f the wanderer who
comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather of the man who comes today and
stays tomorrow, the potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he
has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and
going. He is fixed within a certain spatial circle, but his position
within it is peculiarly determined by the fact that he does not belong
in it from the first, that he brings qualities into it that are not, and
cannot be, native to it.

The union of nearness and remoteness, which every relation between men
comprehends, has here produced a system of relations or a constellation
which may, in the fewest words, be thus formulated: The distance within
the relation signifies that the Near is far; the very fact of being
alien, however, that the Far is near. For the state of being a stranger
is naturally a quite positive relation, a particular form of
interaction. The inhabitants of Sirius are not exactly strangers to us,
at least not in the sociological sense of the word as we are considering
it. In that sense they do not exist for us at all. They are beyond being
far and near. The stranger is an element of the group itself, not
otherwise than the Poor and the various "inner enemies," an element
whose inherent position and membership involve both an exterior and an
opposite. The manner, now, in which mutually repulsive and opposing
elements here compose a form of a joint and interacting unity may now be
briefly analyzed.

In the whole history of economics the stranger makes his appearance
everywhere as the trader, the trader his as the stranger. As long as
production for one's own needs is the general rule, or products are
exchanged within a relatively narrow circle, there is no need of any
middleman within the group. A trader is only required with those
products which are produced entirely outside of the group. Unless there
are people who wander out into foreign lands to buy these necessities,
in which case they are themselves "strange" merchants in this other
region, the trader must be a stranger. No other has a chance for
existence.

This position of the stranger is intensified in our consciousness if,
instead of leaving the place of his activity, he fixes himself in it.
This will be possible for him only if he can live by trade in the role
of a middleman. Any closed economic group in which the division of the
land and of the crafts which satisfy the local demands has been achieved
will st