Georg Simmel (Sociology)

Introduction
Georg Simmel (b. 1858–d. 1918) was a German sociologist, cultural theorist, and modernist philosopher. Simmel’s vast oeuvre, containing approximately twenty books and two hundred smaller pieces, includes fundamental contributions to sociology and several scholarly works on philosophers, among them Kant, Bergson, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, but he also treated such mundane phenomena as fashion, the senses, the picture frame, secrecy, money, and emotions. From these seemingly insignificant and banal objects Simmel tries to extract a deeper meaning; he thinks that from the superficialities of daily life disregarded by scholars until then a “plumb line” can be dropped into profound metaphysical realities. With its emphasis on relations of Wechselwirkung (“reciprocal effect,” “reciprocal causation,” or “reciprocity”) and processes of association, Vergesellschaftung, Simmel’s sociological work initiates a relational mode of thought against reifying substantialist assumptions. Whereas the latter conceive the world in terms of more or less discrete and static entities, Simmel’s thinking places relations into the heart of sociology. But his work also tackles the problem of how to think—both sociologically and philosophically—in the modern world of flux, where no secure philosophical foundation is available any longer, and one thus easily falls into nihilism or bottomless subjectivism and skepticism. Simmel was born 1 March 1858 in Berlin as the youngest child to a family of seven children. Both his parents were of Jewish origin, yet his father Edward converted to Catholicism late in life, and mother Flora had been baptised as an Evangelical when she was young. Simmel began his studies at the University of Berlin in 1876 at the age of eighteen. In addition to history and philosophy, he also studied psychology and Italian. After his first dissertation on the origins of music had been rejected in December 1880, Simmel obtained his doctorate in 1881 with a work on Kant’s conception of matter and completed his habilitation in 1884. In 1885 Simmel was appointed as Privatdozent, an unpaid lecturer, on the philosophical faculty of the University of Berlin. In his lifetime, Simmel was one of the key figures of Berlin intelligentsia. First of all, he was a famous lecturer whose lectures were popular events covered in newspapers. Simmel was also one of the first to welcome women to his lectures, which was a concern for some of his conservative colleagues. Second, Simmel had also active mutual relations with such prominent figures as Max Weber and his wife Marianne, philosophers Edmund Husserl and Heinrich Rickert, poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Stephan George, as well as with philosopher Henri Bergson and sculptor Auguste Rodin in France. Third, Simmel’s books had considerable success. Several of Simmel’s writings also appeared as translations soon after their publication. In his lifetime he was translated for example into English, French, Italian, and Russian. Simmel’s academic career, however, was anything but a success story. He suffered from constant setbacks: his first doctoral dissertation as well as his habilitation lecture were rejected; he remained in the unpaid Privatdozent position for an unusually long period of fifteen years and thirteen years as Ausserordentlich Professor (“extraordinary professor,” an honorary title to which Simmel promoted in 1901), and he had no success in securing himself a permanent position at German universities until 1914, when he received a full professorship in philosophy from the Kaiser Wilhelm University in Strasbourg at the age of fifty-six, four years before his death. Although his sociological writings cover only a part of his oeuvre, Simmel’s sociology is by far the best-known area of his work. In this bibliography, our main focus is on the English translations of his works, but we have also included some original German texts that in our view best reveal his theoretical position and are the most significant in relation to his sociology and philosophy as well as some secondary literature on Simmel, both in English and in German.
Simmel’s Works in German
From the long list of Simmel’s publications, now available in the complete German edition of his collected works, we have selected for this article those works that are most relevant to the understanding of his sociological and philosophical thinking and that have not been translated into English.
Collected Works
Simmel’s collected works have been published as twenty-four-volume Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (GSG) series by Suhrkamp. The editing process, which was initiated in the 1980s, was finally completed in 2015. The series contains the complete works of Simmel. Volumes 1–16 present Simmel’s publications in chronological order. Volume 17 includes miscellaneous writings as well as a number of anonymous and pseudonymous publications. Volume 18 contains English publications, and Volume 19 covers Simmel’s publications in French and Italian. Volume 20 contains Simmel’s posthumous publications and unpublished texts, while Volume 21 includes sets of lecture notes by students from Simmel’s courses. Volumes 22 and 23 are the collected letters by Simmel and, finally, Volume 24 includes a complete bibliography and biography with indices, documents, and appendices. The collected works have also been ordered primarily in terms of authorization (e.g., by distinguishing the publications bearing Simmel’s name as the author from anonymous and pseudonymous writings). Secondly they are ordered by the type of publication (by distinguishing independent works from essays, reviews, and miscellaneous texts), then by periodization and by dividing Simmel’s oeuvre into three periods: 1870–1900 (Volumes 1–6), 1901–1908 (Volumes 7–11), and 1908–1918 (Volumes 12–16). The volumes have various editors, with Otthein Rammstedt acting as the general editor of the series.
Rammstedt, Otthein, ed. 2000–2015. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (GSG). 24 vols. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Simmel’s collected works in German. The volumes of the GSG series have become standard sources in the most recent Simmel scholarship, and the series has also inspired and informed new insights and interpretations in the secondary literature (with several leading Simmel scholars involved in the editing process as editors of individual GSG volumes).
Find this resource:
Monographs
This section contains a small selection of Simmel’s monographs that have not yet been translated into English. All of them hold a significant place in his oeuvre and disclose important aspects of his thought. First, Simmel’s later insistence that society and other seemingly static social formations need to be considered in terms of processes and relations of reciprocal effect can be regarded as an extension of the realistic-dynamic standpoint on matter that he develops in his doctoral thesis, Simmel 2000. Further, the book Über sociale Differenzierung (Simmel 1989) was his first major work, already presenting many of the themes, such as the question of individuality, the concept of society and the epistemological basis of the social sciences, on which he worked pretty much throughout his whole career. Finally, the book Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (Simmel 1910) presents Simmel’s view on the nature of philosophy and also illustrates his own philosophical approach.
Simmel, Georg. 1910. Hauptprobleme der Philosophie. Berlin: Göschenäsche Verlagshanlung.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The book is one of Simmel’s bestsellers. In only two weeks, it sold 8,500 copies, and after the fifth edition in 1920, a total of 37,000 copies had been printed. This popular book examines the nature of philosophy at the most general level. It reveals much of Simmel’s own philosophy. Here he explicitly engages with the work of other philosophers, such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Kant, Stirner, Fichte, and Hegel. However, they are only discussed with regard to the problems that Simmel himself considers important. In methodological terms, the book ventures beyond accustomed paths. The history of philosophy abounds with treatises that focus on the results of philosophy. Simmel sets out to “enliven” philosophical systems, to show their inner life and movement. This shift from metaphysics as dogma to metaphysics as life significantly anticipates Simmel’s later-life philosophy. He thinks that the essential aspect of philosophy is a specific intellectual attitude to the world and life, as well as the movement of thought, and the process of doing philosophy.
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 1989. Über sociale Differenzierung. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The overall theme of the book is differentiation, which owes to the evolutionary scheme developed by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Sociology. Simmel in a way generalizes the Spencerian principle of differentiation. Ultimately, he sees modernization as a process of increasing differentiation.
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 2000. Das Wesen der Materie nach Kant’s Physischer Monadologie. Vol. 1. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
After his first dissertation had been rejected in 1880, Simmel obtained his doctorate with this short work of thirty-four pages, for which he had received an academic prize a year earlier. In the thesis, Simmel examines Kant’s conception of matter. For Simmel’s sociology, the work is of relevance especially due to its “realistic-dynamic” perspective. Contrary to Kant, whom he criticizes for hypostasizing matter, Simmel proposes that matter is not passive stuff, but a process, a flux of becoming instead of being. It is fascinating to note the remarkable resemblance of Simmel’s later sociological conception of society with this: much like matter, for Simmel society is no finished product of forces but something that happens at each and every moment. Translated as “the nature of matter according to Kant’s Physical Monadology.”
