The more specific the achievements (but also the needs) of the individuals, the more urgent becomes their reciprocal supplementation. In the same measure, the total organism which has grown out of the individuals engaged in the division of labor and which includes and mediates their interrelated effects and countereffects, shifts, so to speak, into a location high above them. The specificity of the individual thus requires a powerful political constitution which allocates his place to him, but in this fashion also becomes his master. It is for this reason that this individualism, which restricts freedom to a purely inward sense of the term, easily acquires an anti-liberal tendency.

XREF: Paradoxically echoes Adam Smith's division of labor thesis but reaches an anti-liberal conclusion; connects to classical liberalism's internal contradictions.

Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simm…, loc. 2928