Georg Simmel
1858-1918
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Georg Simmel was born on March 1, 1858, in the very heart of Berlin, the corner of Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse. This was a curious birthplace--it would correspond to Times Square in New York--but it seems symbolically fitting for a man who throughout his life lived in the intersection of many movements, intensely affected by the cross-currents of intellectual traffic and by a multiplicity of moral directions. Simmel was a modern urban man, without roots in traditional folk culture. Upon reading Simmel's first book, F. Toennies wrote to a friend: "The book is shrewd but it has the flavor of the metropolis." Like "the stranger" he described in his brilliant essay of the same name, he was near and far at the same time, a "potential wanderer; although he [had] not moved on, he [had] not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going." One of the major theorists to emerge in German philosophy and social science around the turn of the century, he remains atypical, a perturbing and fascinating figure to his more organically rooted contemporaries.
Simmel was the youngest of seven children. His father, a prosperous Jewish businessman who had converted to Christianity, died when Simmel was still young. A friend of the family, the owner of a music publishing house, was appointed the boy's guardian. Simmel's relation to his domineering mother was rather distant; he seems not to have had any roots in a secure family environment, and a sense of marginality and insecurity came early to the young Simmel.
After graduating from Gymnasium, Simmel studied history and philosophy at the University of Berlin with some of the most important academic figures of the day: the historians Mommsen, Treitschke, Sybel and Droysen, the philosophers Harms and Zeller, the art historian Hermann Grimm, the anthropologists Lazarus and Steinthal (who were the founders of Voelkerpsychologie), and the psychologist Bastian. By the time he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1881 (his thesis was entitled "The Nature of Matter According to Kant's Physical Monadology"), Simmel was familiar with vast field of knowledge extending from history to philosophy and from psychology to the social sciences. This catholicity of tastes and interests marked his entire subsequent career.
Deeply tied to the intellectual milieu of Berlin, both inside and outside the university, Simmel did not follow the example of most German academic men who typically moved from one university to another both during their studies and after; instead, he decided to stay at the University of Berlin, where he became a Privatdozent (an unpaid lecturer dependent on student fees) in 1885. His courses ranged from logic and the history of philosophy to ethics, social psychology, and sociology. He lectured on Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Nietzsche, among many others. Often during a single academic year he would survey new trends in sociology as well as in metaphysics. He was a very popular lecturer and his lectures soon became leading intellectual events, not only for students but for the cultural elite of Berlin. In spite of the fascination he called forth, however, his academic career turned out to be unfortunate, even tragic.
From Coser, 1977:194-195.
(Special acknowledgement to Larry R. Ridener and The Dead Sociologists' Society) http://raven.jmu.edu/~ridenelr/personal/VITA.HTML
For fifteen years Simmel remained a Privatdozent. In 1901, when he was forty-three, the academic authorities finally consented to grant him the rank of Ausserordentlicher Professor, a purely honorary title that still did no allow him to take part in the affairs of the academic community and failed to remove the stigma of the outsider. Simmel was by now a man of great eminence, whose fame had spread to other European countries as well as to the United States. He was the author of six books and more than seventy articles, many of which had been translated into English, French, Italian, Polish, and Russian. Yet, whenever Simmel attempted to gain an academic promotion, he was rebuffed. Whenever a senior position became vacant at one of the German universities, Simmel competed for it. Although his applications were supported by the recommendations of leading scholars, Max Weber among others, they did not meet with success.
Despite all the rebuffs Simmel received from his academic peers, it would be a mistake to see in him an embittered outsider. He played an active part in the intellectual and cultural life of the capital, frequenting many fashionable salons and participating in various cultural circles. He attended the meetings of philosophers and sociologists and was a co-founder, with Weber and Toennies, of the German Society for Sociology. He made many friends in the world of arts and letters; the two leading poets of Germany, Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George, were his personal friends. He enjoyed the active give-and-take of conversation with artists and art critics, with top-level journalists and writers. Very much a man about town, Simmel stood in the intersection of many intellectual circles, addressed himself to a variety of audiences, and enjoyed the freedom from constraints that comes from such an interstitial position.
His sense of relative ease must also have been enhanced by the fact that he was free of financial worry. His guardian had left him a considerable fortune so that he was not beset by financial concerns as were so many Privatdozenten and Ausserodentliche Professoren in the prewar German university. In the Berlin years Simmel and his wife Gertrud, whom he had married in 1890, lived a comfortable and fairly sheltered bourgeois life. His wife was a philosopher in her own right who published, under the pseudonym Marie- Luise Enckendorf, on such diverse topics as the philosophy of religion and of sexuality; she made his home a stage for cultivated gatherings where the sociability about which Simmel wrote so perceptively found a perfect setting.
Although Simmel suffered the rebuff of academic selection committees, he enjoyed the support and friendship of many eminent academic men. Max Weber, Heinrich Rickert, Edmund Husserl, and Adolf von Harnack attempted repeatedly to provide for him the academic recognition he so amply deserved. Simmel undoubtedly was gratified that these renowned academicians for whom he had the highest regard recognized his eminence.
From Coser, 1977:195-196.
Although many of his peers and elders, especially those of secondary rank, felt threatened and unsettled by Simmel's erratic brilliance, his students and the wider, nonacademic audience he attracted to his lectures were enthralled by him. Simmel was somewhat of a showman. Many of his contemporaries who left an account of his lectures have stressed that it seemed to them that Simmel was thinking creatively in the very process of lecturing. He was a virtuoso on the platform, punctuating the air with abrupt gestures and stabs, dramatically halting, and then releasing a torrent of dazzling ideas. What the great German critic Walter Benjamin once said of Marcel Proust, that his "most accurate, most convincing insight fasten on their objects as insects fasten on leaves" applies equally well to Simmel. Emil Ludwig describes him well, though with a touch of characteristic vulgarity, when he writes: "Simmel investigated, when he lectured, like a perfect dentist. With the most delicate probe (which he sharpened himself) he penetrated into the cavity of things. With the greatest deliberation he seized the nerve of the root; slowly he pulled it out. Now we students could crowd around the table in order to see the delicate being curled around the probe." George Santayana, then still experimenting with New England terseness, was given to less fancy modes of expression; but when he wrote to William James that he had "discovered a Privatdozent, Dr. Simmel, whose lectures interest me very much," he undoubtedly wished to convey in this sober fashion a fascination equal to that experienced by Ludwig.
In view of Simmel's enormous success as a lecturer, it must have been especially galling to him that when he finally achieved his academic goal, a full professorship at the University of Strasbourg, he was deprived of practically every opportunity to lecture to students. He arrived at Strasbourg, a provincial university on the borderline between Germany and France, in 1914, just before all regular university activities were interrupted by the outbreak of the war. Most lecture halls were converted into military hospitals. A man as alive to the incongruities in man's destiny as Simmel could not have failed to smile wryly on this crowning irony. His last effort to secure a chair at Heidelberg, where the death of Wilhelm Windelband and Emil Lask had created two vacancies in 1915, proved as unsuccessful as previous attempts. Shortly before the end of the war, on September 28, 1918, Simmel died of cancer of the liver.
From Coser, 1977:196-197.
In contrast to all the other sociologists discussed so far, Simmel's interest in current affairs and in social and political issues was minimal. Occasionally he would comment in newspaper articles on questions of the day--social medicine, the position of women, or criminal insanity--but such topical concerns were clearly peripheral to him. There is one major exception, however. With the outbreak of the war Simmel threw himself into war propaganda with passionate intensity. "I love Germany," he wrote then, "and therefore want it to live--to hell with all 'objective' justification of this will in terms of culture, ethics, history, or God knows what else." Some of Simmel's wartime writings are rather painful to read, exuding a kind of superpatriotism so alien to his previous detached stance. They represent a desperate effort by a man who had always regarded himself as a "stranger" in the land to become immersed in the patriotic community. His young friend Ernst Bloch told him: "You avoided decision throughout your life--Tertium datur--now you find the absolute in the trenches." Throughout his career Simmel had managed to preserve a distance that enabled him to view events with cool rationality; in the last years of his life he succumbed to the desire for nearness and communion. Perhaps it was a failure of nerve.
Simmel was a most prolific writer. More than two hundred of his articles appeared in a great variety of journals, newspapers, and magazines during his lifetime, and several more were published posthumously. He wrote fifteen major works in the fields of philosophy, ethics, sociology, and cultural criticism, and another five or six less significant works. After his dissertation, his first publication, entitled On Social Differentiation (1890), was devoted to sociological problems, but for a number of years thereafter he published mainly in the field of ethics and the philosophy of history, returning to sociology only at a later date. His two major early works, The Problems of the Philosophy of History and the two volumes of the Introduction to the Science of Ethics, were published in 1892-93; these were followed in 1900 by his seminal work, The Philosophy of Money, a book on the borderline between philosophy and sociology. After several smaller volumes on religion, on Kant and Goethe, and on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Simmel produced his major sociological work, Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation, in 1908. Much of its content had already been published previously in journal articles. He then turned away from sociological questions for almost a decade, but he returned to them in the small volume published in 1917, Fundamental Questions of Sociology. His other books in the last period of his life dealt with cultural criticism (Philosophische Kultur, 1911), with literary and art criticism (Goethe, 1913, and Rembrandt, 1916), and with the history of philosophy (Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, 1910). His last publication, Lebensanschauung (1918), set forth the vitalistic philosophy he had elaborated toward the end of his life.
Because he was unable to develop a consistent sociological or philosophical system, it is not altogether surprising that Simmel did not succeed in creating a "school" or that he left few direct disciples. With his accustomed lucidity and self-consciousness, he noted in his diary shortly before his death: "I know that I shall die without intellectual heirs, and that is as it should be. My legacy will be, as it were, in cash, distributed to many heirs, each transforming his part into use conformed to his nature: a use which will reveal no longer its indebtedness to this heritage." This is indeed what happened. Simmel's influence on the further development of both philosophy and sociology, whether acknowledged or not, has been diffuse yet pervasive, even during those periods when his fame seemed to have been eclipsed. Robert K. Merton once called him "that man of innumerable seminal ideas" and Ortega y Gasset compared him to a kind of philosophical squirrel, jumping from one nut to the other, scarcely bothering to nibble much at any of them, mainly concerned with performing his splendid exercises as he leaped from branch to branch, and rejoicing in the sheer gracefulness of his acrobatic leaps. Simmel attracted generation after generation of enthralled listeners, but hardly anyone who would call himself a disciple.
