Simmel's Sociology Research Articles

The Role of Money and Fashion in Character Building in Confession of A Shopaholic Movie

This article discusses the film Confession of A Shopaholic, directed by P.J. Hogan based on Georg Simmel's sociology of money to dismantle the role of money and fashion in the formation of the main character's character. The purpose of this article is to formulate how money problems can change individual character. Georg Simmel's sociology of money points discussed in this article cover two things, namely money as an institution that supports social stratification and the financial system as part of the evolution of society. Simmel's view of fashion is used to support this research. Research data is taken from scenes or dialogues of the main characters in shopping, including when faced with choices. There is a deep connection between money, fashion, social stratification, and the results of the evolution of society which play a role in building the mentality of society itself. Childhood experiences also shape the individual's passion to fulfill his desires as an adult. The results of the study show that the cooperation between money and goods offered by the market is able to drive the emotional side of the individual and the role of the environment to support individuals in finding awareness

Simmel, the Emotions and the Tragic Nature of the Love Bond

The aim of this essay is to analyze the sociological study of emotions produced by Georg Simmel, with specific attention to the concept of love. The article is structured as follows: in the first part, what could be defined as ‘Simmel's sociology of emotions’ is presented through a descriptive and interpretative analysis of the constructed social theory; in the second part, the focus shifts to love as emotion, emphasizing its tragic character within the construction and destruction of the social bond. Finally, in the third part, a comparison with the sociological analysis of love produced by two contemporary researchers such as Eva Illouz – love as a result of the dynamics conveyed by ‘emotional capitalism’ – and Danilo Martuccelli – love as an ‘emotional imperative’ of contemporary daily life - will be produced. The common thread of the entire essay is exactly the tragic character of the emotion of love, which allows both the construction and the destruction of the social bond, through an ambivalent interactional game that seems to have no end.

The Stranger as a Threshold Figure

The Stranger as a Threshold Figure Amos Morris-Reich Given its subject and Georg Simmel's background, one would think that Simmel's excursus "The Stranger" (1908) and Jewish history could easily be brought into sustained conversation. Widely thought to be the most original social thinker of the turn of the twentieth century in Germany, Simmel was of Jewish descent. In "The Stranger," he refers to European Jews as the "classic example" of this social type. The excursus became a landmark in twentieth-century social theory and sociology. In practice, however, "The Stranger" and Jewish history have developed along two separate intellectual trajectories, and attempts to bring them together are frequently met by indifference or resistance by Jewish historians and Simmel scholars alike. While the former have no need for Simmel's short and indirect account to confirm the association between Jews and strangers, anyone minimally versed in Simmel's writings recognizes the impervious border between the social type of the stranger and actual Jews. Any suggestion to the contrary betrays an elementary misunderstanding of Simmel's perspective.1 Even when contextually expected or required—perhaps due to what each side takes as implied—this barrier remains impenetrable. Bringing the two together can nonetheless reveal a "Spinozist moment" with regard to Simmel and "The Stranger" as a subversive threshold figure. Possibly more than any of Simmel's other writings, "The Stranger" can be read as a queering of his own sociological theory, revealing a moment [End Page 314] of liminality in Jewish history. "Queering" is a helpful term here because, while the mental image of the stranger subconsciously fixed in the cultural imagination is generally not gender-neutral, the subversive quality of "The Stranger" stands out prominently in light of contemporary discussions of sex and gender. This liminality is evinced when we read "The Stranger" with the question of Jewish "strangeness" in mind. Of what does the "strangeness" of the stranger consist? Rather than embodying Christian theological supersessionism, racial/antisemitic doctrine, the gaze of the Other and its internalization by Jews, or Zionism's rejection of Jewish exile as an unnatural anomaly, the stranger belongs exclusively to society (in the singular) due to the interaction between individuals. Simmel's epistemology rules out any reduction of Jews as strangers to essentialist, naturalist terms.2 "The Stranger" appears to destabilize this orthodox Simmelian reading, however. Given that Simmel was the first to establish a notion of sociology free from reliance on preexisting collectivities such as nation, race, or ethnicity, Simmel scholars have learned to ignore or explain away moments that contravene this reading. The most famous lines in the excursus, for example, characterize the stranger by contrasting him—and thereby tying him together—with the wanderer: "The stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow."3 These playful, poetic, and deeply ironic lines not only suggest a social "in" and "out" but also hint at organic differences between autochthonous members of society and late arrivers, granting the latter a degree of permanency. They also seem to imply that another society, place, and time exist where the stranger was, is, or could be more naturally at home. From an orthodox point of view, this is pure blasphemy. Simmel scholars who have noted these tensions and ambiguities tend to explain them in terms of the essay's history. Forming part of the ninth chapter of the Soziologie (1908), it constitutes a short and hastily written detour [End Page 315] in a chapter dealing with space and the spatial dimensions of social organization.4 For no obvious reason, it was translated into English (and other languages), whereupon it gained a life of its own. Reprinted numerous times, it has become a social-theory classic, serving as the cornerstone of the sociological paradigm known as the "marginal man," developed by scholars at the University of Chicago. The tensions can also be read as puncturing a purified interpretation of Simmel's sociology. Although a social type, organic—racial, biological, genetic—elements irreducible to the formal theory...

