George Simmel

By Dr Upasana Borthakur
 George Simmel (1858-
1918)
He was born in Berlin, Germany in a Jewish family.
He lead a marginal life with respect to family and
German academia.
He obtained his PhD degree from the University of
Berlin.
But he failed to secure a permanent position in
Germany in spite of his intellectual capability and
scholarship.
Simmel was a philosopher and sociologist,
influenced by Immanuel Kant, Marx and Weber.
He rejected the earlier existing organicist theories
of Comte and Spencer.
He argued that the basic and generic forms of
interaction should be seen as the subject matter of
the discipline.
 Methodology
• He focused on urban life and he is considered as the father of Urban sociology.
• George Simmel is best known as a micro sociologist.
• He belonged to the conflict school.
• He did small group research, symbolic interactionism, and exchange theory.
• In spite of the similarities between Marx and Simmel in their use of dialectical
approach, there are important differences between them.
• Of greatest importance is the fact that they focused on very different aspects of
the social world and offered very important images of the future of the world.
• Simmel’s sociology was always concerned with relationships especially interaction
(association)
• For Simmel society is “a intricate web of multiple relations between individuals who
are in constant interaction with one another : society is merely the name for a
number of individuals, connected by interactions”.
• Forms of association
• Subordination,
• Superordination,
• Exchange,
• Conflict and sociability
• Superordination and subordination have a reciprocal relationship.
• The leader does not want to determine completely the thoughts and actions of
others. Rather the leader expects the subordinate to react either positively or
negatively.
• All the forms of interaction cannot exist without mutual relationships.
• Even in the most oppressive form of domination, subordinates have at least some
degree of personal freedom.
Sociation
• Simmel introduced the term sociation.
• It is a process that implies the particular patterns and forms in which
human beings relate to each other and interact.
• According to him society is nothing more than all the individuals who
constitute it.
• But he has also draw attention to the fact that people form groups of
different sizes.
• Monad (one person), dyads (two persons) and triads (three persons or
groups with more than three persons), interact differently from each
other.
 Life
• According to Simmel, reality is always changing. Life is the concept that Simmel uses to describe the
changing nature of reality.
• Life takes the form of a process with changing contents.
• Simmel says that life is given concrete form through human creation and activity.
• In fact, Simmel argues that life only comes to know itself through a cycle. Here we can see Simmel’s
dialectical approach. The flux of life and the fixity of social forms exist in relationship to one another.
• For Simmel there is a dynamic or dialectical tension between the individual and society- the
individuals are free and creative spirits, yet are part of the socialization process.
• According to Simmel empirically in real life no society can exist with absolute harmony.
• Conflict is an essential and complementary aspect of consensus or harmony in society.
• He maintains that sociation or human interactions involve contradictory elements like harmony and
conflict, attraction and repulsion, love and hatred and so on.
• He also made a distinction between social appearances and social realities.
Simmel’s views on modernity
• Simmel is seen as investigating modernity primarily in two major
interrelated sites: the city and the money economy.
• The city is where modernity is concentrated or intensified, whereas the
money economy involves the diffusion of modernity.
• Thus for Simmel, modernity consists of city life and the diffusion of
money.
The Metropolis and Mental life
• The Metropolis and Mental Life discusses the individual’s position in the big city urban life and his phycological coping with
its form of existence.
• Human interactions in the metropolis become short and instrumental, lacking the emotional and personal involvement as
that of small communities in rural areas.
• The city life makes man to become rational and instrumental in his social interactions.
• Thus the metropolis mental life are essentially intellectual, not emotional.
• The social attitude of people living in cities can often be designated as one of hesitation or reluctance.
• This is in stark contrast to the familiarity and vibrancy that people from small-towns often greet one another, which is
facilitated by years of recognition and knowledge.
• However, in the city, most personal encounters are fleeting and not worth a significant investment of time or emotion.
Thus a characteristic cold and unfriendly stereotype defines people living in a metropolis.