Among Americans who sat at his feet was Robert Park. No one who reads Park's work can overlook Simmel's profound impact. Continentals who derived major inspiration from his lectures include such dissimilar figures as the Marxist philosophers Georg Lukacs and Ernst Bloch, the existentialist philosopher-theologian Martin Buber, the philosopher-sociologist Max Scheler, and the social historian Bernhard Groethuysen. German sociologists Karl Mannheim, Alfred Vierkandt, Hans Freyer and Leopold von Wiese also were influenced by Simmel's work. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and the other representatives of the Frankfort school of neo-Marxist sociology owe his a great deal, especially in their criticism of mass culture and mass society. Modern German philosophers from Nicolai Hartmann to Martin Heidegger were also indebted to him. It is not an exaggeration to state that hardly a German intellectual from the 1890's to World War I and after managed to escape the powerful thrusts of Simmel's rhetorical and dialectical skills.
From Coser, 1977:197-199.
Simmel's approach to sociology can best be understood as a self-conscious attempt to reject the organicist theories of Comte and Spencer, as well as the historical description of unique events that was cherished in his native Germany. He advanced, instead, the conception that society consists of a web of patterned interactions, and that it is the task of sociology to study the forms of these interactions as they occur and reoccur in diverse historical periods and cultural settings.
When Simmel turned his attention to sociology, the field was most often characterized by the organicist approach so prominent in the works of Comte in France, of Spencer in England, and of Schaffle in Germany. This view stressed the fundamental continuity between nature and society. Social process, it will be recalled, was conceived as qualitatively similar to, although more complex than, biological process. Life was seen as a great chain of being, stretching from the simplest natural phenomenon to the most highly differentiated social organism. For this reason, although the methods developed in the natural sciences had to be adapted to the particular tasks of the social sciences, such methods were considered essentially similar to those appropriate to the study of man in society. Sociology was regarded as the master science through which one could discover the laws governing all social developments.
The organicist view of social life was vigorously opposed in the tradition of German scholarship as represented in the school of idealistic philosophy. The German tradition viewed Naturwissenschaft (natural science) and Geisteswissenschaft (moral or human science) as qualitatively different. In this tradition, natural laws would have no place in the study of human culture, which represented the realm of freedom. The method considered appropriate for the study of human phenomena was idiographic, that is, concerned with unique events, rather than nomothetic, the method concerned with establishing general laws. It was believed that the student of human affairs could only describe and record the unique events of human history and that any attempts to establish regularities in the sphere of human culture would collapse because of the autonomy of the human spirit. Natur and Kultur were essentially different realms of being.
Moreover, the proponents of the German traditions argued, sociology had no real object of study; the term society was but a rough label, convenient for certain purposes but devoid of substance or reality. They asserted that there is no society outside or in addition to the individuals who compose it. Once these individuals and their historically located actions are investigated, nothing remains by way of subject matter for a science of society. Human freedom, the uniqueness and irreversibility of historical events, the fundamental disjunction between Natur and Geist (nature and spirit), all combined to make attempts at founding a science of sociology a quixotic--even a scandalous--enterprise. Far from being queen of the sciences, sociology was not a science at all.
Simmel rejected both the organicist and the idealist schools. He did not see society as a thing or an organism in the manner of Comte or Spencer, nor merely as a convenient label for something that did not have "real" existence. In his view, society consists of an intricate web of multiple relations between individuals who are in constant interaction with one another: "Society is merely the name for a number of individuals, connected by interaction." The larger superindividual structures--the state, the clan, the family, the city, or the trade union--are only crystallizations of this interaction, even though they may attain autonomy and permanency and confront the individual as if they were alien powers. The major field of study for the student of society is, therefore, sociation, that is, the particular patterns and forms in which men associate and interact with one another.
Simmel argued that the grandiose claims of those who wish to make sociology the master science of everything human are self-defeating. Nothing can be gained by throwing together all phenomena heretofore studied by jurisprudence and philology, by political science and psychology, and labeling them sociology. Qui trop embrasse, mal etreint. By trying to embrace all phenomena that are in any way connected with human life one pursues a will-o'-the-wisp. There can be no such totalistic social science, just as there is no "total" science of all matter. Science must study dimensions or aspects of phenomena rather than global totalities. The legitimate subject matter of sociology lies in the description and analysis of particular forms of human interaction and their crystallization in group characteristics: "Sociology asks what happens to men and by what rules they behave, not insofar as they unfold their understandable individual existences in their totalities, but insofar as they form groups and are determined by their group existence because of interaction." Although all human behavior is behavior of individuals, much of it can be explained in terms of the individual's group affiliation, as well as the constraints imposed upon him by particular forms of interaction.
Although Simmel considered the larger institutionalized structures a legitimate field of sociological inquiry, he preferred to restrict most of his work to an investigation of what he called "interactions among the atoms of society." He limited his concern, in the main, to those fundamental patterns of interaction among individuals that underlie the larger social formations (what is today described as "microsociology"). The method he advocated and practiced was to focus attention upon the perennial and limited number of forms such interaction might take.
From Coser, 1977:177-179.
Sociology, as conceived by Simmel, did not pretend to usurp the subject matter of economics, ethics, psychology, or historiography; rather, it concentrated on the forms of interactions that underlie political, economic, religious, and sexual behavior. In Simmel's perspective a host of otherwise distinct human phenomena might be properly understood by reference to the same formal concept. To be sure, the student of warfare and the student of marriage investigate qualitatively different subject matters, yet the sociologist can discern essentially similar interactive forms in martial conflict and in marital conflict. Although there is little similarity between the behavior displayed at the court of Louis XIV and that displayed in the main offices of an American corporation, a study of the forms of subordination and superordination in each will reveal underlying patterns common to both. On a concrete and descriptive level, there would seem little connection between the early psychoanalytic movement in Vienna and the early Communist movement, but attention to typical forms of interaction among the members of these groups reveals that both are importantly shaped by the fact that they have the structural features of the sect. Sectarians are characterized in their conduct by the belief that they share an esoteric knowledge with their fellow sectarians and are hence removed from the world of the vulgar. This leads to intense and exclusive involvements of the sectarians with one another and concomitant withdrawal from "outside" affairs.
Simmel's insistence on the forms of social interaction as the domain peculiar to sociological inquiry was his decisive response to those historians and other representatives of the humanities who denied that a science of society could ever come to grips with the novelty, the irreversibility, and the uniqueness of historical phenomena. Simmel agreed that particular historical events are unique: the murder of Caesar, the accession of Henry VIII, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo are all events located at a particular moment in time and having a nonrecurrent significance. Yet, if one looks at history through the peculiar lenses of the sociologist, one need not concern himself with the uniqueness of these events but, rather, with their underlying uniformities. The sociologist does not contribute to knowledge about the individual actions of a King John, or a King Louis, or a King Henry, but he can illuminate the ways in which all of them were constrained in their actions by the institution of kingship. The sociologist is concerned with King John, not with King John. On a more abstract level, he may not even be concerned with the institution of kingship, but rather with the processes of conflict and cooperation, of subordination and superordination, of centralization and decentralization, which constitute the building blocks for the larger institutional structure. In this way, Simmel wanted to develop a geometry of social life: "Geometric abstraction investigates only the spatial forms of bodies, although empirically these forms are given merely as the forms of some material content. Similarly, if society is conceived as interaction among individuals, the description of the forms of this interaction is the task of the science of society in its strictest and most essential sense."
Simmel's insistence on abstracting from concrete content and concentrating on the forms of social life has led to the labeling of his approach as formal sociology. However, his distinction between the form and the content of social phenomena is not always as clear as we should like. He gave variant definitions of these concepts, and his treatment of particular topics reveals some obvious inconsistencies. The essence of his thought, nevertheless, is clear. Formal sociology isolates form from the heterogeneity of content of human sociation. It attempts to show that however diverse the interests and purposes that give rise to specific associations among men, the social forms of interaction in which these interests and purposes are realized may be identical. For example, both war and profit-making involve cooperation. Inversely, identical interests and purposes may crystallize into different forms. Economic interests may be realized in competition as well as in planned cooperation, and aggressive drives may be satisfied in various forms of conflict from gang warfare to legal battles.
In formal analysis, certain features of concrete phenomena, which are not readily observable unless such a perspective is applied to them, are extracted from reality. Once this has been successfully accomplished, it becomes possible to compare phenomena that may be radically different in concrete content yet essentially similar in structural arrangement. For example, leader-follower relations may be seen to be structurally the same both in deviant juvenile gangs and in conformist scout troops. On this point Simmel is often misunderstood: he was not asserting that forms have a separate and distinct existence, but that they inhere in content and can have no independent reality. Simmel's was far from a Platonic view of essences. He stressed that concrete phenomena could be studied from a variety of perspectives and that analysis of the limited number of forms which could be extracted from the bewildering multiplicity of social contents might contribute insights into social life denied those who limit themselves to descriptions of the concrete.
The term form was perhaps not a very happy choice since it is freighted with a great deal of philosophical ballast, some of it of a rather dubious nature. It may have frightened away certain modern sociologists intent on exorcising any metaphysical ghosts that might interfere with the building of a scientific sociology. Had Simmel used the term social structure--which, in a sense, is quite close to his use of form--he would have probably encountered less resistance. Such modern sociological terms as status, role, norms, and expectations as elements of social structure are close to the formal conceptualizations that Simmel employed.
Futhermore, much of the building of modern sociological theory proceeds precisely with the help of the perspective that Simmel has advocated. For example, in a reanalysis of some of the data of The American Soldier, Merton and Rossi, when explaining the behavior of "green" troops and their relationships with seasoned troops in different structural contexts, use this perspective to account more generally for social situations in which newcomers are involved in interaction with oldtimers. By abstracting from the concrete content of army life, they explain certain aspects of the behavior of newcomers--from immigrants to college freshmen--in terms of their relation to preexisting groups. It follows that the newcomer- oldtimer relationship, or the newcomer as a social type, can now be understood as a particular form that can profitably be studied through abstraction from the various concrete social situations that are being observed. It is through such abstraction from concrete social content that the building of a theory becomes possible.