The End of Strangers and the End of Intermediation

The End of Strangers and the End of Intermediation Eva Illouz Being a stranger is the universal condition of modernity. Simmel, like many of his fellow sociologists and Germans at the end of the twentieth century, was riveted by the question of what the new era of trains, light, cities, and money had in store for humanity; but following his anti-positivism and Weberian tendency to look for ideal types, he grasped this change through the emblematic figure of the stranger. Why was the stranger such a key figure of modernity? One reason may lie in Simmel's biography. Although both Simmel's parents had converted to Christianity, he was not able to secure a stable position at the university, largely because he was perceived by others as a Jew. He was, so to speak, forced to be a stranger. Being an outsider from within was the familiar experience of assimilated, modern Jews, a position that turned them into the observers and analysts of the structures that simultaneously accepted them and excluded them. The second reason that the stranger has much to do with modernity is connected to the enormous fluxes of immigration at the end of the nineteenth century. Simmel could not have been unaware that by 1908, the publication date of the collection of essays in which "The Stranger" appears, the largest part of the 2.5 million Eastern European Jews who would immigrate from 1880 until 1924 to the United States had started a new life on the continent. To be sure, many or most of them lived in insalubrious conditions and poor neighborhoods, but they found a country in which they could live, trade, and exercise their religion without the threat of pogroms (which is not to say that antisemitism did not exist in the U.S.). A third reason that the stranger is the key figure of modernity has to do with the enormous development of cities at the end of the nineteenth century. The metropolis—about which Simmel wrote a memorable essay—became a social matrix whose greatness and danger was its capacity to transform people into indifferent strangers to one another, strangers who were no longer [End Page 297] integrated into a psychic economy of hatred, fear, and mistrust. The indifferent stranger has proved to be the main social character of modernity. Simmel thus implicitly opposed two forms of strangeness: one that was unassimilable to Christianity; and a new form of strangeness enabled by the burgeoning secular (or quasi-secular) cities and nation-states, in which the hard boundaries of groups were starting to dissolve. The nation-state not only tolerated but encouraged the perpetual creation of strangers, as millions of peasants throughout Europe left the countryside and migrated to urban centers and as fluxes of population within Europe reshaped the human landscape of cities. This is why the stranger was a figure of intermediation between the state and other states, as well as between social groups constituting a society. Such a modern stranger is the synthesis of nearness and distance. The stranger does not belong to the dominant religion, does not speak the local language, may dress differently, or may eat differently; yet he becomes part of the local social fabric through abstract and impersonal modern intermediaries such as money and the city. For Simmel, the trader is indeed the paradigmatic stranger because he is the node for the circulation of money and of commodities that were destined, until the end of the nineteenth century, mostly for city dwellers. At the end of the century, the notion of the "trader" and the "stranger" might have been a code word for Jews. As described by Simmel, the stranger had all the outer appearances and inner characteristics of the Jew. The Simmelian stranger is an "indifferent stranger," a stranger that was no longer threatening a thick cultural tissue of churches, communities, and tightly bound groups. This is because the modern nation-state was unknowingly promoting three key properties of modernity: abstractness, freedom, and cities—the three key themes of Simmel's sociology. Abstraction of forms of life (bureaucracy, for example), freedom (enabled by the free circulation of goods and money, for example), and...

The pleasure of the holder: media art, museum collections and paper money

When the artist Julian Rosefeldt exhibits video projections of cast Graeco-Roman sculptures, exhibition-goers experience a crisis in resemblance and equivalence between a gallery installation and museum artefacts. On the face of it media magic seems to supersede, even eliminate, the experiential force of collection-holding. This article compares media and artefactual exhibiting practices by combining semiotic analysis, art theory and Georg Simmel's sociology of money. In the late 18th century, as European museums began to display plaster reproductions of classical sculpture and historic architectural details, economists worried that paper money would sever the representational force of monetary signifiers from the intrinsic value of the bullion they signify. Perhaps Rosefeldt defers promises like a banknote? Perhaps museums postpone the 'pleasure of the holder' like a bank reserve? In both cases, this article argues, the technologies of reproduction and repetition (old and new) tell us a great deal about the semantics of objects.

