Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel (March 1, 1858 – September 28, 1918) was one of the first generation of theorists in German sociology.
Life
Georg Simmel was born in Berlin, Germany, and lived there most of his life. He was the youngest of seven children. His father, a Jewish businessman who converted to Christianity, died when Georg was very young, and a guardian was appointed for him. Georg didn’t have close relationship with his mother, and this probably influenced his sensitivity to marginality and insecurity.
Simmel studied philosophy and history at the University of Berlin. He became very interested in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and wrote his doctoral thesis on "The Nature of Matter According to Kant's Physical Monadology." Simmel received his doctorate in 1881. He became a Privatdozent (an unpaid lecturer dependent on student fees) at the University of Berlin in 1885. His lectures, on a wide variety of topics—logic, history of philosophy, ethics, sociology, and psychology—were not only popular inside the university, but also attracted the intellectual elite of Berlin.
In 1890, he married Gertrud Kinel. Being herself a philosopher, she published under the pseudonym Marie-Luise Enckendorf. They lived a sheltered and bourgeois life, their home becoming a venue for cultivated gatherings in the tradition of the salon. They bore a son, Gertmund, a combination of their names. He was frequently mentioned in Simmel's work.
Although the influential sociologist Max Weber supported Simmel in his applications for vacant chairs at German universities, he remained an academic outsider. For fifteen years Simmel remained a Privatdozent. In 1901, when he was forty-three, the academic authorities finally consented to grant him the rank of Ausserordentlicher Professor, a purely honorary title that still did not allow him to take part in the affairs of the academic community and failed to remove the stigma of the outsider. At that time he was already well-known throughout Europe and the United States and was seen as a man of great eminence.
Simmel befriended many well-known men, including sociologists such as Max Weber, poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George, and philosopher Edmund Husserl. This life at the intersection between university and society, arts and philosophy, without a full salary was possible because Simmel was the heir to a considerable fortune from his appointed guardian. His failure to gain a full-time professorship didn’t discourage Simmel. He continued his intellectual and academic work, taking part in artistic circles as well as being cofounder together with Max Weber and Ferdinand Toennies of the German Society for Sociology.
In 1914, Simmel finally received a full professorship with chair, at the German University of Strasbourg. However, due to the outbreak of World War I, all academic activities and lectures were halted as lecture halls were converted into military hospitals. In 1915 he applied, without success, for a chair at the University of Heidelberg.
In 1918, shortly before the end of the war Simmel died from liver cancer.
Work
Simmel's first article, On Social Differentiation, dealt with sociological problems, a topic he returned to only in the later period of his life. Unlike his contemporaries, Simmel was not interested in the current affairs of his time. He didn’t plunge into politics or socio-economic issues like most of his friends. Rather, Simmel was a passionate and diverse writer. He wrote more than two hundred articles that were published in numerous scholarly journals and magazines, on a wide variety of topics, including philosophy, ethics, religion, art, social psychology, and sociology.
Some of his major works include:
- On Social Differentiation (1890)
- The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892-93)
- Introduction to the Science of Ethics (1892-93)
- The Philosophy of Money (1900)
- Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation (1908)
- Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917)
- Lebensanschauung (1918)
In 1908, Simmel published his seminal work Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation. In that work, Simmel summarized his critique of the use in sociology of both the "organicist" approach, favored by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, and any approach based on the German school of idealistic philosophy. The organicist school viewed the development of society in terms similar to the development of living, or organic, beings. Social processes are seen as biological processes, and the functioning of whole system is determined by the working together of all organs as an integrated system. As all organic beings, societies also go through the phases of birth, life and eventually death. Against this approach stood the idealistic school, that saw the natural world as essentially separated from the world of ideas. According to this view, the human spirit, due to its free nature and uniqueness, cannot be studied, and so any attempt to measure human phenomena, in terms of history or sociology, is futile.
Simmel rejected both schools of thought, and offered a third view, namely, that society is the sum of all interactions between the individual parts that make up the whole society. In another words, society is made of individual phenomena that interact and form more complex ones. In his view, society consists of an intricate web of multiple relations between individuals who are in constant interaction with one another: "Society is merely the name for a number of individuals, connected by interaction" (Coser, 1977, p. 178).
"Sociation," the term Simmel used, is a pattern or form that a particular social interaction assumes. For example, the smallest social phenomenon takes place between two individuals. Complex forms take place when simpler phenomena interact with each other. Family, tribe, clan, city, and state are the results, or the final forms, of such interactions. According to Simmel, sociology thus needs to study human phenomena in the terms of interaction, and not final forms. "Sociology asks what happens to men and by what rules they behave, not insofar as they unfold their understandable individual existences in their totalities, but insofar as they form groups and are determined by their group existence because of interaction" (Coser, 1977, p. 179).
