Introduction: Georg Simmel’s ‘Sociological Metaphysics’: Money,Sociality,and Precarious Life

‘Sociological Metaphysics’

In a prominent passage from the closing pages of Sociology, Simmel deploys the phrase ‘sociological metaphysics’ to describe what we take to be a mode or style of reflection on trans- or meta-sociological phenomena. In the course of discussing the consequences of philosophical speculation about the unity of society as a totality of the unique qualities of each and every individual, and after commenting sociologically on the intensification of individuality with the extension of social groups, he ventures a speculative statement which he acknowledges is hard to demonstrate scientifically, but which is nevertheless a legitimate and valid problem of ‘sociological metaphysics’:

The more incomparable an individual is, that is, the more someone stands in the order of the whole in a position reserved for that person alone, fillable only by that person’s being, action, and fate, the more is the whole to be comprehended as a unity, as a metaphysical organism, in which every soul is a member that can be exchanged for no other but that nonetheless takes all other souls and their interaction with one another as a presupposition of that individual's own life. (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: 660; 1992 [1908]: 842–3; translation modified)

Although ‘sociological metaphysics’ is not a phrase Simmel deploys frequently or with any specific technical intention, we use it here to denote the striking organizing confluence in his work of sociological investigation and philosophical reflection on ultimate questions of existence. The conjunction of sociology and metaphysics entails both a disciplinary duality of empirical social science and speculative philosophy in Simmel’s work, as well as a corresponding duality of social structure and interaction on the one hand and human and non-human existence on the other. It is this duality that explains how, while Simmel’s late work may appear to leave sociology behind in order to retreat into purely philosophical, metaphysical, and aesthetic matters of contemplation of higher spiritual values, his reflections continue to turn around the themes of social exchange which had been stressed in his early great sociological works on money, social relations, interaction, and differentiation.

In this sense of the intersection of two broadly polar dimensions of inquiry, we understand sociological metaphysics as an idiom of thinking in Simmel’s work encompassing core ideas and basic problems central to the modernist project of critical reflexive knowledge about the social conditions of human existence. It names first of all an insistence that the traditional philosophical field of metaphysics has a sociology, that is, a relative and conditional position within definite historical contexts of social relations and institutions. But second, it also denotes the idea that compelling grounds exist for probing the liminal area at the intersection of experiences that are open to definite empirical scientific observation and to other dimensions of reality that can only be disclosed by other means (see Kemple, 2007). Such a view rejects the positivist precept that rational discourse cannot meaningfully and coherently transgress the limits and boundaries of observable experience, and that talk of such abstract ideas as beauty, freedom, salvation, or God must therefore be removed from the competences of scientific writing and thinking and surrendered to the purview of artists, poets and religious visionaries. ‘Sociological metaphysics’ in this sense remains continuous with the various uses that have been made of the terms ‘philosophical anthropology’ and ‘philosophy of culture’ in German thought of the last eight or nine decades, many of them substantially indebted to Simmel’s legacy (Fischer, 2008).

To be sure, the specific language of philosophy that drives Simmel’s writings from the first two decades of the last century is no longer one we can take for granted today in an age shaped by the ‘linguistic turn’ and by broadly ‘postmodern’ approaches to cultural inquiry and by the rise of the new cognitive and behavioural sciences of the last 40 years or so (cf. Habermas, 1994). Undoubtedly, some work of conceptual translation and reconstruction is required today a near-century after Simmel’s death. But to think of metaphysics as simply an obsolescent paradigm of thought today would be an unnecessary conclusion. Simmel’s and other early 20th-century European thinkers’ existential questions remain impossible to ignore today, even if the tropes mobilized to resolve them in their time can on occasion seem perplexing or alien to us.

