Simmel's Philosophy Research Articles

Georg Simmel and the ontology of relational emergence

AbstractIn this article we argue that Simmel's social theory has laid the groundwork for the ontology of relational emergence as propounded by critical realism. Although it has been acknowledged by many a scholar that “relationality” as such constitutes the ontological foundation of Simmel's philosophy, a disagreement regarding the nature of this relationality permeates Simmel literature. The main idea of our argument is that Simmel's approach to “relationality” is similar with how critical realists make sense of emergence and causal powers. For this goal, we specify the ways through which four basic ideas of relational emergence are developed in Simmel's work of the dyad, the triad and of the secrecy. We emphasize 1) how the ideas of the irreducibility of the relational properties and of downward causation are presented in Simmel's social theory and 11) why adopting Kantian lines of reasoning does not make him a purely Kantian thinker

Money in the German-Speaking Lands ed. by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley

Reviewed by: Money in the German-Speaking Lands ed. by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley John McCole Money in the German-Speaking Lands. Edited by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley. New York: Berghahn, 2017. Pp. 317. Cloth $150.00. ISBN 978-1785335884. "Money changes everything," in the simple but profound words of a pop philosopher, and this volume amply demonstrates that we keep discovering the many ways it has. Money in the German-Speaking Lands, the seventeenth volume in Berghahn's Spektrum series, assembles seventeen pithy investigations of the changes wrought by money, and how inhabitants of the German-speaking lands have come to terms with them, since the early modern period. This is not a collection of essays on economic history in the traditional sense, but rather a wide-ranging, kaleidoscopic look at the creative diversity of recent approaches to the history of money, on scales ranging from micro to macro. It provides fresh takes on venerable topics such as inflation, currency reform, and moral economy, including luxury debates; offers revisionist accounts of the genealogy of cameralism and the monetary culture of German hometowns; and supplies methodologically innovative case studies of the social and cultural imaginary of money, including its role in collective memory. Most of the essays exemplify what could by now be called the long cultural turn in historical studies. The title's term "money," as befits its protean nature, encompasses various forms of wealth ranging from currency to credit to cigarette butts (in the postwar black market economy); and money is examined, in the editors' words, sometimes as "an instrument" but more often as being "as much about culture and ideas … a psychological force-field"—and, one might add, a sociological and cultural force-field as well (2). Theory plays an important supporting role in some of the pieces; Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of social and cultural capital help animate more of the essays than the volume's index would suggest. The symbolic dimensions of money come to the fore in at least two distinct ways. The first concerns what money and wealth have stood for: we encounter some surprising twists on venerable critiques of acquisitiveness and luxury, and "wealth vs. virtue" discourses, in essays by Johannes Dillinger on the selective punishment of spirit beliefs about acquisitive behavior, Benjamin Marschke on Frederick William I's ostentatious displays of austerity, Jan Carsten Schnurr on Pietist attempts to distinguish between luxury and legitimate pleasures, and Michael L. Hughes on "predatory speculators" and "honest creditors" in the Weimar Republic. Eve Rosenhaft's essay seeks out the [End Page 143] subtexts of German responses to the eighteenth-century Mississippi financial bubble and finds imagined connections to a wider, cosmopolitan geography. A different symbolic dimension of money shows itself in the ways that owners of economic capital mobilized it to forge social and cultural connections—a process that could also work in reverse. Almut Spalding's Hamburg patricians forged quasi-kin networks of reciprocal obligation across social divides; Frank Hatje depicts a lawyer of modest means who leveraged cultural capital to generate social and even economic capital in ways that enhanced Hamburg's civic integration; and Dennis Frey's Swabian hometown artisans savvily managed the remunerative, status-enhancing, and networking potentials of an emerging cash economy. A third cluster of essays, dispersed by the volume's chronological arrangement, treats theories of money and economics: Vera Keller's rich account of the interlaced roles of alchemy and "oeconomy"; Andre Wakefield's revisionist investigation of cameralism's roots in the Saxon "mining state," producing knowledge along with silver; Jonathan Sperber's demonstration of Marx's surprisingly persistent occupation with the topic of money; and Elizabeth S. Goodstein's striking rereading of Simmel's Philosophy of Money as modernist philosophy. Taken as a whole, the volume subtly undercuts a durable, but simplistic distinction between positive and negative evaluations of money, where proponents champion the benefits of wealth and circulation and critics lament the costs. In these essays, we see how "money" has stood on both sides of the ledger: it has been the object of anxieties about transitions, corruption, decline, alienation, and the erosion of authenticity; but it has also been symbolically enabling and...

