Simmel, Georg (1858–1918)

Georg Simmel is a German sociologist and philosopher whose work has been influential on the Chicago tradition of sociology and has recently been rediscovered by scholars of consumer culture. His production is vast, and besides pure philosophical works, he wrote two key texts in sociological theory, often called the Große Soziologie and the Kleine Soziologie, as well as fundamental works on money (Philosophy of Money), metropolitan lifestyles, and fashion (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” and “Fashion” in On Individuality and Social Forms). Simmel's approach to sociology can be seen as a reflexive attempt to reject the organicist theories of August Comte and Herbert Spencer. Like Max Weber, Simmel favored an idiographic and interpretive method, namely, one concerned with historically situated events and [Page 1287]human subjectivities, rather than a nomothetic one concerned with establishing general laws predicated on variables abstract from ordinary experience. In particular, he proposes that society consists of a web of interactions and that it is the task of sociology to study the forms of these interactions as they occur in diverse historical periods and cultural settings, something that today is the province of so-called microsociology.

Consumption appears to Simmel as a culturally ordered field of interaction rather than a threat to social order, as his French contemporary Émile Durkheim would have it. For example, to Simmel, fashion is the outcome of two fundamental principles of social logic: the need for cohesion or union and the need for differentiation or isolation. In following fashion, we align ourselves with some people and differentiate ourselves from others, but at the same time we can enjoy expressing ourselves in a common language that is widely understood. While he tends to describe the social dynamics of fashion as functioning only through imitation, with a top-down descending movement (the so-called trickle-down effect), for Simmel, fashion is also a metaphor for the allure that the new exerts on the modern subject in general, and on the bourgeoisie and the middle classes in particular. In contrast to the nobility, the bourgeoisie cannot rely on tradition and established, long-standing styles and, unlike less well-to-do classes, they hope to better their social position and to find their own style. While periodical switches in dresses and aesthetic forms are as old as history, according to Simmel, fashion characteristically holds to the modern, post-traditional spirit. This is because it makes change, newness, and transitoriness the norm. Still, fashion and style provide individuals with a “temporary anchor” that enables them to approach things while maintaining a certain distance that stresses subjectivity. Through adopting a certain style, especially if it has been acceptable for a while, we free ourselves from the “absolute responsibility” for ourselves, we can experiment in indirect ways, as if through a “veil,” demonstrating our taste without having to keep steady “on the narrowness of mere individuality” (Simmel 1991, 68). Furthermore, the variety of different styles that characterizes the material environment of the modern subject provides again a space for individual originality, allowing for objects to be mixed and mingled to “receive a new centre which is not located in any of them alone” (69), but coincides with the specific combination contrived by the subject underlining individual self-expression.

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