Introduction

This chapter will consider the five fundamental concepts of Simmel’s sociology—“life,” “interaction,” “form,” “sociation,” and “sociability”—and his thesis on the tragedy of culture. We will delve into Simmel’s microsociology and the importance he gave to social interaction between individuals and their everyday life encounters. An in-depth analysis will be dedicated to his theory on fashion.

Soon after, we will explore Simmel’s theory on The Metropolis and Mental Life, where he investigates the relationship between modernity and calculability and the violence exerted by the metropolis on its inhabitants’ psyche, leading them to become “blasé.”

The topic we will cover immediately next is Simmel’s conflict theory.

In the last section devoted to Simmel’s critics, we will address three issues: Simmel’s tendency to contradict himself, his nationalism, and the reason for Lukács’s corrosive criticism.

The Importance of Interaction

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was the first among the classic authors to attribute the most extraordinary centrality to interactions between individuals and their anonymous encounters.

For Simmel, the interaction between individuals is the supporting framework of every social structure, and it is from the interaction between individuals that one must start to understand the world.

A complex and multifaceted theorist, Simmel let his thoughts flow in many directions without stiffening it into a definite form. Anyone who decides to read his sociology texts will not find Durkheim’s strict period and circumscribed definitions. The essay on fashion, one of Simmel’s most famous essays, almost entirely appears to be a collection of scattered thoughts, where reasoning is interrupted and recovered several times.

Jürgen Habermas wrote that Simmel is “a creative although not a systematic thinker” (Habermas 1996, 405). This definition describes well the characteristics of his writing, not exactly those of his thought. As I will explain later, Simmel has a clear sociological theory.

Some have speculated that Simmel deliberately chose to write disorganizedly to express his hostility to any system. More likely, Simmel was not adept at arranging the insides of his writings in an orderly fashion because this is a quality that not all writers possess to the same extent. When a scholar becomes famous, his limitations become strengths. Great scholars are not good at everything, and Simmel also has his limitations.

All this does not mean that Simmel is not gifted with “immense genius and acuteness” (Rensi 1999, 61); it simply means that it makes life hard for those who have to summarize his thinking. It is difficult even to suggest the first texts from which to meet this author. Simmel, who considered himself above all a philosopher (Vozza 2003, 49), wrote on many subjects, respecting an open conception of knowledge. He published twenty-five volumes and more than three hundred essays, reviews, and articles of various kinds (Frisby 1984, 22).

I will begin my exposition with the fundamental concepts of his sociology. The best way to approach the thought of a creative, multifaceted, and fundamentally overflowing author is to become familiar with his basic vocabulary. It is a step-by-step process. Teaching Simmel’s sociology in a university classroom is not an easy task. One needs to give shape to his thought, especially since his work is “voluminous, sometimes convoluted and sometimes difficult to read (Poggi 1993). His major sociological work, Sociology, published in 1908, is a collection of essays that lack unity and organization (Aron 1964, 6).

There are five fundamental concepts of Simmel’s sociology: Life, interaction, form, sociation, and sociability.

Let’s clarify their meaning.

Life as a Primordial Force

For Simmel, society exists where men enter into reciprocal action, influencing each other. Society is the name used to indicate a circle of individuals linked to each other by various forms of reciprocity. Society is formed when a group of people come together and interact with one another (Simmel [1909] 1965, 314).

Having clarified the importance of interaction, let’s ask ourselves where it comes from.

The interaction arises from life, understood as a primordial energy force that moves the world. It is rare that Simmel, in his writings, speaks simply of “life.” In most cases, he uses a variety of different expressions. Among these: “vital will,” “primordial life,” “soul vibrating without rest,” “motion creator of life,” “pulsation of life,” “vital process,” “fluctuations of life,” “infinite fruitfulness of life,” “Forces of life.”

Simmel did not like to define his fundamental concepts. In the concluding page of The Conflict in Modern Culture, he admits that he cannot describe precisely what life is (Simmel [1918] 1968, 26). Life is strength and motion toward a goal. Beyond the variety of expressions used, it is important to grasp Simmel’s fundamental idea. This idea is that life is the motion, the development, and the passing beyond. There are two of Simmel’s expressions to clarify. “Life as more life” is used by Simmel to affirm that life is more than itself; it is a self-perpetuating process that produces something living. “Life as more than life” indicates that human life creates something that is not life and that has its own significance and law. Religion, art, and knowledge are examples of life’s progeny (Weingartner 1962, 69).

The idea of a primordial energetic force, a perennial source of movement, is by Arthur Schopenhauer, to whom Simmel dedicated an essay in 1907 (Simmel [1907] 1986).

In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer, whom Simmel often quotes in his writings, had written: “The will, considered purely in itself, is devoid of knowledge, and is only a blind, irresistible urge” (Schopenhauer [1819] 1969, Vol. I, §54). The will to live is the eternal substance, the essence of the world that insatiably moves everything that exists, including inorganic matter and plants, albeit with different levels of awareness.

According to Schopenhauer, this primordial energy is “blind” in that it acts even in the absence of awareness and knowledge, as demonstrated by the instincts and mechanical impulses of animals. The one-year-old bird has no mental representation of the eggs for which it builds the nest. The same will to live also acts blindly in humans through stimuli, which make the vital and vegetative processes of the body possible, including digestion, blood circulation, secretion, growth, and reproduction. In short, for Schopenhauer, the will is the engine of all our actions and desires. Schopenhauer speaks of the will to live, while Simmel, also indebted to him in the lexicon, speaks of a “vital will,” understood as a wealth of inexhaustible possibilities.

According to Simmel, life creates impulses, purposes, and needs in individuals, who are directed toward each other to fulfill their ends. This process gives rise to an uninterrupted chain of actions and feedback, which Simmel calls “the effect of reciprocity,” “reciprocal action,” “reciprocal influence,” or “reciprocal effect” (Wechselwirkung). The mechanism, described by Simmel, is simple. The individual, moved by a purpose, acts toward another individual, who, by feeding back, creates a union. Without an individual purpose, there would be no action; without feedback, there would be no union. It follows that the birth of a structured coexistence requires that at least two people are willing to interact. Consistent with this approach, Simmel believes that the minimum unit of analysis of sociology is the dyad, the group composed of two people.