To Simmel, the forms found in social reality are never pure: every social phenomenon contains a multiplicity of formal elements. Cooperation and conflict, subordination and superordination, intimacy and distance all may be operative in a marital relationship or in a bureaucratic structure. In concrete phenomena, moreover, the presence of a multiplicity of forms leads to their interference with one another, so that none of them can ever be realized in purity. There is no "pure" conflict in social life, just as there is no "pure" cooperation. "Pure" forms are constructs, that is, typical relationships never to be completely realized. Simmel's forms are not generalizations about aspects of reality, but they tend to heighten or to exaggerate "so as to bring out configurations and relations which underlie reality but are not factually actualized in it." The art historian may speak of "gothic" or "baroque" style, even though no known work of architecture exhibits all the elements of either style in all their purity; so too the sociologist may construct a "pure" form of social conflict even though no empirically known process fully embodies it. Just as Weber's ideal-type may be used as a measuring rod to help calculate the distance between a concrete phenomenon and the type, a Simmelian form--say, the typical combination of nearness and distance that marks the relation of "the stranger" form the surrounding world--may help gauge the degree of "strangerness" inherent in the specific historical circumstances of, for example, the ghetto Jews or other pariah peoples.
From Coser, 1977:179-182.
Simmel constructed a gallery of social types to complement his inventory of social forms. Along with "the stranger," he describes in great phenomenological detail such diverse types as "the mediator," "the poor," "the adventurer," "the man in the middle," and "the renegade." Simmel conceives of each particular social type as being cast by the specifiable reactions and expectations of others. The type becomes what he is through his relations with others who assign him a particular position and expect him to behave in specific ways. His characteristics are seen as attributes of the social structure.
For example, "the stranger," in Simmel's terminology, is not just a wanderer "who comes today and goes tomorrow," having no specific structural position. On the contrary, he is a "person who comes today and stays tomorrow. . . . He is fixed within a particular spatial group . . . but his position . . . is determined . . . by the fact that he does no belong to it from the beginning," and that he may leave again. The stranger is "an element of the group itself" while not being fully part of it. He therefore is assigned a role that no other members of the group can play. By virtue of his partial involvement in group affairs he can attain an objectivity that other members cannot reach. "He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of 'objectivity.' " Moreover, being distant and near at the same time, the stranger will often be called on as a confidant. Confidences that must me withheld from more closely related persons can be given to him just because with him they are not likely to have consequences. In similar ways, the stranger may be a better judge between conflicting parties than full members of the group since he is not tied to either of the contenders. Not being "bound by commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given," he is the ideal intermediary in the traffic of goods as well as in the traffic of emotions.
Similarly, the poor as a social type emerge only when society recognizes poverty as a special status and assigns specific persons requiring assistance to that category. In Simmel's view,
the fact that someone is poor does not mean that he belongs to the specific social category of the 'poor' . . . . It is only from the moment that [the poor] are assisted . . . that they become part of a group characterized by poverty. This group does not remain united by interaction among its members, but by the collective attitude which society as a whole adopts toward it. . . . Poverty cannot be defined in itself as a quantitative state, but only in terms of the social reaction resulting from a specific situation. . . . Poverty is a unique sociological phenomenon: a number of individuals who, out of a purely individual fate, occupy a specific organic position within the whole; but this position is not determined by this fate and condition, but rather by the fact that others . . . attempt to correct this condition.
Once the poor accept assistance, they are removed from the preconditions of their previous status, they are declassified, and their private trouble now becomes a public issue. The poor come to be viewed not by what they do--the criteria ordinarily used in social categorization--but by virtue of what is done to them. Society creates the social type of the poor and assigns them a peculiar status that is marked only by negative attributes, by what the status-holders do not have.
The stranger and the poor, as well as Simmel's other types, are assigned their position by virtue of specific interactive relations. They are societal creations and must act out their assigned roles. They resemble the character in one of Randall Jarrell's academic novels who "had never been what intellectuals consider an intellectual but other people had thought him one, and he had had to suffer the consequences of their mistake."
From Coser, 1977:182-183.
Simmel's sociology is always informed by a dialectical approach, bringing out the dynamic interconnectedness and the conflicts between the social units he analyzes. Throughout his work he stresses both the connections and the tensions between the individual and society. He sees individuals as products of society, as links in the social process; yet "the total content of life, even though it may be fully accounted for in terms of social antecedents and interactions, must yet be looked at at the same time under the aspect of singularity, as oriented toward the experience of the individual." According to Simmel, the socialized individual always remains in a dual relation with society: he is incorporated within it and yet stands against it. The individual is, at the same time, within society and outside it; he exists for society as well as for himself: "[Social man] is not partially social and partially individual; rather, his existence is shaped by a fundamental unity, which cannot be accounted for in any other way than through the synthesis or coincidence of two logically contradictory determinations: man in both social link and being for himself, both product of society and life from an autonomous center." The individual is determined at the same time as he is determining; he is acted upon at the same time as he is self-actuating.
The insistence on the pervasive dialectic of the relation between individual and society informs all of Simmel's sociological thought. Incorporation into the network of social relations is the inevitable fate of human life, but it is also an obstacle to self-actualization; society allows, and also impedes, the emergence of individuality and autonomy. The forms of social life impress themselves upon each individual and allow him to become specifically human. At the same time, they imprison and stultify the human personality by repressing the free play of spontaneity. Only in and through institutional forms can man attain freedom, yet his freedom is forever endangered by these very institutional forms.
To Simmel, sociation always involves harmony and conflict, attraction and repulsion, love and hatred. He saw human relations as characterized by ambivalence; precisely those who are connected in intimate relations are likely to harbor for one another not only positive but also negative sentiments. Erotic relations, for example, "strike us a woven together of love and respect, or disrespect . . . of love and an urge to dominate or the need for dependence . . . . What the observer or the participant himself thus divides into two intermingling trends may in reality be only one."
An entirely harmonious group, Simmel argued, could not exist empirically. It would not partake of any kind of life process; it would be incapable of change and development. Moreover, Simmel stressed, it is naive to view as negative those forces that result in conflict and as positive those that make for consensus. Without, for example, "safety valves" allowing participants "to blow off steam," many social relations could not endure. Sociation is always the result of both categories of interaction; both are positive ingredients, structuring all relationships and giving them enduring form.
Simmel differentiated sharply between social appearances and social realities. Although a given conflictive relationship might have been considered wholly negative by participants or by outside observers, it nevertheless showed, upon analysis, to have latent positive aspects. Only a withdrawal from a relationship could be considered wholly negative; a conflictive relationship, though possibly painful for one or more participants, ties them to the social fabric through mutual involvement even in the face of dissensus. It is essential to recognize, Simmel argued, that social conflict necessarily involves reciprocal action and therefore is based on reciprocity rather than unilateral imposition. Conflict can serve as an outlet for negative attitudes and feelings, making further relationships possible; it can also lead to a strengthening of the positions of one or more parties to the relationship, thereby increasing the individual's dignity and self-esteem. Because conflict can strengthen existing bonds or establish new ones, it can be considered a creative, rather than a destructive, force.
Simmel never dreamed of a frictionless social universe, of a society from which clashes and contentions among individuals and groups would be forever banned. For him, conflict is the very essence of social life, an ineradicable component of social living. The good society is not conflict-free; it is, on the contrary, "sewn together" by a variety of crisscrossing conflicts among its component parts. Peace and feud, conflict and order are correlative. Both the cementing and the breaking of custom constitute part of the eternal dialectic of social life. It would therefore be a mistake to distinguish a sociology of order from one of disorder, a model of harmony from one of conflict. These are not distinct realities but only differing formal aspects of one reality.
Throughout his work Simmel considered the individual's social actions not in themselves but in relation to actions of other individuals and to particular structures of processes. In his famous chapter on "Superordination and Subordination," he shows that domination does not lie in the unilateral imposition of the superordinate's will upon the subordinate but that it involves reciprocal action. What appears to be the exercise of absolute power by some and the acquiescence by others is deceptive. Power "conceals an interaction, an exchange . . . . which transforms the pure one-sidedness of superordination and subordination into a sociological form." Thus, the superordinate's action cannot be understood without reference to the subordinate, and vice versa. The action of one can only be analyzed by reference to the action of others, since the two are part of a system of interaction that constrains both. Attempts at analyzing social action without such reference would have been rejected by Simmel as examples of what he called the fallacy of separateness.
Moreover, he does not rest his case after demonstrating that, contrary to first appearance, domination is a form of interaction. He proceeds to show in considerable detail the particular ways in which various types of groups structure are associated with different forms of subordination and superordination--distinguishing, for example, between levelling and gradation. If a number of individuals are equally subject to one individual, he argued, they are themselves equal. Such levelling, or "negative democratization" to use Karl Mannheim's term, favors and is favored by despotic rulers. Despots try to level their subjects and, conversely, highly developed levelling easily leads to despotism. On the other hand, strong intermediated gradations among a ruler's subjects tend to cushion his impact and weaken his hold over them. Although intermediate powers may increase inequalities in the subject population, they shield the individual from the direct powers of the ruler. A pyramidal form of social gradation, whether it develops under the plan of the ruler or results from the usurpation of some of his power by subordinates, gives every one of its elements a position both lower and higher than the next rungs in the hierarchy. In this way, each level--except the very highest and the very lowest--is subordinate to the authorities above and, at the same time, is superordinate to the rungs beneath. Dependence on some persons is compensated by authority over others.
From Coser, 1977:183-188.
Simmel's emphasis on the structural determinants of social action is perhaps best exemplified in his seminal essay, "Quantitative Aspects of the Group." Here he comes nearest to realizing his goal of writing a grammar of social life by considering one of the most abstract characteristics of a group: the mere number of its participants. He examines forms of group process and structural arrangement insofar as these derive from sheer quantitative relationships.
A dyadic relationship differs qualitatively from all other types of groups in that each of the two participants is confronted by only one another and not by a collectivity. Because this type of group depends only on two participants, the withdrawal of one would destroy the whole: "A dyad depends on each of its two elements alone--in its death though not in its life: for its life it needs both, but for its death, only one."
