Week 5: Georg Simmel

The work of Georg Simmel has been influential in American sociological theory for many years. The focus of this influence seems to be shifting from micro-sociology to a general sociological theory. Simmel’s microsociology is embedded in a broad dialectical theory that interrelates the cultural and individual levels. This chapter identifies four basic levels of concern in Simmel’s work: psychological, interactional, structural, and institutional, and the ultimate metaphysics of life.

Simmel operated with a dialectical orientation, although it is not as well articulated as that of Karl Marx. The chapter illustrates Simmel’s dialectical concerns in various ways. It deals with the way they are manifested in forms of interaction—specifically, 

fashion. Simmel also was interested in the conflicts between the individual and social structures, but his greatest concern was the conflicts that develop between individual culture and objective culture. He perceived a general process by which objective culture expands and individual culture becomes increasingly impoverished in the face of this expansion. Simmel saw this conflict, in turn, as part of a broader philosophical conflict between more-life and more-than-life.

The bulk of this chapter is devoted to Simmel’s thoughts on each of the four levels of social reality. Although he has many useful assumptions about consciousness, he did comparatively little with them. He had much more to offer on forms of inter-action and types of interactants. In this formal sociology, we see Simmel’s great interest in social geometry, for example, numbers of people. In this context, we examine Simmel’s work on the crucial transition from a dyad to a triad. With the addition of one person, we move from a dyad to a triad and with it the possibility of the development of large-scale structures that can become separate from, and dominant over, individuals. This creates the possibility of conflict and contradiction between the individual and the larger society. In his social geometry, Simmel was also concerned with the issue of distance, as in, for example, his essay on the “stranger,” including “strangeness” in social life. Simmel’s interest in social types is illustrated in a discussion of the poor, and his thoughts on social forms are illustrated in a discussion of domination, that is, superordination and subordination.