Simmel declares that he is not interested in engaging in a controversy on the definition of society, considering it much more interesting to ask how this is born and is kept alive. He answers that society exists where several individuals enter into reciprocal action. This reciprocal action always arises from certain impulses or purposes, causing the man to get into coexistence with others to satisfy their needs. This is the elementary mechanism giving birth to any society, Simmel explains in his essay The Problem of Sociology (Simmel [1909] 1965, 314). This idea of Simmel will be at the center of the exchange theory, one of the contemporary theories we will encounter in the second part of this volume.

A year before his death, Simmel felt the need to enclose his fundamental sociological ideas in his Fundamental Problems of Sociology. In these pages, too, Simmel reiterates that interests form the basis of human society, formed by individuals who come together under the pressure of “practical conditions and necessities” (Simmel [1917] 1950b, 41).

However, to cement a union, it is not enough to direct action toward others. The interaction must take on a stable character. It must become a recurring way of acting and retroacting. The fluctuations of life must stabilize in an ordered interaction, or forms, which makes our actions and those of others predictable. Predictability is essential for the conduct of daily life. If men want to achieve their goals, letting life energy flow in new and unexpected ways, society would be unable to find a shape. Without any ordered interaction, the needs of individuals would remain unfulfilled. Therefore, the birth of forms is fundamental for the development of civilizations.

How are these societal forms born?

The Sociation

The process of consolidating an interaction into a form takes the name of “sociation” or “association” (Vergesellschaftung).

And now, let’s pay attention because this is Simmel’s fundamental theory.

As soon as the sociation generates a form, life rebels against it, creating a conflictual dynamism full of contradictions. On the one hand, the form allows life to express itself; on the other, it gags and degrades it. In his important essay, “On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture,” Simmel writes that sometimes even the language we employ to interact with others in everyday life can be felt as a foreign force of nature, which deforms and mutilates our true manifestations of empathy and our most intimate intentions (Simmel [1911] 1968, 39).

The conflict between the rigidity of form and the plasticity of life is evident in the phenomenon of falling in love. Persons in love are required to reveal their amorous passion in respect of a form that provides them with a means of expression and, at the same time, compresses their most vital impulses. Between the creativity of the life, and its practical and theoretical creations, there is a relationship of profound alienation or hostility.

Simmel resorts to the conflict between life and form—an opposition that he takes up from Kant (Simmel [1904] 2004; Podoksik 2016)—to explain also the birth and decline of civilizations.

The flow of life, falling into the forms of its being, creates works of art, religions, science, technology, law, and all the other forms that life takes on, but the moment these products of life are born, they become rigid. This rigidity no longer has anything to do with the streaming life that creates forms and immediately withdraws from them. And so, the forms become autonomous from life; they follow a specific logic and a system of rules of their own. Perhaps in the formation process, they correspond to life, but as this unfolds, forms usually become rigidly extraneous to life and opposed to it. The contrast between the dynamism of life and the fixity of forms condemns the individual to live “countless tragedies” because “life is the antithesis of form” (Simmel [1911] 1968, 26).

In the last phase of his thought, Simmel, exasperating his interpretation, affirms that the struggle of life against form has taken on an extreme character, creating a widespread malaise. At one time, life replaced the old forms with new ones more suited to its flow. Today, however, life rebels against all forms. Life would like to flow in every direction, without coverings, in a sort of vitalistic madness condensing into an overall malaise of civilization where life feels any form as something forcefully imposed on it. We live in a time when life struggles against form in general, against the principle of form. Life fights in every sphere against having to flow in fixed forms of any kind. It is no longer a question of a new form that undertakes the fight against an old one. It is the life that wants to break, not this or that form, but the form in general, and absorb it to flow without limitations.

Simmel thinks that life cannot be reduced to the so-called fundamental sociological variables: Sex, age, level of education, marital status, occupation, etc. Men cannot be reduced to their work or the social class to which they belong. Life is not entirely social. Personal qualities—such as strength, beauty, depth of thought, magnanimity, meekness, distinction, courage, and purity of heart—have an autonomous existence which does not depend at all on social ties. These are human qualities that exist separately from those of society, which are always based on people’s actions. The idea that the individual is much more than the social role it plays is one of the three a priori of Simmel’s sociology. In his essay How Is Society Possible? Simmel lists the three a priori guiding his sociology (Simmel 1910, 372–391).

The first a priori concerns the relationship between the subject and the other, and is based on the idea that each of us generally fails to evaluate the other for itself. We evaluate the other on the basis of what it does.

The second a priori rectifies the first since it affirms that the individual does not exhaust itself in its role. To know a man, it is not sufficient to know his/her social role.

The third a priori concerns the relationship between the individual and society and is based on the idea that each individual is destined to occupy a place in the social structure based on his/her characteristics.

Let’s pay attention to the second a priori that exalts the power of life.

I like to think that Simmel exalted life so much because he was pervaded by it. He was an incredibly vital professor who attracted many admiring students. Although he was baptized in a Protestant church and had secular beliefs, he was discriminated against because of his family’s Jewish origins. For these reasons, and many others, including the envy his success aroused, he had a belated and troubled university career. He became a full professor only in 1914 when he joined Strasbourg University (Fuchs 1991, 1).

Before dying, he wrote a work translated as The View of Life, a hymn to life itself, conceived as a perennial flowing that cannot be stopped (Simmel [1918] 2010; Lizardo 2012, 302–304). He enjoyed the esteem of some of the outstanding scholars of his time, including Max Weber. Talcott Parsons regarded Simmel as a classic figure of sociology (Featherstone 1991, 1). He had distinguished students, such as Georg Lukács, who wrote: “Georg Simmel was undoubtedly the most significant and interesting transitional figure in the whole of modern philosophy” (Lukács 1991, 145). Simmel’s fame reached the United States, also thanks to the publication of nine articles, between 1896 and 1910, for The American Journal of Sociology edited by Albion Small. He was invited to teach at Northwestern University in Chicago and at Western Reserve in Cleveland. Still, he declined the offer, believing he could not adequately express his thoughts in a language other than German (Cavalli and Perucchi 2019, 37).

The success of readers was also extraordinary. His The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, which contains “On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture,” sold one-hundred thousand copies in six weeks (Alferj 2003, 48).

Autonomy of Forms and Sociability

On the surface, the struggle waged by life seems proud and victorious. Life fights and wins in the end. Life demands form, but it demands more than form. The contradiction of life lies in expressing oneself only in the form but not being able to exhaust oneself in the form. The end result is that life fatally breaks all forms.

