• The impact of Georg Simmel’s ideas on American sociological theory and sociological theory in general differs significantly from that of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.

• Marx, Durkheim, and Weber had relatively little influence on early 20th-century American theory, despite their later importance.

• Simmel was much better known to early American sociologists compared to the classical trio.

• Although later eclipsed by Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, Simmel is today more influential than classical thinkers like Comte and Spencer.

• Recently, there has been an increase in Simmel’s impact on sociological theory.

• This resurgence is largely due to the growing influence of Simmel’s work, especially The Philosophy of Money.

• Simmel’s ideas have also been linked to postmodern social theory, one of the most important developments in social thought.

• Secondary literature and analyses by scholars such as Dahme, Featherstone, Helle, Kaern, Phillips, Cohen, Frisby, Nedelmann, Scaff, Aronowitz, Levine, Poggi, and Weinstein provide extensive overviews and interpretations of Simmel’s work.

Primary Concerns

• Simmel’s main contributions to sociological theory are the focus here, although he was primarily a philosopher dealing with philosophical issues such as ethics and with other philosophers like Kant.

• Apart from his contribution to macroscopic conflict theory, Simmel is best known as a microsociologist.

• He played a significant role in the development of small-group research, symbolic interactionism, and exchange theory.

• Simmel believed sociologists should primarily study forms and types of social interaction.

• Robert Nisbet highlights Simmel’s microsociological approach, emphasizing the importance of the small and intimate elements of human association and the primacy of concrete individuals in analyzing institutions.

• David Frisby notes that Simmel’s sociology, grounded in psychological categories, appeals not only to interactionists but also to social psychologists.

• It is often overlooked that Simmel’s microsociological work on interaction forms is part of a broader theory about the relations between individuals and larger society.

Levels and Areas of Concern

• Simmel had a more complicated and sophisticated theory of social reality than often credited in contemporary American sociology.

• Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (1978) identify four basic levels of concern in Simmel’s work:

  1. Microscopic assumptions about the psychological components of social life.

  2. Interest in the sociological components of interpersonal relationships on a slightly larger scale.

  3. The most macroscopic level focusing on the structure and changes in the social and cultural “spirit” of his times.

  4. A fourth, overarching level involving ultimate metaphysical principles of life that influence all his work and his vision of the future.

• Simmel operated with a three-tiered social reality and adopted the principle of emergence, where higher levels emerge from lower levels, creating supra-individual formations that mediate relations between individuals.

• He stated that society can only be an autonomous object of science if a new entity emerges from the sum of individual elements, otherwise social science would only be individual psychology.

• Simmel’s concern with multiple social reality levels is reflected in his definition of three problem “areas” in sociology:

  • “Pure” sociology: combines psychological variables with forms of interaction, focusing on interaction forms (subordination, superordination, exchange, conflict, sociability) and types of people in interaction (e.g., competitor, coquette, miser, spendthrift, stranger, adventurer).

  • “General” sociology: deals with social and cultural products of human history, groups, and the structure and history of societies and cultures.

  • “Philosophical” sociology: concerns the basic nature and inevitable fate of humankind.

• Although Simmel sometimes separated these levels and sociologies, he often integrated them into a broader totality.

GEORG SIMMEL

A Biographical Sketch

• Georg Simmel was born in Berlin on March 1, 1858.

• He studied a wide range of subjects at the University of Berlin.

• His first dissertation effort was rejected, and a professor remarked they should not encourage him further in that direction.

• Despite this, Simmel persevered and received his doctorate in philosophy in 1881.

• He taught at the university until 1914, holding a relatively unimportant position as Privatdozent (unpaid lecturer dependent on student fees) from 1885 to 1900.

• Simmel was a popular lecturer, attracting large numbers of paying students and even cultured members of Berlin society; his lectures became public events.

• He was a somewhat contradictory and bewildering person, described variably as tall/slender or short/forlorn, unattractive yet intensely intellectual and noble, hardworking yet humorous and overarticulate.

• Simmel was seen as intellectually brilliant, friendly, well-disposed, but also irrational, opaque, and wild inside.

• He wrote numerous influential articles (e.g., “The Metropolis and Mental Life” [1903]) and books (e.g., The Philosophy of Money [1907]).

• He was well-known in German academic circles and had an international following, especially in the United States, where he influenced the birth of sociology.

• In 1900, he received an honorary title at the University of Berlin but was never granted full academic status despite attempts and support from scholars like Max Weber.

• One major reason for his academic failure was being Jewish in a period of rampant anti-Semitism in 19th-century Germany.

• A report described him as “an Israelite through and through” in appearance, bearing, and thought.

• Another reason was the nature of his work—many articles appeared in newspapers and magazines aimed at a general intellectual public, not just academics.

• Without a regular academic position, Simmel relied on public lectures for income.

• His audience was more the intellectual public than professional sociologists, leading to derisive judgments by peers who dismissed his influence as limited to journalism.

• The low esteem for sociology in German academia also contributed to his struggles.

• In 1914, Simmel obtained a regular academic appointment at the University of Strasbourg, but felt estranged and missed his Berlin intellectual audience.

• His wife described his departure from Berlin as very difficult, with affectionate students bidding farewell.