Form and Dialectic in Georg Simmel’s Sociology: A New Interpretation

PART I: SIMMEL'S METHOD AND THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF HIS WORK 1. Interaction, Form and the Dialectical Approach - Simmel's Analytical Conceptual Framework 2. The Historical Context of Simmel's Sociology PART II: EXEMPLIFICATIONS 3. Fashion as a Social Form 4. The Poor Man 5. The Secret and Secret Societies PART III: FURTHER ASPECTS OF SIMMEL'S METHOD 6. Absolute and Relative - the Operation of a Single Polarity 7. The Philosophy of the 'As If' - the Role of 'Fictions' in Science and Social Life 8. Echoes of Darwin - Simmel's Evolutionism PART IV: THE CONTEMPORARY SIMMEL 9. The Overall Terrain and Contemporary Relevance of Simmel's Oeuvre

Transnational academic mobility, knowledge, and identity capital

This article begins with the contemporary context of transnational academic mobility, and sketches a typology of mobile academics according to their self-identification. UK examples are offered as the main case study here. The article will then explore the relations of mobile academics and their embodied and encultured knowledge. It employs a concept of ‘transnational identity capital’ to discuss the position of transnational mobile academic intellectuals as a ‘stranger’ as inspired by Simmel's sociology of space.

Mobilising (Global) Democracy: A Political Reading of Mobility between Universal Rights and the Mob

This article argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the role of democracy within globalised structures of power. Relegated to a socio-economic background that prompts new engagements with democracy, mobility has been neglected as a condition of possibility and as a form of political democratic practice. Drawing on Georg Simmel's sociology of money, we show that practices of mobility become democratic moments in relation to structures of power that are constituted across the territorial circumscription of national states. Understood as a particular form of sociality, mobility can work upon structures of power through universal rights and the politics of the `mob'. In this sense, practices of mobility are also democratic inscriptions of equality.

Structurational aspect of Georg Simmel's sociology

In this paper attempt will be made in explaining some basic notions of Simmel's sociology, especially those regarding his very complex comprehension of money and causality in history. In analysis of his work, I will argue that Simmel stands very close to the contemporary structurational point of view, and that there are three levels of freedom and structural givens (overlapping each other) in society. These are: meta-theoretical level, level of integration into the World, and the historical level. Besides that, less explicit aims of this paper are to show that in Simmlel's thought there are no disciplinary borders between sociology and philosophy, as well as to depict some of the potential benefits that sociology might get from this line of reasoning.

Georg Simmel's Timeless Impressionism

Georg Simmel's sociology tends to elicit mixed feelings even among his admirers. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” provides one of the most compelling and influential accounts of modern, urban experience available, yet the meaning of this work is notoriously elusive. Does the difficulty lie in Simmel's deep ambivalence toward the new forms of experience he describes? And does this ambivalence legitimate his historically transitional status in the history of modernist thought, ceding the role of critic of modern life to Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin? Or is Simmel's tone better understood as reserve, a refusal to suggest a totalizing account of modernity? This essay aims to reevaluate and defend Simmel's aesthetic interpretation of modernity on the grounds of his latent materialism. Focusing on his discussion of Auguste Rodin's sculpture and the impressionist aesthetic more generally, I aim to draw out the implicit claims of Simmel's materialism from within his seemingly seamless commitment to psychologism.

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.

Simmel and the Dialectic of the Double Boundary: The Case of the Metropolis and Mental Life

George Simmel's sociology was only one expression of his overall project of understanding the modern human condition. Works such as “The Metropolis and Mental Life” have been appropriated by sociology for their substantive insights. These works are more fully understood when they are interpreted in terms of Simmel's late philosophical writings, which are based on an image of man as standing between boundaries and therefore of being a boundary for them. In light of the boundary dialectic the metropolis becomes, for Simmel, a symbol of the failed mediations attempted in modernity between the objective culture of things and the subjective culture of personal development.