In reality, this pride, this winning by “breaking,” is quite apparent because life spends most of its time kneeling in its products. But this is only one aspect of the problem since the forms, in addition to subduing life, even take a direction contrary to life’s needs. The tragic paradox is that all these forms develop their own logic and transform themselves within their own borders into autonomous fields as opposed to life, whose direction and rhythm deviate and stop. Forms quickly become blind alleys, dead-end streets, where life slowly dies out.

Simmel outlines a very important phenomenon for the social sciences, which Wilhelm Wundt, in 1886, had called “the law of the heterogony of ends.” According to Wundt, men may go to ends other than those they consciously pursue due to their actions’ side effects or unforeseen consequences. In other words, men unite to achieve a goal, but then they must deal with objective conditions and contrasting human wills. The consequence is that institutions often deviate from their original aims, developing new motivations, sometimes representing a betrayal of the original ideals.

Robert Michels focused on this phenomenon by studying the German Social Democratic Party, which, born to defend democracy, becomes an oligarchy. According to Michels, the power of the workers is in their labor organization. The weak can hope to beat the strong only if they unite. The strong have the resources to fight in a few, while the weak must be many. Thus, workers need a stable and ramified apparatus of officials to coordinate protests against the capitalists by virtue of their technical skills, rendering them indispensable for the production process. Competence is power: “One who is indispensable has in his power all the lords and the masters of the earth” (Michels [1911] 1915, 86).

The result is that all the decision-making powers of the masses are transferred to the leaders, an aristocratic body, making democratic exercise entirely illusory. Thus, a paradoxical phenomenon occurs. If the power of the organization increases, the power of the union and party leaders also increases, who detach themselves from the productive places and the masses, getting used to a life of privileges inverting the respective position of the leaders and the led. Hence a minority of directors takes over a majority of directed in every party, organization, or professional union. Michels summarized his “iron law of oligarchy” in his masterpiece, Political Parties, originally published in 1911. In sum, whoever says organization says a tendency to oligarchy. A profoundly aristocratic element is inherent in the very nature of the organization. The mechanism of the organization, while creating a solid structure, causes notable changes in the organized mass, such as the total overturning of the relationship of the leader with the mass and the division of each party or trade union into two parts: A minority that has the task of directing and a directed majority from the former.

Simmel focuses on the same phenomenon, citing the case of the law.

Life creates the right to repress and codify certain behaviors vital to society but then develops an internal logic independent of the needs of life, according to the motto fiat iustitia, pereat mundus (“Let justice be done, though the world perish”). In summary, I will try to summarize the cycle described by Simmel in the simplest possible way: (a) Life creates the law; (b) the law betrays life; and (c) life rebels against its product. The forms developed from life acquire a greater richness and autonomy from their creator. While maintaining the energy that life gave them initially, their meaning and nature now depend on something else. A radical change, an “autonomization” process, as Simmel names it, frees the forms from any close link with life and transforms them into the end.

In addition to law, Simmel cites the case of love.

Life uses love as the means to achieve its most important purpose: The reproduction of the species. In the moment in which love stabilizes, the relationship between life and love changes, to the point of overturning. In the initial phase, love was a means at the service of life, but then, with the consolidation of the form, life finds itself at the service of love.

Simmel gives a name to the phenomenon of forms that act only for themselves: “sociability.” Like all forms, sociability arises from the human impulse to enter into relationships with fellow men.

Having clarified this, Simmel divides sociability into two moments.

In the first, men create the forms to achieve their goals. In the second, these forms become autonomous and act only for themselves, independently of any content. This phenomenon is what Simmel means by the term “sociability” (Simmel 1950b, 40).

What does it mean?

Said in the simplest way possible, men form a union to achieve a goal but then find it convenient to stay together and try to keep the union alive, regardless of its specific contents. In the strict sense, sociability is formed when being together becomes a value for the pleasure it gives its participants. Sociability has no purpose, content, or outcome other than going beyond the simple moment of being together, a sociable gathering pursued by everyone.

At this point, Simmel utters an enigmatic phrase:

“Sociability is the art or play form of association” (Simmel [1911] 1949, 255).

Again, what does it mean?

Sociability is playful in the sense of being similar to a free and joyful game (from the Latin word ludus or “game”), which provides an intrinsic pleasure, regardless of its specific contents. I will give an example, which is not found in Simmel, but that I regard as consistent with his thinking: The topic being talked about at a birthday party is not important. What matters is to interact amiably with the guests. Simmel cites the case of court society, which gives itself a series of immanent laws, just like art does, whose laws are valid only in its field.

The courtly encounters do not have concrete content and the etiquette becomes an end in itself. The best way to clarify Simmel’s thinking on the playful character of sociability is to resurrect his distinction between “sociable discussion” and “serious discussion.” In sociable discussions, individuals argue without attaching importance to their speeches’ content. In a serious discussion, however, they argue to find the truth about a topic, stripping the discussion of its playful character. By acquiring concrete content, that is, the search for truth, the discussion, from being sociable, becomes serious because it aims to achieve a purpose. In short, sociability is rooted in the whirlwind and futile joy of the social game.

But that is not all.

For the sociation to take the playful form of sociability, the participants must have the sense of tact or delicacy, that is to say, the ability to put aside the most egocentric and unpleasant aspects of their personality to leave space for others and make it possible commonality. In the game of life in society, personal qualities, such as kindness, education, friendliness, and personal charm, make the difference. Sociability needs egoism and the most pronounced aspects of the person to be leveled in some way. This is the reason why, in society, tact takes on such a high importance. Thanks to it, in fact, the individuals regulate themselves and act in harmony with others. Tact safeguards the rights of the other by limiting individual impulsiveness, the desire for self-affirmation and intellectual or material claims. Tact is a form of respect for others. Being tactful means protecting the reciprocity of an encounter; it means learning not to accentuate enthusiasm and depression, which monopolize the scene and impose on all participants the state of mind of only one; it also means dressing appropriately to the context, so as not to create embarrassments and disagreements, which deprive the sociability of its playful strength. By paraphrasing what Kant had written about freedom, Simmel holds that everyone must satisfy their need for sociability in a way that allows others to satisfy theirs.

In addition to tact, Simmel adds “courtesy” as a form of behavior necessary for sociability. Courtesy places the weak and the strong on the same level. Indeed, it is often the stronger who, in the name of courtesy, succumb to the weaker. Sociability finds its purest, most transparent, and simplest expression in reciprocity between equals.