• This reservation leads to another characteristic of the city, the large degree of personal freedom. As an individual in an
urban setting, one is freed from the kinds of prejudices and boundaries that one might feel in political or religious
communities. This urban freedom is clearly illustrated when juxtaposed to rural life, where an urbanite might feel trapped
or suffocated.
• In the city people are enslaved to time, working under the clock. Everything in the city is measurable, qualitative value is
reduced to quantitative and this yields what Simmel terms as "blasé" – superficiality, greyness, indifference and alienation.
• At the same time Simmel notes that for the individual this creates the “difficulty of asserting his own personality within the
dimensions of metropolitan life”.
Tragedy of culture
• Simmel argues that modern societies allow individuals to express their own unique talents and interests, while at the same time
leading individuals to a tragic form.
• Simmel argues that the tragedy of culture comes about when the objective culture comes to dominate the subjective culture of
the individual.
• Objective culture involves those objects that people produce (artifact, science inventions, technologies and so on) that become
part of culture.
• On the other hand, subjective or individual culture refers to the capacity of the individual to produce, absorb and control the
elements of objective culture.
• In other words, the tragedy of culture occur when the individual’s will and self-development become submissive to the product
of its own creativity.
• The highly specialised individual loses a sense of total culture and loses the ability to control it.
• As objective culture grows, individual culture declines.
• First, the absolute size of objective culture grows. Second, the number of different components of objective culture increases.
And lastly, various elements of objective culture become intertwined in ever more powerful, self-contained worlds that are
increasingly beyond the comprehension of the actors who created them.
• One of the examples of this is that language in its totality has clearly expanded enormously, yet the linguistic abilities of given
individuals seem to be declining.
• Similarly, with the growth of technology and machinery, the abilities of the individual worker and the skills required have
declined dramatically.
 Philosophy of money
• In his book “Philosophy of Money”, Simmel is concerned with money as a symbol.
• People use money as a medium of exchange to achieve their goals.
• Money, Simmel asserted, is the ultimate social tool because it is generalized, people can use it in many
ways to manipulate the environment and obtain their goals.
• Money provides a common yardstick for a quick calculation of values (how much a commodity or service
is worth of)
• For Simmel social exchange involves the following elements
• The desire for a valued object that one does not have
• The possession of the valued object by an identifiable other
• The offer of an object of value to secure from another the valued object
• The acceptance of this offer by the possessor of the valued object
• When money becomes the predominant means for establishing value in social relationships, the
dynamics of social relations are transformed.
• Money displaces other criteria of value such as logic, ethics and aesthetics.
 Consequences of money on social structure
• Money represents the ultimate objective symbolization of social relations, unlike material entities
money has no intrinsic value.
• Money merely represents values and it is used to express the value of one object in relation to
another.
• The use of money enables individuals to make quick calculations of respective values.
• The use of money as liquid and non specific resource allows for much greater continuity in social
relations
• Money also allows exchange between individuals located at great distances
• Money also promotes social solidarity in the sense that it generates trust
• Money increases the power of central authority as it guarantees the worth of money.
• Money releases individuals from constrains of tradition and moral authority.
• Deviance and pathology are more likely in systems where money becomes the prevalent medium of
interaction
 Consequences of money on individual
• Most of the consequences reflect the inherent tension between individual freedom
from constraint, on the one hand and alienation and detachment from social groups, on
the other. Money gives people new choices and options, but it also depersonalizes their
social milieu.
• Individuals in a society that uses money as its principal medium of exchange enjoy
considerably more freedom of choice than is possible in a society that does not use
money.
• Money gives people many options for self expression but also creates a distance
between one’s sense of self and objects of self expression. With money objects are
easily acquired and discarded and hence long term attachments to objects do not
develop.
• The impersonal, rational ties among people are institutionalized in the money form.
• Thus in modern society, money becomes an impersonal or objectified measure of value.