Find this resource:
Edited Volumes
Many of Simmel’s most important writings have appeared originally as essays and articles later included in various edited volumes with often partly overlapping contents. The collection Philosophische Kultur, Simmel 1983, originally appeared in Simmel’s lifetime, in 1911. But the other three volumes presented here, Simmel 1989, Simmel 2008a, and Simmel 2008b, have been published posthumously.
Simmel, Georg. 1983. Philosophische Kultur. Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter und die Krise der Moderne. Gesammalte Essays mit einem Vorwort von Jürgen Habermas. Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The collection of essays includes many of Simmel’s important cultural-critical writings, some of which had already appeared in other contexts or as different versions elsewhere. Their themes vary from the philosophies of gender, religion, and culture to aesthetics and the discussion of the cultural importance of such artistic personalities as Michelangelo and Rodin. As Jürgen Habermas points out in his preface to this work, the fact that the volume was republished more than half a century after its original date of publication could be read as symptomatic of the fact that Simmel’s critical thinking on culture feels at once so close and so distant to us. Translated as “Philosophical Culture. On Adventure, the Sexes and the Crisis of Modernity. Collected Essays with a Foreword by Jürgen Habermas.”
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 1989. Gesammelte Schriften zur Religonssoziologie. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Includes practically all that Simmel wrote and published on religion: ten essays originally published between 1898 and 1918, as well as his only monograph on the topic, Religion (1912; earlier version 1906). In contrast to Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, who are famous for their treatment of religious social formations, doctrines, and their historical evolution, Simmel was interested mainly in the specific spiritual attitude or perspective typical of a religious person. Faithful to his dialectic between the form and content of social phenomena, Simmel made a distinction between religion as an institution and religiosity. He distinguished a wide variety of contents in the form of religious experiences. An objectified religion can become the object of scientific analysis. Religion as created in the interaction of believers was to him the primary aspect of the sociology of religion and not the written creed or the predispositions of the pious person. Translated as “collected writings on the Sociology of Religion.”
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 2008a. Individualismus der modernen Zeit – und andere soziologische Abhandlungen. Ausgewählt und mit einem Nachwort von Otthein Rammstedt. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is a collection of Simmel’s sociological writings compiled by one of the leading German Simmel scholars, Otthein Rammstedt. Rammstedt has also written a long afterword to the collection in which he discusses how Simmel’s understanding of sociology developed during his academic career. All the contributions included in the book have also been published in the various volumes of the GSG series. What makes this collection especially useful (besides the informative afterword) is that Rammstedt has both selected and placed under their proper headings the writings that in his mind best embody and exemplify Simmel’s sociological thinking. Consequently, the selected writings are divided, following Simmel’s own view which he expresses in the book Grundfragen der Soziologie, under three headings: general sociology, formal sociology, and philosophical sociology. Therefore, the collection gives a good idea of what Simmel understood by these different types of sociological analysis and why it was important both to keep in mind but also recognize their specificity. Translated as “individuality of the modern times – and other sociological articles. Selected and with an afterword by otthein rammstedt.”
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 2008b. Jenseits der Schönheit. Schriften zur Ästhetik und Kunstphilosophie. Ausgewählt und mit einem Nachwort von Ingo Meyer. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Contains a collection of Simmel’s aesthetic and art-philosophical writings, divided into three sections: Simmel’s texts on the aesthetic aspects of lifeworld, programmatic writings on art, and, finally, life-philosophical texts on art. Ingo Meyer’s informative afterword looks at the scarce reception of Simmel’s aesthetic writings, their influence, key aspects, and contributions. Translated as “Beyond Beauty. Writings on Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. Selected and with an afterword by Ingo Meyer.”
Find this resource:
Simmel’s Works in English Translations
Simmel’s major works on sociology and philosophy have come out as English translations remarkably late compared to other sociological classics, such as those of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. It was not, however, that his work had been completely unknown to an English-speaking readership. In fact, several extracts from his larger works were published in English early on, starting in 1893, so that by the 1910s no other European sociologist had more pieces translated into English than Simmel. The texts (thirteen in all) also reached a broad audience. Their wide dissemination was due to the fact that the majority of them were published in the American Journal of Sociology as translations by Albion Small, the founder and first editor-in-chief of the journal. However, after 1910s this flood of translations dried up almost entirely, and it was only in 1950, with the publication of The Sociology of Georg Simmel, that it was revitalized. The persistent image in the English-speaking world of Simmel’s work as unsystematic, essayistic, impressionistic, and fragmentary is largely due to the scarce availability of his works in translation. While each generation reads and interprets its classics in its own way, this has been especially characteristic of the reception of Simmel’s work. The publication history was determined from his early American reception as a sociologist of small group studies and social conflict to his later reception as a cultural-critical analyst of modernity, an interpretation to a great extent initiated by David Frisby in the 1980s. More recently, the new wave of scholarship has discovered SImmel as a philosopher of life and a refined aesthete.
Monographs
Until late 1970s, not a single one of Simmel’s books had been made available in English. The Problems of the Philosophy of History was the first, and it came out in 1977 (Simmel 1977). It was followed by The Philosophy of Money the next year (Simmel 1978). After that, only five others have seen daylight: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (Simmel 1991), Rembrandt (Simmel 2005), Kant and Goethe (Simmel 2007), Sociology (Simmel 2009), and The View of Life (Simmel 2010). With the publication of Simmel’s major sociological works in English it has become possible for an English-speaking readership to gain a more comprehensive picture of his thinking and assess his overall contribution to the methodology and epistemology of sociology.
Simmel, Georg. 1977. The problems of the philosophy of history. Translated and edited with an introduction by Guy Oakes. New York: Free Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The book is an epistemological study in which Simmel extends Kant’s idea of form as an a priori precondition of knowledge to the study of history. The book can be read as a critique of a realist conception of history. Simmel opposed the “naïve” realist conception typical of the historicism of his time, which assumed that it is possible to describe the past as it really was, without the need for any mediating theoretical concepts. For Simmel, by contrast, the knowing subject has a constitutive role in the production of historical knowledge. Historical knowledge can never be a copy or projection of the past but, analogous to the study of nature, it is dependent on certain a priori elements of our experience. Accordingly, in the book Simmel advances a thesis of history as a constitutive form and asks: how does the mere event of a phenomenon become a historical fact?
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 1978. The philosophy of money. Edited by David Frisby and Tom Bottomore. London: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The Philosophy of Money is divided into two parts. Whereas the first, analytic, part explores the preconditions and social constitution of money, the second, synthetic, part of the book deals with the social and cultural consequences of the generalized use of money. Many regard the book as Simmel’s main sociological treatise and a key to his sociological thinking and theory. These claims are mainly based on three key aspects of The Philosophy of Money: first, the book gives an exemplary look into Simmel’s method of thought; second, of all Simmel’s works it embodies best his theoretical idea of sociology as a study of the forms of association or social interaction; and third, it (or, more specifically, money) provides a key to Simmel’s analyses of modern culture and to his understanding of the fate of the individual in the objectified culture and modern society. According to Simmel, money as a general medium of exchange both liberates individuals from social bonds and creates new kinds of social dependences.
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 1991. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Translated by Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein. Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This was Simmel’s first major engagement with modern life-philosophy and in many ways anticipates his own life-philosophy. While being a tour-de-force analytic critique of the key ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book also connects with Simmel’s philosophy of culture. It situates the philosophies of the two thinkers in relation to the preponderance of means over ends, which Simmel regards as a characteristic of modern culture. While Schopenhauer’s philosophy is for him the absolute philosophical expression of the simultaneous desire for (and loss of) final goals and definite values as the inner condition of modern individuals, Nietzsche takes the world characterized by this ambiguity as his starting point. Simmel likens his philosophizing about these philosophers to an artistic portrait: rather than pursuing absolute likeness, he selects some leitmotivs of their work and interprets them.