Sociability is, therefore, a form of democracy in which everyone enjoys the same rights. However, Simmel, with a fair amount of realism, points out that this democracy is only feasible between individuals who belong to the same social class. Anticipating, in some respects, Bourdieu’s concept of “hysteresis,” which we will encounter in the second part of this volume, Simmel writes that if a union is composed of individuals who are too different for their tact due to their class differences, unpleasant conflicts are resolved with the exclusion of the disturbing element. The sociable ethic is the enemy of contrasts and fights all the elements hindering reciprocity because the joy of the individual depends on that of others, and individual satisfaction must never leave other people unsatisfied.

In clarifying these concepts, we must never lose sight of the great protagonist of Simmel’s work, which is life. It is the life that creates the problem of the autonomy of forms. Indeed, if life were not engaged in an uninterrupted process of creation, men would not be overwhelmed by such a large amount of religious, artistic, social, technical, artistic, and normative forms that become independent. These overabundant products develop an autonomous force that transcends and goes beyond life itself. The source of the problem is always life, which produces many more products than are necessary for its vital process.

A Sociology of Contradiction

Simmel’s sociology is known as “formal sociology” for focusing on forms of social interactions rather than content. However, it could also receive different labels, such as “sociology of contradiction.” As we have seen, the word contradiction constantly appears in his essays, and it could not be otherwise. The contradiction arises from the conflict between life and form. Since this conflict is everywhere, the contradiction is omnipresent.

For Simmel, the characteristic feature of human existence is the oscillation between two pairs of opposites, which makes life contradictory and, for this reason, fascinating. Social life is based on the antagonistic game between a series of vital principles, which seek a continuous balance between them. The history of society unfolds in the struggle between the need of each individual to belong to a group and be like the others and the need to stand out from the group to enhance one’s individuality and be different. This form of dualism also emerges in contrast between opposing parties, such as socialism and individualism. It is found everywhere, even in biology, with the contrast between inheritance and variation.

The physiology of human nature needs motion and stasis, two opposite currents of life, at the basis of the contradictions that men carry within themselves. Social life is conceived as a battlefield, furrowed by the “antagonism of the tendencies” (Simmel [1904] 1971b, 315).

I want to stress the importance of conflict in Simmel’s sociology as he influenced one contemporary sociological theory today known as the “sociology of conflict,” as we will see in the second part of this book.

Simmel sees conflict everywhere, including in the need to be fashionable.

Speaking of imitation, there are two antagonistic tendencies of human nature, corresponding to two opposite poles corresponding to two anthropological types: The “imitator,” or passive individuals, and the “teleological,” or ever-experimental individuals, relying on their personal convictions.

On the one hand, men follow the impulse to imitate a mass model to be equal to others and ensure social support; on the other hand, they feel the need to distinguish themselves and establish the goals they intend to pursue in life independently. Men are wrapped in contradictions because they feel, at the same time, the impulse to be like others and the impulse to impose their uniqueness.

A dialectic approach informs Simmel’s sociology based on the dualism of human nature. Socialized individuals always maintain a dual relationship with society. They are embedded in it, yet they are against it; they are active and passive; they produce society and are a product of it (Coser 1977, 184).

However, Simmel’s dualism differs from Durkheim’s.

For Durkheim, dualism arises from the clash between man and society. According to Durkheim, the opposite currents of life are two: One current is within man and it is egotism, and the other is in society and it is altruism. For Simmel, however, dualism is within man: “In the depths of our spiritual essence—he writes in his essay on Michelangelo—there seems to be a dualism” (Simmel 1985, 111).

Once Simmel’s fundamental concepts are clarified—life, interaction, form, and sociation—we are ready to face the decisive question.

How is sociology possible?

Simmel writes that sociology can be constituted, as a scientific discipline, only by separating the content from the form of society, which, empirically, are merged in all social phenomena. In this respect, sociology is similar to geometry: Both leave it to other sciences to investigate the contents that arise in their forms.

The content of life corresponds to the inner universe of the person, to everything that, in individuals, is impulse, interest, purpose, inclination, and psychic situation, from which the action on others flows. Life is full of these, which set it in motion. However, the contents of life, such as hunger or love, work or religiosity, are insufficient to create an association. The mere fact that men possess vital contents, which move them individually, is not enough to constitute a union.

People can coexist only when the contents of their lives acquire the form of mutual influence, that is, when each element stably acts on the other, forging a web of patterned interactions.

The contents of life are always the same, in the sense that man’s basic needs do not change but take on different forms of association. Hierarchical relationships, imitation, competition, the division of labor, the formation of parties, and the closure of groups to the outside are found both in societies governed by the state and in religious sects, as much in a gang of criminals as in a community of saints. Simmel’s formal sociology makes it possible to compare qualitatively different social phenomena having common models of interaction. Marriage and war are two very different phenomena. However, the conflict between spouses and between states presents similar forms of interaction.

Simmel adds many other examples.

The economic interest can be realized by taking the form of free competition or centralized planning; the contents of religious life can take the form of free or hierarchical communities; the erotic interests, which are the basis of the relationship between the sexes, create very different forms of families; the pedagogical interest, which leads to the relationship between teacher and pupil, can take a despotic or liberal form. Well, sociology studies the pure forms of association, leaving the substantive questions to other disciplines. Simmel’s science of society investigates only these reciprocal actions, these forms of association.

Sociologists took only the first step by separating the content from the form. To progress, they must observe the elementary interactions of daily life, which underpin the greatest structures of society.

Simmel compares these reciprocal actions to biological cells, whose continuous operation we do not see but which, uniting and destroying each other, create and change the body’s shape. Likewise, interactions between individuals create and change the shape of society. Simmel’s sociology pushes the researchers to descend to the microsociological level to observe the details and describe their particular forms. This forces the sociologist to look at individual interactions in small groups or “social circles.”

The sociologist must observe individuals engaged in their usual activities. All this is equivalent to devising a discipline that has the task of studying the “microscopic” processes at the basis of society (Simmel 1950b, 395). Provided with this “psychological microscopy” (Simmel [1909] 1965, 328), Simmel ennobles and exalts all that is inessential in Marx’s grand narrative: Jealousy, envy, a lunch with friends, the feeling of gratitude for a benefactor, a request for information on the street, the purchase of a fashionable dress to seduce a person. Simmel throws a beam of light on these infinitely “small actions,” which constitute the indissolubility of society. This flow of actions and feedback is real life, the fundamental life of society. Simmel transforms ordinary life into an extraordinary fact, laying the foundations for those ethnographic researchers interested in grasping the micro-details of the interaction, including the contraction of the facial muscles of two individuals about to hit each other. Simmel’s The Aesthetic Significance of the Face (Simmel 1965) is a seminal essay relevant even to studying fights in the streets (Collins 2008) and the facial expressions of terrorists about to kill their victims (Orsini 2015, 179–197). Contemporary sociological theory owes Simmel attention toward the “microscopic-molecular processes within human material,” to quote another well-chosen expression of Simmel (Simmel 1965, 327).