A number of texts in this issue of Theory, Culture & Society address this thematic in Simmel’s work. We begin with some comments on a series of essays by Simmel himself that have been translated into English here for the first time. A first set of writings comprises the figurative, allegorical, and aphoristic pieces he contributed to the avant-garde journal Jugend from 1897 to 1907 (see the selections translated in this special section), which also happens to be the decade when he was writing and revising his monumental Philosophy of Money and assembling the components of Sociology. In contrast to his well-crafted books, systematic treatises, and scholarly essays which advance key theoretical arguments while portraying a repertoire of standard social types – the stranger, the city-dweller, the prostitute, the pauper, the miser, and so on – these pieces try out different, often ironic registers of voice. In the brief epigrammatic sketches he published in the journal under the title ‘Momentbilder sub specie aeternitatis’ (literally, ‘Snapshots under the aspect of eternity’), for instance, issues examined in the longer more serious and systematic works are dealt with more playfully and even comically. Judging from the title he gave to his series, Simmel is offering a satirical spin on Spinoza’s wish to view things purely according to their ‘inner necessity and significance, released from the contingency of the here and now’ and dissolved from the ‘relationship between before and after’, as if to provide positive content to the conception of ‘absolute, unified being’ where Spinoza could not, as Simmel suggests elsewhere (Simmel, 1992 [1895]: 96–7; 2010: 11).

Although these literary ‘stills’ of everyday scenes and ordinary encounters were produced in the early days of popular photography, they were not accompanied by any actual snapshots, but rather by stylized designs and graphic drawings characteristic of the Jugendstil movement which celebrated individual creativity against the technological reproducibility of art forms (Frisby, 1981: 101; Rammstedt, 1991; see the examples reproduced in this issue and in TCS 8(3) 1991). Nevertheless, we might consider for a moment the photographic snapshot (Momentbild) reproduced here of Simmel with his wife and friends at a Sunday garden party in Berlin’s Westend in the summer of 1914, presumably taken just before the outbreak of the first World War and around the time Simmel was making the transition to his first permanent position at the University of Strasbourg. OPEN IN VIEWER

As many of his students and acquaintances remember, Simmel had a characteristic way of moving his hands and twisting his body as he spoke, as if gesturing to grasp a moment of creative thought in the course of expressing his own ‘turn toward an idea’ (die Wendung zur Idee), as he would later title a chapter from The View of Life (see also Stewart, 1999). Viewed sub specie aeternitatis, or at least from the vantage point of the personal fates, historical transformations, and political upheavals in the lives of the people depicted here in the years that would immediately follow, this image might suggest to us that not only on the lecture podium or in the published work but also in private, improvised moments of sociable conversation Simmel was grappling with those metaphysical and sociological problems which can first be glimpsed in an instant and in statu nascendi. One could imagine the conversations that Simmel reports overhearing in the comical ‘Snapshots’ called ‘Money Alone Doesn’t Bring Happiness’, ‘Relativity’ and ‘La Duse’, or even the internal dialogue which frames the ironical ‘Beyond Beauty’ (all published in Jugend), to have emerged from just such intimate scenes of friendship and sociability.

Judging from his private correspondence and his writings in Jugend, by the early years of the new century Simmel appears to have been ready to withdraw from sociology altogether. As recent commentators have noted (Tyrell, 2007; Tyrell et al., 2011), one motivation for Simmel in completing the Sociology volume may have been to settle accounts with one aspect of his interests and professional ambitions in order to turn unencumbered to another – to the trans-social validity-claims of art, philosophy and religious thought. It is notable in this regard that neither art nor religion occupy any thematically central position in Sociology, and it may be that around 1905 Simmel began to view art and religion not only as social forms of relationship and interaction – as Vergesellschaftungsformen or soziale Beziehungsformen – but also as forms of consciousness sui generis, as quasi-apriori dimensions of mental life tout court. ‘Life’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ in this sense seem to be beckoning in Simmel’s thinking from this point onward as higher limit-situations for which social science can provide only partial illumination (Harrington, 2011; Krech, 1998).