Hence the dyad does not attain that superpersonal life which, in all other groups, creates among its members a sense of constraint. Yet the very lack of superpersonal structure also entails intense absorption of the participants in their dyadic relationship. The dependence of the whole on each partner is obvious; in all other groups duties and responsibilities can be delegated, but not in the dyad, where each participant is immediately and directly responsible for any collective action. Because each partner in the dyad deals with only one other individual, who forms a unit with him, neither of the two can deny responsibility by shifting it to the group; neither can hold the group responsible for what he has done or failed to do.
When a dyad is formed into a triad, the apparently insignificant fact that one member has been added actually brings about a major qualitative change. In the triad, as in all associations involving more than two persons, the individual participant is confronted with the possibility of being outvoted by a majority.
The triad is the simplest structure in which the group as a whole can achieve domination over its component members; it provides a social framework that allows the constraining of individual participants for collective purposes. The dyad relies on immediate reciprocity, but the triad can impose its will upon one member through the formation of a coalition between the two others. Thus, the triad exhibits in its simplest form the sociological drama that informs all social life: the dialectic of freedom and constraint, of autonomy and heteronomy.
When a third member enters a dyadic group, various processes become possible where previously they could not take place. Simmel singled out three such processes, although others have since been identified. A third member may play the role of mediator vis-a-vis the other two, helping, through his own impartiality, to moderate passions that threaten to tear the group apart. He may, alternately, act as a tertius gaudens (the third who rejoices), seeking to turn to his own advantage a disagreement between the other two. Finally, through a strategy of divide et impera (divide and rule), he may intentionally created conflicts between the other two in order to attain a dominant position or other gains.
This brief outline of three types of strategy open to the third participant can hardly exhaust the richness of Simmel's thought in this analysis. He offers a great variety of examples, deliberately comparing intimate human involvements, such as the competition of two men for one woman, with such large-scale events as the European balance of power and the formation of coalitions among political parties. He compares the strategy of a mother-in-law who confronts a newly married couple with the ways in which Rome, after subjugating Greece, dealt with Athens and Sparta.
It is a virtuoso performance, one of the more persuasive demonstrations of the power of sociological analysis. Simmel reveals the sterility of total psychological reductionism by demonstrating how the apparently peripheral fact that a third member has been added to a group of two opens up possibilities for actions and processes that could not otherwise have come into existence. He uncovers the new properties that emerge from the forms of association among individuals, properties that cannot be derived from characteristics of the individuals involved. The triad provides new avenues of social action while at the same time it restricts other opportunities, such as the expression of individuality, which were available in the dyadic group.
Simmel does not restrict his analysis of numbers to the dyad and triad. Although it is not possible to demonstrate that each addition of new members would produce a distinct sociological entity, he shows that there is a crucial difference between small groups and larger ones.
In small groups, members typically have a chance to interact directly with one another; once the group exceeds a relatively limited size, such interaction must be mediated through formal arrangements. In order to come to grips with the increasing complexity of relationships among large numbers of individuals, the group must create special organs to help the patterning of interactions among its members. Thus, no large group can function without the creation of offices, the differentiation of status positions, and the delegation of tasks and responsibilities. This is the reason larger groups become societies of unequals: in order to maintain themselves, they must be structurally differentiated. But this means that the larger group "gains its unity, which finds expression in the group organs and political notions and ideals, only at the price of a great distance between all of these structures and the individual."
The smaller the group, the greater the involvement of its members, for interaction among a few tends to be more intense than interaction among many, if only because of the greater frequency of contact. Inversely, the larger the group, the weaker the participation of its members; chances are high that they will be involved with only a segment of their personalities instead of as whole human beings. The larger group demands less of its members, and also creates "objective" structures that confront individuals with superpersonal powers: "For it is this large number which paralyzes the individual element and which causes the general element to emerge at such a distance from it that it seems that it could exits by itself, without any individuals, to whom in fact it often enough is antagonistic."
Although through its formal arrangement the larger group confronts the individual with a distant and alien power, it liberates him from close control and scrutiny precisely because it creates greater distance among its members. In the dyad, the immediacy of the we is not yet marred by the intrusion of structural constraints, and, it will be remembered, in the triad two members may constrain the third and force their will upon him. In the small group, however, the coalitions and majorities that act to constrain individual action are mitigated by the immediacy of participation. In the large group, the differentiated organs constrain the individual through their "objective" powers, even though they allow freedom from the group through segmental rather than total involvement.
Simmel's discussion of the differences between small and large groups--between the intensity of involvement among individuals in the primary group and the distance, aloofness, and segmentation of individuals in larger groups--reveals his general dialectical approach to the relation between individual freedom and group structure. His minute sociological analysis is part of his general philosophical view of the drift of modern history. Like Durkheim, Simmel theorizes about types and properties of group relations and social solidarities as part of a more general endeavor to assess and evaluate the major trends of historical development and to elaborate a diagnosis of his time.
From Coser, 1977:186-189.
Perhaps nothing so clearly reveals Simmel's profound ambivalence toward contemporary culture and society as his view of the drift of modern history. This view is a compound of the apparently contradictory assessments of liberal progressivism and cultural pessimism, as revealed in the writings of Herbert Spencer and as reflected in German idealism since the days of Schiller or Nietzsche.
The trend of modern history appears to Simmel as a progressive liberation of the individual from the bonds of exclusive attachment and personal dependencies in spite of the increasing domination of man by cultural products of his own creation. In premodern societies, Simmel argued, man typically lived in a very limited number of relatively small social circles. Such circles, whether kinship groups or guilds, towns or villages, tightly surrounded the individual and held him firmly in their grip. The total personality of the individual was immersed in this group life. Thus, medieval organizational forms "occupied the whole man; they did not only serve an objectively determined purpose, but were rather a form of unification englobing the total person of those who had gathered together in the pursuit of that purpose." Associations in premodern societies were not functionally specific or limited to clearly articulated purposes; they bound the individual through undifferentiated dependencies and loyalties. Moreover, subordination in premodern society typically involved domination over the entire personality of the subordinate. The lord of the manor was not only the political overlord of the serf; he dominated the total person of the serf--economically, juridically, and socially. Dependence, therefore, was al encompassing.
In such premodern societies, the individuals were organized, as it were, in a number of linked concentric circles. A man could be a member of a guild, which in turn was part of a wider confederation of guilds. A burgher may have been a citizen of a particular town and this town may have belonged to a federation of towns, such as the Hanse. An individual could not directly join a larger social circle but could become involved in it by virtue of membership in a smaller one. A primitive tribe does not consist of individual members but of clans, lineages, or other groupings in which individuals participate directly.
The principle of organization in the modern world is fundamentally different: an individual is a member of many well-defined circles, no one of which involves and controls his total personality. "The number of different circles in which individuals move, is one of the indices of cultural development." Modern man's family involvements are separated from his occupational and religious activities. This means that each individual occupies a distinct position in the intersection of many circles. The greater the number of possible combinations of membership, the more each individual tends toward a unique location in the social sphere. Although he may share membership with other individuals in one or several circles, he is less likely to be located at exactly the same intersection as anyone else.
Human personality is transformed when membership in a single circle or in a few of them is replaced by a social position at the intersection of a great number of such circles. The personality is now highly segmented through such multiple participation. In premodern societies, for example, locality or kinship determined religious affiliation; one could not coexist with men who did not share his religious beliefs, for the religious community coincided with the territorial or kinship community. In the modern world, in contrast, these allegiances are separated. A man need not share the religious beliefs of his neighbors, although he may be tied to them by other bonds. It does not follow, however, that religion loses its force; it only becomes more specific. Religious concerns are differentiated from other concerns and hence become more individualized; they do not necessarily overlap with a person's kinship or neighborhood ties.
Multifaceted involvement in a variety of circles contributes to increased self-consciousness. As the individual escapes the domination of the small circle that imprisons his personality within its confines, he becomes conscious of a sense of liberation. The segmentation of group involvement brings about a sense of uniqueness and of freedom. The intersection of social circles is the precondition for the emergence of individualism. Not only do men become more unlike one another; they are also afforded the opportunity to move without effort in different social contexts.
The forms of subordination and superordination also assume a novel character in the modern world. No longer can the individual be totally dominated by others; whatever domination continues to exist is functionally specific and limited to a particular time and place. As compared with the lord of the manor, the modern employer cannot dominate the entire personalities of the workers in his factory; his power over them is limited to a specifically economic context and a specified number of hours. Once the workers leave the factory gates, they are "free" to take part in other types of social relations in other social circles. Although they may be subordinate in some of these relations, they may well be superordinate in others, thus compensating for their inferiority in one area by superiority in another.
It should be clear that Simmel, in his original manner, is retracing the liberal view of historical patterns that could be found in such otherwise diverse thinkers as Spencer and Durkheim. Differentiation, in this view, involves a shift from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from uniformity to individualization, from absorption in the predictable routines of a small world of tradition to participation in a wider world of multifaceted involvements and open possibilities. The drift of western history leads form status to contract, form mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity, from societies in which custom is so rigid that it militates against individuality to those in which the multiplicity of involvements and contracts allows the emergence of uniqueness and individual autonomy.
This is only one of the two perspectives Simmel used to consider the past and present cultural situation. His other view owes more to Marx and to German cultural pessimism than to the optimism of British and French progressive thought. From this perspective, Simmel writes of the ineradicable dualism inherent in the relation between individuals and objective cultural values. An individual can attain cultivation only by appropriating the cultural values that surround him. But these values threaten to engulf and to subjugate the individual. More specifically, the division of labor, while it is the origin of a differentiated cultural life, in its way also subjugates and enslaves the individual. More specifically, the division of labor, while it is the origin of a differentiated cultural life, in its way also subjugates and enslaves the individual.
The human mind creates a variety of products that have an existence independent of their creator as well as of those who receive or reject them. The individual is perpetually confronted with a world of cultural objects, from religion to morality, from customs to science, which, although internalized, remain alien powers. They attain a fixed and coagulated form and tend to appear as "otherness" to the individual. Hence, there is a perennial contradiction "between subjective life, which is restless but limited and time-bound, and its contents which, once created, are . . . timelessly valid."