There is a passage in Simmel’s The Problem of Sociology that is a sort of “manifesto of microsociology” on which three contemporary sociological theories arise: Symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and the theory of exchange, which we will meet in the second part of this volume. Simmel explains that the association between men is connected, dissolved, and reconnected continuously, like an eternal flux and pulsation that link individuals, even when it does not result in real organizations. The fact that men look at each other and are jealous of each other; the fact that they exchange letters or have lunch together; the fact that they are nice or unpleasant, completely disregarding all tangible interests; the fact that gratitude for altruistic acts produces an indissoluble social bond over time; the fact that one asks another information to find its way or dresses and adorns him/herself for gratifying the other and vice versa, in sum, all the thousands of social relations conscious or unconscious, superficial or intimate, momentary or lasting, bind individuals indissolubly:

At each moment such treads are spun, dropped, taken up again, displaced by others, interwoven with others. These interactions among the atoms of society are accessible only to psychological microscopy, as it were. They explain all the toughness and elasticity, all the colorfulness and consistency of social life, which is so striking and yet so mysterious. […] Immeasurably small steps constitute the structure of historical unity; equally unpretentious interactions between persons constitute the structure of societal unity. (Simmel 1965, 328)

Microscopy is the future of sociology as a science because microscopic structures are fundamental to social life. By transforming their eyes in microscopes, sociologists will gain the best tool to catch the interaction among the atoms of society made of spiritual contacts, mutual causation of pleasure and suffering, speeches and silences, and common and antagonistic interests constituting the indissolubility of society.

It will be opportune to devote a more profound consideration to these apparently unimportant types of relationships that established sociology usually neglects. Simmel’s microsociology also created a bridge between psychology, social psychology, and sociology. Simmel was convinced that all societal processes have their seat in mind and that sociation is a psychical phenomenon.

When Simmel wrote these words, mainstream sociology did not attach importance to the fluctuation of life. Today, it regards it as fundamental.

Microsociology

So far, I have said that life is the key concept of Simmel’s thought. From life arise the interactions which, becoming forms through sociation, shape society. It would therefore be reasonable to expect sociology to study life, but Simmel has another idea in mind. To gain an autonomous place alongside the other social sciences, sociology must deal with forms and leave life to philosophy. Simmel is a philosopher of life and a sociologist of form. It is, therefore, obvious to speak of formal sociology with reference to Simmel. Precisely because it is a foregone definition, it can be stimulating to question it.

According to Gianfranco Poggi, Simmel has developed not one but three conceptions of sociology. In addition to the formal one, Poggi identified the “interstitial” and the “molecular” one (Poggi 1993).

According to the interstitial conception, the great structures of society are supported by a multiplicity of face-to-face interactions, which take place in the smallest and most unexplored spaces of institutions.

According to molecular conceptions, social structures exist thanks to microscopic exchanges among individuals.

The thesis that Poggi developed is no less interesting to explain why Simmel emphasized the formal conception of sociology, leaving the other two in the shade, despite being outlined in his writings. According to Poggi, Simmel also acted in this way out of cunning.

Emphasizing the idea that molecular exchanges form the foundations supporting historical institutions would have risked debasing the work of many illustrious professors committed to studying those very institutions. The molecular conception of sociology suggests that those professors have not grasped a phenomenon of capital importance or that their well-established disciplines—philosophy, law, the study of religions, and history—cannot account for it. Simmel attached great importance to actions that appeared insignificant in the eyes of one distinguished professor of Church history, such as Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), who said that Simmel had limited himself to “high-level journalism.” Not a compliment, but a “damning judgment” (Frisby 1992, 13).

Simmel’s academic situation was also damaged by his idea that sociology should study society and not the state, stripped of moral imperatives: A free value choice that did not appeal to the more conservative professors of his university (Dal Lago 1983, 22).

In any case, the precautions in defining sociology discipline were not useful to Simmel, who became a full professor at the age of fifty-six at the University of Strasbourg (Mele 2020, 161), not in Berlin, where he had graduated with honors and that in always denied him the tenure. Troeltsch was transferred to that university in 1915.

Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson: We have seen how much philosophy and sociology are interpenetrated in Simmel, who feared that his thinking was too abstract for ordinary readers. For this reason, after having exposed his “methodology of sociology,” he invited them to read his investigation of particular cases to acquire a more precise idea about his way of applying theory to research.

Let’s accept Simmel’s invitation and try one of his studies, Fashion, employing all the concepts studied.

Fashion (1904)

Fashion often dictates such ugly and uncomfortable clothes to show off its power over us. Its social function is twofold, like that of marriage. On the one hand, it unites the peers; on the other, it closes the group to those with a lower social status than its members. The need to imitate the members of one’s group promotes ingroup cohesion, and the need to differentiate oneself from the members of other groups promotes exclusion toward non-members.

Although cohesion and exclusion are in logical opposition, each represents the condition for realizing the other.

Simmel’s idea is that the success of fashion is not rooted in its practical utility but in the division of society into classes. The upper groups use fashion to distinguish themselves from the lower ones and from the lower groups to resemble the higher ones.

Simmel describes a circular dynamic, the “fashion game,” in which the upper classes abandon a certain fashion as soon as it spreads excessively in the lower classes. Each upper stratum leaves fashion the moment the lower one takes over it. In the game of fashion, the upper classes decide when the time comes to launch a new fashion, with which to push the masses down and restore social distances.

Fashion belongs to society, but the “new fashion,” which is the power to innovate, belongs only to the upper classes.

However, this does not mean that the masses have only a passive role limited to consuming commodities. For the upper classes to innovate quickly, the masses need to be able to purchase new fashion items, which requires that they are not too expensive. Affordable prices allow the masses to accumulate money more quickly to keep up with fashion trends, speeding up the industrial production of new articles. In this way, the fashion game creates the fashion circle, in which the speed of industrial production becomes very important. A real circle is thus created: The more rapidly fashion changes, the more articles of fashion must become cheaper, and the cheaper the articles of fashion become, the more they induce consumers and force manufacturers to change fashion rapidly and merrily. The lower social classes want to copy, and the higher ones don’t want to be copied. The result is a feverish change bringing about new styles that lead to new lines of demarcation.