This train of thought can be seen in a late essay of Simmel’s from 1916 on the theme of ‘The Fragmentary Character of Life’ (translated in this issue), a preliminary study for what would later become the second chapter of The View of Life. Here Simmel conveys a vision of conflict between multiple worlds of value and meaning such as art, religion, and science, including – implicitly – social science. Life, Simmel affirms, is embroiled not only in ‘the world’ but also in different perspectival ‘worlds’, each with different ultimate claims to authority but whose conflictual relations to one another create effects of fragmentation for life. Yet life, Simmel also says, evinces a practical capacity for mediation between fragmented worlds, for insofar as these worlds cannot themselves exist other than as objectivations of the flow of life’s creative energies, they presuppose that life has a wholeness of which they are but parts. Life is thus at one and the same time something fragmentary and whole, both articulated into multiple discrete frames of ultimate relevance and nevertheless seamlessly flowing forward in a process of creative self-reconstitution (Harrington, 2012).

It is this conception of simultaneous fragmentation and ongoing re-elaboration of life that Simmel explicates more fully in The View of Life of 1918, available now in full in English with an appendix of aphorisms and brilliant fragmentary sketches of thoughts from Simmel’s diaries (Simmel, 2010 [1918]). Concluding with two engrossing chapters on death and its meaning for individual life and individual ethical styles of life (to which we turn shortly), Simmel begins here with a meditation on life as a work of intellectual and emotional self-overcoming or ‘transcendence of limits’. Echoing Nietzschean musings about virtues of personal philosophical asceticism, he writes of life finding ‘more-life’ only through ‘more-than-life’, through limits to itself, through form and objectivity as challenges to subjective will (Simmel, 2010 [1918]: 13). Transcendence in this sense describes a way in which any ‘Beyond’ or transcendent condition, such as the religious or aesthetic, is not a place or space or meta-physical domain of some kind but always only an inflection of life’s immanent flow and diversity through time, space, and history, and across natures, cultures, and their associations (see Kantorowicz, 1959 [1923]). Absolute ideas or limit-experiences on this understanding have potentially coherent and important meanings for life but only from a starting-point of this-worldly relativity. Absolutes ab-solve or break off from life and constitute their own independent fragmented ‘worlds’; but they also continuously dis-solve back again into life’s ongoing flux and variety of cultural and historical forms.

As with his essay on ‘The Fragmentary Character of Life’, Simmel’s View of Life resonates in numerous ways with some central concerns of 20th-century thinking about epistemological and axiological pluralism and perspectivism – from, say, William James’s ‘pluriverse’ or Alfred Schütz’s ‘multiple realities’ (Schütz, 1966) to books such as Cornelius Castoriadis’s modernist World in Fragments (1997) or Zygmunt Bauman’s postmodern Life in Fragments (Bauman, 1993) and the last published work of Gilles Deleuze (1997, 2001). His arguments anticipate more recent attempts to revive metaphysics in philosophy and sociology, not all of which acknowledge Simmel as a precursor (Latour, 2005; Harman, 2005; an exception is Lash, 2010: 31–3). As for Deleuze, rather than posit some ancient scholarly doctrine about what exists ‘beyond’ the plane of the physical world, or promote popular ideas about the mystical basis of reality, ‘metaphysics’ for Simmel refers to how life unfolds, intensifies, and effervesces into ‘more life’, ultimately augmenting, overcoming, and transcending itself into ‘more-than-life’.

As all of his major philosophical and exegetical writings indicate, Simmel came to sociology only via an all-encompassing engagement with the German classical humanistic tradition and the legacy of the visions of social and self-formation, or Bildung, from Herder and Goethe to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Robert Button’s essay in this issue shows how the contemporary ‘tragedy of culture’ for Simmel re-performs and transforms ancient Greek motifs of resignation in the face of an immutable destiny (moira) through modern meaning-making practices which strive to make sense of accident, arbitrariness, danger, and chance. In similar connections, Efraim Podoksik’s contribution highlights how Simmel’s famous lecture on the modern metropolis and mental life needs to be set against the background of a classical humanistic interest in the legacies of Roman antiquity, as illustrated by Simmel’s three less well appreciated essays on the Italian cities of Rome, Florence, and Venice. The three cities for Simmel suggest differing images of unity and integration of the human collective creative mind in its urban setting that become obscured or thrown into question under conditions of modern industrialization with its dynamism of ruin and renewal, even as they retain a symbolic validity as trans-historical reference-points for individual self-formation. Analogously, Donald N. Levine pinpoints the continuous presence of Simmel’s engagement with the writings of Kant and Goethe at all stages of his mature intellectual development from the 1890s to his death in 1918. As Levine indicates, on each occasion the great authors stand for Simmel as contrasting yet ultimately complementary progenitors of two rival visions of unity and division in the cosmos and society. Levine’s insight is crucial in showing us how the social sciences and humanities are productively blended in Simmel’s work to articulate the compelling norms of individual personhood that take shape out of life’s energies and emergent forms (see also Levine, 1985; and Levine’s introduction with Daniel Silver to Simmel, 2010).

