This distinction may be elaborated further. It is necessary to start from poverty as an objectively determined phenomenon and to attempt to eliminate it as such. Whoever the poor may be and whatever the individual causes that produce it and the individual consequences it produces, poverty requires assistance, compensation for this social deficiency. But, on the other hand, interest may be directed to the poor person, who is assisted unquestionably because he is poor, not for the purpose of eliminating poverty in general pro rata, but rather to help this particular poor person. His poverty operates here as an individal and specific characteristic; it serves as the immediate occasion for being concerned with him; but the individual as a whole should be put into such a situation that poverty would disappear by itself. For this reason assistance derived from the first attitude is directed more to the fact of poverty; and assistance derived from the second attitude, on the other hand, to its cause.

DEFINE: Simmel distinguishes between assistance aimed at eliminating poverty in general (objective) versus assistance aimed at helping a particular poor person (subjective), with each directed at the fact vs. the cause of poverty.

XREF: Distinguishes systemic/social-bloc poverty aid from individualized charity — a classic sociological distinction still relevant to modern welfare policy debates.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 434