Georg Simmel was born in Berlin in 1858.
His father ran a successful chocolate factory, but died when Georg was 16, leaving a considerable inheritance,
making it easier for him to pursue his studies in philosophy and history.
He taught philosophy, psychology and sociology at the University of Berlin, and was close to Max Weber.
Together with Weber and Ferdinance Toenies, was a co-founder of the German Society for Sociology.
He was always an outsider to German academic circles, partly because he wrote for a broader general public,
in magazines and newspapers, as well as for other academics in journal articles and books.
Simmel drew on Weber’s concern with meaning and interaction, but placed it more centrally in his analyses.
If you look at other textbooks and other accounts of the classical theorists in sociology, they tend to talk mostly about Marx, Durkheim and Weber,
leaving Simmel out.
By including Simmel, I’m trying to say something about how important his work is to complement the other three.
Although you get some discussion of social interaction in Weber,
you get a lot more of it in Simmel, who pursued that line of argument in a much more interesting way.
He’s often presented as a bit lightweight, talking about less serious topics like fashion or love,
and that’s why he’s tended to be excluded from the pantheon of classical theorists that everyone has to know.
But my own view is that a student of sociology does need to become as familiar with Simmel as with Marx, Durkheim and Weber.
Students also tend to like his work, often more than that of the other three.
Simmel pushed the argument about interaction to the point where he was critical of concepts like social structure and social system.
He argued that there is no such thing as a ‘society’, there are only people interacting with each other.
He believed that one has to look at the fabric of the way people connect up with other, if one is to understand what ‘the social’ is all about.
Simmel wasn’t very keen on using concepts like ‘society’ as a driving concept in sociological analysis.
He argued that you have to look as society not as a structure or system,
but as a web of interactions between people.
If you were to visualize it, it'd look a bit like this:
Social forms – to use the term that Simmel was more attracted to - don’t exist as if they were things that stay the same over time,
they have to be constantly re-made by human beings in their interactions with each other.
Durkheim’s conception of the sociological imagination is to emphasise the ways in which society and social institutions exist
prior to any individual’s entry to the world, and how individuals have to adapt to society, and not the other way around.
Simmel responded to that by saying, ‘well, that’s only partially true.
To some extent we have to constantly re-make those social institutions,
and the fact that it generally happens more or less automatically without us thinking about it consciously, doesn’t mean that it’s not the case.
The examples that get used to demonstrate that are points of quite dramatic social and political change.
One could refer to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as an example of how a social system, a society,
a political and economic system that appeared to be solidly entrenched in the world, having a firm existence since the end of the Second World War
in 1945, with no likelihood that it would change to any significant degree, suddenly seemed to dissolve.
A whole society, an entire state, appeared to disappear before our eyes.
That example, the case study of the disappearance of the German Democratic Republic in 1989,
is an example of what Simmel was trying to say: that without constant re-production of the social order, without the active participation of
people in all the different aspects of the way a society is organised, it doesn’t continue, it can just fall apart.
Another kind of example is the fate of Roman Catholic monasteries in England. I’ll quote from the opening passage of Simon Marginson’s recent
article on higher education:
In 1529 the greater monasteries of England and the nearly 400 smaller monastic establishments looked very strong.
They were doubly protected, by universal belief and by a multitude of material connections into English society,
the economy, politics and the court.
They were essential to daily life in many localities. Monasteries were centres of farming and craft production,
sources of community welfare and way stations for travellers across the land.
They provided valued careers for younger sons. Cathedrals loomed over the landscape.
Holders of vast wealth and power, the monasteries could not be touched.
Ten years later, they were gone, and the English found other ways of being religious.
As Marginson points out:
An important practical question, then, is: is it possible for institutions that we think are very well established, highly unlikely to change,
actually to be quite fragile and unstable, is it possible that they will dissolve from one day to the next?
One could argue that the global financial crisis in 2008 was an example of the world coming very close to that.
Simmel was basically raising the question of exactly how stable institutions are.
Simmel is the theorist one looks to, then, to think about how important it is to look at the interactions that we all engage with in constantly
reproducing and re-creating social institutions, rather than starting with the institutions, and then looking at how individual ‘fit’ into them.
Another aspect of Simmel’s approach that’s important is the idea of thinking in terms of social types,
of individuals as expressions of particular social forms – a vice-chancellor, a students, a lecturer, a politician, a queen, a manager, and so on.
Instead of thinking in terms of the particular human being that happens to be President or Prime Minister,
one considers what all Presidents or all Prime Ministers are expected to do and be.
This is the foundation of the concept of role, looking at what is expected of anyone in that position,
what pressures are exerted on the person in that position, what relationships they have with other individuals in a particular social network,
how all that will elicit a certain kind of behaviour.
Simmel’s own example is that of ‘the stranger’, which he analysed as a particular kind of role that people play,
that has a certain function in social relationships.
He pointed out that the stranger is both part of society and outside of it, at the same time.
The stranger is present in society, so not an outside in that sense, they are both inside the social world and outside it at the same time.
Many of us play that role as a matter of course without thinking about it, and it’s certainly a role that you play when you move from one country
to another, from one cultural and social context to another.
You’re immediately a stranger in the sense that you’re outside some aspects of that society,
but you also still have to become part of it in other respects.
It’s possible to feel a stranger in one’s own family – some people will have grown up with the suspicion that they must have been adopted!
One can certainly be a stranger at school, many children feel that they’re very different from everyone else at their school,
with a distinctive way of thinking and feeling.
It’s been said that it helps enormously to have the sensibility of a stranger to be a sociologist,
you have to have some sense of being outside of social institutions, social norms, in order to be able to analyse and think about them.
The very process of developing a critical sociological imagination takes you outside the society you’re in.
Simmel was also concerned to analyse the form, the geometry and the grammar of social life,
to look at the structure of social relationships as having a certain logic to them.
The concepts of form, geometry and grammar are more fully developed in later sociological theory,
but he was the first person to argue along these lines.
This is how he explained it:
Simmel argued that one can see similar kinds of logics at play in different social groupings
that at first glance look as though they ought to be completely different.
A Royal court might seem to be completely different from, say, Apple, but if you look closely at the structure of social relationships,
if you look at the logic of how people relate to one another, then you find there are important similarities.
So Tim Cook’s relationship with everyone else at Apple has similarities to that of any king or queen and their courtiers.
One useful formula is that one can go about “learning about doctors by studying plumbers, and about prostitutes by studying psychiatrists”.