Through his study of social psychology, Simmel identified some “typical” interactions within societies. There is certain uniformity, for example, when observing human interaction between a leader and his followers, as well as in the interaction between the group and a newcomer. Thus, Simmel argued, the interaction should be the object of sociological inquiry.
Simmel described a number of these social "types," including his most eloquently expressed "stranger." He also described in great phenomenological detail such diverse types as "the mediator," "the poor," "the adventurer," "the man in the middle," and "the renegade." According to Simmel, the type becomes what he is through his relations with others who assign him a particular position and expect him to behave in specific ways. Thus, the "stranger" is defined by not having belonged to the group from the beginning, and by still having the freedom to leave. "He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going" (Simmel, 1950, p. 402).
Simmel always took a dialectical approach, bringing out the dynamic interconnectedness and the conflicts between the social units he analyzed. To Simmel, sociation always involves harmony and conflict, attraction and repulsion, love and hatred. Sociation is always the result of both categories of interaction; both are positive ingredients, structuring all relationships and giving them enduring form. An entirely harmonious group, Simmel argued, could not exist empirically. It would not have any life to it—it would be unable to change or develop.
Reflecting his interest in economics, Simmel noted that "the stranger everywhere appears as the trader, or the trader as stranger. ... Insofar as members do not leave the circle in order to buy these necessities—in which case they are the 'strange' merchants in that outside territory—the trader must be a stranger" (Simmel, 1950, p. 403). He also noted that money paves the way for a radical change in society, from Gemeinschaft, or simple, personal interactions, to Gesellschaft, in which trading becomes impersonal, indirect, and quantitative (Simmel, 1900). When monetary transactions replace barter, significant changes occur in the forms of interaction between social actors. Money permits exact measurement of equivalents. It is impersonal in a manner in which objects of barter, like crafted gongs and collected shells, can never be. With the introducation of money, the "stranger" with the role of trader is no longer needed, and a middleman emerges to mediate and regulate the interactions between buyer and seller.
In the latest period of his life, with the outbreak of the war, Simmel became a passionate patriot. He became involved in war propaganda, and devoted himself to writing justifications for the war. Simmel wrote: “I love Germany and therefore want it to live. To hell with all 'objective' justification of this will in terms of culture, ethics, history, or God knows what else” (Coser, 1977, p. 197). Many of his friends and fellow scholars were stunned with the passion Simmel was using in his articles. But it was not only passion, but also a lack of objectivity that amazed people who knew Simmel.
Perhaps it was the desire for belonging that led Simmel to this position. After the long period of rejection from the academic community, and his inability to obtain an academic post, it could be that Simmel saw the war as an opportunity to join the patriotic community. Or perhaps it was because he spent so much time writing about abstracts that war reminded him of reality, and he thus wanted to contribute somehow to that reality, and leave something substantial behind.
Due to the fact that he never focused on only one issue, and wrote on the whole variety of topics, Simmel was unable to develop a major philosophical system, or school of thought. Thus, Simmel left no direct disciples. He wrote in his diary: "I know that I shall die without intellectual heirs, and that is as it should be. My legacy will be, as it were, in cash, distributed to many heirs, each transforming his part into use conformed to his nature: a use which will reveal no longer its indebtedness to this heritage" (Coser, 1977, p.199).
Legacy
Even though he didn’t leave any established school of thought or any direct disciples, Simmel influenced further development of both sociology and philosophy. His ideas, dispersed through different areas that he wrote in, left mark on the future generations of scholars. Robert Park, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, and Max Scheler are among those who were inspired with some of Simmel’s ideas. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for example, are two followers of the Frankfort school of neo-Marxist sociology, who built up on Simmel’s work, especially in their criticism of mass culture and mass society. Modern German philosophers like Nicolai Hartmann and Martin Heidegger are also indebted to Simmel. With his phenomenology of human interaction Simmel can be seen as one of the important participants of the phenomenological movement in general. Simmel’s study on groups and group-behavior has gained some important insights that will later be used in social psychology.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Coser, Lewis A. 1977. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. ISBN 0155551302
- Simmel, Georg, (Trans. & Ed. by Kurt Wolff). 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York, NY: Free Press (reissued 1964) ISBN 0029289203 excerpt "The Stranger"
- Sociology in Switzerland presents Georg Simmel Online
External link
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