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 2005. Rembrandt: An essay in the philosophy of art. Translated and edited by Alan Scott and Helmut Staubmann. New York and London: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The book is a magisterial philosophical interpretation of Rembrandt’s art. It is not the historical contextualization of the artworks that it seeks, nor does it focus on their technical or aesthetic aspects, but it lays emphasis on the meaning and significance of the works. What intrigues Simmel in Rembrandt is the impulse of movement that forms the basis of Rembrandt’s art. The aim of the book is to give a philosophical expression to this impulse in terms of life. In Simmel’s view all great art manifests the unity of life and form. However, whereas in classical art the only purpose of life seems to be to bring out form, for Rembrandt a form is only an accidental expression and moment of life. It is especially in the light of an anti-mechanistic notion of life as dynamic becoming that Simmel interprets Rembrandt’s art.
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 2007. Kant and Goethe: On the History of the modern Weltanschauung. Translated by Joseph Bleicher. Theory, Culture and Society 24.6: 159–191.
DOI: 10.1177/0263276407078717Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This text pits Kant and Goethe against one another. The contrast between the two represents a conflict not only between two individual personalities or strands of thought but ultimately between two epochs. Simmel discusses Kant as an advocate of mechanistic thought, which is characteristic of the late Renaissance. In the Renaissance, mechanism appears as the decisive form of existence: unlike assumed by previous epochs, knowing the world no longer amounted to revealing logically binding concepts and the metaphysical eternity of substances but to calculating laws of motions governed by causality. Accordingly, events were perceived in terms of the to-and-fro of matter and energy determined by laws of nature. Simmel suggests that even though Kant conceived the external world as a representation within the representing, he nevertheless considered the world in terms of mechanical movement. Goethe’s work, by contrast, manifests for Simmel organicism. Goethe perceives both nature and human soul as emerging from life. He regards both as manifestations of the unity of being—with nature as its external dimension and the human soul as the internal one.
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 2009. Sociology: Inquiries into the construction of social forms. Translated and edited by Anthoni J. Blazi and Mathew Kanjirathinkal, with an introduction by Horst J. Helle. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Simmel’s Sociology appeared in 1908 and is generally regarded as one of his major works, if not the major work. Simmel lays out the foundation of his program of the analysis of society as a study of the social forms of association based on the distinction between the form and content of social phenomena, as well as his famous three “a priories” of society and social knowledge. As a sociologist, Simmel was interested more in social processes than in reified social formations. He understands society, too, in terms of reciprocal relations between individuals, thereby inverting the conventional view: instead of examining how social relations take place in society, he insists that sociology should study how society is produced in and by concrete relations between people. Unlike nature, society is constituted from within, by its elements themselves. To simplify a bit and to replace Simmel’s original terminology, the three a priories could be called “role,” “individuality” and “structure.” The first a priori follows from the fact that we typify other actors. According to the second a priori, life is not completely social. No individual can be reduced to their social roles but has a unique identity not based only on the particular combination of his or her social roles. And, finally, an ideal society would be one in which each individual finds a social position or a vocation in which they can best realize their unique capabilities and features of their personality. A constant play and counter-play of the social roles allocated to the individuals takes plays in an open society. Ultimately, Sociology presents a wide variety of subjects of sociological analysis and thematic conceptualization, including the quantitative determination of the group, secrecy, space, senses, super- and subordination, faithfulness and gratitude as well as conflict.
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 2010. The view of life: Four metaphysical essay with Journal Aphorisms. Translated by John A. Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226757858.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Simmel regarded this as his “philosophical testament,” and it was published in German three weeks after his death in 1918. The original German title, Lebensanschauung, verbatim “lifeview,” is a modification of Wilhelm Dilthey’s concept of “worldview” (Weltanschauung). The book sets out to view life itself: not only the life of the individual, but life as an incessant, continuous flux. The book has four chapters, three of which had appeared earlier in the journal Logos. Ultimately, Simmel understands life in terms of self-transcendence. The key to his life-philosophy lies therefore in the notion of “boundary” (Grenze) and in the opposition of life and form. Notwithstanding Simmel’s aim announced also by the title of the book, he rejects the very possibility of experiencing and knowing life as such, purely as life. As a flux of becoming, life is the opposite of form, but it is only ever manifest in some form. Form thus presents a boundary that is indispensable for life, and yet every single boundary can be stepped over. Accordingly, Simmel remarks that humans are boundary beings who have no boundaries.
Find this resource:
Edited Volumes
The first collections of Simmel’s works in English were edited by Kurt H. Wolff. Wolff 1950 contains for example the only available translation of Simmel’s programmatic book Grundfragen der Soziologie (“Basic Problems of Sociology”). Wolff’s second collection (Wolff 1959) includes a number of commentaries in addition to Simmel’s own essays. Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N. Levine (Levine 1971), presents a broad selection of essays and excerpts, mainly from The Philosophy of Money and Sociology, plus a couple of writings from Simmel’s later life-philosophy. All of the later collections have a somewhat more specific focus: Simmel 1984 introduces the reader to his writings on women and sexuality; the volume Simmel on Culture edited by Frisby and Featherstone 1997 concentrates in Simmel’s writings on culture, and Simmel 1997 presents him as a sociologist of religion, which is a relatively little-known side of Simmel’s thinking.
Frisby, David, and Mike Featherstone, eds. 1997. Simmel on culture. London: SAGE.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is a comprehensive volume of Simmel’s writings on culture, in a broad sense of the term, which contains both translations published earlier and several new ones, many of which are widely cited. The essays and writings cover a great variety of related themes, classified under nine topics, from Simmel’s more general writings on the concept of culture and its fate in the modern society to his analyses of more specific themes such as adornment, style, the Alpine journey, and the bridge and the door. David Frisby’s informative introduction places Simmel’s writings into a wider context.
Find this resource:
Levine, Donald N., ed. 1971. Georg Simmel on individuality and social forms. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The book starts with a section on Simmel’s programmatic writings on sociology, and it continues with selections on the forms of social interaction, social types, the forms of individuality, and the relation between the individuality and social structure. The essays “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and “Fashion” are among the best known in contemporary sociology. The metropolis essay is, in many ways (in addition to the second, synthetic part of The Philosophy of Money) a key to Simmel’s understanding of modern culture and modernity. The essay on fashion is an absolute classic in the sociology of fashion. Fashion is to Simmel a metaphor of modernity, and it also offers a prime example of what he means by social forms being aesthetic by nature. The primary forces of the self-reproducing fashion cycles are the parallel human needs of distinguishing oneself from others and of being a part of a bigger social whole. The essay “Socíability” contains his idea of sociology in a nutshell: sociability (Geselligkeit) is to Simmel a pure form of association, the form of forms, which is self-purposive in that it does not serve any purpose other than itself.
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 1984. On women, sexuality, and love. Translated with an introduction by Guy Oakes. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Simmel, just like many of his academic contemporaries, was interested in the “women’s question,” actualized by the emerging women’s movement of his days. The four writings included in this collection, the last of which, “On Love,” was published posthumously, are all directly related to the main concerns of Simmel’s sociological and philosophical thinking, namely the question of the relation between the subjective and objective culture.
Find this resource:
Simmel, Georg. 1997. Essays on religion. Edited and translated by Horst Jürgen Helle in collaboration with Ludwig Nieder. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The collection of translations is almost identical to the German collection Gesammelte Schriften zur Religonssoziologie published in 1989 and also edited by Helle. Before the publication of this collection of translations, Simmel’s ideas on religion were almost unknown to the English-speaking readership.