Although the fashion game and the fashion circle are interdependent and feed off each other, they are not to be confused.

The fashion game is a predominantly symbolic phenomenon consisting of an escape and run-up mechanism between the higher and lower social classes. The fashion circle, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of a commercial nature, which involves the speed of industrial production.

The fashion game appears to be an affliction for the lower classes, forced into a run-up, which never leads them to achieve their goal.

Why do the lower classes choose to copy the wealthiest classes precisely in fashion? The answer is that fashion is the easiest to imitate among the forms that the upper strata boast about. Even individuals from the lower strata could get hold of a fashionable suit. However, it would be much more difficult for them to rise to the level of the upper classes in art, science, or speech. Fashion articles can be purchased with money, which men can easily get hold of. In this sense, the advent of the monetary economy represented a driving force for the spread of fashion. The fact that economic interests shape fashion is demonstrated by the role that fashion professionals have taken on in our society.

In pre-industrial society, fashion had a personal origin determined by the whims or needs of a high-ranking person. For example, medieval-pointed shoes were born from the need of a nobleman to contain an outgrowth of his foot. The Guardinfante, on the other hand, originated from the desire of a high-society woman to hide her pregnancy.

In industrial society, on the other hand, fashion is designed by experts to be sold on a large scale. Professionals and industries working in the fashion sector create clothes to accumulate profit. Fashion triumphs when it assumes the traits of moral action, that is, an action based on a sense of duty and not on the attempt to achieve a purpose external to the action based on personal motivations. In this case, fashion exerts a “tyranny” over our outward appearance and mind. No less important are the intellectual fashions, which push scholars to embrace the most popular ideas of the moment.

However, the success of fashion does not only have economic causes.

A psychological factor also plays an important role: Fashion frees individuals from ethical and aesthetic responsibility. Dressing in fashion means being other-oriented, which is convenient and reassuring for most who find it too hard to be self-oriented. Following fashion is typical of individuals who are not intimately independent and seek outside support. Even an insignificant man embracing fashion can become an exemplary representative of a social group.

This is the case of the “dude,” someone who fanatically follows fashion. Fashion fanatics remain within the perimeter of the most popular aesthetic models, limiting themselves to exasperating their features. By remaining fashionable, they retain the social approval necessary for their fragile identity and, at the same time, experience the thrill of distinction. The fashion fanatic is like the others but showier and more sensational. Fashion fanatics are not distinguished from other individuals qualitatively but quantitatively. Qualitatively, they remain followers who do not invent or innovate anything; quantitatively, they do an unparalleled number of fashionable things. Fashion fanatics seem to lead, but they are led—a paradoxical case where the driver is guided.

According to Simmel, the man who deliberately opposes fashion is entangled in the same social dynamic as the fashion fanatic.

Dressing out of style is a form of addiction to fashion.

The aesthetic decisions of those who pay no heed to fashion are made in relation to the dominant fashion. Negating fashion requires considering fashion, knowing it, and inquiring about it.

Sometimes, dressing out of fashion dressing subjugates entire communities to an alternative fashion, recreating the same dynamics of domination and submission to a specific aesthetic taste. With his love for paradox, Simmel points out that an association of enemies of associations is still an association. Those who live in the denial of the fashion sense to be free. Still, an antagonistic fashion born from the denial of a dominant fashion can be as intolerant and fanatical as certain forms of atheism that become tyrannical religions without God through the organization of club-haters: “Freedom, likewise, after having put a stop to tyranny, frequently, becomes no less tyrannical and arbitrary” (Simmel 1971b, 307).

Simmel also touches upon another key concept in contemporary sociology: Time (Lyotard 1985; Lewis & Weigert 1981; Kern 1983; Hawking 1988; Giddens 1990; Bergmann 1992; Zerubavel 2020).

What is the relationship between fashion and time?

Fashion is one of the most stable and, at the same time, most transient phenomena of our time. Defining “fashionable” any dress means announcing that it will soon stop being worn.

This transitoriness, which, for Simmel, is also the most fascinating aspect of fashion, cannot be explained solely by industrial production needs. The transitory character of fashion fits perfectly with modern life, which is also rapid, ephemeral, and changing. Fashion undergoes modernity, being subjected to its own cultural trend, which breaks with the past to live permanently in the present. The social classes, more prone to change, follow fashion in all of its aspects expressing movement. This is how the fashion of travel is affirmed, which divides life into a multiplicity of arrivals and departures, dividing the year into many short periods, according to a typical modern logic of fragmentation.

In conclusion, fashion’s social, psychological, and cultural functions are much more numerous than practical ones. In confirmation of his thesis, Simmel compared two neighboring populations of southern Africa: The Kaffirs and the Bushmen. Fashion changes rapidly in the former, which has an articulated social stratification; in the latter, which lacks a strongly developed class system, fashion is absent.

Fashion and the Currents of Life

It is legitimate to ask whether Simmel has a positive or negative image of fashion.

The answer calls for caution.

On the surface, Simmel’s portrayal looks rather negative. According to him, fashion expresses a need for imitation, affinity, and fusion, which impoverishes the authenticity of life. Fashion is a social leveling mask the individual wears to insert their personality into a general scheme. In this regard, Simmel is very clear: Fashion integrates the mediocrity of the person by covering its inability to individualize its existence autonomously. In some passages, fashion is even described as a kind of pathology of modern society.

The best way to understand whether Simmel has a positive or negative conception of fashion is to analyze his definition. Still, Simmel is not Durkheim and does not enclose his definition of fashion in an explicit and synthetic formula. In reality, a definition exists, but it must be unearthed in the pages of the essay. Once the excavation is complete, the definition appears anything but neutral. Fashion requires complete obedience to the norms of the community in all that is external to the individual. In Simmel’s own words, fashion is “blind obedience to the standards of the general public” (Simmel 1971b, 311–312). It is an “ephemeral tyrant” imposing a tremendous subjugation on banal people (Simmel 1971a, 318). The passages from which Simmel’s pessimism emerges are numerous, and the list would be long (Orsini 2021, 257–258).