Shortly after Simmel’s death, in Germany under the Weimar Republic the question of the precise integration of humanistic education and social science took on a heightened and more politicized significance as the governing coalition parties headed by the Social Democrats found themselves confronted with reactionary elements in the German professoriate vehemently opposed to the demystification of long-dominant elite canons of culture. This question would become an especially decisive preoccupation for the young Karl Mannheim, who, in Budapest in the spring of 1918, gave a lecture on Simmel’s thought entitled ‘Soul and Culture’ (translated from the Hungarian in this issue). As David Kettler points out in his commentary on this address, Mannheim here takes up Simmel’s theme of the ‘crisis’ or ‘tragedy’ of culture (Simmel, 1997 [1911]) in a novel way. In Mannheim’s subtly dialectical reading, ‘soul’ is, on the one hand, only a discourse of the age that reflects a romantic yearning for escape into putatively transcendent but essentially illusory orders of being. But ‘soul’ is also, on the other hand, an authentic expression of protest against rationalistic structures of social organization and against reifying categories of perception that close down life’s potential richness of sensuous understanding. As Kettler shows, the Simmelian polarities of idealism and realism here become intertwined reference-points for Mannheim’s diagnosis of the contradictions of European societies over the course of the 1920s (see also Kettler, 1995; Loader and Kettler, 2002).

Money, Sociality, and Precarious Life

In light of the return today of many of the features of degraded social security and democratic breakdown that dominated European history in the inter-war period, Simmel’s work speaks on many levels to the problem of a search for last fundaments of value for human social life – and to the impossibility of fixing these fundaments in any determinate way. In the face of capitalism’s ever accelerating winds of ‘creative destruction’, Simmel’s sense of the need – and elusiveness – of some definite anchoring criterion of collective value in social life becomes more and more urgent. In Simmel’s terms, which resonate with those used today, life consists in self-evidently important qualities and experiences that need to be protected; yet life also turns out to be perpetually under construction, a precarious product of always shifting and often conflicting frames of social transaction (cf. Butler, 2010). The resonant core of this problem, which chimes with Simmel’s reflections in The Philosophy of Money on money-mediated processes of sociation and circulation, is that disputes over value can never be expunged from public discussion about collective ends. Several articles in this issue of Theory, Culture & Society respond to this constellation of issues.

The relevance of this striking commutability in Simmel’s thinking between the flow of life on the one hand and the flux of monetary transactions on the other stands at the forefront of Hans Blumenberg’s brilliant essay on Simmel of 1976, translated into English here for the first time. Best known for a series of dense philosophical monographs on the theory of myth and metaphor and on the concept of the ‘legitimacy of modernity’ in relation to antiquity and religious cognitive tradition, Blumenberg (1985, 1988, 2010) was a close reader of Simmel’s works until his death in 1996. For Blumenberg, the paradox at the heart of Simmel’s corpus consists in arriving at a thematic of Life only via the concept of money. In Blumenberg’s suggestive formulation, money is Simmel’s ‘proto-metaphor’ for Life. The very phenomenon that might seem most opposed to Life and to ‘higher’ ‘spiritual’ values is also the phenomenon that most dynamically unlocks life’s plenitude of creative forms – even as it threatens constantly to destroy this plenitude through effects of reification and objectification. As Blumenberg reads Simmel, Life itself turns out to be pure circulation, sociation, and interactivity, an endless cycle of extensions and intensifications of value emerging through processes of social exchange.