Find this resource:
Wolff, Kurt H., ed. 1950. The sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is an early translation of two of Simmel’s major works on sociology into English. It covers most parts of Sociology as well as the book Grundfragen der Soziologie, which is Simmel’s late presentation of his sociology and in which he introduced his influential interpretation of the three different types of sociological questioning: general, formal, and philosophical sociology. General sociology deals with the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the relation of the individual with the other members of his or her group as well as the consequences of social differentiation. Formal sociology introduces the conceptually and methodically crucial division between social forms and their contents, thus uncovering a specific layer of reality: the social one. Finally, philosophical sociology deals with epistemological and metaphysical aspects of society, such as the fundamental problems of individuality and humanity, mainly by way of analyzing different philosophical and ethical solutions to them, from egoism and classical individualism to socialism.
Find this resource:
Wolff, Kurt H. 1959. Georg Simmel, 1958–1918. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Includes a small selection of Simmel’s own writings, including two programmatic articles on the nature and object of sociology, “The Problem of Sociology” and “How is Society Possible?” It also contains commentaries on Simmel’s work with a wide range of topics and interests, among them some classic interpretations of his sociology. The volume also introduces the English translation of Gertrud Kantorowicz’s preface to Simmel’s Fragmente und Aufsätze aus dem Nachlaß und Veröffentlichungen der letzten Jahre (“Fragments and Essays: Posthumous Essays and Publications of His Last Years”) edited by her and published in 1923.
Find this resource:
Secondary Literature
Despite exerting a considerable influence in his lifetime both in Europe and in North America, soon after his death Simmel was forgotten almost completely, at least by name. It was only in the 1950s that his work began to receive interest again. The revived interest owed much to the edited volumes by Kurt H. Wolff. It was from across the Atlantic that Simmel was brought back, even to Germany (although the efforts of Kurt Gassen and Michael Landmann were significant in generating new interest in Simmel in Germany). Whereas the—admittedly rather scarce—postwar North American scholarship on Simmel focused especially on his studies of small groups and conflict, more recently Anglophone commentaries on Simmel’s work have not only become much more numerous but also broader in scope. This is largely due to the contributions of David Frisby and Donald N. Levine, who introduced Simmel as a much more versatile thinker than how he was perceived until then. Whereas at the highpoint of postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, Simmel was received as a theorist of modernity and postmodernity and as a cultural critic, in the new millennium the new wave of Simmel scholarship has emphasized especially the life-philosophical or trans-sociological aspects of his work.
Monographs on Simmel in German
In Germany, the reception history of Simmel’s work is over one hundred years long. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that a real Simmel renaissance began, with several monographs on his work published around that time. Here, we give a small selection of them as well as introduce a few more recent studies. Schnabel 1974, Dahme 1981, and Hübner-Funk 1982 present a systematic interpretation of Simmel’s sociological thought. Christian 1978 analyzes Hegel’s influence on Simmel’s sociological and philosophical thought. Bevers 1985 emphasizes the theoretical unity of Simmel’s work and the centrality of his distinction between form and content as well as the concept of Wechselwirkung. Lichtblau 1997 is a concise introduction to Simmel’s thinking, whereas Köhnke 1996 presents a detailed intellectual biography of Simmel during the formative years of his thinking. Lastly, Fitzi’s monograph reconstructs Simmel’s intellectual relation to Henri Bergson.
Bevers, A. M. 1985. Dynamik der Formen bei Georg Simmel: Ein Studie über die methodische und theoretische Einheit eines Gesamtwerkes. Berlin: Dunker & Humblot.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Tries to reconstruct the methodological and theoretical unity of Simmel’s work. Bevers argues that Simmel’s epistemology, sociology, and life-philosophy conflate in two themes that run throughout his oeuvre: the distinction between form and content and the principle of Wechselwirkung, “reciprocal effect.” Bevers shows how in Simmel’s epistemology the distinction between form and content appears as a logical principle (i.e., embodied in the a priori forms of knowledge); in his sociology as a methodological principle (i.e., forms of Vergesellschaftung, “association”); and, finally, in the philosophy of culture and life as a metaphysical principle (i.e., the opposition of life and form). According to Bevers, the principle of reciprocal effect, in turn, manifests itself in Simmel’s epistemology in the form of epistemological relationism as the relative character of knowledge and truth. In Simmel’s sociology, it figures as his sociological relationism, which stresses the functional character of social reality. Lastly, in his philosophy of culture/life, the principle is manifest in the form of metaphysical relationism, expressed in the dialectical character of life and cultural process.
Find this resource:
Christian, Petra. 1978. Einheit und Zwiespalt: Zum hegelianisierenden Denken in der Philosophie und Soziologie Georg Simmels. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Looks into the influence of Hegel on Simmel’s thought while also documenting the renewed interest in Hegel in Germany during the early 20th century. Christian emphasizes the notions of “life” and Wechselwirkung, “reciprocal effect.” She argues for the interconnectedness of Simmel’s sociology and metaphysics, apparent for instance in how the notion of Wechselwirkung, serving initially as a sociological concept, grows in his work into a broad metaphysical principle that concerns the whole of reality. In the book, Christian also interestingly traces the pre-Simmelian history of the concept of Wechselwirkung, as a path leading from Kant to Hegel and via Schleiermacher and Dilthey eventually to Simmel. What is also fascinating is how she sees the content and form of Simmel’s own thought as one: she argues that both language and thinking are for Simmel something “living,” not systems of meanings and propositions.
Find this resource:
Dahme, Heinz-Jürgen. 1981. Soziologie als Exakte Wissenschaft: Georg Simmels Ansatz und seine Bedeutung in der gegenwärtige Soziologie. I & II Simmel’s Soziologie in Grundriß. Stuttgart: Enke.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Dahme’s comprehensive two-volume book examines, on the one hand, the reception and contemporary relevance of Simmel’s work and, on the other, the foundation that it provides for sociology. As also its title hints, Dahme suggests that in his work Simmel develops a much more systematic conception of sociology than is usually thought: Simmel sought to define and legitimize sociology as an exact science.
Find this resource:
Fitzi, Gregor. 2002. Soziale Erfahrung und Lebensphilosophie: Goerg Simmels Beziehung zu Henri Bergson. Konstanz, Germany: Universitätsverlag Konstanz.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A fascinating and detailed reconstruction of the intellectual relation between Simmel and Henri Bergson, beginning from its prehistory via the more intensive communication phase ever till the conflict caused by war and eventually to the end of their relation in Simmel’s death. It is with an eye on the affinities and differences between Simmel’s life-philosophy and Bergson’s vitalism that Fitzi interprets the relation. Importantly, Fitzi emphasizes the notion of “boundary” (Grenze) as the key to Simmel’s life-philosophy. Unlike for Bergson, for Simmel the impulse for the restless movement of life does not derive from life itself, from pure duration, but from the need to overcome its present form. Fitzi also explicates the mutual relationship between Simmel’s sociology and his life-philosophy by asserting the interconnectedness of social experience and life-experience.
Find this resource:
Hübner-Funk, Sibylle. 1982. Georg Simmels Konzeption von Gesellschaft: Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von Soziologie, Äesthetik und Politik. Cologne, Germany: Pahl-Rugstein.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this concise book, Hübner-Funk sets as her aim to crystallize Simmel’s notion of society from his sociological and philosophical writings. She suggests that Simmel’s worldview is marked by delicate relations between sociology, aesthetics, and politics, and argues that it is only through his theory of society that those relations become perceptible. The author puts special emphasis on the presence and significance of aesthetics in Simmel’s sociology. She argues that, considering that Simmel’s contributions to modern sociology have remarkable potential, their aesthetics components are not outdated but stand in an intimate relationship with the methodology of building sociological theory, especially with the interactionist strand. As somewhat symptomatic of the original date of publication of the book (it originally came out as a sociological diploma work in 1968), the author presents it as ultimately a “critique of ideology,” tracing not only the ties and repercussions of Simmel’s specification of the sociological method but also its practico-political consequences.