The King and the Poor Wretch: Simmel's Philosophy of the Actor

How can the actor, a poor wretch in private life, be a king onstage? Can two great actors’ different interpretations of the same role both be true? The German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel (1858-1918) squarely addressed these and other questions about the art of acting. This essay presents key ideas in Simmel’s philosophy of the actor in the context of his sociology of modern life, characterized by the money economy and the urban mentality. For historical background, it also includes an Appendix on Rousseau’s and Diderot’s divergent conceptions of acting, both of which Simmel implicitly rejected.

Bitcoin and The Philosophy of Money: Evaluating the Commodity Status of Digital Currencies

The rhetoric in Satoshi Nakamoto's White Paper on the origins of Bitcoin suggests that the digital currency was envisioned as an entirely autonomous money. Due to the increase in popularity and circulation of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, an intense regulatory debate has been sparked at the global level. These debates reveal a fundamental tension regarding the role of the state in establishing money. While the digital currency community insists that Bitcoin is money, states and monetary authorities have declared Bitcoin a commodity, a declaration that can be traced back to Georg Friedrich Knapp's foundational text The State Theory of Money and reinforced by A. Mitchell Innes' The Credit Theory of Money. Circulating alongside state monies, Bitcoin is then neaccessory money,' unable to satisfy tax obligations and behaving as a commodity. This chartalist account of Bitcoin is refuted by what I identify as a libertarian/von Misean understanding of money motivating the circulation of digital currencies. I argue that the circulation of digital currencies is better explained by the chartalist narrative. I then prescribe Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money, a broader understanding of money in which more abstract monies might create a supranational economic society, as an ideological alternative to digital currency advocates -- one that better conforms to the nature of money gestured to in Nakamoto's White Paper. However, even through the lens of Simmel, the limitations imposed by domestic authorities and taxation prevent digital currencies from reaching the envisioned state of autonomy. Synthesizing these understandings of money, Bitcoin may exist as a compromise, a means of international money transfer that weakens the abstract, international economic borders created by state monies.

Die Normativität des Kapitals: Zur politischen Aktualität von Georg SimmelsPhilosophie des Geldes

This paper argues that Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money is best understood as a political theory that focuses on the normativity of finance capitalism and the latter's effects on modern societies. Simmel shares some common ground with recent critiques of capitalism, such as the work of Thomas Piketty and Joseph Vogl, but he also presents a more comprehensive philosophical framework for understanding the dynamics of capitalism and financialization.

DWELLING WITHIN: THE INHABITED RUINS OF HISTORY1

ABSTRACTAddressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings.To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel's philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans‐dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness.Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co‐appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event‐horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation.

Échange, don, réciprocité : l'acte de 'donner' chez Simmel et Durkheim

This focuses on a key topic for comparison of two masters of sociological thought, Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim: the question of giving in the context of social exchange. Durkheim deals with the issue in introducing the concept of organic solidarity, based on the division of social labour and implying the interdependence of individuals. This representation of solidarity links with the interest in credit and debt relations in Simmel's philosophy of money and with a perspective in which reciprocity is conceived as one of the main sociological functions involved in the representation of social bonds. After a comparison of Durkheim and Simmel's theories of reciprocity, a specific case discussed is the mortgage, conceived as a paradigm of the shape assumed by the immaterial reality of reciprocity in institutional and everyday life.