To be sure, any discussion of fluctuation and fluidity as features of contemporary modernity runs a risk of false naturalization. It is important that any age of so-called ‘liquid modernity’, in Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) phrase, be seen in terms of a contingent product of complex yet highly deliberate decision-making processes conducted at elite levels since the 1970s, with the turn toward neoliberal global economic governance policies. What often appears ‘fluid’ in this perspective is in many ways the symptom of something that is the reverse of fluid, namely rigid, doctrinaire and dictatorial. David Graeber’s recent account (2011) reminds us that money is that invention of human civilization that flattens out customary ties of economic reciprocity into rigid monetized debt relations and takes on the veneer of a spurious moral authority in an age of global finance capitalism and IMF-led structural adjustment programmes.

One of the many ironies of the global financial crisis of 2008 in this respect is that the banks and other financial institutions at its centre suddenly found themselves confronted not with too much but with too little ‘liquidity’. The dynamic of liquefaction propelling the banks’ hegemonic financialization of neoliberal economies – the melting of ‘all that is solid into air’ – now found itself faced with blockage and petrification. The result has been that ‘liquid modernity’ has come to look more and more like an automobile running out of gas and spluttering to a halt. In this regard, Simmel’s motifs of the flow and elan of modern life need to be cross-checked with themes from Marx and Weber concerning political economy and state power. Where for Simmel, and for the multifaceted artistic and literary avant-garde movements of his day, vitalistic philosophical vocabularies once stood as forces of expressive protest against the deadening hand of the capitalist market and techno-industrial civilization, today these same vocabularies are deployed to reinvigorate the ‘creative’ capitalist economy. Lebensphilosophie, having once been an intellectual sub-culture of outsiders and romantic anti-capitalists, becomes entrenched at the frontier of the contemporary entrepreneurial culture (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Lash, 2010).

It is partly this situation that Isabelle Darmon and Carlos Frade address in their account of the scope of Simmel’s vision of reflective subjectivity for purposes of anti-capitalist critique today. On one level, it is clear that the premium Simmel places on self-distance in multiple arenas of social form renders problematic any simple appeal to a truer self that needs to be liberated from inauthentic states of being under capitalism. But as Darmon and Frade emphasize, Simmel’s project cannot ultimately rest content with an ethos of lives led in diffuse fragments and masks. Driving Simmel’s interest in mystic and religious thought is a passionate search for the prospect of ontological unity across multiplicity, where diverse lived experiences can be expressed through shared commitments to life-enhancing social transformation, including emancipatory political struggle. Nigel Dodd’s essay takes up some of these questions by examining Simmel’s insight into the absence of ‘conceptually correct money’ in capitalist economies, that is, the lack of a stable, neutral, and balanced standard of value. The inevitable disproportion between value and reality can also serve as a critical ideal for assessing the shortcomings of liberal and socialist schemes of ‘labour money’ and ‘just pricing’, as Simmel does in The Philosophy of Money, along with countless projects devised since then for micro-financing, local currencies, time-dollars, time-to-time credit, mutual financing, and so on. As Dodd argues, rather than presenting ‘alternatives’ to the capitalist money economy, these utopian schemes are just as likely to expose and entrench its fundamental logic.

Further aspects of debates about globalization over the past 20 years have revolved around the resurgence of regional, ethnic, and religious identity politics and movements that react, sometimes violently, to experiences of eroded social solidarity and security. It is useful here to recall Simmel’s three famous ‘sociological aprioris’, from the canonical ‘Excursus on the Problem: How is Society Possible?’ inserted into the opening chapter of Sociology, which examine the ontological unity of social life despite the drift toward fragmentation (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: 40–52; see Kemple, 2007). Simmel’s first apriori, on the dynamics of typification versus singularization, informs Gregor Fitzi’s contribution to this issue, which proposes a novel way of thinking about the politics of social solidarity in an age of flows of capital and people over national boundaries. As Fitzi suggests, for all the talk today of the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ in mainstream political discourse, structures and practices of social integration in complex interdependent global societies have in many ways ceased to presuppose definite substantive values or norms as preconditions for consensus building. In this sense they have become, in Fitzi’s phrase, ‘post-normative’ or ‘trans-normative’.