Find this resource:
Köhnke, Christian. 1996. Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Köhnke’s detailed and extensive intellectual biography of Simmel covers his studies and academic achievements as well as intellectual development until the mid-1890s. Among the many topics that it takes up are, for instance, the impact of Simmel’s academic teachers’ Völkerspychologie on his thinking, Simmel’s relation to the student movements of his times and the role of his Jewish origin in young Simmel’s self-understanding. The book also gives an interesting interpretation and detailed account of Simmel’s early major work on ethics, Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaften.
Find this resource:
Lichtblau, Klaus. 1997. Georg Simmel. Frankfurt, Germany: Campus Verlag.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is a concise but comprehensive introduction to the whole of Simmel’s oeuvre, starting from his early major sociological writings about social differentiation and ending with his diagnosis of modernity and the fate of individuality in the modern world. While highlighting the rather radical changes in Simmel’s orientation and interests from sociology to aesthetics and life-philosophy of life that took place after the completion of The Philosophy of Money, the author also emphasizes continuity in Simmel’s thinking.
Find this resource:
Schnabel, Peter-Ernst. 1974. Die soziologische Gesamtkonzeption Georg Simmels: Ein wissenschaftshistorische und wissenschaftstheoretische Untersuchung. Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Schnabel seeks a rehabilitation of Simmel as a sociologist engaged with fundamental questions of scientific inquiry. The structure of the book is twofold. In Part I, the author formulates a critique of the history of sociology with special reference to Simmel. Parts II and III present an analysis of Simmel scholarship and its often stereotypical understanding of the history of sociology. By examining the reception of Simmel’s work, Schnabel aspires, on the one hand, to demonstrate the limitations and consequences of an uncritical conception of history and, on the other hand, to give Simmel scholarship a new impetus by transcending these limitations.
Find this resource:
Edited Volumes on Simmel in German
The edited volume Buch des Dankes an Georg Simme by Gassen and Landmann 1958 commemorated Simmel’s 100th anniversary and was an early attempt to revitalize his intellectual heritage. Böhringer and Gründer 1976 positions Simmel’s thinking in between aesthetics and sociology at the turn of the 20th century. Rammstedt 1988 takes up Simmel’s relation to other classical sociologists. Dahme and Rammstedt 1984 is an early contribution to Simmel as a theorist of modernity, inspired by David Frisby’s interpretations that came out in English at the same time. Kintzelé and Schneider 1993 is a relatively rare attempt to highlight various aspects of Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, and Tyrell, et al. 2011 presents a wide range of interpretations of Simmel’s Sociology.
Böhringer, Hannes, and Karlfried Gründer, eds. 1976. Ästhetik und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende. Frankfurt, Germany: Vittorio Klostermann.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The first part of this volume consists of contributions to a seminar held in 1973 in Cologne. In the first presentation included here, Michael Landmann outlines the main features of Simmel’s thinking. Sibylle Hübner-Funk takes up the importance and impact of the aesthetic elements in his sociological thinking. Her essay shows how the works of the greatest artists of the day influenced Simmel’s understanding of life and modernity. Despite the title of the book, only a few of the essays gathered in it deal with the aesthetic dimensions of Simmel’s thinking, but they cover various sociological themes and concepts.
Find this resource:
Dahme, Heinz-Jürgen, and Otthein Rammstedt, eds. 1984. Georg Simmel und die Moderne: Neue Interpetationen und Materialien. Frankfurt, Germany: Surhkamp.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
David Frisby’s long essay “Georg Simmel’s Theorie der Moderne” introduces this interesting collection of essays written by leading (mostly German) experts on Simmel’s thought and writings. Despite being part of the revival of interest in Simmel as a sociologist of modernity, the individual contributions vary thematically. They analyze, for instance, Simmel’s relation to Stefan George and Friedrich Nietzsche, the reception and sometimes even outright neglect of Simmel’s sociology by some classical sociologists, the interpretations of Simmel’s sociology as an aesthetic theory, the impact of aesthetics on his sociological method, and the young Simmel’s interest in his academic teachers’ Völkerpsychologie. There is also Heinz-Jürgen Dahme’s discussion of the relation between sociology and philosophy in Simmel’s self-understanding and self-positioning throughout his academic career, as well as Klaus Lichtblau’s path-breaking study of Simmel’s reception of Nietzsche’s idea of the pathos of distance and the centrality of the idea of the aristocracy of culture (Vornehmheit) in his problematizing of modern individuality under the pressure of monetary relations.
Find this resource:
Gassen, Kurt, and Michael Landmann, eds. 1958. Buch des Dankens an Georg Simmel. Briefe, Erinnerungen, Bibliographie. Zu seinem 100. Geburtstag am 1.März 1958. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The book came out on the 100th anniversary of Simmel’s birth in 1958. It was an early, postwar attempt to revitalize his intellectual heritage. In addition to Simmel’s own short and unfinished autobiography, Michael Landmann’s biography of Simmel, and a (rather incomplete) bibliography, this includes Simmel’s letters to, for instance, Edmund Husserl, Heinrich Rickert, Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as Max and Marianne Weber. These are all, along with many more letters, made available more recently in the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe. The most valuable contents of this book consist of a compilation of memoirs from Simmel’s friends and former students.
Find this resource:
Kintzelé, Jeff, and Peter Schneider, eds. 1993. Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes. Frankfurt, Germany: Anton Hein.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This extensive collection of essays thematically centring on The Philosophy of Money is divided into three parts. The essays included in the first part give a general introduction to Simmel’s sociological writings, his cultural philosophy, and his theory of knowledge. The place of The Philosophy of Money in his oeuvre is discussed as well. Simmel’s theory of value is scrutinized, showing its shortcomings and the relevance of trust in money. There is also discussion of whether Simmel was, in fact, a theoretician of alienation.
Find this resource:
Rammstedt, Otthein, eds. 1988. Simmel und die frühen Soziologen: Nähe und Distanz zu Durkheim, Tönnies und Max Weber. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The contributions to this volume, written by several prominent experts on Simmel, take up different angles the question of Simmel’s relation to the three other giants of sociology: Durkheim, Tönnies, and Max Weber. One of the interesting questions addressed here is how and to what extent the first major works of these classics in sociology resemble each other in their basic questions, methodological approach, and development of concepts. All of these thinkers wrote and published their major contributions almost simultaneously at a time when sociology did not yet have an established institutional disciplinary identity in the academic world. Being primarily a sociologist was for them far from self-evident, and their intellectual activities and ambitions far outstretched the limits of any single academic discipline. Translated as “Simmel and the early sociologists: Proximity and distance to Durkheim, Tönnies and Max Weber.”
Find this resource:
Tyrell, Hartmann, Otthein Rammstedt, and Ingo Meyer, eds. 2011. Georg Simmels grosse “Soziologie”: Eine kritische Sichtung nach hundert Jahren. Bilefeld, Germany: Verlag.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of essays based on papers presented in a seminar dedicated to the centennial of Simmel’s Sociology in 2008. In addition to analyzing special aspects of Simmel’s breakthrough book, such as the impact of quantity on social relations, social competition, senses, and religion, it addresses many important questions concerning the genesis of Simmel’s big monograph on sociology—the constitution and the structure of the work as well as its relation to Simmel’s other works. The volume also highlights some of the core ideas of Simmel’s Sociology as well as his relation to some of his predecessors and contemporaries. The book includes also a bibliographical note on the reception of Simmel’s work in the United States as well as selected recensions of Sociology published shortly after its appearance.