Modern Culture, Money and Individual -focused on the G. Simmel's Philosophy of Culture-

Modern Culture, Money and Individual -focused on the G. Simmel's Philosophy of Culture-

THE RELATIONSHIP OF PHILOSOPHY, SOCIOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY IN THE WORK OF GEORG SIMMEL

"Relationship" is an important term in the work of Georg Simmel (1858 - 1918). Simmel used this or familiar term to describe completely different processes and structures. In this essay attempts will be made to apply the concept of relationship to the work of Simmel itself. The aim is to demonstrate particularly interesting links between Simmel's philosophy, sociology and pedagogy. The intention of the essay is not to give extensive interpretations of Simmel’s philosophy, sociology and pedagogy, but to show in general terms that at least four Simmel's ideas create a strong relationship between his philosophy, sociology and pedagogy. The results of analysis demonstrate that there is relationship between Simmel’s philosophy, sociology and pedagogy and it is possible to find many developments, transformations and sometimes surprising variations of the theme.

Event dynamics: the eventalization of society in the sociology of Georg Simmel

Commencing from Georg Simmel's notion of the general tendency of modern thought as the ‘dissolution of substance into functions’, the article analyzes Simmel's own thought as an apotheosis of that dissolution. The focus is on Simmel's conception of society as an ‘event’ (Geschehen), which rejects the reifying conception of society as a substantive entity, but does not reduce the social to action nor actors either- event has primacy both over subject and substance. The article asserts that the Simmelian event has two main aspects: that of reciprocal causation and inner antagonism. Along with clarifying the event dynamics in accordance with these aspects, the key sociological implications of Simmel's philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) are also unfolded: it is claimed that event expresses the deep continuity between the vital and the social in Simmel's thought. In the end, the uses of the notion of the event are elaborated by connecting Simmel's reflections to more recent insightful conceptualizations of the social.

Reification, Resistance, and Ironic Empiricism in Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money

This essay examines Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money in relation to certain themes in the Marxian philosophical tradition. It first examines Simmel's thoroughgoing and antiessentialist epistemology of exchange. It then looks at a contrary movement taken by Simmel's thought, in which he seems to posit an absolute objectivity in an almost Kantian vein. Finally, it explains Simmel's position through a look at his theory of capitalist reification and the necessary and ironic resistance that reification implies for a critical theory of society.

Georg simmel's philosophy of culture: chronos, zeus, and in between

Georg simmel's philosophy of culture: chronos, zeus, and in between

Enemy of the people: Simmel, Ibsen, and the Civic legacy of Nietzschean sociology

The fall of Communism continued an ongoing weakening of Marxist ideology, which had been hegemonic among the European Left since the Great War. While the decline of Marxist thought can be justly seen negatively as the historical correlative of globalization, this decline has also produced cultural space for a re-evaluation of non-Marxist critiques of capitalist civilization. One example of a powerful non-Marxist critique of capitalist civilization is Georg Simmel's sociology of money culture. Before turning to Simmel's radical critique, this essay explains how Simmel came to be viewed as a conservative. Simmel's presumed conservatism is challenged via a re-examination of the civic implications of his Nietzschean sociology. A central question is whether Simmel's ethical individualism is conservative. This question is finally answered through an analysis of Ibsen's Enemy of the People. The choice of Ibsen is not random, for it amplifies the close ethical and historical affinity of Naturalist drama and Simmel's philosophy.

Allotment holding as an eco‐leisure practice: the case of the Sataf village

This article explores the phenomenon of allotment holding as a leisure practice, by drawing upon on a 2‐year field study conducted at the Sataf village allotment site near the city of Jerusalem. The findings indicate that plotting at the Sataf involves an ideological commitment to nature and environment‐friendly related themes. Accordingly, plot holding at the Sataf is termed an eco‐leisure practice. In addition, the findings indicate that plotting at Sataf is an individual rather than a socially oriented experience. These findings are interpreted with regard to all of the particular features and developments in Israel, the specific literature on allotment holding, the study fields of leisure and tourism, and George Simmel's philosophy of experience.

