Georg Simmel (born in Berlin 1858, died in Strasbourg 1918) counts as a classic in the social sciences.
Although his major book was entitled The Philosophy of Money, Simmel is regarded as a sociologist. His academic career was not successful, since he repeatedly failed to obtain a chair at a university until, finally, four years before he passed away, he was appointed to a professorship at Strasbourg University.
The reasons for his failures are diverse.Simmel’s Jewish background has often been mentioned as one cause for being neglected; another reason was certainly that he was not mainstream. In 1908 he was considered for a chair in philosophy at Heidelberg University, following Max Weber’s recommendation. In the end, a majority in the university council decided to withdraw the call for Simmel, since he could not be clearly categorized as a member of one or the other discipline, and many committee members qualified his writing style as insufficiently academic and too essayist-narrative.
Simmel studied history, psychology and philosophy. He submitted a work on music as PhD thesis, which was rejected, and he replaced his submission with a study on Kant, which was finally accepted. Two years later, he encountered similar problems with his “habilitation” thesis: a first submission was accepted only after a long process of confrontational debate, and his first “habilitation” defence lecture was rejected, so that a second lecture became necessary.
Simmel had no real financial problems, since he was able to live on an inheritance left to him by a benefactor. He lectured with the status of a Privatdozent and attracted a large number of students, because his lectures always served as a kind of cultural event. In 1911, he received a doctoral degree honoris causae in economics at Freiburg University in recognition of his works on defining and initiating sociology.
Simmel published around 30 books and more than 200 articles and papers.
His achievements were considered an attempt to consolidate sociology as an independent discipline. Sociology was always thought of as a branch of science with a specific and unique object, which can be distinguished from and defended against other sciences, but sociology was also regarded as a method of historic and social sciences in general, which deals with issues of human action. Sociology works with findings delivered by history or anthropology or other sciences, and tries to form a synthesis of empirical material, perspectives, and interpretation. Much of Simmel’s sociological discussion of empirical phenomena is based on his impressions gained in Berlin, where the speed of the modernization process was very rapid and the span of lifestyles and social diversity was very broad (Moebius 2002; Helle 2015).In its first steps, network research also goes back to Georg Simmel, even if he was not a genuine network researcher by any formal definition. He was, however, a researcher who thought in categories, which are quite similar to network approaches nowadays. He portrayed society in dualistic terms to which, for example, the binary wordings of universality and particularity, continuity and change, or conformism and distinction belonged. Also, human beings are regarded as dualistic. Simmel thinks about dualism as a driving force of development, which causes change. Society is regarded as a place of permanent conflict of different sorts. Individual human agents are part of a uniform collectivism as well as pieces of specific individual accentuation. The very central
idea of interdependence (“ Wechselwirkung”) corresponds to the idea of dualism in Simmel’s thinking.
In the early days of sociology, society was thought of as a geometry of social relations. In the same sense that geometry deals with forms through which matter becomes a body, the analysis of abstract forms was a major part of Simmel’s work. Social formations are characterized and constituted through continuous repetition.
Simmel’s crossing of social circles looks similar to the modern analysis of cliques, as they are discussed in contemporary network analysis. Different dispositions of individual actors differ according to their positions in a network, and personality in a sense of individuality is a result of the crossing of circles (Simmel 1908). Networks function as a mode of social differentiation and societal trends of standardization. Finally, social structures are conceptualized as relational - and principally changing - links between human actors and organizations.Society is the result of interdependences, in which everything is related to every other thing. Reality is always the outcome of permanent and diverse interplays between different agencies. Even an accidental interaction between different human beings can be portrayed as society. According to Simmel, these are elementary forms of social interdependence. Besides informal or episodic forms of interaction, Simmel has bigger and more stable forms of social organization in mind, namely, classes or families. Again, interdependencies keep society working, and society is a permanent process.
