Book Review: Kauko Pietilä,Reason of Sociology: George Simmel and Beyond

Though it refers to Simmel as ‘George’ in its title, readers should not judge this book by its cover. Kauko Pietilä provides a clear, sensitive, and critically sympathetic account of Simmel’s relational conception of society. He finds in that conception possibilities, only partially tapped by Simmel himself, for reenergizing sociology as an ethical practice. I found this book stimulating and challenging and I expect others would as well. It could be assigned in contemporary theory courses for advanced undergraduates and graduate students and would be of interest not only to Simmel scholars and sociological theorists but also to social thinkers exploring potential normative missions for their work.

Pietilä’s argument has three stages. He

For Pietilä, sociology has lost hold of its core concept, ‘society’. Historical change, Pietilä suggests, accounts for part of the loss: globalization weakens self-contained bounded entities; the decline of workers’ movements weakens interests presumably identified with society as a whole. But there are conceptual sources as well. The deepest is that sociology’s basic concept of society has been not ‘societal’ but instead ‘communal’. As ‘community’, society is based on institutionalized cultural values that regulate interactions; to defend ‘society’ is thus to defend currently institutionalized values in a backwards-looking way or to look for models of integrated communities in the past. To the extent that few sociologists are willing to make this seeming traditionalism the core of the discipline as such, ‘society’ seems to have been lost, and with it, an ethical mission for sociology. Retreat to descriptive or highly local, individualistic, and specialized work with little normative purchase is the result.

In stressing interaction and association rather than common values, Simmel’s sociology represents an alternative ‘societal’ conception of society. Interactions are not only empirical material controlled and regulated by higher-order values that make them ‘society’. Rather, society consists in interactions, which come in various degrees and forms.

Building on this familiar Simmelian claim, Pietilä’s more original contribution is to develop its normative consequences. Simmel’s essay on ‘sociability’ provides key inspiration. There Simmel makes it clear that people can interact for the sake of interaction itself, meaning that society itself is an ethical practice rather than a set of shared mental representations. Though Simmel confined this practice to small sociable gatherings typically among individuals with similar social status, Pietilä suggests this was a mistake with dire consequences for Simmel himself and sociology in general. Sociology missed an opportunity to investigate and make explicit how (and how well) society is practiced on larger scales. Simmel lost theoretical resources for practicing sociology ethically, falling into communalist-nationalist declarations of his bedrock love for Germany as a set of common values.

The last section on ‘applications’ works toward a solution. It elaborates the theoretical outlines of how money, the mass media, and the state are sustained by experts in practicing society. Pietilä’s societal sociology studies intermediaries like bankers, journalists, and political officials, highlighting how they do or do not facilitate large-scale societal interaction. The normative task of sociology then consists in making these operations visible and articulating how they could be more reciprocal. This would make Simmel’s ‘ideal sociological community’ from ‘sociability’ the normative model for society at large.

Some critical comments. First, Pietilä’s narrative of how sociology lost its core will likely be unpersuasive to those, like myself, for whom Simmel and the pragmatists have always counted as classics. Second, Pietilä neglects authors and literatures that might have enhanced or challenged some of his claims. He discusses Parsons without mentioning the ‘generalized symbolic media of interchange’, which are meant to capture something very similar to what Pietilä is after with his discussions of money, the mass media, and the state. And he barely mentions the voluminous work in relational and network sociology. This research has now for decades sought to map large organizations as interaction networks, developing sophisticated language (‘centrality’, ‘betweenness’, ‘structural holes’, etc.) and methods for investigating how society happens. Third, perhaps owing to this neglect, Pietilä fails to contrast his admittedly sketchy account of how small groups develop into big ones with alternatives. In Social Structures, for instance, John Levi Martin (2011) argues that the movement from small to big is theoretically and empirically most likely to occur and last not through extensions of reciprocal relations (as Pietilä would like) but through asymmetric patron-client and command relations, with the state and the military being the prime examples.

Similarly, one might question Pietilä’s near identification of ethical interaction with the mutual reciprocity characteristic of sociability. Simmel himself was sensitive to ethical aspects of various social forms. For instance, relationships of super/sub-ordination and relationships of conflict also have ethical imperatives. Rather than tie ethics to one form of interaction, we might instead seek to develop techniques for revealing general ethical dimensions applicable to all forms. This, it seems to me, would be a more Simmelian extension of Simmel’s ideas.