And yet, a number of these claims are balanced by opposing comments. At the same time, fashion is oppressive and liberating, leveling and individualizing, in sum, positive and negative. For example, Simmel argues that the frequent changes in fashion are an immense slavery for the individual. Still, immediately after, he adds that they are also one of the complements of political and social freedom growth.

What conclusion can we draw?

Although the pieces that portray fashion negatively are predominant, fashion is a form that liberates life and imprisons it like all forms.

Assuming the tutor’s role, Simmel suggests using fashion in favor of inner freedom. Fashion can perform a positive function if its power is diverted from our soul, that is, the inner part of ourselves, toward the external part of life, that is, society

What exactly does this mean?

It means that the power of fashion is nefarious when it penetrates the depths of our soul, much less if it limits itself to governing what we appear on the surface. Men of the highest caliber used a submission to fashion to cultivate their undisturbed interiority. By bending to the external form of their time, men can avoid the frictions of social interaction—being against fashion can create disparities and sorrows—and invest their energies in nourishing their inner life and devote themselves to what they consider essential for themselves. In this case, fashion becomes the means through which we superficially bind ourselves to the mass to remove it from the depths of our souls.

According to Simmel, Goethe succeeded in yielding to the conventions of his time to rise upwardly, becoming an example for us all. Goethe is one of the brightest examples of an extraordinary life that has reached the maximum of inner freedom with the rigid observance of form and a voluntary yield to the conventions of society.

In conclusion, whether fashion is good or bad is a question that cannot be answered definitively since the opposite currents of life converge in it. Fashion is a complex form in which all the fundamental opposite tendencies of the soul come to light.

This attention to the antagonistic tendencies of life is always present. Between 1909 and 1917, Simmel dedicated a series of essays to some eminent artistic personalities, such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin. In Michelangelo’s sculptures, he sees the superb ability to enhance the elements that push life down and those that elevate it. This passage portrays Michelangelo attempting to grasp the opposite currents of life, which is the same undertaking that Simmel entrusted to his sociology. It seems that Simmel, by speaking of Michelangelo’s chisel, describes the aim of his sociology of contradiction.

In the figures of Michelangelo, Simmel sees the force of gravity that drags downwards and the spiritual energies that tend upwards, opposing each other with irreducible enmity. On the one hand, they maintain an insuperable distance; on the other, they interpenetrate in the struggle, balancing each other, creating a unity stemming from their contrast (Simmel 1985, 121).

Box 8.1: Fashion, Women, and Power

Simmel also investigates the female universe of his time, wanting to explain why women are particularly addicted to fashion. Premising that fashion has the same importance for today’s men as women (Barry 2014, 2015, 2018), Simmel’s analysis still deserves special attention for two primary reasons. The first is that it helps us understand how the classical sociology theorists have interpreted the woman’s figure: Knowing the history of sociology means knowing this subject as well. The second is that Simmel’s analysis provides valuable insights for an open debate on a topical issue. Is what Simmel has written about women and fashion still valid? Can we share the idea that women have a different relationship with fashion than men?

Let’s try to answer this question by reconstructing what Simmel wrote.

Women attach great importance to fashion due to the weakness of their social positions, to which they are historically condemned. Holding roles without powers and prestige gives women a feeling of weakness and vulnerability. Women follow the fashion to adapt to the forms of existence that enjoy greater social approval. The weak avoid individualization. Defending oneself from the social pressures exerted by the community is a titanic undertaking for those who, without powers, must defend themselves with their own strength. For women, it is better to follow the strongest social currents rather than oppose it by investing solely on their creativity.

However, in addition to the need to stay average, women also feel the need to stand out. Fashion satisfies both needs. On the one hand, it allows women not to take responsibility for their own tastes; on the other hand, it provides them with those individual ornaments that ensure the distinction. Each individual has a coexistent need for individualization and a need to blend into the community. If one man leads a conformist life in a certain social environment, he will try to individualize himself in a different field.

Simmel compares the relationship between women and fashion in two countries, Germany and Italy, between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In that period, Germany witnessed an extraordinary development of individuality. Individual freedom lifted its head, breaking the collectivist systems of the Middle Ages. However, this growth in individual freedoms excluded women, who could neither express their personality nor interact with men’s freedom. And so German women began to dress following the most extravagant and hypertrophic imaginable fashions.

On the other hand, in Italy, the Renaissance gave women freedom unknown in past centuries. Especially in the higher strata of society, women had development opportunities similar to men, who often equaled even in education. The consequence, Simmel observes, is that history does not document particular extravagances in women’s fashion in Italy at the time. Italian women did not need to excel in the field of fashion to vent their need for individuality because that impulse found satisfaction in other areas of life.

The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)

For Simmel, modernity is synonymous with a permanent crisis caused by social change or, more precisely, by the speed of the change. Since the points of reference constantly change or are continually questioned, modern men witness the progressive weakening of indisputable convictions. Hence, they must learn to live with disorientation, emptiness, and meaninglessness. Men can find their place in the world but at the cost of an existential enterprise. This exacerbating condition weakens the individual’s nervous energies. Modernity is highly stressful and violently attacks the nervous system of individuals.

This is the central thesis of the essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), which summarizes the main themes developed in his ponderous The Philosophy of Money (1900) and presupposes its reading.

These two works are also important because they show that, in addition to a microsociological inclination, there is also a purely macrosociological orientation in Simmel, who insists a lot on the power of culture, metropolis, technology, and monetary system, to crush the individual or hunt him down and close him in a corner.

The deepest problems of modern life arise from the struggle that individuals fight to preserve their independence and peculiarities against the overwhelming power of society, historical heritage, culture, and technology. The Metropolis and Mental Life tells of a titanic clash between a small force, the individual, and a great power, society.

According to Simmel, the big city embodies the salient features of modernity. One of these is the intensification of nervous life produced by the speed of flow of internal and external impressions. In the modern metropolis, professional, economic, and social life flows too quickly, making problematic even to cross the road. This intense and pervasive nervousness even constitutes the psychological basis of the inhabitant of the metropolis, in which Simmel indicates the place of an excessive concentration of unexpected “violent stimuli” against subjective life, incessantly struck by a bewildering number of human products (Simmel [1903] 1971a, 325).

What psychological strategies can metropolitan residents adopt to defend themselves from the metropolis?

According to Simmel, when men are attacked by too aggressive and impersonal rhythms of life and feel the danger of psychic uprooting, they can react emotionally or intellectually.