The individual needs and science and religion and law in order to attain autonomy and to realize his own purposes. He needs to internalize these cultural values, making them part of himself. Individual excellence can be attained only through absorption of external values. And yet the fetishistic character that Marx attributed to the economic realm in the epoch of commodity production constitutes only a special case of the general fate of cultural contents. These contents are, particularly in more developed cultural epochs, involved in a peculiar paradox: they have been created by people and they were intended for people, but they attain an objective form and follow an immanent logic of development, becoming alienated from their origin as well as from their purpose.
In passages that may express more pathos than analytical understanding, Simmel sees modern man as surrounded by a world of objects that constrain and dominate his needs and desires. Technology creates "unnecessary" knowledge, that is, knowledge that is of no particular value but is simply the by-product of the autonomous expansion of scientific activities.
As a result of these trends, modern man finds himself in a deeply problematical situation: he is surrounded by a multiplicity of cultural elements, which, although they are not meaningless to him, are not fundamentally meaningful either. They oppress the individual because he cannot fully assimilate them. But he cannot reject them because they belong at least potentially to the sphere of his own cultural development. "The cultural objects become more and more linked to each other in a self-contained world which has increasingly fewer contacts with the subjective psyche and its desires and sensibilities." Simmel, like Marx, exemplifies this process by reference to the division of labor. Once this division is highly developed, "the perfection of the product is attained at the cost of the development of the producer. The increase in physical and psychical energies and skills which accompanies one-sided activities hardly benefits the total personality; in fact it often leads to atrophy because it sucks away those forces that are necessary for the harmonious development of the full personality." The division of labor severs the creator from the creation so that the latter attains an autonomy of its own. This process of reification of the cultural products, accentuated, though not originated, by the division of labor, causes increasing alienation between the person and his products. Unlike the artist, the producer can no longer find himself within his product; he loses himself in it.
The cultural universe is made by men, yet each individual perceives it as a world he never made. Thus, progress in the development of objective cultural products leads to an increasing impoverishment of the creating individuals. The producers and consumers of objective culture tend to atrophy in their individual capacities even though they depend on it for their own cultivation.
Although committed in one facet of his Weltanschauung to the progressive liberal vision of those French and English thinkers who influenced him deeply, Simmel is equally bound to a tragic vision of culture. He combines in an original, though not fully resolved, way the uncomplicated evolutionary faith in the perfectibility of man of a Condorcet with the metaphysical pathos of a Schiller or a Nietzsche. Unable to relinquish the vision of a progressive liberation of the individual from the bonds of tradition and subjugation, Simmel yet foretells, with a sense of impending doom, "a cage of the future" (to use Max Weber's term), in which individuals will be frozen into social functions and in which the price of the objective perfection of the world will be the atrophy of the human soul.
From Coser, 1977:189-193.
Simmel's The Philosophy of Money is a much neglected classic. While most of his sociological work has now been translated into English, we still lack a translation of this seminal work. One possible reason for its neglect is the title, which could have led many to infer that this is one of Simmel's metaphysical works. An early interpreter of Simmel in this country, Nicholas Spykman, took just that view. Although this large book does contain certain important philosophical ideas, it is mainly a contribution to cultural sociology and to the analysis of the wider social implications of economic affairs.
Economic exchange, Simmel argues, can best be understood as a form of social interaction. When monetary transactions replace earlier forms of barter, significant changes occur in the forms of interaction between social actors. Money is subject to precise division and manipulation and permits exact measurement of equivalents. It is impersonal in a manner in which objects of barter, like crafted gongs and collected shells, can never be. It thus helps promote rational calculation in human affairs and furthers the rationalization that is characteristic of modern society. When money becomes the prevalent link between people, it replaces personal ties anchored in diffuse feelings by impersonal relations that are limited to a specific purpose. Consequently, abstract calculation invades areas of social life, such as kinship relations or the realm of esthetic appreciation, which were previously the domain of qualitative rather than quantitative appraisals.
Just because money makes it possible to limit a transaction to the purpose at hand, it helps increase personal freedom and fosters social differentiation; money displaces "natural" groupings by voluntary associations, which are set up for specific rational purposes. Wherever the cash nexus penetrates, it dissolves bonds based on the ties of blood or kinship or loyalty. Money in the modern world is more than a standard of value and a means of exchange. Over and above its economic functions, it symbolizes and embodies the modern spirit of rationality, of calculability, of impersonality. Money levels qualitative differences between things as well as between people; it is the major mechanism that paves the way from Gemeinshcaft to Gesellschaft. Under its aegis, the modern spirit of calculation and abstraction has prevailed over an older world view that accorded primacy to feelings and imagination.
The Philosophy of Money elaborates on various themes Simmel discussed in other works, some of which have already been taken up in the preceding pages. However, because this work gives a fuller treatment of these themes than do his other writings, it is indispensable for an understanding of his cultural analyses and his cultural criticism.
From Coser, 1977: 193-194.
From Kurt Wolff (Trans.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press, 1950, pp. 402 - 408.
If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the "stranger" presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics. This phenomenon too, however, reveals that spatial relations are only the condition, on the one hand, and the symbol, on the other, of human relations. 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 to morrow. He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.
The unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation is organized, in the phenomenon of the stranger, in a way which may be most briefly formulated by saying that in the relationship to him, distance means that he, who is close by, is far, and strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near. For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction. The inhabitants of Sirius are not really strangers to us, at least not in any social logically relevant sense: they do not exist for us at all; they are beyond far and near. The stranger, like the poor and like sundry "inner enemies," is an element of the group itself. His position as a full-fledged member involves both being outside it and confronting it. The following statements, which are by no means intended as exhaustive, indicate how elements which increase distance and repel, in the relations of and with the stranger produce a pattern of coordination and consistent interaction.
Throughout the history of economics the stranger everywhere appears as the trader, or the trader as stranger. As long as economy is essentially self-sufficient, or products are exchanged within a spatially narrow group, it needs no middleman: a trader is only required for products that originate outside the group. Insofar as members do not leave the circle in order to buy these necessities--in which case they are the "strange" merchants in that outside territory--the trader must be a stranger, since nobody else has a chance to make a living.
This position of the stranger stands out more sharply if he settles down in the place of his activity, instead of leaving it again: in innumerable cases even this is possible only if he can live by intermediate trade. Once an economy is somehow closed the land is divided up, and handicrafts are established that satisfy the demand for them, the trader, too, can find his existence. For in trade, which alone makes possible unlimited combinations, intelligence always finds expansions and new territories, an achievement which is very difficult to attain for the original producer with his lesser mobility and his dependence upon a circle of customers that can be increased only slowly. Trade can always absorb more people than primary production; it is, therefore, the sphere indicated for the stranger, who intrudes as a supernumerary, so to speak, into a group in which the economic positions are actually occupied--the classical example is the history of European Jews. The stranger is by nature no "owner of soil"--soil not only in the physical, but also in the figurative sense of a life-substance which is fixed, if not in a point in space, at least in an ideal point of the social environment. Although in more intimate relations, he may develop all kinds of charm and significance, as long as he is considered a stranger in the eyes of the other, he is not an "owner of soil." Restriction to intermediary trade, and often (as though sublimated from it) to pure finance, gives him the specific character of mobility. If mobility takes place within a closed group, it embodies that synthesis of nearness and distance which constitutes the formal position of the stranger. For, the fundamentally mobile person comes in contact, at one time or another, with every individual, but is not organically connected, through established ties of kinship, locality, and occupation, with any single one.
Another expression of this constellation lies in the objectivity of the stranger. He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of "objectivity." But objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement. I refer to the discussion (in the chapter on "Superordination and Subordination" [8]) of the dominating positions of the person who is a stranger in the group; its most typical instance was the practice of those Italian cities to call their judges from the outside, because no native was free from entanglement in family and party interests.
With the objectivity of the stranger is connected, also, the phenomenon touched upon above, [9] although it is chiefly (but not exclusively) true of the stranger who moves on. This is the fact that he often receives the most surprising openness--confidences which sometimes have the character of a confessional and which would be carefully withheld from a more closely related person. Objectivity is by no means non-participation (which is altogether outside both subjective and objective interaction), but a positive and specific kind of participation--just as the objectivity of a theoretical observation does not refer to the mind as a passive tabula rasa on which things inscribe their qualities, but on the contrary, to its full activity that operates according to its own laws, and to the elimination, thereby, of accidental dislocations and emphases, whose individual and subjective differences would produce different pictures of the same object.
Objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given. The freedom, however, which allows the stranger to experience and treat even his close relationships as though from a bird's-eye view, contains many dangerous possibilities. In uprisings of all sorts, the party attacked has claimed, from the beginning of things, that provocation has come from the outside, through emissaries and instigators. Insofar as this is true, it is an exaggeration of the specific role of the stranger: he is freer practically and theoretically; he surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria for them are more general and more objective ideals; he is not tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent. [10]
Finally, the proportion of nearness and remoteness which gives the stranger the character of objectivity, also finds practical expression in the more abstract nature of the relation to him. That is, with the stranger one has only certain more general qualities in common, whereas the relation to more organically connected persons is based on the commonness of specific differences from merely general features. In fact, all somehow personal relations follow this scheme in various patterns. They are determined not only by the circumstance that certain common features exist among the individuals, along with individual differences, which either influence the relationship or remain outside of it. For, the common features themselves are basically determined in their effect upon the relation by the question whether they exist only between the participants in this particular relationship, and thus are quite general in regard to this relation, but are specific and incomparable in regard to everything outside of it--or whether the participants feel that these features are common to them because they are common to a group, a type, or mankind in general. In the case of the second alternative, the effectiveness of the common features becomes diluted in proportion to the size of the group composed of members who are similar in this sense. Although the commonness functions as their unifying basis, it does not make these particular persons interdependent on one another, because it could as easily connect everyone of them with all kinds of individuals other than the members of his group. This too, evidently, is a way in which a relationship includes both nearness and distance at the same time: to the extent to which the common features are general, they add, to the warmth of the relation founded on them, an element of coolness, a feeling of the contingency of precisely this relation--the connecting forces have lost their specific and centripetal character.
In the relation to the stranger, it seems to me, this constellation has an extraordinary and basic preponderance over the individual elements that are exclusive with the particular relationship. The stranger is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of a national, social, occupational, or generally human, nature. He is far from us, insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people.
