It’s a real shame that such a genius who profoundly affected more popular sociologists like Max Weber and Emile Durkheim doesn’t even have a review here.
Simmel is one of the most fascinating thinkers I’ve ever read, taking a neo-Kantian approach to sociological study and the occasional digression into German idealist philosophy. With 24 essays in this collection on a wide variety of subjects, it’s difficult to pinpoint a general idea within the text, but Simmel has four basic presuppositions that editor Donald Levine outlines in his wonderful introduction.
1. Form and Content: The world is made up of innumerable contents constantly in flux that are given meaning and structure through the imposition of forms.
2. Reciprocity: Nothing has a fixed meaning. Objects’ meanings only emerge through interaction with other objects.
3. Distance: The properties and meanings of forms are a function of the relative distances between individuals and other individuals or objects.
4. Dualism: The world is best understood through the conflicts and contrasts between opposed categories.
With these in mind, Simmel tackles subjects like the stranger’s paradox of being both inside and outside the group, how charity creates the concept of “poor people” itself, and how individualism and independence are often directly opposed. Simmel was greatly interested in the individual in society and the idea of being an individual. There are so many things that create who we are: our culture, our interests, that cool trick we can do to make us the life of the party. Yet how do all of these attributes combine to form our personalities, who we are as unique individual human beings? How can we ever be understood if no one could ever know all the factors that play into our individualities? These are the kinds of questions Simmel wants to answer.
Although his prose is challenging and abstract(especially in the essays that aren’t analyses of specific social examples, but more philosophical), it can sometimes be really beautiful. For example, in “Eros, Platonic, and Modern,” he argues how love is something that can’t be understood through mere reason.
“The great themes of Plato’s thought have been infinitely fruitful in the course of intellectual history. But what mankind grown old, differentiated, and sophisticated can no longer support is this: to transform the world in its reality, its love, its meaning, and its spiritual values into a logical structure of abstract concepts and analogous metaphysical essences and to perceive this as the deepest happiness of the spirit; to derive from logical thought those tremors and awesome relations to the ground of things which later times can attain precisely only by rejection of pure thought, through a cleavage between logical structure and that living, feeling existence whose immediacy is caught neither in the Platonic concepts nor in ours, but can only be experienced in its own depths.”
One of the things that hindered him in academia was his individualistic style and choice of subjects that were considered “unacademic,” but these ultimately add tremendously to the text.
The entire collection is incredible and I couldn’t begin to do it justice with this review, but I’d particularly suggest “Exchange,” “The Poor,” “The Stranger,” “Fashion,” and “The Metropolis and Mental Life.”