequality and injustice, in turn constituting springboards for aspiring moral entrepreneurs. He organizes the story around roses to emphasize that the issue is distinction and difference in itself, rather than anything that affects people’s well-being in any concrete sense. The sociological point made in the story is that there is no egalitarian paradise, except at the price of boundless boredom, because the more progress is made towards equality, the more sensitive people become to any remaining inequality as an affront to their sense of justice. This makes the pursuit of equality a never-ending paradoxical process without beginning or end, caught between the pursuit of both distinction and its elimination at the same time. In this sense, Simmel’s analysis of egalitarianism here differs from the critique of meritocracy found in de Tocqueville (2000 [1863]) before him and Michael Young (1959) after him – in terms of meritocracy and relative deprivation – and raises the important question of how his account might be connected with those of de Tocqueville and Young (and, more recently, Jo Littler, 2018).

Simmel’s fairy tale also highlights the paradoxical ways in which the pursuit of equality and justice often generates new forms of perceived inequality and injustice, driven by the fundamental human desire not just for recognition ( Honneth, 1995 ), but for distinctive recognition, i.e. acknowledged distinctiveness, if not indeed superiority. Simmel concentrates on the view from below, but the view from the position of advantage is also important, the inclination towards competitiveness in pursuit of distinction. Humans appear to have far less of a problem with being the beneficiary of injustice than they do being its victims. A further development of his analysis, then, can be found in Abram de Swaan’s concept of ‘downward jealousy’, in which a group of people ‘resents another group obtaining the privileges and resources that it already possesses’ (1989: 260). Here this would refer to the superior rose-growers feeling unsettled by improvements in rose production among hitherto inferior rose-growers.

In his subsequent writing Simmel was more often concerned with social differentiation than with social inequality, so the connections between ‘Roses’ and his other writings, on individualization, fashion, objective culture and money, remain to be developed, but there is enormous potential here. There are also connections with Freud’s concept of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ ( Blok, 1998 ), which leads to the observation not only that it is minor rather than major differences that generate conflict, to the point of violence, but also that one can observe a tendency to seek out, to the point of manufacturing, such differences for their own sake. As Bourdieu was to remark much later, and ‘Roses’ is an early version of this point, ‘Social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat’ ( Bourdieu, 1984 : 479).

Another particularly fruitful question raised by ‘Roses’ is the connection with the analysis of ressentiment, understood in Nietzsche’s sense as the moral, psychological and emotional outcome of the combination of resentment and powerlessness ( Müller, 2004 ). Wendy Brown (1993) coined the term ‘wounded attachments’ to capture the idea of ressentiment, although it would be more accurate to turn that around – it is more a question of ‘attachment to wounds’, with Simmel’s fairy tale addressing the tendency to seek out any distinction as an injury or injustice. Simmel’s village displays the foundational elements of the disposition towards ressentiment that underpins all the various forms of populist rancour, ranging from National Socialism ( Ter Braak, 2019 ; van Krieken, 2019 ) through to its current expressions around the world. As Ter Braak put it, by 1933 rancour had become a human right ( Ter Braak, 2019 : 107), just as indignation about the differences in rose-production was in Simmel’s tale. Simmel’s analysis should not be read as seeking to diminish the significance of all the various forms of social and economic inequality; instead, its value lies in pointing towards a more considered appreciation of the complexity of human beings’ relationship to equality, difference and distinction.

Translator’s note, Robert van Krieken OPEN IN VIEWER

This fairy tale takes place in utopias or in Seldwyla, ¹ or perhaps everywhere.

There, a terrible inequality arose among the citizens. Everyone owned a piece of land that bore as much as they needed, where they simply did not need more than it produced. But some were able to grow roses on their plots of land. It might be because they had more money than the others, or devoted more time to it, or had the soil and sun that roses loved – in short, they had roses, and the others did not. For a long time, this was accepted without resentment, because no thought was given to it as a natural necessity distributing this possession as unevenly as beauty or ugliness, or understanding and stupidity. But when the owners of the roses constantly increased and refined them, there arose a dull resentment among the other citizens. One agitator convinced people with fiery words that we were born with the right to roses, and that we should finally overturn the blind chance which allocated them only to some. Another cried out to the masses that the era of dumb humility was over, and the battle cry in the struggle for high culture was: you must desire, must desire! ² A third pointed out logically and botanically that the roses, through their tendency to multiply, would finally have to accumulate themselves in such a way that their few owners, like Heliogabalus’s guests, ³ would be smothered in roses, and all their property would readily fall to the masses, but that this unavoidable process of expropriation could be facilitated and accelerated. But it was by no means only the lower impulses of envy, greed, and hedonism that excited the crowd. Rather, as the fragrance of the rose itself not only flatters the senses (how poorly one smells them only with the nose!) but penetrates to the finest and most remote parts of our being with sweet excitements – so this call to the people, with their all-too-human impulses, combined the ultimate longings of the soul with the most profound cultural ideas. There arose a revolutionary party opposing the conservative one of the rose owners, who wanted to protect not only their property, but the advantage they had only just become aware of: having something that others envied and coveted. While they were still preparing a law to secure their hereditary, historical possession of the roses with a monopoly, the insurrection broke out, ending with the overwhelming victory of the Egalitarian Party. And this was the outcome because the moral idea which inspired this party ultimately took hold in the opposing camp; the ideal of social justice had overcome all the opposition of interests, and its external victory only confirmed the internal one, which it had already won.