A trace of strangeness in this sense easily enters even the most intimate relationships. In the stage of first passion, erotic relations strongly reject any thought of generalization: the lovers think that there has never been a love like theirs; that nothing can be compared either to the person loved or to the feelings for that person. An estrangement--whether as cause or as consequence it is difficult to decide usually comes at the moment when this feeling of uniqueness vanishes from the relationship. A certain skepticism in regard to its value, in itself and for them, attaches to the very thought that in their relation, after all, they carry out only a generally human destiny; that they experience an experience that has occurred a thousand times before; that, had they not accidentally met their particular partner, they would have found the same significance in another person.
Something of this feeling is probably not absent in any relation, however close, because what is common to two is never common to them alone, but is subsumed under a general idea which includes much else besides, many possibilities of commonness. No matter how little these possibilities become real and how often we forget them, here and there, nevertheless, they thrust themselves between us like shadows, like a mist which escapes every word noted, but which must coagulate into a solid bodily form before it can be called jealousy. In some cases, perhaps the more general, at least the more unsurmountable, strangeness is not due to different and ununderstandable matters. It is rather caused by the fact that similarity, harmony, and nearness are accompanied by the feeling that they are not really the unique property of this particular relationship: they are something more general, something which potentially prevails between the partners and an indeterminate number of others, and therefore gives the relation, which alone was realized, no inner and exclusive necessity.
On the other hand, there is a kind of "strangeness" that rejects the very commonness based on something more general which embraces the parties. The relation of the Greeks to the Barbarians is perhaps typical here, as are all cases in which it is precisely general attributes, felt to be specifically and purely human, that are disallowed to the other. But "stranger," here, has no positive meaning; the relation to him is a non-relation; he is not what is relevant here, a member of the group itself.
As a group member, rather, he is near and far at the same time, as is characteristic of relations founded only on generally human commonness. But between nearness and distance, there arises a specific tension when the consciousness that only the quite general is common, stresses that which is not common. In the case of the person who is a stranger to the country, the city, the race, etc., however, this non-common element is once more nothing individual, but merely the strangeness of origin, which is or could be common to many strangers. For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness.
This form is the basis of such a special case, for instance, as the tax levied in Frankfort and elsewhere upon medieval Jews. Whereas the Beede [tax] paid by the Christian citizen changed with the changes of his fortune, it was fixed once for all for every single Jew. This fixity rested on the fact that the Jew had his social position as a Jew, not as the individual bearer of certain objective contents. Every other citizen was the owner of a particular amount of property, and his tax followed its fluctuations. But the Jew as a taxpayer was, in the first place, a Jew, and thus his tax situation had an invariable element. This same position appears most strongly, of course, once even these individual characterizations (limited though they were by rigid invariance) are omitted, and all strangers pay an altogether equal head-tax.
In spite of being inorganically appended to it, the stranger is yet an organic member of the group. Its uniform life includes the specific conditions of this element. Only we do not know how to designate the peculiar unity of this position other than by saying that it is composed of certain measures of nearness and distance. Although some quantities of them characterize all relationships, a special proportion and reciprocal tension produce the particular, formal relation to the "stranger."
8. Pp. 216-221 above.--Tr.
9. On pp. 500-502 of the same chapter from which the present "Exhurs" is taken (IX, "Der Raum und die raumlichen Ordnungen der Gesellschaft," (Space and the Spatial Organization of Society). The chapter itself is not included in this volume.--Tr.
10. But where the attacked make the assertion falsely, they do so from the tendency of those in higher position to exculpate inferiors, who, up to the rebellion, have been in a consistently close relation with them. For, by creating the fiction that the rebels were not really guilty, but only instigated, and that the rebellion did not really start with them, they exonerate themselves, inasmuch as they altogether deny all real grounds for the uprising.
From Kurt H. Wolff, (Trans.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950, pp. 13-17.
The sociological significance of conflict (Kampf) has in principle never been disputed. Conflict is admitted to cause or modify interest groups, unifications, organizations. On the other hand, it may sound paradoxical in the common view if one asks whether irrespective of any phenomena that result from convict or that accompany it, it itself is a form of sociation. [l] At first glance, this sounds like a rhetorical question. If every interaction among men is a sociation, conflict--after all one of the most vivid interactions, which, furthermore, cannot possibly be carried on by one individual alone--must certainly be considered as sociation. And in fact, dissociating factors --hate, envy, need, desire--are the causes of convict; it breaks out because of them. Conflict is thus designed to resolve divergent dualisms; it is a way of achieving some kind of unity, even if it be through the annihilation of one of the conflicting parties. This is roughly parallel to the fact that it is the most violent symptom of a disease which represents the effort of the organism to free itself of disturbances and damages caused by them.
But this phenomenon means much more than the trivial ''si vis pacem para bellum'' [if you want peace, prepare for war]; it is something quite general, of which this maxim only describes a special case. Conflict itself resolves the tension between contrasts. The fact that it aims at peace is only one, an especially obvious, expression of its nature: the synthesis of elements that work both against and for one another. This nature appears more clearly when it is realized that both forms of relation--the antithetical and the convergent--are fundamentally distinguished from the mere indifference of two or more individuals or groups. Whether it implies the rejection or the termination of sociation, indifference is purely negative. In contrast to such pure negativity, conflict contains something positive. Its positive and negative aspects, however, are integrated: they can be separated conceptually, hut not empirically.
Social phenomena appear in a new light when seen from the angle of this sociologically positive character of conflict. It is at once evident then that if the relations among men (rather than what the individual is to himself and in his relations to objects) constitute the subject matter of a special science, sociology, then the traditional topics of that science cover only a subdivision of it: it is more comprehensive and is truly defined by a principle. At one time it appeared as if there were only two consistent subject matters of the science of man: the individual unit and the unit of individuals (society); any third seemed logically excluded. In this conception, conflict itself--irrespective of its contributions to these immediate social units--found no place for study. It was a phenomenon of its own, and its subsumption under the concept of unity would have been arbitrary as well as useless, since conflict meant the negation of unity.
A more comprehensive classification of the science of the relations of men should distinguish, it would appear, those relations which constitute a unit, that is, social relations in the strict sense, from those which counteract unity. [2] It must be realized, however, that both relations can usually he found in every historically real situation. The individual does not attain the unity of his personality exclusively by an exhaustive harmonization, according to logical, objective, religious, or ethical norms, of the contents of his personality. On the contrary, contradiction and conflict not only precede this unity but are operative in it at every moment of its existence. Just so, there probably exists no social unit in which convergent and divergent currents among its members are not inseparably interwoven. An absolutely centripetal and harmonious group, a pure ''unification'' ("Vereinigung''), not only is empirically unreal, it could show no real life process. The society of saints which Dante sees in the Rose of Paradise may be like such a group, but it is without any change and development; whereas the holy assembly of Church Fathers in Raphael's Disputa shows if not actual conflict, at least a considerable differentiation of moods and directions of thought, whence flow all the vitality and the really organic structure of that group. Just as the universe needs "love and hate,'' that is, attractive and repulsive forces, in order to have any form at all, so society, too, in order to attain a determinate shape, needs some quantitative ratio of harmony and disharmony, of association and competition, of favorable and unfavorable tendencies. But these discords are by no means mere sociological liabilities or negative instances. Definite, actual society does not result only from other social forces which are positive, and only to the extent that the negative factors do not hinder them. This common conception is quite superficial: society, as we know it, is the result of both categories of interaction, which thus both manifest themselves as wholly positive. [3]
There is a misunderstanding according to which one of these two kinds of interaction tears down what the other builds up, and what is eventually left standing is the result of the subtraction of the two (while in reality it must rather be designated as the result of their addition). This misunderstanding probably derives from the twofold meaning of the concept of unity. We designate as "unity'' the consensus and concord of interacting individuals, as against their discords, separations, and disharmonies. But we also call ''unity'' the total group-synthesis of persons, energies, and forms, that is, the ultimate wholeness of that group, a wholeness which covers both strictly-speaking unitary relations and dualistic relations. We thus account for the group phenomenon which we feel to be ''unitary'' in terms of functional components considered specifically unitary; and in so doing, we disregard the other, larger meaning of the term.
This imprecision is increased by the corresponding twofold meaning of ''discord'' or ''opposition.'' Since discord unfolds its negative, destructive character between particular individuals, we naively conclude that it must have the same effect on the total group. In reality, however, something which is negative and damaging between individuals if it is considered in isolation and as aiming in a particular direction, does not necessarily have the same effect within the total relationship of these individuals. For, a very different picture emerges when we view the conflict in conjunction with other interactions not affected by it. The negative and dualistic elements play an entirely positive role in this more comprehensive picture, despite the destruction they may work on particular relations. All this is very obvious in the competition of individuals within an economic unit.
1. "Vergesellschaftungsform.'' "Vergesellschaftung" win be rendered as ''sociation.'' On the term and its various translations, see The Sociology of Georg Simmel, loc. cit., pp. lxiii-lxiv.--Tr.
2. "Einheit" is both "unit" and "unity," and Simmel uses the term promiscuously in both senses. --Tr.
3. This is the sociological instance of a contrast between two much more general conceptions of life. According to the common view, life always shows two parties in opposition. One of them represents the positive aspect of life, its content proper, if not its substance, while the very meaning of the other is non-being, which must be subtracted from the positive elements before they can constitute life. This is the common view of the relation between happiness and suffering, virtue and vice, strength and inadequacy, success and failure--between all possible contents and interruptions of the course of life. The highest conception indicated in respect to these contrasting pairs appears to me different: we must conceive of all these polar differentiations as of one life; we must sense the pulse of a central vitality even in that which, if seen from the standpoint of a particular ideal, ought not to be at all and is merely something negative; we must allow the total meaning of our existence to grow out of both parties. In the most comprehensive context of life, even that which as a single element is disturbing and destructive, is wholly positive; it is not a gap but the fulfillment of a role reserved for it alone. Perhaps it is not given to us to attain, much less always to maintain, the height from which all phenomena can he felt as making up the unity of life, even though from an objective or value standpoint, they appear to oppose one another as pluses and minuses, contradictions, and mutual elimination. We are too inclined to think and feel that our essential being, our true, ultimate significance, is identical with one of these factions. According to our optimistic or pessimistic feeling of life, one of them appears to us as surface or accident, as something to be eliminated or subtracted, in order for the true and intrinsically consistent life to emerge. We are everywhere enmeshed in this dualism (which will presently be discussed in more detail in the text above)--in the most intimate as in the most comprehensive provinces of life, personal, objective, and social. We think we have, or are, a whole or unit which is composed of two logically and objectively opposed parties, and we identify this totality of ours with one of them, while we feel the other to be something alien which does not properly belong and which denies our central and comprehensive being. Life constantly moves between these two tendencies. The one has just been described. The other lets the whole really be the whole. It makes the unity, which after all comprises both contrasts, alive in each of these contrasts and in their juncture. It is all the more necessary to assert the right of this second tendency in respect to the sociological phenomenon of conflict, because conflict impresses us with its socially destructive force as with an apparently indisputable tact.