Find this resource:
Monographs on Simmel in English
After a relatively late start, quite a few monographs examining various aspects of Simmel’s sociological and philosophical work have been published in English. Spykman 2004, originally published in 1925, was the first monograph to appear on Simmel’s social theory in English. Weingartner 1960 is the only monograph on Simmel’s philosophy written in English, and Poggi 1993 is the only comprehensive English monograph on Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money. David Frisby’s four influential treatises published within about ten years (1984, 1981, 1992, 1985) re-discovered Simmel as a theorist of modernity, emphasized his sociological impressionism, as well as gave rise to a renewal of interest in his sociological thought in the Anglophone world. Green 1988 presented an original application of literary method to analyzing the specific style of the writings of Simmel and Weber. Jaworski 1997 examines the American reception of Simmel’s work during the last hundred years. Cantó Milà 2005 presents a systematic analysis of Simmel’s sociological theory of value and his relational method. Pyyhtinen 2010 argues for the importance and relevance of Simmel’s analysis of the fundamental questions of social theory concerning the notion of the social. Schemer and Jarry 2013 defends the position of Simmel being a systematic social theorist applying a dialectical mode of thought. Helle 2015, finally, argues for the fruitfulness of Simmel’s method of interpretative sociology in studying the fundamental problems of our time.
Cantó Milà, Natàlia. 2005. A sociological theory of value: Georg Simmel’s sociological relationalism. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag.
DOI: 10.14361/9783839403730Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Presents a systematic analysis of the sociological theory of value developed by Simmel in The Philosophy of Money. Cantó-Milà argues that when one reads the theory of value as the leitmotif of The Philosophy of Money, the book appears much more coherent and systematic than what Simmel’s investigations of money would seem to suggest. She embeds Simmel’s theory of value in his broader conception of and approach to sociology. The author identifies Simmel’s relationalism as the epistemological foundation of his theory of value. This book relates how Simmel understood values not as stable and objective but as products of human relations. It also looks at the particular circumstances, influences, and motivations behind The Philosophy of Money and reconstructs its relational mode of thought.
Find this resource:
Frisby, David. 1981. Sociological impressionism: A reassessment of Georg Simmel’s social theory. London: Heinemann.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
With this work David Frisby, together with his introduction to the English translation of The Philosophy of Money (1978), began his long and highly influential career as a leading Simmel interpreter and mediator of his work to the English-speaking world. As Frisby admits in his preface, the book covers only a limited range of themes in Simmel’s work but these are central in interpreting Simmel’s contribution to sociology and cultural philosophy. Frisby’s main interests lay in interpreting Simmel’s specific and original conception of sociology as a particular perspective on reality. To Simmel, the sociologist is like the modern artist or painter who captures the meaning of social life in its fleeting moments.
Find this resource:
Frisby, David. 1984. Georg Simmel. London: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The best and most comprehensive introduction to Simmel’s sociological thought published in English. After briefly narrating Simmel’s life and the context of his work, Frisby presents the development of Simmel’s ideas about the specific nature of sociology, its differentia specifica compared to the humanities and other disciplines as well as its method. Frisby systematically tackles Simmel’s three main sociological works, On Social Differentiation, The Philosophy of Money, and Sociology, showing both important continuities and disruptions in Simmel’s thinking.
Find this resource:
Frisby, David. 1985. Fragments of modernity: Theories of modernity in the works of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Frisby published several treatises, both in separate articles or as parts of larger works, and in English and German, on Simmel’s theory of modernity. The monograph Fragments of Modernity includes what could be regarded as Frisby’s most comprehensive and developed presentation and interpretation of Simmel as a theorist of modernity (modernity as an eternal present) and of Simmel’s focus on the fragments of social experience that captured a sense of modernity. Besides Simmel, the book also discusses the work of two of Simmel’s followers, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.
Find this resource:
Frisby, David. 1992. Simmel and since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s social theory. London: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is a collection of Firsby’s articles, most of which had been published in journals and reprinted in revised form here. Covers a wide range of topics, but the main focus is on social theory and on the theory of modernity in particular. The book also takes up Simmel’s relation to the sociological analyses of his predecessors and contemporaries Ferdinand Tönnies, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. The last chapter argues for the importance and actuality of Simmel’s analyses of cultural phenomena. It also shows how the 1980s Simmel revival, largely initiated by Frisby, was related to the debates on postmodernity.
Find this resource:
Green, Bryan S. 1988. Literary methods and sociological theory: Case studies of Simmel and Weber. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this highly original work, Green develops and tests the application of literary methods in analyzing the style of writing and rhetorical practice of sociological theorizing. Green uses Simmel’s Philosophy of Money and Sociology as well as Max Weber’s Economy and Society as his main examples. His aim is to demonstrate that textual style is highly relevant to the meaning of a theorist’s work in identifying the text’s strategic commitments to classical genres. Whereas Weber’s style of textual composition, according to Green, corresponds to the literary practices of casuistry, the exemplary value of Simmel’s theorizing is to be found in his dialectical mode of writing. Green’s literary approach to the language of sociological theorizing offers, in his own words, a new basis for assessing the value of sociological work.
Find this resource:
Helle, Horst J. 2015. The social thought of Georg Simmel. London: SAGE.
DOI: 10.4135/9781483387598Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is a short but useful introduction to Simmel’s sociological thinking that explores and emphasizes the potential of his method and concept of interpretative sociology in studying the major questions of our times. Helle’s presentation is guided by three main problems: (1) devising and applying a method for a study of cultural change, (2) exploring the scope of human creativity and freedom in society, and (3) delineating the limits and reasonable restrictions of such freedom. It is sociology’s task to develop new ways of looking at familiar things and problems in a society by analyzing, among other things, the relations between objectified social forms and individual action. After presenting Simmel’s ideas on ethics, religion, private life, women, and marriage, Helle takes up money as exemplifying the most general form of a social relationship and rounds up his concise treatise by discussing Simmel’s ideas about the poor person and about life in general. Helle recommends (and briefly comments on) Simmel’s piece “The Metropolis and Mental Life” as further reading.
Find this resource:
Jaworski, Gary D. 1997. Georg Simmel and the American prospect. New York: State Univ. of New York Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the American reception of Simmel’s work and investigates the significance of Simmel’s ideas for a variety of North American authors, ranging from the Chicago sociologists Albion Small, Robert E. Park, and Everett C. Hughes to Erving Goffman, Talcott Parsons, Kaspar D. Naegle, Robert K. Merton, Lewis E. Coser, and finally postmodernist sociologists Deena Weinstein and Michael Weinstein. The book brings to light several previously undiscovered facets of the American Simmel reception by not merely studying publications by American sociologists for evidence of Simmel’s influence but also by looking at their earlier drafts, correspondence, unpublished research notes and by making use of some interview material, too. Moreover, Jaworski’s analysis of the reception goes far beyond the standard line of approach, as it ties the reception of Simmel’s work to social concerns and to aspirations to transform American society.
Find this resource:
Poggi, Giancarlo. 1993. Money and the modern mind: Georg Simmel’s philosophy of money. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is the only monograph in English on Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. After describing Germany at the end of the 19th century and Simmel’s position in the German academia, Poggi looks closely at The Philosophy of Money. He explains what Simmel understood by economic action and economic value and discusses the central concept of money—its theoretical constitution and historical preconditions. There is also focus on the synthetic part of Simmel’s book, which investigates the social and cultural consequences of money. The author also presents an interesting interpretation of the Hegelian roots of Simmel’s concept of the objective spirit. Poggi’s work stands out as a particularly useful reader’s guide and companion to The Philosophy of Money.
Find this resource:
Pyyhtinen, Olli. 2010. Simmel and “the Social.” Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230289840Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues for Simmel’s relevance for the thought of one of the most fundamental problems of social theory, namely, “What is the social?” Pyyhtinen suggests that Simmel has a lot to offer to our contemporary concerns. Not only did Simmel look at society as something in need of explanation rather than as an explanation, but his understanding of society/the social as relations and processes also resonates with several processualist and relationalist emphases of contemporary social theory. Besides explicating Simmel’s social theory and arguing for its relevance, the book also tries to uncover the philosophical background of Simmel’s sociology. Pyyhtinen maintains that we cannot fully understand Simmel’s social theory without paying attention to his philosophy.