Thus, at last peace, equality, and happiness was achieved. Roses blossomed on every little patch any citizen owned, and the new subdivision of land which had arisen at the same time created equal conditions for everyone's prosperity. Everything that the external ‘constitution of things’ (äußere Verfassung der Dinge) could grant to the people was now given to them with the fairest distribution of favour. However, the distribution of shares could not work out as evenly as the two sides of a mathematical equation. After all, one would have the luckier hand in tending their roses, the other a little more sun, a third a more successful graft; for Nature always cooperates with human plans only very approximately, and without binding itself in any way. But these minimal inequalities were seen as something to which one was unavoidably subject, just as one had only a short time ago accepted the great distinctions which had just been eliminated; indeed, given the enormity of what had been achieved, one did not even notice this quantité négligeable.

But the fact that things turned out quite differently was due to a peculiar characteristic of the human soul, which is so deeply rooted in it, and branches out into its experiences every day in such a way that it was only discovered after thousands of years of thinking about our spirit. For the soul can apprehend nothing other than the difference between its present activity and stimulation, and what came before; in a mysterious way the past echoes in the present and forms the background against which the present moment acquires and evaluates its content and meaning. This is why life, no matter at what heights or depths it flows, seems to us so empty and indifferent when it lacks internal distinctions, so that one fears the uninterrupted bliss of paradise to be an equally unbroken boredom. The loss of hundreds of thousands does not make the rich any more unhappy than the poor losing a few thalers, and in the first seasons of love a furtive squeeze of the hand leads no less to the illusion of utter happiness than in its highest stages. It is not the absolute magnitude of life’s stimuli that we feel, not how high or low the total level of our satisfaction and privation is, but only the distinctions between individual fulfillments. Therefore, whoever is raised or lowered from one level of life to another will, after a short period of adjustment, respond to the fluctuations and differences within the new with exactly the same feelings of joy and sorrow as the so much greater or lesser ones of their previous state. Our soul resembles those fine mechanisms that react to every change of external conditions with an automatic adjustment, so that its performance always remains the same. And when our relationship to other people, the distinctions in status, become internalized as feelings, it will also become apparent from this that we are such difference-sensitive, and at the same time such adaptable beings, that we ultimately attach the same degree of feeling to the altered size of the stimuli.

So things went on as long as possible; but one day the shift was complete, and those most minor differences in colour and form, in the scent and charm of the roses, with which nature proves itself to be the last authority over all attempts at equalization, aroused the same hatred and envy, the same arrogance on the one hand, the same feeling of disinheritance on the other. And once again great theories began to bore into people’s minds: what is the use of any possessions, if not to lift people to a higher level of happiness? Could not any external thing have acquired meaning only by awakening feelings of satisfaction, without which it would be a shell without a core, an appeal falling on deaf ears? Had all the indignation against that former state arisen from something other than the perceived suffering of inequality, deprivation, or injustice, and had this been remedied by an external shifting of goods back and forth, which inwardly left everything as it was? A mere change of mask! The terrible realization arose that there is nothing more indifferent than roses, when nature attaches the same feelings of inequality to their possession as to their privation. This was the world-historical mistake, that the reason for joy or suffering was to be found in the having or not having of objects. No, it is not whether I have it or not that determines my feelings – it is whether others have it or not. Only very fine and pure souls, rich enough to live from their own innermost being, may enjoy the object and draw it into themselves without their feelings going beyond its limits; but the masses will never be satisfied by the attraction of things themselves, but will tie their emotions to possession, because the neighbour lacks it, to privation, because the neighbour is in possession. Only the first immediate impression of altered possessions may drown out the comparison; but our rapidly adjusted sensitivity soon makes the finer differences at the new level just as acutely disturbing as those of the earlier and coarser ones. And again and again the illusion drives us into the Sisyphean pursuit of external equivalence, to the point where nature establishes the limit, and where we realize that the suffering we wanted to escape externally is pursuing us from within.

If and when the citizens of our fairyland realized this, how often the revolution – always concerning the continuing remnant of inequality – was repeated, I do not know. In a hundred years, perhaps we will know. But in consoling indifference to all these developments, the roses continued to live out their self-sufficient beauty.

Translated by Robert van Krieken