Weber,Simmel,and the Sociology of Culture

Max Weber and Georg Simmel began their long and important association not later than the mid-1890s. Both emerged from the upper middle class intellectual life of Berlin, but with different starting points: Protestant political and moralistic culture for Weber; the Jewish experience and the new aesthetic culture of modernism for Simmel. Despite such a contrast, Weber and Simmel were drawn together essentially because of a shared interest in problems of modern culture. The historical evidence shows that this interest developed around an assessment of Nietzsche's significance and a critique of ‘psychologism’. The German Sociological Society both helped to establish in 1909 then became a notable, if brief, episode in the attempt to clarify the tasks of sociology as a ‘science of culture’. Their relationship (and Marianne Weber's) to the debate over the prospects for a unique ‘female culture’ illustrates a neglected aspect of the cultural problem. Notwithstanding their different sociologies, Weber and Simmel can be seen as raising a similar question about the ‘fate’ of our culture, and it is this question that continues to make their work significant.