Simmel's Philosophy of History and Its Relation to Phenomenology: Introduction

This set of three papers presents an inaugural study of the relationship of Georg Simmel's philosophy of history to phenomenology. These studies function as provisional, yet trailblazing explorations in the sense that they lack corrobo ration with an established body of research. They are meant to motivate fur? ther historical research concerning, and creative use of, Simmel's philosophy of history towards the goal of developing a phenomenological approach to history. One task of this brief introduction is to demonstrate that this subject matter should be viewed as transcending the narrow interests of a circum? scribed group of Simmelian specialists. This new direction in Simmelian stud? ies should be recognized as potentially effecting important consequences in the fields of both the human sciences and philosophy. Any historical period of theoretical thought needs to be a living history, continually engaged so that it dynamically and continually unfolds through perspectival modifications. Otherwise, the historical relation (and history only exists as a relation) becomes reified: we forget that it is a human achievement and allow it to be packaged as positivistic facticities ("no assembly neces? sary"), rather than as a lived relation. Just as inauthenticity is a fundamental characteristic of Dasein, the reification of history is also a fundamental mo? dality of historical inauthenticity. Once the historicality of the lifeworld is objectivated as history, the hypostatization of the temporal process can be accepted without renewed and continued reflection. Another fundamental aspect of history is anachronistic thinking, which follows from its present-at hand objectivation. Anachronistic thinking reads an outcome back into its genesis. For example, we think of Husserl as the father of the phenomen? ological movement and from our temporally situated reflective glance may unthinkingly place the present meaning-context back into the horizons of his milieu. This anachronistic thinking is quite common without disciplined train? ing in historical thinking and method, but only a lived-historical reflection can counter this tendency of the natural attitude to de-historicize the genesis of its outcomes.

Introduction: The Child in the Marketplace

Introduction:The Child in the Marketplace Judith Plotz (bio) This issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly is devoted to CHILDREN AND MONEY, a theme both inevitable and uncomfortable. On the one hand, no topic could be more in tune with our current idolatry of acquisition and consumption. (A new Website that allows girls to design their own dolls "choosing facial features, clothes, and accessories in any of 69 billion possible combinations" is called, perhaps ironically, "iDolls" [Kotkin]). To an extent unprecedented in history, American children are no longer children but what trade professionals call a "market": consumers with money to spend and the will and the authority to spend it (Kline 164). According to a recent NPR report on the Kaiser Family Foundation's Kids & Media @ the New Millennium children now constitute the fastest growing consumer market in the United States and "influence half a TRILLION dollars in consumer spending a year." Even two-year-olds can be trained by artful advertising to recognize brand logos; even two-year-olds can activate the "Nag Factor" and do their bit for the economy. The New York Times reports the "increasingly expensive and sophisticated drive to tap a market that is growing in numbers and buying potential: girls 8 to 12 years old," a "target" group that already is a "$5 billion-a-year market" for clothing (Kotkin). This new consumer child, clearly here to stay, has been glorified as reveling in empowering choices, lamented as withering in consumer alienation in such incisive studies as Gary Cross's Kids' Stuff, Stephen Kline's Out of the Garden, and Ellen Setter's Sold Separately. But on the other hand, the consumer child, credit card in hand, is not the whole story. The market terms are not the only ones in which readers of ChLAQ —generally more mindful of child readers than child shoppers—are accustomed to consider children. The distinctly anti-commercial flagrantly unglossy format of this journal—gray, frugal, void of advertising, a Dream Child on its cover—is an outward sign of the longstanding resistance by children's literature scholars to Pricing the Priceless Child (to cite Viviana Zelizer's brilliant title), to the general commercializing of childhood. Our very austerity of form, a necessary byproduct of the tight budget common to most children's organizations, is itself a useful reminder of the vexed relationship between the world of children and the world of getting and spending: just why is it natural that an organization devoted to children's literature should be poor? Hugh Cunningham's indispensable Children of the Poor has made a powerful case that the establishment around 1890 of "childhood" as a value applicable to all children was a crucial weapon in the struggle against child labor. To guarantee a childhood to every child no matter how poor meant wresting that child away from the site of labor and installing her in a garden or at least a kindergarten. By the late nineteenth century, Cunningham writes, gainful "child labor was in decline," and by the early twentieth century children were so precious that they were worthless; that is, they "no longer had any conceivable economic value" (167). Not only had the fight to end child labor and to institutionalize "childhood" as an entitlement of all young persons deliberately severed the economic realm from the realms of school, garden, and nursery, but these childish realms increasingly became ideologically necessary to high capitalism as safety valves. It is notable that Georg Simmel's great Philosophy of Money (1900) depicts the emergent money culture as the antithesis of the culture of childhood: where money is, childhood is not. The three major qualities Simmel imputes to the money culture—impersonality, abstractness, and fungibility ("the interchangeability [Fungibilität] of things personified" [Poggi 134])—could be neutralized within the domestic sphere by the antithetical qualities found in the new Romantic Child with his priceless and redemptive qualities of a loving heart, bodily energy, spontaneity of consciousness, imagination, originality, uniqueness. Hence the new child could be at once economically worthless and socially indispensable. In the four papers gathered for this issue, the writers explore the four different intersections of childhood and the economic...