(Farganis 2000:146-148)
Farganis, James. 2000. Readings in Social Theory: The Classic Tradition to Post-Modernism, 3d ed. New York: McGraw Hill.
Georg Simmel: Dialectic of Individual and Society
Introduction
Simmel’s approach to sociology differs from those of Comte and Durkheim in that he rejects the notion that one can study society as a whole and attempt to discover its laws of evolution and development. Society is a moral and cultural enterprise involving the association of free individuals, and therefore must be approached differently from the way in which we study nature and nature’s laws in the physical sciences. For Simmel, society is made up of the interactions between and among individuals, and the sociologist should study the patterns and forms of these associations, rather than quest after social laws.
Simmel attempts to capture the complexity and the ambiguity of social life by viewing it dialectically. Although individuals are free and creative spirits and not the mere objects of social determination, they are nevertheless part of the socialization process and play a role in its continuation. It is this dynamic tension that Simmel wishes to capture in his social theory. Simmel’s explorations of social forms and social types place the reader in a vortex of interactions. Thus, for example, Simmel’s typology of the stranger not only addresses the marginality of the person who exists on the fringes of a group, but also describes how the stranger becomes an element of the life of the group when its members seek to confide in the stranger. The marginality of the stranger connotes a role that is in but not of the group. Thus the stranger can have detachment and objectivity and be sought after by the group members as an intermediary or as someone who can keep secrets. It is this interactive relationship, from the perspective of the individual and the group, that Simmel so effectively captures in his writings.
Simmel began his inquiries from the bottom up, observing the smallest of social interactions and attempting to see how larger-scale institutions emerged from them. In doing so he often noticed phenomena that other theorists missed. For example, Simmel observed that the number of parties to an interaction can effect its nature. The interaction between two people, a dyad, will be very different from that which is possible in a three-party relationship, or triad. Within a dyadic relationship, each individual can maintain his or her identity. When one party to the interaction is no longer interested in maintaining it, the relationship is over. As soon as another person is added, however, the situation and its possibilities change markedly, and group structures which are separate from and influence the individuals involved begin to emerge. Two of the people can form a group against the third, one person can become the mediator or the object of competition between the remaining two, and so on. Simmel saw the forms of these interactions as entailing similar options and strategies whether one was dealing with roommates, nation-states, or corporate groups.
Simmel was very interested in and troubled by this relation between the individual and society, and he was particularly acute at relating the most intimate details of individual psychology to larger social structures. Modern civilization in his view was both an aid and a hindrance to the free development of the individual.
Simmel’s reflections on culture and alienation as well as his writings on the philosophy of money point to his willingness to write about weighty themes that have moral implications. But Simmel does not moralize: He approaches his subject dialectically and analyzes the tensions that define the modern experience.
Modern society has moved to liberate individuals from the stifling constraints of earlier forms of association. Urban life today allows individuals to play a variety of roles in different social spaces thereby enhancing freedom from the constraints of a fixed, static, and communal life of an earlier era. Yet the price of this freedom is to be found in the increasing sense of alienation that people experience in respect to the culture of urban life.
The latter theme forms the focus of the essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," which appears on the following pages. On the one hand, Simmel sees the modern emergence of cities and cosmopolitan living as having freed individuals to an unprecedented degree from the narrow constraints of small town life, a promising development; on the other, the impersonal nature of city life, especially its tendency to cause people to treat others merely as means toward ends, and in purely monetary terms, threatens to become an alienating structure that would dominate and distort this new found individualism. The essay is a good example of Simmel’s eclecticism: He borrows heavily from Durkheim in his analysis of the relation between personality type and the division of labor, and from Marx in his discussion of alienation and objectification. In the end, however, he comes closest in his overall vision, to Weber’s pessimistic view of the "iron cage," seeing the new metropolitan way of life as threatening to personal freedom and the quality of mental life.
Georg Simmel was born in 1858 in Berlin, the youngest of the seven children of his prosperous and cultured Jewish parents. After graduating from the German equivalent of high school, the Gymnasium, he studied at the University of Berlin, then a locus of intellectual activity in central Europe. Although he was officially a philosophy student, Simmel quickly acquired what was to be a lifelong taste for intellectual eclecticism, studying a broad array of disciplines including history, social psychology, art, anthropology, and sociology, and cultivating a mild contempt for academic procedures such as extensive footnoting and the establishment of strict disciplinary boundaries.
This rebelliousness and the refusal to limit himself to a single academic subject, combined with the considerable anti-Semitism of German university administrations, caused Simmel significant setbacks in his academic career. After receiving his doctorate he became a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1885, and despite the many books and articles he was to write, the international fame he was to acquire during his years there, and the efforts of many of his fellow professors, including Max Weber, to obtain him a professorship, he was repeatedly to be denied a regular academic appointment. It was not until 1914, four years before his death, that Simmel received a normal professorship, at the University of Strasbourg, and even this achievement was marred by the fact that the university shut down almost immediately with the outbreak of World War I.
Despite his ostracism from mainstream academic life, Simmel became a noted figure in the intellectual circles of Berlin and even worldwide. Because he was one of the most brilliant lecturers of his day, his classes were not only favored by students but became intellectual events, with many of the cultural elite of the city in attendance. He was friends with many of the leading intellectual figures of the day, including Max Weber and Edmund Husserl, and he was a frequent guest at dinner parties and social events. Many of his six books and over seventy articles were translated into English, French, Italian, Polish, and Russian.
Simmel has had an enormous effect on sociology and is considered perhaps the major founding figure of microsociology. His influence has been particularly strong in America. Albion Small, a translator of several Simmel articles, Robert Park, who studied with Simmel in Berlin in 1899 and 1900, and George Herbert Mead (Chapter 6), who reviewed Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, all played a major role in the founding of the Chicago School and its main theoretical bent, symbolic interactionism (Chapter 13).
(Simmel 2000:149-157)
Simmel, Georg. 2000. "The Metropolis and Mental Life." Pp. 149-157 in Readings in Social Theory: The Classic Tradition to Post-Modernism, 3d ed., edited by James Farganis. New York: McGraw Hill.
Georg Simmel: The Metropolis and Mental Life
The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces. This will be my task today.
The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Man is a differentiating creature. His mind is stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly. Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan psychic life becomes understandable—as over against small town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships. These latter are rooted in the more unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most readily in the steady rhythm of uninterrupted habituations. The intellect, however, has its locus in the transparent, conscious, higher layers of the psyche; it is the most adaptable of our inner forces. In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events. Thus the metropolitan type of man—which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants—develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart. In this an increased awareness assumes the psychic prerogative. Metropolitan life, thus, underlies a heightened awareness and a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan man. The reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and intellectuality branches out in many directions and is integrated with numerous discrete phenomena.
The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy. Here the multiplicity and concentration of economic exchange gives an importance to the means of exchange which the scantiness of rural commerce would not have allowed. Money economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things; and, in this attitude, a formal justice is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness. The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations. In the same manner, the individuality of phenomena is not commensurate with the pecuniary principle. Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much? All intimate emotional relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations man is reckoned with like a number, like an element which is in itself indifferent. Only the objective measurable achievement is of interest. Thus metropolitan man reckons with his merchants and customers, his domestic servants and often even with persons with whom he is obliged to have social intercourse. These features of intellectuality contrast with the nature of the small circle in which the inevitable knowledge of individuality as inevitably produces a warmer tone of behavior, a behavior which is beyond a mere objective balancing of service and return. In the sphere of economic psychology of the small group it is of importance that under primitive conditions production serves the customer who orders the good, so that the producer and the consumer are acquainted. The modern metropolis, however, is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness; and the intellectually calculating economic egoisms of both parties need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships. The money economy dominates the metropolis; it has displaced the last survivals of domestic production and the direct barter of goods; it minimizes, from day to day, the amount of work ordered by customers. The matter-of-fact attitude is obviously so intimately interrelated with the money economy, which is dominant in the metropolis, that nobody can say whether the intellectualistic mentality first promoted the money economy or whether the latter determined the former. The metropolitan way of life is certainly the most fertile soil for this reciprocity, a point which I shall document merely by citing the dictum of the most eminent English constitutional historian; throughout the whole course of English history, London has never acted as England’s heart but often as England’s intellect and always as her moneybag!
In certain seemingly insignificant traits, which lie upon the surface of life, the same psychic currents characteristically unite. Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new precision, a certainty in the definition of identities and differences, an unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements has been brought about in the relations of life-elements—just as externally this precision has been effected by the universal diffusion of pocket watches. However, the conditions of metropolitan life are at once cause and effect of this trait. The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so many people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism. If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time. In addition an apparently mere external factor: long distances, would make all waiting and broken appointments result in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule. Here again the general conclusions of this entire task of reflection become obvious, namely, that from each point on the surface of existence—however closely attached to the surface alone—one may drop a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all the most banal externalities of life finally are connected with the ultimate decisions concerning the meaning and style of life. Punctuality, calculability, exactness, are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with its money economy and intellectualistic character. These traits must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without. Even though sovereign types of personality, characterized by irrational impulses, are by no means impossible in the city, they are, nevertheless, opposed to typical city life. The passionate hatred of men like Ruskin and Nietzsche for the metropolis is understandable in these terms. Their natures discovered the value of life alone in the unschematized existence which cannot be defined with precision for all alike. From the same source of this hatred of the metropolis surged their hatred of money economy and of the intellectualism of modern existence.