Simmel, Rationalisation and the Sociology of Money

Simmel was born in 1858. Raised in the centre of the Jewish business culture of Berlin. Simmel studied history and philosophy, becoming a Privatdozent in 1885. Although he published numerous books and artickes, simmel was excluded from influential university positions as a result of the pervasive anti-Semitism of the period and it was bot until 1914 that Simmel was finally promoted to a full professorship at the University of Strasbourg. Like Durkheim. Simmel was both the object of anti-Semitic prejudice and a fervent supporter of the nationalist cause in the First World War. Simmel died in 1918 if cancer of the liver.1 This basic and naïve factual biography of Simmel in many respects provides many of the themes in Simmel's sociology. First, his sociology is held to be the brilliant reflection of the glittering, cospospolitan world of pre-war Berlin and that his commentary on that world took the form of impressionism his sociological essays are snapshots sub specie aeternitatis”? simmel's perspective has been regarded as an example of the nature of modern society as contained in Robert Musil's The Man's Without Qualities. That is a social existence without roots, commitments or purpose.3 Secondly, Simmel was and remained a social outsider despite his good connections with Berlin's cultural elite. His writing has been as a result characterised as perspectivism and an aestheticication of reality. As an indication of this, Simmel's influence has in the past often rested on such minor contributions as ‘The Stranger’4 Thridly, because Simmel failed to secure an influential location within the German university system, there was no development of the Simmelian school of sociology at all comparable to Durkheimain sociology. Decades of sociological interpretation of Simmel's work have still left Simmel as a theoretical enigma on the ambitus of the sociological tradition. His sociology has been categorised as interactionist, formal and conflict sociology.5 In more recent years there has been a renewal of interest in Simmel which has begun to show a greater appreciation of the unity and stature of his sociology. This renewal has been brought about by the cominentaries of Levine. Frisby, Robertson, and Holzner. 6 More importantly, the translation of Simmel's The Philosophy of Money7 by Bottomore and Frisby provides a new opportunity for a systematic evaluation of Simmel's sociology of modern culture. The main burden of this paper is that existing commentaries have failed to focus on the central theme of ‘alienation’ and ‘rationalisation’ in The Philosophy of Money which provided the major theoretical backing for on the one hand, Weber's analysis capitalism as the iron cage and on the other Lukács so-called rediscovery of the alienation theme in the young Marx.

Understanding Georg Simmel

Abstract This paper makes two basic claims. First, Simmel was aware of the Als-Ob (“As-If”) before Vaihinger published his Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (The Philosophy of As-If) (Vaihinger, 1911 [1935]), and he used the As-If in his epistemology of the social sciences. It is difficult to understand Simmel's sociology without recognizing the role of the As-If. However, this essential part of Simmel's epistemology of the social sciences almost has gone unreported in the standard literature. Second, Simmel formulated a concept of relativity. This concept, too, is an important part of his epistemology, yet it is not understood well. Only through an appreciation of his view of relativity can Simmel's concept Wechselwirkung (usually translated as “reciprocal interaction” but more exactly translated as “reciprocal effect”) be interpreted properly. Without an understanding of his concept of relativity Simmel's form-content relation does not convey the sense intended. This paper demonstrates that the form-content relation as used by Simmel is, in current terminology, the theory-model relation. Finally, use is made of my explication of Simmel's epistemology to clarify some relations between Simmel's ideas and Durkheim's position.

An Introduction to Reading Georg Simmel's Sociology

This study begins by viewing Georg Simmel's sociology as the focal point of controversy. That is, it begins with an interest in the historic dialogue between Simmel and the academic community. Through an explication of critics’complaints against Simmel‘s work, and through an analysis of Simmel‘s own essay, “The Secret Society,” this investigation succeeds in uncovering in Simmel's writing a significant, alternative form of sociological life.

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetics of Social Reality

Georg Simmel's sociology is shown to be grounded on his aesthetics. Isomorphisms between his sociological and aesthetic approaches to their respective subject matters are found in their similar stress on (1) the visual modality, (2) the separation of the product from the process which created it, and (3) the method of generalization through particularization. Although Simmel's sociology is usually said to be disorganized, considering his sociology to be modeled after his aesthetics reveals that it is actually more unified in conception than is commonly thought. Arthur Salz (1959) once said he learned from his teacher Georg Simmel, the following about society: [Simmel] conceives of sociology as the study of the forms of sociation. But whoever speaks of forms moves in the field of aesthetics. Society, in the last analysis, is a

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetics of Social Reality

Georg Simmel's sociology is shown to be grounded on his aesthetics. Isomorphisms between his sociological and aesthetic approaches to their respective subject matters are found in their similar stress on (1) the visual modality, (2) the separation of the product from the process which created it, and (3) the method of generalization through particularization. Although Simmers sociology is usually said to be disorganized, considering his sociology to be modeled after his aesthetics reveals that it is actually more unified in conception than is commonly thought.