When civil rights in war and peace accrued to both father and sons, and when the sons were able to acquire personal significance, influence, booty, and so on, a fissure had been opened in the patria protestas that inevitably split the patriarchal relation more and more widely apart to the benefit of the expanded needs of the state and of the law of the great whole over each of its members, but also to the benefit of the personality. Out of its relation to this whole, the personality could gain an importance that the patriarchal relation had incomparably restricted.

DEFINE: Clarifies 'patria potestas' as the Roman legal concept of paternal authority that civil rights eroded.

DEFINE: Clarifies the connection between the expanded state and the emergence of personality as a legal and social concept beyond patriarchal authority.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 681