Nobility’s special synthesis is one between the extremes in which the individual is either swallowed up by his group or comes to regard it with oppositional self-centeredness. The rigor of the status-specific form of life produces a maximally broad contact surface among the members. The insistence on equality of birth effects a physiological guarantee of qualitative and historical continuity. Through the technique of the noble tradition, the values and achievements of family and status group coalesce as though into a reservoir. By these sociological means, the nobility has smelted individuals into the common grouping to a degree not otherwise attained. But the superpersonal structure thus created has its goal and meaning, here more than anywhere else, in the existence of individuals, in their might and significance, in the freedom and self-sufficiency of their lives.

XREF: Relates to Simmel's broader sociology of social forms — the concept of how a superpersonal structure serves individual existence mirrors his writings on the tension between individual and society.

XREF: Connects to sociological analyses of aristocracy as a group that subordinates individuals to tradition yet paradoxically maximizes individual stature — echoing Simmel's dialectic of individual and group.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 522