• At Strasbourg, Simmel felt isolated, describing the university life as cloistered, indifferent, and hostile.

• Shortly after his appointment, World War I began; lecture halls became military hospitals, students left for war, and Simmel remained a marginal figure until his death in 1918.

• Despite lacking a conventional academic career, Simmel attracted a large academic following and his fame as a scholar has grown over the years.

Dialectical Thinking

• Simmel’s approach to the interrelationships among three basic levels of social reality (excluding his metaphysical level) gave his sociology a dialectical character similar to Marx’s sociology.

• A dialectical approach is multicausal and multidirectional, integrates fact and value, rejects strict dividing lines between social phenomena, focuses on social relations, considers past, present, and future, and is deeply concerned with conflicts and contradictions.

• Despite similarities, Simmel and Marx differed in their focus on social aspects and their visions of the future.

• Unlike Marx’s revolutionary optimism, Simmel’s view of the future is closer to Weber’s notion of an “iron cage”—a pessimistic view of entrapment.

• Simmel’s sociology emphasized relationships, especially interaction (association), and he was a methodological relationist, believing that everything interacts with everything else.

• He was consistently attentive to dualisms, conflicts, and contradictions across social realms.

• Donald Levine notes Simmel’s belief that the world is best understood through conflicts and contrasts between opposed categories.

• Simmel’s dialectical method is exemplified in his work on the social form of fashion, illustrating his treatment of social forms and types.

• This dialectical thinking also appears in his concepts of subjective-objective culture and notions of “more-life” and “more-than-life.”

Fashion

• Simmel’s essay on fashion highlights its inherent contradictions and dualities.

• Fashion acts as a social relationship enabling individuals to conform to group demands.

• Simultaneously, fashion provides a norm from which individuals seeking individuality can deviate.

• Fashion follows a historical process: initially, everyone accepts what is fashionable; then individuals deviate; finally, a new fashion emerges through this deviation.

• Fashion is dialectical because the success and spread of a fashion cause its eventual failure—what was once distinctive and attractive loses its appeal as it becomes widely adopted.

• The leader of a fashion movement paradoxically leads by following the fashion more determinedly than anyone else.

• Efforts to be unfashionable also involve dualities; those rejecting fashion see themselves as independent but are often engaging in an inverse form of imitation.

• Avoiding fashion out of fear of losing individuality is not necessarily a sign of personal strength or independence.

• Simmel summarized fashion as embodying all leading antithetical tendencies within it.

• More generally, Simmel’s dialectical thinking focuses on conflicts and contradictions between the individual and the larger social and cultural structures.

• These social and cultural structures develop a life of their own, limiting the individual’s control over them.

Individual (Subjective) Culture and Objective Culture

• People are influenced and, in Simmel’s view, threatened by social structures and more importantly by their cultural products.

• Simmel distinguished between individual culture and objective culture.

• Objective culture refers to cultural products created by people, such as art, science, philosophy, and similar creations.

• Individual (subjective) culture is the actor’s capacity to produce, absorb, and control elements of objective culture.

• Ideally, individual culture shapes and is shaped by objective culture.

• The problem arises when objective culture gains a life of its own, acquiring fixed identities, logic, and lawfulness independent of the creative force that produced it.

• This independence creates a distance from the spiritual dynamic that originally created these cultural elements, making them rigid and autonomous.

• This leads to a contradiction between the creative actors and their cultural products, exemplifying a deep estrangement or animosity between the organic, creative processes of the soul and its fixed, unchanging products.

• The creative soul’s vibrant, restless life contrasts sharply with the rigid, unchanging cultural products, which exert a feedback effect that arrests and rigidifies creativity.

• Often it appears as if the creative movement of the soul is dying because of its own product.

• K. Peter Etzkorn summarized this as the danger man faces of being destroyed by his own creations when those creations lose their organic human coefficient.

More-Life and More-Than-Life

• Simmel’s philosophical sociology represents a broad manifestation of his dialectical thinking.

• He discussed the emergence of social and cultural structures, taking a position similar to some of Marx’s ideas.

• Marx’s concept of fetishism of commodities illustrates the separation between people and their products, a phenomenon specific to capitalism and historically overcome only in socialism.

• For Simmel, this separation is inherent and inevitable in the nature of human life, not just historical.

• Philosophically, this is expressed as a contradiction between “more-life” (restless, creative human capacities) and “more-than-life” (the objective cultural products that transcend individuals).

• In Simmel’s essay “The Transcendent Character of Life” (1918), he argues that transcendence is immanent in life.

• Humans possess a doubly transcendent capability:

  1. Their creative, restless capacity (more-life) allows self-transcendence.

  2. This capacity produces objects and phenomena (more-than-life) that transcend the creators themselves.

• The objective existence of these cultural products stands in irreconcilable opposition to the creative forces that produced them.

• Social life thus creates something beyond life that follows its own laws independent of human life.

• Life’s essence and process lie in the unity and conflict between more-life and more-than-life.

• Due to these metaphysical views, Simmel’s image of the world aligns more closely with Weber’s than Marx’s.

• Like Weber, Simmel saw the world as an “iron cage” of objective culture, progressively limiting human freedom and escape.

• These themes connect deeply to Simmel’s overall thoughts on social reality’s major components.