The same factors which have thus coalesced into the exactness and minute precision of the form of life have coalesced into a structure of the highest impersonality; on the other hand, they have promoted a highly personal subjectivity. There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves. From this, the enhancement of the metropolitan intellectuality, also, seems originally to stem. Therefore, stupid people who are not intellectually alive in the first place usually are not exactly blasé. A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all. In the same way, through the rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless impressions force such violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they have no time to gather new strength. An incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that blasé attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when compared with children of quieter and less changeable milieus.
This physiological source of the metropolitan blasé attitude is joined by another source which flows from the money economy. The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other. This mood is the faithful subjective reflection of the completely internalized money economy. By being the equivalent to all the manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler. For money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of "how much?" Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover. In the individual case this coloration, or rather discoloration, of things through their money equivalence may be unnoticeably minute. However, through the relations of the rich to the objects to be had for money, perhaps even through the total character which the mentality of the contemporary public everywhere imparts to these objects, the exclusively pecuniary evaluation of objects has become quite considerable. The large cities, the main seats of the money exchange, bring the purchasability of things to the fore much more impressively than do smaller localities. That is why cities are also the genuine locale of the blasé attitude. In the blasé attitude the concentration of men and things stimulate the nervous system of the individual to its highest achievement so that it attains its peak. Through the mere quantitative intensification of the same conditioning factors this achievement is transformed into its opposite and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the blasé attitude. In this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation the last possibility of accommodating to the contents and forms of metropolitan life. The self-preservation of certain personalities is brought at the price of devaluating the whole objective world, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness.
Whereas the subject of this form of existence has to come to terms with it entirely for himself, his self-preservation in the face of the large city demands from him a no less negative behavior of a social nature. This mental attitude of metropolitans toward one another we many designate, from a formal point of view, as reserve. If so many inner reactions were responses to the continuous external contacts with innumerable people as are those in the small town, where one knows almost everybody one meets and where one has a positive relation to almost everyone, one would be completely atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state. Partly this psychological fact, partly the right to distrust which men have in the face of the touch-and-go elements of metropolitan life, necessitates our reserve. As a result of this reserve we frequently do not even know by sight those who have been our neighbors for years. And it is this reserve which in the eyes of the small-town people makes us appear to be cold and heartless. Indeed, if I do not deceive myself, the inner aspect of this outer reserve is not only indifference but, more often than we are aware, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion, which will break into hatred and fight at the moment of a closer contact, however caused. The whole inner organization of such an extensive communicative life rests upon an extremely varied hierarchy of sympathies, indifferences, and aversions of the briefest as well as of the most permanent nature. The sphere of indifference in this hierarchy is not as large as might appear on the surface. Our psychic activity still responds to almost every impression of somebody else with a somewhat distinct feeling. The unconscious, fluid and changing character of this impression seems to result in a state of indifference. Actually this indifference would be just as unnatural as the diffusion of indiscriminate mutual suggestion would be unbearable. From both these typical dangers of the metropolis, indifference and indiscriminate suggestibility, antipathy protects us. A latent antipathy and the preparatory stage of practical antagonism effect the distances and aversions without which this mode of life could not at all be led. The extent and the mixture of this style of life, the rhythm of its emergence and disappearance, the forms in which it is satisfied—all these, with the unifying motives in the narrower sense, form the inseparable whole of the metropolitan style of life. What appears in the metropolitan style of life directly as dissociation is in reality only one of its elemental forms of socialization.
This reserve with its overtone of hidden aversion appears in turn as the form or the cloak of a more general mental phenomenon of the metropolis: it grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions. The metropolis goes back to one of the large developmental tendencies of social life as such, to one of the few tendencies for which an approximately universal formula can be discovered. The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this; a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles. However, this circle is closely coherent and allows its individual members only a narrow field for the development of unique qualities and free, self-responsible movements. Political and kinship groups, parties and religious associations begin in this way. The self-preservation of very young associations requires the establishment of strict boundaries and a centripetal unity. Therefore they cannot allow the individual freedom and unique inner and outer development. From this stage social development proceeds at once in two different, yet corresponding, directions. To the extent to which the group grows—numerically, spatially, in significance and in content of life—to the same degree the group’s direct, inner unity loosens, and the rigidity of the original demarcation against others is softened through mutual relations and connections. At the same time, the individual gains freedom of movement, far beyond the first jealous delimitation. The individual also gains a specific individuality to which the division of labor in the enlarged group gives both occasion and necessity. The state and Christianity, guilds and political parties, and innumerable other groups have developed according this formula, however much, of course, the special conditions and forces of the respective groups have modified the general scheme. This scheme seems to me distinctly recognizable also in the evolution of individuality within urban life. The small-town life in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages set barriers against movement and relations of the individual toward the outside, and it set up barriers against individual independence and differentiation within the individual self. These barriers were such that under them modern man could not have breathed. Even today a metropolitan man who is placed in a small town feels a restriction similar, at least, in kind. The smaller circle which forms our milieu is, and the more restricted those relations to others are which dissolve the boundaries of the individual, the more anxiously the circle guards the achievements, the conduct of life, and the outlook of the individual, and the more readily a quantitative and qualitative specialization would break up the framework of the whole little circle.
The ancient polis in this respect seems to have had the very character of a small town. The constant threat to its existence at the hands of enemies from near and afar effected strict coherence in political and military respects, a supervision of the citizen by the citizen, a jealousy of the whole against the individual whose particular life was suppressed to such a degree that he could compensate only by acting as a despot in his own household. The tremendous agitation and excitement, the unique colorfulness of Athenian life, can perhaps be understood in terms of the fact that a people of incomparably individualized personalities struggled against the constant inner and outer pressure of a de-individualizing small town. This produced a tense atmosphere in which the weaker individuals were suppressed and those of stronger natures were incited to prove themselves in the most passionate manner. This is precisely why it was that there blossomed in Athens what must be called, without defining it exactly, "the general human character" in the intellectual development of our species. For we maintain factual as well as historical validity for the following connection: the most extensive and the most general contents and forms of life are most intimately connected with the most individual ones. They have a preparatory stage in common, that is, they find their enemy in narrow formations and groupings the maintenance of which places both of them into a state of defense against expanse and generality lying without and the freely moving individuality within. Just as in the feudal age, the "free" man was the one who stood under the law of the land, that is, under the law of the largest social orbit, and the unfree man was the one who derived his right merely from the narrow circle of a feudal association and was excluded from the larger social orbit—so today metropolitan man is "free" in a spiritualized and refined sense, in contrast to the pettiness and prejudices which hem in the small-town man. For the reciprocal reserve and indifference and the intellectual life conditions of large circles are never felt more strongly by the individual in their impact upon his independence than in the thickest crowd of the big city. This is because the bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes the mental distance only the more visible. It is obviously only the obverse of this freedom if, under certain circumstances, one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd. For here as elsewhere it is by no means necessary that the freedom of man be reflected in his emotional life as comfort.
It is not only the immediate size of the area and the number of persons which, because of the universal historical correlation between the enlargement of the circle and the personal inner and outer freedom, has made the metropolis the locale of freedom. It is rather in transcending this visible expanse than any given city becomes the seat of cosmopolitanism. The horizon of the city expands in a manner comparable to the way in which wealth develops; a certain amount of property increases in a quasi-automatical way in ever more rapid progression. As soon as a certain limit has been passed, the economic, personal, and intellectual relations of the citizenry, the sphere of intellectual predominance of the city over its hinterland, grow as in geometrical progression. Every gain in dynamic extension becomes a step, not for an equal, but for a new and larger extension. From every thread spinning out of the city, ever new threads grow as if by themselves, just as within the city the unearned increment of ground rent, through the mere increase in communication, brings the owner automatically increasing profits. At this point, the quantitative aspect of life is transformed directly into qualitative traits of character. The sphere of life of the small town is, in the main, self-contained and autarchic. For it is the decisive nature of the metropolis that its inner life overflows by waves into a far-flung national or international area. Weimar is not an example to the contrary, since its significance was hinged upon individual personalities and died with them; whereas the metropolis is indeed characterized by its essential independence even from the most eminent individual personalities. This is the counterpart to the independence, and it is the price the individual pays for the independence, which he enjoys in the metropolis. The most significant characteristic of the metropolis is this functional extension beyond its physical boundaries. And this efficacy reacts in turn and gives weight, importance, and responsibility to metropolitan life. Man does not end with the limits of his body or the area comprising his immediate activity. Rather is the range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating from him temporally and spatially. In the same way, a city consists of its total effects which extend beyond its immediate confines. Only this range is the city’s actual extent in which its existence is expressed. This fact makes it obvious that individual freedom, the logical and historical complement of such extension, is not to be understood only in the negative sense of mere freedom of mobility and elimination of prejudices and petty philistinism. The essential point is that the particularly and incomparability, which ultimately every human being possesses, be somehow expressed in the working-out of a way of life. That we follow the laws of our own nature—and this after all is freedom—becomes obvious and convincing to ourselves and to others only if the expressions of this nature differ from the expressions of others. Only our unmistakably proves that our way of life has not been superimposed by others.
Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena as in Paris the remunerative occupation of the quatorzieme. They are persons who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons. In the measure of its expansion, the city offers more and more the decisive conditions of the division of labor. It offers a circle which through its size can absorb a highly diverse variety of services. At the same time, the concentration of individuals and their struggle for customers compel the individual to specialize in a function from which he cannot be readily displaced by another. It is decisive that city life has transformed the struggle with nature for livelihood into an inter-human struggle for gain, which here is not granted by nature but by other men. For specialization does not flow only from the competition for gain but also from the underlying fact that the seller must always seek to call forth new and differentiated needs of the lured customer. In order to find a source of income which is not yet exhausted, and to find a function which cannot readily be displaced, it is necessary to specialize in one’s services. This process promotes differentiation, refinement, and the enrichment of the public’s needs, which obviously must lead to growing personal differences within this public.
All this forms the transition to the individualization of mental and psychic traits which the city occasions in proportion to its size. There is a whole series of obvious causes underlying this process. First, one must meet the difficulty of asserting his own personality within the dimensions of metropolitan life. Where the quantitative increase in importance and the expense of energy reach their limits, one seizes upon qualitative differentiation in order somehow to attract the attention of the social circle by playing upon its sensitivity for differences.
Finally, man is tempted to adopt the most tendentious peculiarities, that is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and preciousness. Now, the meaning of these extravagances does not at all l