Book Review: Money and the Modern Mind: Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money

Book Review: Money and the Modern Mind: Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money

The dialectic of life and thought: Georg Simmel's philosophy of history

Guy Oakes has provided an important service for scholars in the Englishspeaking world by translating and introducing Georg Simmel’s works on the philosophy of history. Until the appearance of Oakes’s translations Simmel has been accessible to intellectual life in the English language primarily through his works on sociology. This partiality has, perhaps, distorted and blunted Simmel’s influence, especially in the United States. Where Simmel’s philosophical studies have been accessible to the intellectual community, as in the Hispanic world through the efforts of Jose Ortega y Gasset, they have had a fruitful and important impact. Indeed, the Orteguian school of ratiovitalism owes much directly to the Simmelian dialectic of life and form, in which cultural forms serve life by completing it, but violate life by containing its incessant novelty. Those who interpret Simmel as a formalist might reexamine their views in the light of his vitalistic philosophy, which bears greater resemblance to Henri Bergson’s intuitionism and William James’s radical empiricism than to the rigid conceptualism of the neo-Kantian schools. Oakes’s translations provide a good occasion for such a revaluation of Simmel’s contribution. In order to gain an adequate understanding of Simmel’s philosophy of history and of its significance it is necessary to read both The Problems of the Philosophy of History and Essays on Interpretation in Social Science, which should be considered as companion volumes. The Problems is a translation of the 1905 second edition of Simmel’s ‘epistemological essay’ critiquing the thesis of ‘historical realism’ that the aim of historical inquiry is to describe past events as they actually occurred. The 1905 work, which systematises an early effort of 1892, has the polemical intention of showing that realistic doctrines of historiography ignore the constitutive role of subjectivity in producing works of history. Simmel is inconclusive here, however, in presenting an alternative doctrine to realism, though he refers at the end of the work to a theory of ‘epistemological idealism’ that he has been defending. Except for the brief lecture, ‘On the History of Philosophy’, written in 1904, Essays

