Georg Simmel

David Frisby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134495214
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Until recently little of Simmel's work was available in translation and certain key texts were unknown outside Germany. David Frisby, the eminent Simmel scholar, provides not only an introduction to the major sociological writings of this important figure, but also an argument for a reconsideration of his work. The author outlines the cultural and historical context in which Simmel worked; reviews Simmel's most important writings; and examines his legacy to sociology by illuminating his links with Weber's theories and his influential relationship with Marxism.
Simmel, a central figure in the development of modern sociology, and a contemporary of Weber and Durkheim, was one of the first to identify sociology as a separate discipline. His ideas influenced Weber, the Chicago School, and many later sociologists. His introduction of a number of basic concepts to sociology, such as exchange, interaction and differentiation, attest to his intellectual stature and the far-reaching significance of his work.

1

Introduction

Today, over a century after Georg Simmel commenced publishing works on psychology, philosophy and, later, sociology, it is difficult to imagine how significant Simmel was in the development or sociology. Contrary to our conception of the development of the social sciences in Germany, sociology as an independent discipline emerged relatively late compared with its neighbouring disciplines. For a variety of reasons, some of them political, sociology was not taught in German universities until the end of the nineteenth century. And quite probably the first to do so was Georg Simmel. This appears to be the verdict of his contemporaries. At the Paris Exhibition of 1900—to which sociologists also presumably went to exhibit their wares—a report was prepared by the American sociologist Lester Ward and others on the state of sociology in the United States, Russia and Europe. After commenting on the absence of any chairs of sociology in Germany—a situation which continued until 1918—Paul Barth reported with regard to sociological instruction that is was

the representatives of the older sciences allied to sociology, or the ones out of which it has sprung…who admit the study of social theories in their courses. Nor do these all do so; but a certain number do something of the kind…In this connection mention ought to be made of the work of Simmel, of the university of Berlin, who has been giving a course in sociology nearly every semester for the last six years.[1]

Still earlier, in a report by Thon in the newly founded American Journal of Sociology on ‘The Present Status of Sociology in Germany’, Simmel is again singled out for special mention. Aside from Ernst Grosse in Freiburg and Earth in Leipzig—neither of whom taught courses exclusively on sociology as an independent distinctive discipline—Thon emphasized the work of Simmel who

has an audience that is increasing in numbers each semester. For several years he has read in the summer semester on social psychology, and in the winter semester a special course on sociology. Everyone who knows his Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaften will guess that in his lectures on ethics he introduces and suggests many sociological ideas and points of view. Besides this he conducts a seminar for sociological practice. Here reports are made on sociological books and independent dissertations are read. Simmel himself usually conducts the discussions. This is for the moment very agreeable to the listeners, but it is pedagogically by no means advantageous. [2]

A few years later in 1899, Simmel himself declared to Bouglé that his ‘sociology is a very specialised discipline, for whom there is no representative in Germany apart from myself. [3] But it was not merely in the teaching of sociology in Germany that Simmel was already well-known by the mid-1890s.

Aside from his own publications in Germany, Simmel’s articles were quickly translated abroad. Between 1896 and 1910 no fewer than nine of Simmel’s sociological essays, largely due to the initiative of Albion Small, appeared in the newly established American Journal of Sociology. In the mid-1890s Simmel was also a member of the ‘Institute Internationale de Sociologie’, recently founded by René Worms. The very first issue of L’Année Sociologique in 1896—edited by Emile Durkheim—contained as its second article an essay by Simmel. Durkheim often criticized Simmel’s conception of sociology but respected his work nonetheless. Simmel corresponded with another member of the Durkheimian School, Celestin Bouglé, who not merely reported on Simmel’s work to a French audience as early as 1894 but took up some aspects of Simmel’s conception of sociology in his own works.

Simmel’s institutional position within German sociology is reflected much later in his being one of three original executive members of the German Sociological Association at its inception early in 1909. At the first congress which commenced on 19 October 1910 the first preliminary talk was given by Simmel—questionably apposite in the light of sociological congresses—on ‘The Sociology of Sociability’. Already in 1908 Simmel had given the opening address to the Viennese Sociological Society on ‘The Nature and Task of Sociology’. [4] But this institutional acclaim took place when Simmel’s interest in sociology was already on the wane. As Tönnies reported, ‘in the autumn of 1913…Professor Simmel left the executive committee [of the German Sociological Association, D.F.] because of other directions in his studies’. [5] Simmel did return to sociology briefly whilst in Strasbourg during the First World War. This is indicated by the course in sociology he taught there and the publication of his slender volume on Basic Questions of Sociology (1917). But it is open to question whether, had he lived beyond the war (he died in 1918), he would have continued to develop this interest in sociology. His last wartime writings do indeed suggest that ‘other directions’ preoccupied him.

