Simmel and Since (Routledge Revivals)

Essays on Georg Simmel's Social Theory

David Frisby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136838460
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1992, this book, written by one of the world's leading experts on Simmel, provides a fascinating set of insights into a thinker who is fast becoming recognized as the sociologist of modernity; an indispensible resource in confronting post-modernity. It examines the relevance of his work in relation to contemporary debates on culture, aesthetics and modernity.

Part I
Societies and individuals

1
The study of society

What is society, whatever its form? The product of human reciprocal action.

Karl Marx

Society…is only the synthesis or the general term for the totality of…specific interactions.

Georg Simmel

I

I would like to draw attention to the diversity of Simmel’s conceptions of what was once viewed as a foundational question in sociology, without whose satisfactory answer it was often claimed the discipline could not exist: namely, the concept of society. Simmel is one of the first sociologists who sought to secure grounds for the new discipline of sociology without having recourse to the then—and often subsequently—seemingly unproblematical answer: sociology is the study of society. Indeed, Simmel maintained that only by abandoning society as a hypostatized and totalized object could sociology develop successfully as an independent academic discipline.

Simmel’s interventions into the grounding of sociology must be seen within the context of the late nineteenth century in which the terrain of the social sciences as a whole was being aggressively contested. This was taking place, on the one hand, in a context in which universal claims were being made to ground large parts of the domain of the human sciences in three competing directions—as being the object of the Geisteswissenschaften, as the object of a Völkerpsychologie (comprising the study of culture, language and social forms), and as the object of specialized Sozialwissenschaften.¹ On the other hand, and at the same time, demarcation disputes within the tighter division of labour between political science (as Staatswissenschaft) and economics (as Nationalökonomie), between psychology and sociology, and between sociology and history were also under way, with attempts by each discipline radically to exclude the other (e.g. Durkheim’s attempted exclusion of psychology from sociology), or to incorporate one into another (e.g. Barth’s incorporation of sociology into the philosophy of history). Taking both directions together, and borrowing terms from Mannheim, we can see that there were disputes concerning both foundational sciences (Begründungswissenschaften)— and claims to be such sciences—and the specialized sciences (Spezialwissenschaften). In addition, there were even more hotly contested disputes within some of the narrower disciplines themselves (most noticeably between the historical and logical (marginalist) schools in economics).

In this latter context, and despite the fact that for a time at least one of his patrons was Gustav Schmoller, Simmel did not particularly concern himself with the so-called Methodenstreit (unless one includes his discussions of the problems of the study of history or his review of Stammler’s Wirtschaft und Recht nach der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung in 1896).² Rather, he was concerned in the 1890s with the grounding of a Moralwissenschaft, as opposed to a Moral-philosophie—the former arguing for the substantive analysis of ethical norms and hence feeding directly into his sociology—and with establishing sociology as an independent discipline.³

However, our concern is not directly with this vital chapter in the history of sociology but rather with the delineation of Simmel’s shifting conceptions of society. In order to do this, it may be instructive to briefly examine some of the possible antecedents to the conceptions and formulations that constitute Simmel’s early notions of society.

This in turn may make it easier to highlight the distinctive nature of Simmel’s diverse concepts of society. They comprise: society (Gesellschaft) as a totality, society as sociation (Vergesellschaftung), society as experience and as everyday knowledge and, finally, society as aesthetic object. These conceptions of society should not be understood as listed in a chronological sequence, nor should they all be deemed to be mutually exclusive. None the less, having delineated the major features of these concepts of society, it may be possible to indicate some of the problems associated with them and to draw out their contemporary relevance.

II

All Simmel’s conceptions of society are either directly grounded in or presuppose the concept of interaction or reciprocal effect (Wechselwirkung). The concept of interaction or reciprocal effect was already in frequent use in philosophy and elsewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century. Any indication of Simmel’s sources must be qualified as possibilities, as provisional, unless a direct connection can be established. In recent discussions, Böhringer has outlined the putative relevance of Gustav Fechner’s work for the young Simmel.⁴ Certainly in Fechner’s work we find a conception of the reciprocal effects (Wechselwirkung) of physical and psychological elements upon one another rather than the operation of forces in a single direction. This is a constituent feature of Fechner’s logical atomism, whose relevance for Simmel’s social theory Böhringer has outlined as follows:

The dissolution of the substance of the psyche into the functional unity of its elements follows necessarily from Fechner’s simple atomism. It enables Simmel to move from Völkerpsychologie to a sociology that no longer justified its object by a distinctive substance, but rather wished to describe the formal relationship of complex elements in a functional constellation.⁵

It is certainly true that Simmel knew Fechner’s work and that he established early on an ensemble of relational concepts for his social theory, but it is more plausible to argue that these can be found in the Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal who were, after all, Simmel’s self-acknowledged influential teachers.

We know also that in the late 1880s (in fact in 1886–87) Simmel was lecturing on Hermann Lotze’s practical philosophy, in which the concept of interaction [Wechselwirkung] also figures. For instance, in volume three of Mikrokosmos, whose third section is entitled ‘The Connection of Things’, Lotze maintains that the relationship between things appears not merely on the surface of objects but also penetrates their very existence.⁶ This putative source requires further investigation.

