DURKHEIM'DAN SİMMEL'E TOPLUM VE BİLİMİNE GİRİŞ: BİR VARMIŞ, BİR YOKMUŞ

Abstract

Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel, respectively of French and German origins, were contemporaries with similar philosophical foundations. While they shared the common concern of developing and maintaining a science of society, they reached to very different methodological and theoretical conclusions. Durkheim bases his sociological method on the claim that society is a fact all by itself, whereas Simmel argues that there is no such independent entity, and what social is can only be explained by tracing bonds, interactions, relations and associations among individuals. He also proposes that social change does not involve laws that are awaiting to be discovered, because its dynamics are fluid and not predictable. In the light of these prepositions, social reality should be understood not as a thing onto itself, but as a process made up of forms and contents of individual interactions. Simmel's argument that the forms, not the contents, of social interactions can be objects of formal sociological investigations, has vastly different implications concerning understanding culture, which Durkheim formulates as collective consciousness that shapes and determines the individual.