But although there is little doubt that Simmel may be counted amongst the principal figures in the foundation of sociology as an independent discipline, there remains even today a tendency to see Simmel as a somewhat marginal figure within the sociological establishment. Caplow has pointed out [6] that ‘for a founding father, Simmel seems curiously remote from organized sociology’ and seems to remain a neglected figure. This impression, it is argued, ‘may stem from a discrepancy between Simmel’s style of thought and the prevailing sociological idiom’ which has come to be dominated by detailed and refined empirical research and specialized modes of conceptualization that ‘can only be used by professionals’. In contrast, Caplow maintains, Simmel ‘seems to have envisaged sociological progress to be an increase of understanding by the sheer process of ratiocination and not to have attached any importance to the accumulation of descriptive facts’. Indeed, Simmel goes so far as to state in his Sociology that although the work is replete with actual empirical and historical examples that illustrate his propositions, he could just as well have used fictitious ones. In this respect, Simmel is the first sociologist to apply the philosophy of ‘As-If’ to the sociological domain. [7]

In Simmel’s sociological work we therefore confront the paradox of the social theorist who, especially in the 1890s, sought to establish sociology as an independent discipline whilst at the same time rejecting the aims of many contemporary sociologists ‘who want to describe the human sector of the universe as accurately as possible, uncovering hidden regularities for science’s sake, or to enlarge man’s control over the environment’. [8] Compared with the work of Durkheim or Weber, Simmel’s sociological writings do not display an explicit concern with the role of sociology in society.

It is all the more remarkable then that after his death attempts were made to order his sociological writings under the rubric of ‘systematic’ sociology, despite his persistent and explicit aversion to all forms of system. In the philosophical realm, with which Simmel more closely identified himself, it was said of him that he is ‘not so much a philosopher as a philosophizer’. Similarly, in sociology Simmel sought not merely to avoid reifying society but also to express an aversion for the preoccupation with the role of the professional sociologist. Even within a single short piece of work Simmel was not merely the master of the essay form but also of the shifting perspective of the philosopher, the sociologist, the psychologist and the aesthete. This is another reason why ‘to the modern experimenter, Simmel is an exasperating godfather’. Perhaps in part because of the then unbounded and disputed terrain, Simmel refused to confine himself to participation within a strictly ‘sociological’ discourse. Even those of his contemporaries who admired his work were often bewildered by the variety of perspectives that it contained. As one of those admirers—Max Adler—pointed out, a full understanding of Simmel’s work was impaired not merely by

problems of style but also the largely merely fragmentary assessment of his work for which he himself was in large part to blame. Because he wrote upon the philosophy of history at one time, at another upon money and then again upon Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well as upon Rembrandt without an apparently recognisable system, it might appear as it his frame of mind exhibited the same erratic jumps of thought as the immediacy of the diversity of objects with which he concerned himself. [9]

We might also add here that there is sometimes an apparent diversity of theme and perspective even within the same work.

Yet there is a positive side to this seemingly bewildering array of themes and perspectives. As ‘a guest, a wanderer’, Simmel possesses ‘the capacity for association, the gift of seeing the connectedness and meaningful unification of arbitrary phenomena. Simmel is an eternal wanderer between things; an unlimited capacity for combination allows him to step out in any direction from any single point’. [10] The reader of Simmel’s sociological and philosophical essays must be struck by his ability to draw connections between the most diverse phenomena such that the patterns or social relationships in society always appear as an intricate web in his work. The danger, however, is that the reader becomes lost in this eternal wandering from one aspect of social life to another.

Such a danger is amplified by the changing meaning that Simmel often gives to his central concepts. In turn, the essayistic form of much of Simmel’s writing reveals a further feature of his thought. Simmel’s essays are almost never accompanied by footnotes and other references to the sources of his examples. This is just as true of his major sociological works as it is of his essays. As one of his contemporaries pointed out, Simmel’s works

are distinguished even in their external form from the scientific working community. They are free creations of a free mind that never require reference to the results of predecessors or verification by co-researchers…One cannot extract from the works themselves when they appeared, which impulses might have had their effect upon them, where they might have engaged in the course of scientific development and which standpoints and theories they might be opposing. They are, as it were, autonomous, timeless forms that…preserve the ‘pathos of distance’ in all directions in a proud and exclusive reserve. [11]

In this respect too Simmel’s works are very different from those of his contemporaries such as Durkheim and Weber. The essay form takes up the anti-systematic impulse of intellectual creativity that proves annoying to orthodox members of the scientific community. It is more suited to a different conception of sociology which Nisbet has somewhat loosely described as ‘sociology as an art form’. [12]

Even though Simmel outlined and defended his conception of sociology as an independent discipline, there is seldom any sense of his being engaged in the major academic controversies of his time. One would be hard pressed to elicit Simmel’s position in the methodological dispute in political economy (the Methodenstreit) or in the debate on the role of values in social science (the Werturteilsstreit). Unlike Weber, Simmel never engaged in such controversies and they do not explicitly shape his formulation of the nature and tasks of sociology. Where Simmel does take up academic issues and debates they relate to other spheres as free trades unions, foreign students, women and untenured lecturers in Prussian universities.

But if all this is true, what is it about Simmel as a sociologist that excited his contemporaries? Simmel was certainly one of the first sociologists in Germany to establish sociology as a circumscribed, independent discipline. As with succeeding generations of sociologists, his contemporaries applauded him for the wealth of insights into social life that his sociological and philosophical works provided. These include not merely the study of the preconditions for social relations (space, mass) but also of the fundamental features of social organization (domination and subordination, conflict). In some of his works, especially in The Philosophy of Money, there is also a more general social theory of modernity and a sociology of modern life (especially metropolitan life). There are also in his works an astonishing array of sensitive analyses of the seemingly most insignificant aspects of everyday life (mealtimes, writing a letter) as well as of some apparently marginal but illuminating social types (the stranger, the adventurer). And from his very earliest works onwards, Simmel proved to be a master of the analysis of psychological states (pessimism, the blasé attitude, etc.).

Yet it was not merely the wide range of themes that impressed his contemporaries. Time and time aga...