Money's Place in Society

Problems with existing approaches to money in sociology are reviewed and an alternative approach suggested. Money is founcl to originate in well socialized objects enjoying particular concentrations of magical spirit. It thus enables control and grasp of physical and social events. Money's super-objective impact on the individual and a model of its dual nature - as essence possessed of intrinsic value an(l as symbol of that value - is advanced. The two sides of its nature are ir tension but linked through number. It is suggested that money overleaps the problems of so( ial interaction to integrate the individual with the economic infrastructure. This substantiates Marx's lack of concern with the symbolic realm but the monetary structure differs from both infrastructure and superstructure. It assures the predominance of the former whilst introducing its own character- notably a bias towards consumption. The different possible relations to money are exalnined in ternls of the model proposed. Money is a central part of modern day life yet its nature has been very little considered either by economists' or sociologists. Economists tenct to take its nature (but not its effects) as a given which can be described simply by listing the functions it fills. In sociology, the appearance of Simmel's Philosophy of Money in English translation2 has thrown into relief the absence of serious discussion. Apart from Simmel's work, there are two main methods of disposing of money as a sociological proble-m: first, to treat it as a symbol or sign, thus as having the same basic character as other elements of what might be called the social superstructure; second, by use of the Marxist perspective which sees money as the product and reflection of the economic infrastructure. In this paper I shall argue that an understanding of money's place in society can be gained through neither approach and that the kind of

Dialogo con Maurizio Blondel (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 285 than" which is both immanent and transcendent, a kind of "coincidentia oppositorum" beyond logic and definition. It is the realm of the "person" within which, although the tragic conflict is not resolved, there arises the free self from whose non-dual perspective the unity and eternity of life are seen. Within this realm the individual gains an illumination the result of which is "amor fad," his free decision to affirm his being. In this act of decision lies the "meaning" and "value" of life. The substance and point of Miss Bauer's book is to show the connection between the metaphysical ground of Simmel's concept of the tragic and its manifestations in different aspects of human experience. Her account is especially interesting in her chapter on the "tragic opposition" in which as an example of a tragic personality she cites Socrates who, by his refusal to flee from his prison, freely embraced his fate and, by choosing to die, confirmed his decisive, binding truth that the heavenly powers remain silent to the questions asked by a doubting and despairing humanity. His act declares that the individual must really stand alone in the world, taking counsel only from himself. Miss Bauer's book is written with a sympathetic understanding of Simmel's philosophy. By opening our eyes to the significant in human existence she succeeds in showing file relevance of his thought to our time. RIA STAVR1DES Vassar College Dialogo con Maurizio Blondel. By Michele Federico Sciacca. (Milano: Carlo Marzorati Editore , 1962. Pp. 159. L. 1300.) Sciacca has gathered here various articles which he had written about Blondel as well as new notes about this French thinker. Blondel struggled against the cult of science seeking to vindicate man's religious needs. Man longs for an end which transcends the natural order. Hence philosophy cannot ignore religion which points to a supernatural human destiny. According to Blondel, God is the only Word which answers the search of man and makes his action both fruitful and progressive. PAUL T. FUHRMANN Columbia Theological Seminary Essays in Ontology. By E. G. Allaire, M. Brodbeck, R. Grossman, H. Hochberg, R. G. Turnbull. Vol. I, Iowa Publications in Philosophy. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963. Pp. 216.) Essays in Ontology is the introductory volume of a new series of monographs to be published by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. The first volume, as its title indicates, is a collection of essays whose authors are closely affiliated with the Iowa Philosophy Department, being faculty members there now (Allaire and Turnbull) or former students (Hochberg, Grossman, and Brodbeck). Considered as a representative display of talent, the collection is somewhat unbalanced, since twelve of the fourteen papers are by three of the contributors, Allaire, Grossman, and Hochberg, while the other two are contributed by Brodbeck and Turnbull. It is also a matter of some disappointment that eleven of the fourteen papers have seen the light of print elsewhere; although this feeling is somewhat offset by the impact of sustained inquiry into one philosophical problem which the papers make when brought together in this way. The three new papers are "Particulars and ...