Simmel, Georg

Work and Biography

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was a philosopher, although sociologists consider him a founder of the humanist branch of sociology and recognize his contributions to an interpretive approach to the study of society. Contemporary theorists are deeply indebted to him as is amply documented by the frequent references to his work in recent publications. His theoretical method is rooted in his philosophy of life. From that he develops four epistemological approaches: pragmatism, constructivism, interactionism, and evolutionism. These serve as the context for Simmel's heuristic tools: (1) dealing with perspectives as realities, (2) seeing mental constructs as bridges across the gap between the subjective and the objective, (3) the dialectic of form and content, and (4) the tension between center and periphery. Simmel applies his unique method of study to various topics, including a famous analysis of “the stranger,” a book-length investigation of money, the theoretical topic of historical materialism, and culture as it appears in music and in religion.

From 1858 until 1914, his home was Berlin. He spent the last four years of his life, however, which coincided with World War I, as a full professor at the University of Strasbourg. He died there of liver cancer on September 26, 1918 (not on September 28, as several sources report). Simmel was of Jewish origin and belonged to a Protestant church. He grew up the youngest of seven children and received a sizable inheritance after the death of his father. This allowed him to pursue his natural inclinations toward intellectual autonomy.

Simmel earned his doctorate degree from the University of Berlin, which enjoyed considerable international reputation then. Among those intellectuals who came from abroad to study there were George Herbert Mead and Robert Ezra Park. In Berlin, as well as elsewhere in Austria, Germany, and other parts of Europe, it had been—and still is—the tradition not to promote a scholar from within his or her department to the rank of full professor. This old custom, by which intellectual inbreeding was to be minimized, excluded Simmel from eligibility for a professorship at the university where he had been a student, a PhD candidate, and a Privatdozent. That is one of the reasons why Max Weber tried to get him a professorship at Heidelberg, which failed, most likely due to anti-Semitic prejudices.

Philosophy of Life

After Simmel was diagnosed with liver cancer, knowing that his days were numbered, he completed his philosophy of life and presented it in his Lebensanschauung: Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Life-anschauung: Four Metaphysical Chapters) in 1918. Simmel's sociology is consistently based on this philosophy. He appears to pick up and modify statements by Plato, Spinoza, and Kant. These greats help Simmel to find his own position, which he then compares with the work of Goethe, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others: To Simmel, reality is too vast and complex for the human mind to grasp. The only chance humans have is to create tools for selecting, describing, and placing in context segments of reality that correspond to their interests and emotions. The construction of ideal types as recommended by Max Weber is for Simmel essentially all we ever do: Scholarship is—whether admitted or not—the creation of heuristic tools. This insight and the message that reality is socially constructed have their origin in Simmel's epistemology.

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