In a similar way, Simmel’s second apriori on the extremes of inclusion and exclusion offers a perspective on the contradiction within the neoliberal project of capital accumulation and mobility: between the call for open, transparent, corruption-free communication, on the one hand, and the apparatuses of surveillance, security, and secrecy, on the other. Charles Barbour’s contribution to this issue examines how Simmel addresses these aporias of secrecy and mendacity in both collective and personal terms, in a way that implies that the impossibility of society may be ultimately constitutive of its possibility. Like Simmel’s curious poem ‘Only a Bridge’ and the piece, conceived as narrative fable, titled ‘The Maker of Lies’ (which Barbour discusses in some detail), the social relation and its pitfalls must be believed in and enacted rather than simply declared or imagined. Both Barbour’s and Fitzi’s essays also suggest the relevance of Simmel’s third apriori, on the tension between the force of external necessity and the freedom of inner purpose, to contemporary conditions. Following Simmel, they draw our attention to the reflexive process by which social relations are made possible as participants in a collective become conscious of and actively synthesize a social unity which does not wait for the sociologist and ‘needs no spectator’ (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: 41). Simmel assumes the dual experiential standpoint of the engaged observer and objective participant (or ‘stranger’) who is marked off simultaneously as a part of and apart from intersecting social circles, both inside the social whole as a subject of rights and outside as an object of obligatory concern.

In all these connections, Simmel’s focus on individuality and individualization is relevant to current thinking about networked sociality and the decline of conventional concepts of the ‘social group’ predominant in early post-war sociology. As Olli Pyythinen explores in this issue, in the third chapter of The View of Life Simmel unfolds a vision of individual self-identities that evolve through narrative relations to death – a vision strikingly redolent of Martin Heidegger’s famous conception of ‘being-toward-death’ in Being and Time, and indeed an explicit source of inspiration for the Black Forest philosopher in his early career, as first documented by Michael Theunissen (1991). Pyyhtinen considers this vision of individual selfhood from a sociological point of view as it emerges in Simmel’s later life-philosophical writings, overlaying the rich spectrum of contrasts he draws in his earlier works between the ‘quantitative’ expansion of individuality on the one hand and its ‘qualitative’ intensification on the other, or between 18th-century egalitarian-mechanistic views on the one side and 19th-century expressive-organic outlooks on the other (Simmel, 1950 [1917]). Simmel’s preoccupation in his last years with a third proto-existentialist conception of selfhood acutely raises the question of how an individual is to find a sense of inner autotelic self-realization, even and especially in a lifeworld seemingly marked by thickening webs of relations to the fragments, faces, or functions of other persons. Neither a retreat back into 19th-century organic romantic outlooks on the one hand, nor an appeal to Heidegger’s appeal to ‘authentic Dasein’ over against an anonymous mass of ‘the They’ (das Man) on the other hand, seem defensible options in this perspective.