Find this resource:
Schemer, Henry, and David Jarry. 2013. Form and dialectic in Georg Simmel’s sociology: A new interpretation. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137276025Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Schemer and Jarry argue for a view of Simmel as a systematic theorist who had a consistent method of inquiry. The authors suggest that we can identify the method in Simmel’s dialectical mode of thought that is perceptible, on the one hand, in his frequent use of polarities and in the central place that the notion of Wechselwirkung occupies in his thought, on the other. While the unity of Simmel’s work and its roots in the dialectical tradition have also been documented by others, the strength of Schemer and Jarry’s book lies in the thoroughness and accuracy of the scholarship, both on Simmel’s own works and of the secondary literature on Simmel.
Find this resource:
Spykman, Nicholas J. 2004. The social theory of Georg Simmel. London: Transaction.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is the first monograph ever published on Simmel’s social theory in English. Spykman treats Simmel principally as a social philosopher who was interested not so much in conceptual abstractions as in understanding the socio-historical world and its phenomena such as art, money, economic value, morals, aesthetics, and religion. The first part deals with Simmel’s contributions to the methodology of the social sciences in general and of sociology in particular. The second part turns to the practical applications of Simmel’s sociology by focusing on specific forms of association examined by Simmel: superordination and subordination as well as conflict and struggle. The third part examines Simmel’s social metaphysics.
Find this resource:
Weingartner, Rudoph H. 1960. Experience and culture: The philosophy of Georg Simmel. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
To this day, Weingartner’s book is the only monograph on Simmel’s philosophy written in English. Weingartner is mainly interested in the key ideas and internal organization of Simmel’s work. He remarks that the exposition is synthetic in nature, as Simmel himself nowhere defined and reflected on his philosophical position in such explicit terms. The first chapter sets out to reconstruct Simmel’s life-philosophy. The second chapter discusses Simmel’s philosophy of history, and the third presents a detailed discussion of Simmel’s ideas about the nature of philosophy itself.
Find this resource:
Edited Volumes on Simmel in English
Coser 1965 includes commentaries on Simmel’s sociology by several famous classical and latter-day sociologists covering a wide spectrum of topics. Kaern, et al. 1990 covers many important aspects of Simmel’s sociological thinking, including in relation to other sociologists. Frisby 1994 deserves special attention since the volume contains wide-ranging commentaries on Simmel’s work published in English. It also includes Simmel’s English-language writings published during his lifetime.
Coser, Lewis A., ed. 1965. Georg Simmel. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Starts with the editor’s introduction to Simmel’s intellectual career and sociological thinking, which also includes a short appraisal of Simmel’s intellectual influence. The second part of the book contains commentaries on Simmel’s work, starting with Émile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies. The third part of the book presents appraisals of various aspects of Simmel’s work by several well-known sociologists. The topics include, for instance, his sociology of forms, sociological methods, as well as alienation and the tragedy of culture. The last part is devoted to Simmel’s (then current) influence on American sociology and is the most illuminating despite its limited scope.
Find this resource:
Frisby, David, ed. 1994. Georg Simmel: Critical assessments. 1–3 vols. London: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
These volumes collects a number of reviews and articles about Simmel, almost all of which had been previously published in English. The three comprehensive volumes are therefore an essential companion to anyone interested in the reception of Simmel’s sociology in English-speaking academia up until the early 1990s. Many articles made available in these volumes had previously faded into obscurity and are often difficult to find in their original contexts.
Find this resource:
Kaern, Michael, Bernard S. Phillips, and Robert S. Cohen, eds. 1990. Georg Simmel and contemporary sociology. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the explicit aims of this edited volume is to confront the opinion that has been prevalent among later sociologists to this day: that Simmel continues to be an enigma among leading sociological interpreters. Simmel’s sociology is often thought to be full of original ideas but theoretically incoherent, fragmentary, and therefore difficult to discern. Contrary to Durkheim’s works, Simmel’s sociology does not easily conform to empirical applications or, unlike the work of Weber, to historical analyses. The volume consists of several contributions on a wide variety of topics, covering many important and original aspects of Simmel’s sociological thinking relevant to modern sociology. Some chapters take up the relation of Simmel’s thinking to other sociologists (e.g., Parsons) or philosophers (e.g., Schopenhauer).
Find this resource:
Kemple, Thomas, and Pyyhtinen, Olli, eds. 2016. The anthem companion to Georg Simmel. London: Anthem Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The writers included in the volume have each made recent contributions to an emerging new wave of Simmel scholarship. Accordingly, the volume has as its aim to highlight those issues, themes and concepts that concern readers today. It seeks to show how Simmel’s work is relevant, interesting and significant for advancing contemporary discussions and debates. The chapters fall into two main sections, the first addressing general questions that characterize the whole of Simmel’s work, including the tension between subjective versus objective culture, philosophy versus sociology, solidity versus liquidity and proximity versus distance, followed by a transitional chapter on Simmel’s relational view of reality. The second section considers the limits of individual life, and includes chapters that focus on more particular issues, such as the material and immaterial nature of money, the sources of (neo)liberalism in the culture of conflict and competition, the aesthetics of things and the creativity of selfhood.
Find this resource:
Journals and Special Issues
In this section we cover journals and journal special issues devoted to Simmel’s work. While innumerable articles on Simmel’s work as well as translations of his writings have appeared in various journals all over the world, there also exists a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted solely to the work of Simmel, as its title Simmel Studies unambiguously expresses. There are also a number of journal special issues published on Simmel’s work. Many of them have appeared in Theory, Culture & Society. The special issue Featherstone 1991 was the first, and it focused especially on Simmel’s interests in culture, modernity, aesthetics, and individuality. Kemple 2007 broadened the scope of translations of Simmel’s writings, making, for example, Simmel’s essays on metaphysics available for the first time to an Anglophone readership. It was followed by Harrington and Kemple 2012, which includes mostly commentaries by contemporary scholars and gives special emphasis to Simmel’s philosophical or trans-sociological work. There are also two special issues published as tributes to the incredibly important contribution of the late David Frisby to Simmel scholarship, Kemple 2010 and Dodd 2013.
Dodd, Nigel, ed. 2013. Special issue: Georg Simmel and David Frisby. Journal of Classical Sociology 13.1.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This special issue is compiled in honour of the late David Frisby. The articles gathered in it treat not only Simmel but also other thinkers and topics that Frisby was interested in. As Nigel Dodd remarks in his editorial, all of the contributors are somehow connected with Frisby.
Find this resource:
Featherstone, Mike, ed. 1991. Special issue: Georg Simmel. Theory Culture & Society 8.3.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This comprehensive issue contains articles by several prominent Simmel scholars (e.g., David Frisby, Otthein Rammstedt, Klaus Lichtblau, Donald N. Levine, and Birgitta Nedelmann), translations of shorter pieces by Simmel himself, reviews of both Simmel and his critics, as well as a bibliographical note by David Frisby on Simmel’s writings available in English at that time. The translations display Simmel’s omnivorous taste for the analysis of myriad cultural phenomena, from money to the alpine journey and the problem of style and trade exhibitions. The collection also includes a translation of the highly influential obituary of Simmel by Georg Lukács, in which Lukács depicts Simmel as “the most significant and interesting transitional figure in the whole of modern philosophy” (p. 145) and as “the genuine philosopher of Impressionism” (p. 146).