For Simmel’s sociology and concept of society more readily verifiable sources are to be found in the work of Spencer, Dilthey and Lazarus. Spencer, for instance, was read intensively by Simmel in his early years, providing him not merely with an elaborate discussion of the concept of differentiation, amongst others, but also with a number of the historical and ethnographic examples and instances which populate his earlier works. More especially, however, the first volume of Spencer’s Principles of Sociology commences with ‘The Data of Sociology’ before moving on to ‘The Inductions of Sociology’, the first of which is ‘What is Society?’. But there, in contrast to Simmel, Spencer speaks of ‘the reciprocal influence of the society and its units’ —thereby already hypostatizing society.⁷ For Simmel, however, it is not the relationship of the part to the whole which is central but rather the conviction that the totality of reciprocal influence of units is society.

For a time at least, Simmel came under the influence of Dilthey, though it is doubtful that the relationship of the Privatdozent to the Ordinarius was ever a close and harmonious one. None the less, Dilthey’s work in the 1870s and 1880s often contains elements of a conception of society and interaction which would appeal to Simmel. In his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, for instance, Dilthey proposes a conception of individual interaction in which ‘the individual is an element in the interactions of society, a point of intersection of the diverse systems of these interactions who reacts with conscious intention and action upon their effects’.⁸

But without in any way diminishing the significance of Dilthey’s conception here, it is none the less true that a similar constellation is to be found in the work of Lazarus, whose pupils were Dilthey and Simmel. Lazarus (and Steinthal) had already grounded a Völkerpsychologie in the early 1860s whose object was to be ‘the psychology of societal human beings or human society’, in which society is not a ‘mere sum of all individual minds’ but rather the unity of a plurality of individuals which lies in the ‘content and form or mode of their activity’. Again, even closer to Simmel’s later conception of society, Lazarus insists that

within the large circle of society, smaller circles are formed… These circles, however, do not stand side by side but intersect and affect one another in many ways. Thus, within society, there emerges a highly varied…relationship of connection and separation (Absonderung)⁹.

It need hardly be pointed out that the issue of the intersection of social circles was one of Simmel’s earliest sociological problematics, indeed one amongst others that were deemed important in Lazarus and Steinthal’s programme for a Völkerpsychologie (covering language, culture and social forms).

Finally, it should not be assumed that Simmel abandoned these earlier insights gained into a conception of society as interaction of its elements. The theme of connection and separation of interactions that is found in Lazarus’s formulation reappears, for example, at the outset of one of Simmel’s most famous essays, ‘Bridge and Door’ (1909), in the following manner:

The undisturbed transformation of matter as well as energies brings everything in relation to everything else and makes a single cosmos out of all individual elements… In contrast to nature, it is only given to human beings to unite and to dissolve things and to do this, in fact, in the distinctive manner that the one is always the presupposition of the other.¹⁰

What Simmel is about to deal with here in terms of connection and separation in society fully accords with his earlier principles upon which he established his conception of sociology and society.

These principles may be readily summarized by extracting from Simmel’s early works. He starts out from ‘a regulative principle that everything interacts in some way with everything else’. This principle of interaction holds for society too. Secondly, the dynamic element of interactions is often emphasized, as in the statement that ‘between every point in the world and every other force permanently moving relationships exist’¹¹. Later, Simmel identified both principles as symptomatic of real tendencies in intellectual life, as a ‘general tendency of modern thought, with its dissolving of substances into functions, the fixed and permanent in the flux of restless development’.¹² Thirdly, in order to come to terms with this dynamic interaction of a totality, Simmel argued that the only appropriate concepts were relational ones: ‘We gain a secure—as opposed to a rigid—position, as soon as we explain what is objective, in both knowledge and action, as a relational concept’.¹³ Fourthly, any substantive unity that exists or is discerned is itself the result of interaction: ‘Where one speaks of the unity of a form of whatever type, there one means—since we have no access to the absolute, metaphysical unity—the interaction of parts’.¹⁴ Finally, in his most elaborate grounding of sociology prior to the publication of his Soziologie in 1908, namely in the essay ‘The Problem of Sociology’ (extended version in English published 1895), Simmel commences with the anti-individualist proposition that ‘we now regard social forces, national [collective] movements, as the real and determining factors out of which the parts which individuals play cannot be evaluated with complete definiteness. The science of human beings has become the science of human society’.¹⁵

These are some of the key presuppositions from which Simmel elaborates his various conceptions of society. Taken together, they already indicate the centrality of a dynamic interaction that can only be grasped through relational concepts: interaction or reciprocal effect (Wechselwirkung), sociation (Vergesellschaftung) or the process by which we become socialized and, as Kracauer intimated, a crucial assumption of the fundamental interrelatedness [Wesenszusammengehörigkeit] of phenomena. In addition, even the concept of form can only be understood in relation to that of content.

We can now turn to the elucidation of Simmel’s concepts of society, commencing with society as totality (Gesellschaft).

III

In his earliest attempts to ground sociology as an independent discipline, Simmel rejected society as totality as the object of this discipline. He denied that it was ‘an absolute entity’; indeed, society is only a secondary phenomenon ‘compared with the real interaction of the parts’.¹⁶ However, this early formulation still betray...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Societies and individuals
• Part II Into modernity
• Part III Since Simmel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index