In the last chapter of The View of Life Simmel formulates his concept of ‘the individual law’ (das individuelle Gesetz), understood as a search for personal ethical self-justification without recourse to ready-made general moral precepts. Here we find a broadly Nietzschean conception of the importance of generalizable moral norms in modern times that individuals can affirm for themselves as sovereign personalities. In this picture, Kant’s categorical imperative – and by extension all conventional Judaeo-Christian moral doctrines – fail to enable this quest for personal ethical self-expression. As Daniel Silver and Monica Lee consider in their contribution to this issue, Simmel’s chapter on individual law leaves readers asking themselves how these thoughts relate to Simmel’s work from ten years previously on social structures and forms of sociation. Silver and Lee attempt a response by showing how The View of Life marks the final stage in Simmel’s shift away from the conventional Kantian sociology of morality that underlies his early writings from the 1890s, and that in large part continues in the work of Durkheim. Both The View of Life and Sociology show Simmel in the process of thinking through how the ethically mandated conduct of the individual need not concur or coincide with the generalizable morality of the collective – of ‘society’, understood in Durkheim’s strong Kantian sense. Simmel’s work in this regard shines light on recent debates in philosophy over contextualist ethical worldviews (see, for example, Williams, 1985), and in sociology over the problem of legislative moral codes or frameworks (see, for example, Bauman, 1992). It also provides a source for network analyses of the complex shifting character of dyadic and triadic relations, and more generally of the quantitative conditioning and objective conditions of modern social life. Like the naturalistic performances of ‘La Duse’, the famous Italian actress celebrated in one of Simmel’s ‘Snapshots’ (translated here), the ethical principle of action for the modern individual can be expressed as a kind of stage direction or inner imperative, namely, that ‘the essence of the soul is movement.’

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Simmel was fortunately mistaken in believing that he would leave no appreciable intellectual legacy, or that his ideas would not end up being acknowledged as a significant source for later thinkers. ‘I know’, he wrote, in an oft-cited journal entry, ‘that I shall die without spiritual heirs (and this is good). The estate I leave is like cash distributed among many heirs, each of whom puts his share to use in some trade that is compatible with his nature but which can no longer be recognized as coming from that estate’ (Simmel, 2010: 160; translation modified).

Simmel’s path-breaking diagnoses of the crises of European civilization at the beginning of the last century offer ‘bridges and doors’ to an understanding of the conditions of flux, contingency, and precariousness that mark the ‘fragmentary character of life’ in the early 21st century. His manifold analyses of forms of sociation and individualization offer rich resources for understanding cultures of individuality and their relation to systemic social logics today. The multi-disciplinary focus of the articles brought together here highlights Simmel’s distinctive understanding of modernity not just in terms of a new aesthetic style or popular fashion, but also as a mode of inner experience, sense perception, and knowledge. What emerges is a challenging image of modernity defined by the precarious, painful and perplexing aspects of contemporary existence. Not only city streets, fashions, mealtimes, jewellery and séances but also wars, revolutions and stock market crashes – all these things confront us with tasks of ‘finding in each of life’s details the totality of its meaning’, as Simmel says in his ‘Preface’ to The Philosophy of Money (1978 [1900/1907]: 55). At issue are ‘exemplary instances of modernity’ (Frisby, 1985b) that suggest synecdochal glimpses of the whole through its parts.

Thanks now to the publication of complete English translations of Simmel’s three masterworks – The Philosophy of Money of 1900/1907, Sociology of 1908, and The View of Life of 1918 – not to mention the many shorter pieces which present us with new surprises, we can now revise and refine our understanding of Simmel as a philosophical relativist or a post-modernist. As the contributions to this collection suggest, it is impossible to settle on a portrait of Simmel as a philosophical flâneur leisurely strolling through the ruins of the modern metropolis, or of a sociological bricoleur tinkering with the debris of the money economy to project merely a miscellaneous collection of postmodern perspectives. It would be misleading to conclude that Simmel’s fleeting snapshots of ordinary experience are not organized in a methodical way, or that such fragmentary impressions of modern life never add up to a coherent theoretical argument. Despite the impressionistic presentation of the eclectic topics which make up the ten chapters of Sociology, for instance, and the bewildering array of issues noted by Simmel in his index (which is unfortunately omitted from the English translation; see Simmel, 1992 [1908]: 865–75; Tyrell et al., 2011: 395–406), Simmel’s stated objective is to establish sociology’s ‘position in the system of the sciences’ and the legitimacy of its ‘cognitive purposes and methods’, as he notes in his ‘Foreword’ (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: ix). Beneath its scintillating surface, Simmel’s systematic corpus of works provides us with a sustained insight into the preconditions for a fundamental interrogation of the bases of value and meaning in contemporary capitalist societies. It is these systematic as well as essayistic, allegorical and aesthetic contours of Simmel’s style of writing and thinking that this special section seeks to illuminate.