Simmel, Georg

(1858-1918)

Simmel is generally considered to be the most neglected of the founders of modern sociology (although more so in Britain than in the United States). He published some twenty-five volumes and over three hundred essays during his lifetime. Born a Jew, but later baptized into Christianity, he spent most of his life in Berlin, gaining full professorship at Strasburg only four years before his death. This late recognition of such a prolific scholar signposts his maverick nature-as well as a certain anti-semitism on the part of some of his peers. He was one of a number of talented artists, scholars, and intellectuals who would meet regularly at Max Weber's house in Heidelberg.

Simmel's work is almost impossible to summarize or systematize and he was himself opposed to such attempts. In many ways he is a sociologist who seems dismayed by the very possibility of sociology. His style and approach differs from that of the other classical sociologists by virtue of its fragmentary and piecemeal character. Simmel wrote short essays, vignettes of social life, rich and textured in their detail of the microscopic order, but wholly unsystematic and often unfinished. His range of inquiry was vast and varied: from books on Kant and Goethe, through studies of art and culture, and on to major analyses of religion, money, capitalism, gender, groups, urbanism, and morality. Even love is among his many topics. Details, rather than abstract generalization, are given prime position in Simmel's work: he argued that, whilst it was not possible to understand the whole or the totality in itself, any fragment of study may lead one to grasp the whole. Thus, in The Philosophy of Money (1900), he proclaims ‘the possibility … of finding in each of life's details the totality of its meaning’. He saw this particular work as providing a more secure foundation for historical materialism and he was a major influence on the work of the Marxist philosopher György Lukács .

For Simmel there are three kinds of sociology. General sociology is a programme of method-‘the whole of historical life in so far as it is formed societally’. Formal sociology studies ‘the societal forms themselves’-the ‘forms of sociation’. Finally, there is philosophical sociology, which he defines as ‘the epistemology of the social sciences’. He wrote most often about the second of these, formal sociology, which is best seen as the centre of his enterprise. The ‘forms of sociation’ are the forms in which our interaction develops. His most famous short essays-’The Stranger’, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, and his essay on social conflict (all in , Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, 1971) -are part of his formal sociology, and this is the sociology that has been most influential in the United States.

Simmel's work was enormously influential in the development of early North American sociology. Paul Rock, in The Making of Symbolic Interactionism (1979), identifies him as one of the key founders of symbolic interactionism . Certainly he was an important mentor for Robert Park and other members of the Chicago School. Some of Simmel's ideas may also be found in the functionalism of Robert Merton (particularly his reference group theory and role theory) and of Lewis Coser (notably his theory of social conflict).

Simmel came to see social forms as dominating the life process, as a form of alienation, and his development of his own very individual method-and indeed of the essay form itself-was an attempt to resist this. In this respect he has been likened to the impressionists in the world of art-constantly trying to create new forms which are closer to our experience of the flux of life. It is no surprise that he has been seen as a precursor of post-modernism .

Almost any of David Frisby's numerous publications about Simmel give a good account of his sociological significance and relative neglect (see, for example, his Georg Simmel, 1984). See also formalism ; urban sociology.