Simmel, Georg (1858–1918)

Abstract

Georg Simmel was born in Berlin on March 1, 1858 and died in Strasbourg in Alsace on September 26, 1918. He is generally recognized as an important sociological writer and teacher in Europe around 1900. He is less well recognized as an important philosopher of the same period. While he was a friend and contemporary of the German sociologist Max Weber, he was also a colleague and fellow teacher with the eminent philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. Among the students and correspondents influenced by Simmel, four major figures in American sociology attended his lectures in Berlin: Albion Small, later head of department at the University of Chicago and founding editor of the American Journal of Sociology , George Herbert Mead, University of Chicago philosopher, W. I. Thomas, Chicago sociologist, and Robert Park, founder of the US research tradition known best as ethnography. In the famous “Green Book,” The Introduction to Sociology , of 1921, Park and Burgess included more separate contributions from Simmel than from any other European sociologist. Simmel's influence from his teaching and his published papers on the development of sociology in the USA cannot be underestimated. Only his exclusion from Talcott Parsons's seminal Structure of Social Action cast a shadow for the period 1937 into the early 1960s. Since sociologists of the stature of Erving Goffman, Lewis Coser, and Kurt Wolff reclaimed Simmel's sociological work during the 1960s, his influence has been extended to virtually every area of the sociological spectrum.