Find this resource:
Harrington, Austin, and Thomas Kemple, eds. 2012. Georg Simmel’s sociological metaphysics: Money, sociality and precarious life. Theory, Culture & Society 29.7–8.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
As the editors note in their introduction, the articles brought together in the collection focus on two intertwined aspects of Simmel’s thought: his metaphysics of the social and his ideas about money economies. So, whereas the 1991 TCS Simmel special issue focused especially on Simmel’s ideas about culture, aesthetics, modernity, and individuality, the 2012 issue brings to light his more philosophical or trans-sociological work. The latest scholarly work showcased in the collection is relatively unanimous in thinking that we cannot settle on depicting Simmel as a sociological flâneur any more than as a bricoleur whose ideas would never add up to a coherent theoretical argument, but Simmel’s writings do make up a systematic corpus of work concerned with fundamental questions of human existence in a world of social turbulence.
Find this resource:
Kemple, Thomas, ed. 2007. Simmel: On aesthetics, ethics and metaphysics. Theory, Culture & Society 24.7–8.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Commemorated the 150th anniversary of Simmel’s birth and the 100th anniversary of the publication of Sociology. The translations presented include the essay “The Philosophy of Landscape,” Simmel’s three essays on Italian cities, “The Social Boundary,” “The Metaphysics of Death,” and “The Problem of Fate.” In his excellent introduction to the volume, the editor Thomas Kemple develops the notion of “allosociality” and outlines a “set of axes of sociability” by drawing on the Simmelian a prioris of association. Regarding the translations included in the special issue, Kemple suggests that they not only extend the corpus of Simmel’s texts available in English but, if they are read through Simmel’s sociology, they may give us a broader and richer understanding of alternative social theory and what it could look like.
Find this resource:
Kemple, Thomas, ed. 2010. David Frisby on Georg Simmel and social theory. Theory, Culture & Society.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In the aftermath of David Frisby’s death (b. 1944–d. 2010), this special e-issue, introduced by Thomas Kemple, pays tribute to Frisby’s lifework by collecting his articles in TCS, his translations of Simmel, other TCS articles he was involved with and a review of his Sociological Impressionism.
Find this resource:
Simmel Studies. 2000–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Published since 1991 (though initially titled Simmel Newsletter up to 1999), this is the central forum for Simmel scholarship. The journal comes out twice a year and publishes articles in German, English, and French (with most of the texts, however, so far in German).
Find this resource:
Works Making Use of Simmel
Simmel has undoubtedly inspired many sociologists and cultural philosophers, both during his lifetime and afterward, up to this day. He is also a generally recognized pioneer in the discipline of sociology. However, unlike in the case of Durkheim and Weber, it is not easy to find works or authors that would have made extensive and systematic use of Simmel’s sociology, social theory, or method; relied on Simmel more or less exclusively; or applied his sociology systematically to answer their own research questions. This can certainly be explained at least partly by his personal writing style. Simmel’s writings do not offer any readymade models that could be easily applied in empirical research. Furthermore, it is not particularly easy to imitate his style of reasoning and writing, either. To the following, we have included only a limited number of books that make explicit use of Simmel’s work and in which Simmel’s ideas play a decisive role. The seminal study Arendt 1951, on the origins of totalitarianism, relied on one of Simmel’s basic ideas about secret societies in interpreting the specific character of the totalitarian political parties. Similarly, Simmel is a key starting point for Coser 1958 when the latter developed his theory of social conflicts. Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money plays a central role in Dodd’s (Dodd 1994; Dodd 2014) construction of a sociology of money. To Gronow 1997, Simmel’s theory of fashion and “sociologization” of the Kantian aesthetics of taste offered important tools in analyzing modern consumption. In Frisby 2001, Simmel plays a crucial role in Frisby’s interpretation of the spatial dynamics of metropolitan modernity. Pietilä 2011 finds in Simmel’s writings the most workable notion of society. And, finally, Helle 2013 argues that we can find in Simmel’s work relevant sociological tools and ideas to guide our attempts at understanding social phenomena.
Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The origins of Totalitarianism. New York: World.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In analyzing the specific character of totalitarian political movements, Russian Stalinism and German Fascism, Hannah Arendt makes explicit use of Simmel’s essay on secret societies. According to Arendt, contrary to other parties, the Russian Communists and German fascists divided the world into a closed circle of inner members and outsiders. The two powers demanded absolute loyalty and subservience from their members to a leader who remained a mystic figure surrounded by a small group of initiated members—who in turn were surrounded by “fellow-travelers.”
Find this resource:
Coser, Lewis. 1958. The functions of social conflict. New York: Free Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Lewis Coser was one of the postwar American sociologists who had a keen interest in Simmel’s sociology. Coser found it useful in questioning some of Talcott Parsons’s sociological functionalism. Coser’s work on social conflicts is a relatively early attempt to apply and develop some of Simmel’s sociological concepts and ideas.
Find this resource:
Dodd, Nigel. 1994. The sociology of money: Economics, reason and contemporary society. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the rare systematic sociological treatises on money. In the spirit of Simmel, it aims at understanding the nature of money—arguably the most important modern institution—as well as demonstrating its far-fetching social consequences.
Find this resource:
Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The social life of money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1515/9781400852048Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Covers a great variety of topics and presents various sociological analyses of the uses of money, its social and cultural conditions as well as its consequences, referring also extensively both to Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money and his other relevant writings. One of the chapters is devoted to Simmel’s—in Dodd’s interpretation utopian—idea of perfect money, which would price commodities differently for different groups of people depending on their relative wealth and capacity to pay.
Find this resource:
Frisby, David. 2001. Cityscapes of modernity: Critical explorations. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shows the remarkable influence of Simmel on David Frisby. On the one hand, Frisby reads Simmel’s theorizing on modernity in reference to the aesthetic idea of modern experience developed by Baudelaire. On the other hand, drawing on The Philosophy of Money, Frisby looks at the modern metropolis as a network woven by the circulation of money. The book consists of seven thematically independent essays, which examine modern cityscapes mostly in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris between 1830 and 1930.
Find this resource:
Gronow, Jukka. 1997. The sociology of taste. London: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
By comparing, among others, Simmel’s work with that of Pierre Bourdieu’s, the book analyses Simmel’s contribution to the sociology of taste and consumption. In his interpretation, Gronow emphasizes the theoretical importance of the aesthetic or play forms of association in Simmel’s sociology.
Find this resource:
Helle, Horst J. 2013. Messages from Georg Simmel. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
As the title of the book suggests, the author encourages us to learn from Simmel’s basic methodological and theoretical approaches, not only for the reasons of understanding the history of sociological ideas but also in order to develop them as tools highly relevant to our 21st-century attempts at understanding social phenomena.
Find this resource:
Kemple, Thomas, and Pyyhtinen, Olli, eds. 2016. The anthem companion to Georg Simmel. London: Anthem Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The writers included in the volume have each made recent contributions to an emerging new wave of Simmel scholarship. Accordingly, the volume has as its aim to highlight those issues, themes and concepts that concern readers today. It seeks to show how Simmel’s work is relevant, interesting and significant for advancing contemporary discussions and debates. The chapters fall into two main sections, the first addressing general questions that characterize the whole of Simmel’s work, including the tension between subjective versus objective culture, philosophy versus sociology, solidity versus liquidity and proximity versus distance, followed by a transitional chapter on Simmel’s relational view of reality. The second section considers the limits of individual life, and includes chapters that focus on more particular issues, such as the material and immaterial nature of money, the sources of (neo)liberalism in the culture of conflict and competition, the aesthetics of things and the creativity of selfhood.
Find this resource:
Pietilä, Kauko. 2011. Reason of sociology: George Simmel and beyond. London: SAGE.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book develops what its author calls “reason of sociology,” in opposition to the reason of state. Pietilä sets as his aim the rehabilitation of the concept of society, and it is from Simmel that he finds the most workable notion of society, stressing the idea of society as association and interaction. While not being a study on Simmel per se, the book also dissects the problems of Simmel’s sociology