Abstract
I need no excuse to dedicate this review to the late David Frisby (1944–2010), who played a major role in translating the work of Georg Simmel and interpreting his contribution to the sociology of modernity. Although I received a basic training in sociological theory as an undergraduate at the University of Leeds in the early 1960s, I only became aware of the real importance of Simmel in the 1970s as a consequence of reading The Philosophy of Money (1978), which had been translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. While classical sociologists are frequently criticized in an age of globalization for equating ‘society’ with ‘national society’ or even ‘nation-state’, I often return to Simmel’s account of money as the perfect refutation of this naïve claim. Although I completed my doctoral thesis in the sociology of religion, it was not until much later in my career that I began to take notice of Simmel’s Essays on Religion (1997), and it was later still that I began to relish such gems as ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’ and ‘Space and the Spatial Ordering of Society’. In short, through most of my academic career, I had read Simmel’s work in the wrong order.
This splendid translation of Soziologie: Untersuchungen uber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung in two handsome (if expensive) volumes allows us to read Simmel’s account of what sociology actually is (namely an inquiry into the construction of social forms in terms of their quantity, spatial distribution and structures) in the correct order starting with ‘The Problem of Sociology’ and then moving through a definite sequence through issues about ‘domination and subordination’, ‘conflict’, ‘the intersection of social circles’, and so on, to the concluding discussion of ‘The Expansion of the Group and the Development of Individuality’.
These essays were first published in 1908, but their development had extended over some fifteen years, starting with ‘The Problem of Sociology’ in 1894. Philosophie des Geldes had appeared in 1900 and Die Religion was published in 1906; the enlarged edition followed in 1912. Although Simmel was the author of over twenty monographs and some three hundred essays, Frisby in his entry on ‘Georg Simmel’ in The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006: 552) described Soziologie simply as ‘his major work’. Why is that? One answer is that, rather like Émile Durkheim in his account of the epistemological foundations of social facts, Simmel in these essays laid out the principal justification for sociology as a separate academic discipline and at the same time spelt out the specific characteristics of the social.
The fundamental question of philosophy for Kant was: how is nature possible? In Simmel’s Kantian turn, the fundamental question of sociology is: how is society possible? Through the notion of social forms and social interaction, Simmel sought to overcome the division between scientific positivism and psychologism. For Simmel, social forms were not (to quote Durkheim) external and autonomous social facts, but simply the conditions for social action with others. The idea of society covers two distinct meanings. First there is the
… complex of interacting individuals, the socially formed human matter, as that constitutes the entire historical reality. Then, however, ‘society’ is also the sum of individual forms of relationship by which individuals are able to become a society in the first sense.
Commenting on Simmel’s approach to the social, Frisby observed that ‘Simmel explores ideal forms of social interaction in sociability and in exchange relations. Second Simmel, sees society as grounded in the experience and knowledge of its participants thus anticipating a phenomenology of society and a sociology of knowledge’ (2006:552).
‘A Note on the Translation’ in Volume 1 is particularly helpful in explaining the neologism employed by Simmel as the cornerstone of the work, namely the idea of Vergesellschaftung. This concept has been in the past unhelpfully translated as ‘socialization’ and by Kurt Wolff (1950) as ‘sociation’, but these to an English ear are not entirely satisfactory. In Simmel’s actual usage it sometimes refers simply to social interaction and at other times to the creation of social entities. To reflect this difference, the translators have used both ‘social interaction’ and ‘creating society’. The important point in this discussion, however, is that the social for Simmel always involved both forms and processes rather than a reification of the social as society.
In attempting to describe this relatively new science of society, Simmel made an interesting analogy between sociology and geometry, in which the latter ‘considers the form through which matter becomes empirical bodies at all’ (Vol. 1, p. 27). However, sociological forms refer to a ‘relatively small range of phenomena’ (Vol. 1, 28). Thus the forms – such as domination and subordination – have to be studied in their ‘individual types’. We can then read the subsequent essays in this collection on conflict, secrecy, and so forth, as investigations through specific examples of this social geometry. These essays therefore offer both the most appropriate introduction to Simmel and the most systematic account of sociology as a whole.
But what do they amount to? The principal theme of David Frisby’s interpretation of Simmelian sociology was that it had perfectly captured the fleeting and fragmented nature of modernity in which the individual is bombarded by signs and commodities. As a result the individual develops a blasé attitude towards urbanism in order to cope with the overwhelming abundance of experiences in the modern city. Indifference and apathy protect us against the welter of impressions and encounters. Consequently Simmel’s account of ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1950) has become a classic of early sociology. For many social theorists, the rise of the city, the never-ending flux of modernity and the evolution of association and the erosion of community created both a melancholic interpretation of the present and a nostalgic view of the past. This pessimistic trajectory of European society coloured much of the world-view of Max Weber in the metaphor of the iron cage. Critical theorists of modernity, especially Theodor Adorno writing on American society, were equally negative in their appraisal of mass society and the culture industry. Simmel’s work has a critical edge in perceiving the tragic nature of the tensions between form and content in modernity. He followed the mood of his age in ‘The Conflict of Modern Culture’ in recognizing that ‘[l]ife can enter reality only in the form of its counterimage – that is, only as form’ (Simmel, 1997: 24, original emphasis).
However, Simmel’s work also represented a new departure, because his cultural sociology opened up an innovative inquiry into consumption, circulation, money and aesthetics. Simmel’s analysis of money suggests that he saw social change as offering creative opportunities for individuals, and hence social change was never simply the inexorable march of alienation or standardization. For example in ‘The Expansion of the Group’, Simmel observes:
Money is the bond within the economy that sets the maximum expansion of the economic group into a relationship with the maximum differentiation of its members on the side of freedom and responsibility as well as on that of the qualitative division-of-labor differentiation; or more correctly, money develops the smaller, more closed, more homogeneous groups of the natural economy into a different one whose uniform character divides into the two aspects of expansion and individualization.
To this example from the circulation of money, we can add the sociological account of group boundaries in relation to rights and duties that runs throughout these essays, illustrating the point that for Simmel the external forms of interaction always open up conditions of possibility for individuals. Society therefore is never an objective determination but is a complex assembly of social interactions. As a result, Simmel’s work retains a remarkable freshness as well as a relevance to modern sociology. For example, there has been much discussion in contemporary social theory of cosmopolitanism. Simmel ties this issue to the question of social circles and the expansion of the group when he writes that
… the individualism of the stoics thus has cosmopolitanism as its complement; the breakup of the narrower social group, favored no less in that epoch by the political relationships than by a theoretical consideration, shifted the central focus of ethical interest on the one hand to the individual and on the other hand to the widest circle to which each belongs as a human individual.
Simmel’s vision of the rise of modernity – through these essays on the stranger, the city, the poor and the changing social roles of women, the rise of the money market, and so forth – continues to dazzle, making these essays some of the most rewarding in the history of the social sciences. Obviously David Frisby was dazzled by Simmel’s sociology of modernity, recognizing in these essays not only a foundation for sociology as such, but also an anticipation of the post-modern culture of the present era.