Person
Georg Simmel
German philosopher and sociologist (1858–1918); known for forms of sociation, the stranger and the metropolis essay; an influence on the Chicago tradition.
Biography
Georg Simmel was born in Berlin in 1858 and spent most of his life in the city. His father was a Jewish businessman who had become a Roman Catholic and his mother was Lutheran; he was baptized a Lutheran. His productive period in sociology lasted little more than a decade; his earliest and latest writings were philosophical. He had a lifelong interest in art, admired Rodin, and received the young Rilke in his home.
His academic career was long obstructed: it took fifteen years before he became a titular professor, and a full chair came only in 1914, at the age of fifty-six, from the University of Strassburg, where he died of cancer in the autumn of 1918. His bibliography lists 31 books, 256 articles and about a hundred translations.
Simmel defined the subject of sociology as interactions and forms of interaction; he saw society not as an organism or substance but as the sum of the reciprocal interactions between individuals. Soziologie (1908) is the main work of this approach, and its excursus on the stranger is much cited. His 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” treats the psychological effects of urban life. With Weber and others he took part in founding the German Sociological Society; in America he became known first through Albion Small’s translations and then through Park and Burgess’s 1921 textbook.
In this course
Appears in Roots of Social Thought in the cards on the two-century summary, the stranger, the metropolis and the organism debate; a bridge to the Chicago tradition in later lessons.
Key works
- Simmel, Georg (1903). Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben. Die Großstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung (Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung zu Dresden, ed. Th. Petermann), 9, 185-206. — The metropolis, nervous life, the blasé attitude and reserve.
- Simmel, Georg (1908). Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Duncker & Humblot. — Forms of sociation; the excursus on the stranger.