Simmel published many articles, which appeared in collections of essays. He discussed various topics of everyday life and he also addressed topics such as religion, fashion, family, gender or ethnicity. There is hardly a topic on which Simmel did not reflect. Alongside a great number of shorter works, Simmel’s most ambitious work was Die Philosophie des Geldes (first published in 1900, English translation, The Philosophy of Money, Simmel 2011). The title reflects the fact that philosophy at that time promised greater success than “sociology”, which did not really exist in Germany at that time. However, Simmel was not greatly concerned about differences between philosophy and sociology, but assumed fluid borders between both areas of discussion and knowledge.
The Philosophy of Money discusses money as a mirror of the process of rationalization in capitalist life (Dietz 1997).
Money is like a spider weaving the net of society. It documents the impersonality of society and it is simultaneously its cause. Money fosters neutrality of life in a positive and a negative understanding. Finally, life-styles and social rationalities are discussed intensively against the new historical fact of a money economy. The Philosophy of Money gives proof of Simmel’s cultural critique. He reflects on ambiguities of progress and freedom to choose, and insists on rising contradictions, needs, and processes of a loss of social coherence (Deflem 2003). The Philosophy of Money is a treatise that deals with money from the perspective of a non-economist. While economists deal with money almost in an empirical way, Simmel argues as a socioeconomist, underlining the social embeddedness of money, the extra-economic, social basis of modern money (Zelitzer 1989). Human knowledge and cognition in society is highly dependent upon the evolution of the money economy. In this sense, the sphere of finance has generated its own dynamics, which underpin and transport societal and economic development and relations (Poggi 1993).Simmel was generally interested in the outlines of the modern style of life at a time when society was not only experiencing cultural change, but was also going through turbulent economic changes as well. In The Philosophy of Money he examined in detail this modern “style of life”, which complicates human relationships. Complications were seen in the ever-increasing detachment in social circles and the replacement of traditional rhythms in social life by more complex forms as well as in an increase in the tempo in which society was changing. These distinctions in everyday culture can be seen as a growing “multiplicity” of cultural styles that are forever changing (Bogenhold 2001).
Today, Simmel serves as a classic and founding father of sociology, especially of the sociology of culture, but he is also well known in the history of economic thought, especially as a figure of heterodoxies throwing light on extra-economic dimensions.
He was - compared with other scholars of his time - discovered and discussed quite recently in Anglo-American sociology (Levine 1995), but he also represents a starting-point for many specific discussions. Aesthetics, sociology of design and fashions, or sociology of religion all have Simmel as one of their progenitors.Dieter Bogenhold
See also:
German and Austrian schools (II); Non-Marxist socialist ideas in Germany and Austria (II).
References and further reading
Bogenhold, D. (2011), ‘Social inequality and the sociology of life style material and cultural aspects of social stratification’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 60 (4), 829-47.
Deflem, M. (2003), ‘The sociology of the sociology of money: Simmel and the contemporary battle of the classics’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 3 (1), 67-96.
Dietz, R. (1997), ‘Georg Simmel’s contribution to a theory of the money economy’, in P. Koslowski (ed.), Methodology of the Social Sciences, Ethics, and Economics in the Newer Historical School Studies in Economic Ethics and Philosophy, Berlin and New York: Springer, pp. 115-44.
Helle, H.J. (2015), The Social Thought of Georg Simmel, Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Levine, D.N. (1995), Visions of the Sociological Tradition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Moebius, S. (2002), Simmel lesen: Moderne, dekonstruktive und postmoderne Lekturen der Soziologie von Georg Simmel, Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag.
Poggi, G. (1993), Money and the Modern Mind: Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Simmel, G. (1908), ‘Die Kreuzung sozialer Kreise’, in G. Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen uber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 305-44.
Simmel, G. (1989-2015), Gesamtausgabe, ed. O. Rammstedt, 24 vols, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Simmel, G. (2011), The Philosophy of Money, London: Routledge.
Zelitzer, V.A. (1989), ‘The social meaning of money: “special monies”’, American Journal of Sociology, 95 (2), 342-77.