RICHARD WHATMORE SIMMEL, GEORG (1858–1918)

Georg Simmel’s reputation has long suffered by being under the shadow of WEBER. Certainly one cannot find a rigorous, systematic sociology in Simmel’s work, as one can in Weber’s. Yet what is so striking about Simmel is precisely his lack of system, his eclectic range of interests, and wide-ranging subjects of research. From an early period

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(1890–1908), whose high point was the publication of the Philosophie des Geldes (Philosophy of Money), in 1900, Simmel devoted himself to trying to establish sociology as an independent discipline. But he devoted just as much effort to philosophical studies (Kant (1904), Die Probleme der Geschichts-philosophie (Problems of the Philosophy of History) (1892), Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (1907)) and to studies of art and aesthetics (Rembrandt [1916]), metaphysics (Lebensanschauung [Philosophy of Life, 1918]) and contemporary civilization, including numerous articles on the position of women, sexuality, religion, the city, aristocracy, friendship and love, marriage, pessimism and his famous piece on ‘The Stranger’.

In his attempt to promote sociology, stated most clearly in his article ‘The Problem of Sociology’ (Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, vol. 6, 1895), Simmel did not set out to define ‘society’. Rather than hypostatize society, Simmel insisted that society was no more than the interactions or reciprocal effects (Wechselwirkungeri) and ‘essential interrelatedness’ (Wesenszusammenge-hörigkeit) that comprise it. Since society is no more than the sum total of reciprocal relations, all areas of human interaction come into Simmel’s purview, as examples of what he terms ‘sociation’ (Vergesellschaftung). For Simmel, sociology must study not society as a totality, must not concern itself with the relation between the parts and the whole, since this notion of ‘the whole’ already presupposes the thing that is to be understood; rather, sociology must seek to comprehend the various forms of ‘sociation’, and thus understand society as a form of becoming, as experience and as never-completed aesthetic object.

The clearest example of this approach is provided by Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, in which the necessary inter-relatedness of the mature money economy and the cosmopolitan, intellectual world of the metropolis is shown to be the focal point of modernity. Simmel was born in the heart of Berlin, and his sociology, with its aestheticization of reality, its relativism and stress on the fragmentary, chaotic and discontinuous experience of modernity, was largely a description of that city; as one commentator put it in 1901, the Philosophy of Money ‘could only be written in these times and in Berlin’. Like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer (the latter a student of Simmel’s), Simmel captured the alienating, transitory feel of the modern city, but insisted also on the excitement gained through ‘the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions’ and the ‘heightened awareness and predominance of intelligence’ that underpins metropolitan life. Like BERGSON, Simmel saw life as a creative energy, and nowhere is this more clear than in his description of the modern city.

Although Simmel, as a result of anti-Semitism, was not promoted to a professorship until 1914—and then in Strasburg rather than Berlin—his lectures were enormously popular. Despite the curmudgeonly attitude of the Prussian authorities, he occupied a stellar place in Berlin’s intellectual life and, until the watershed of the Great War, was at the forefront of the analysis of metropolitan modernity. His strength as a philosopher lies precisely in his rejection of system and his wide-ranging and engaging illustrations of what he meant by sociation. As one of his favourite students, George Lukács, put it, Simmel was ‘the true philosopher of impressionism’, ‘a philosophical Monet’.

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RICHARD WHATMORE SIMMEL, GEORG (1858–1918)