This state of affairs serves to explain numerous phenomena, including, first of all, the naturalness and honorableness of robbery, of the subjective and normatively unregulated seizure of what is immediately desired. Long after the Homeric era piracy remained a legitimate occupation in peripheral Greek territories. Indeed, among many primitive peoples armed robbery is held to be superior to honest payment. This latter point of view is thoroughly understandable: in exchange and payment one is subordinated to an objective norm, which the strong, autonomous personality must defer to, something it often is just not inclined to do. For this reason very aristocratic, self-willed natures disdain commerce.

XREF: Connects to Nietzsche's master-slave morality and the Greek aristocratic ethos described in the Genealogy of Morals.

DEFINE: Explains the aristocratic disdain for exchange as rooted in subordination to objective norms versus the autonomy of seizure.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 263