In the first case, the emotional reaction, men try to adapt emotional relationships to external contrasts. However, this is impossible in big cities because feelings belonging to the deepest and least conscious part of the psyche constantly change slowly and painfully in adverse circumstances. The emotional reaction can work well in provincial towns and country life but not in metropolis life, which flows at a dizzying pace.

In the second case, the intellectual reaction, men defend themselves against uprooting by resorting to the intellect, representing the human psyche’s transparent, conscious, and superior stratum. The intellect is a much more direct and immediate means of defense than feelings. It is also the inner strength that adapts more easily to external adversities. The metropolitan type defends itself against the uprooting that threatens it by the intellect. In summary, since men are struck by the metropolis in the center of their psyche, their defensive reaction can only occur on a psychic level. The more the inhabitant of the metropolis detaches itself from the surrounding world, the more it can successfully cope with the violent stimuli hitting it. Therefore, the first psychic characteristic of the metropolitan person is “metropolitan intellectuality,” the most practical means to defend their mental life from the violence of metropolitan life.

Monetary Economics and Emotional Relationships

After clarifying his essay’s central thesis, Simmel analyzes how metropolitan intellectuality is intertwined with the money economy.

The metropolis is the seat par excellence of the power of money. The money economy and the domination of the intellect marry perfectly since they are both dominated by indifference toward men and objects. This objective neutrality has positive and negative aspects. The positive aspect consists in ensuring equal justice for all, favoring even the weak against the strong, thanks to the impersonal power of the law.

The negative aspect derives from the extreme ruthlessness of objective neutrality. Formal justice is often the cause of great substantial injustices due to the absence of emotionality on which it rests. The man dominated by the psychological intellectualistic attitude is indifferent to what is properly individual. In this, it is similar to money, which, having to do with exchange value, is interested not in the quality of a commodity but in its demand and, therefore, its quantity. The best quality of a commodity is to be in high demand. Money becomes an absolute value. The money logic also affects how men relate to one another.

When emotionality governs the social world, human relations have great value. When the intellectual attitude trumps the emotional life, men become numbers, which take on importance only for their objectively calculable performance.

The inhabitants of the metropolis behave toward the people who are part of their social environment with the same detachment with which they act toward the customer or the supplier. In contrast, emotionality assumes quite another importance in the more limited environments because the relationships between men are not reduced to the arid logic of performance. The market economy plays an essential role in causing a contrast between a life based on feeling and emotional relationships and a life based on intellectual relationships.

The modern metropolis is centered on production for the market, where customers and producers seldom or never meet, not even visually. The market economy pushes them to develop relations based on intellectual calculation, which their egoistic economic interests cannot do without. In the money economy which dominates the metropolis, emotionality must not interfere with the exchange. Otherwise, the imponderability of personal relationships could deviate from their functioning mechanisms.

In The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel expressed a fundamental idea, which we will find a year later in Weber’s The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), about the relationship between modernity and calculability: “The modern mind—Simmel writes—has become more and more a calculating one” (Simmel [1903] 1971a, 327).

The ideal of the natural sciences of transforming the whole world into a calculation, an arithmetical problem that requires fixing every part of it in mathematical formulas, corresponds to the calculating exactness of practical life that the money economy has generated. In modern life, the money economy fills many people’s day with weighing, calculating, and defining numerically, in a word, by reducing qualitative values to quantitative terms.

One of Simmel’s most loved antagonistic couples, quality versus quantity, is also present in the essay on metropolitan life. The conflict between life and form is found in the essay’s title. The mind represents life, and the metropolis indicates form. The conflictual dynamic is presented according to the now-known pattern. The metropolis aspires to the universal and the timeless and would like to impose its rigidly prefigured scheme right into the spirit of its inhabitants, erasing all its colors. The metropolis’s punctuality and calculability would like to chase away life’s sovereign and irrational impulses, which rebel against such an intellectual prison. This is the typical existential rebellion of men who exalt individuality, such as Nietzsche, whom Simmel cites as an example of autonomous existence rebelling against form in the name of an existence that finds the value of life only in what is unique, in what cannot be defined univocally for everyone, only in unschematized individual expression. A passionate hatred toward the metropolis, the money economy, and the intellectualism of existence animated Nietzsche.

The Blasé Type and the Monetary Economy

Simmel has identified a peculiar psychic attitude generated by the nervous contradictions that swarm in the metropolis: The blasé or the skeptical, indifferent, and disenchanted man toward the surrounding world. Being blasé, for Simmel, means having become unable to react to new stimuli from the environment with an adequate amount of mental energy. The blasé outlook is a psychic phenomenon caused by the city’s aggressiveness.

Simmel clarifies his thoughts on the blasé metropolitan attitude by comparing the psychic attitude of children of a large city with that of children who live in a quiet and not very stimulating milieu. Many events, which arouse indifference in the children of the metropolis, appear exceptional to the countryside children. Being blasé is the defensive psychic reaction to the dense concentration of contradictory nervous stimuli, with which the metropolis traumatizes man’s inner life. The concept of nervous energy and that of blasé are inextricably linked. The blasé person is, in fact, the one who saves nervous energies and keeps them for itself, reacting to situations with the intensification of consciousness or without emotional involvement, similar to a battery that has entered energy-saving mode to avoid draining too quickly. Even in the face of shocking facts, blasé does not produce emotions to preserve its nervous energies by using its “protective organ,” the intellect, as a shield for the inner life against the domination of the metropolis (Simmel [1903] 1971a, 326). Being blasé is a self-protection strategy to rescue the mental life from the profound destruction threatened by the external milieu.

But be careful: The blasé is never a man without intellectual faculties. It is not a stupid person. On the contrary, it is precisely the men with the most developed intellectual faculties who resort to the blasé attitude since, having an excess of intelligence, can use it to defend themselves from the eradicating forces of the metropolis through a shrewd cognitive strategy. Being blasé is a consequence of the growth of intellectualism of existence. The fact that the metropolitan type is subjected to a strong nervous tension leads it to the paradoxical reaction of detaching itself emotionally to stop reacting nervously. If the metropolis exasperates its nerves, the metropolitan person puts it to rest. To conclude, the blasé attitude is the psychic strategy with which one weakest force (modern man) fights its battle against one greatest force (modern society) to preserve its independence and the particularity of its being.

What does Simmel Think of the Metropolis?

The essay on the metropolis raises the same question we encountered when discussing fashion: Does Simmel have a positive or negative conception of the big city?

The instinctive answer is that it is impossible to answer because Simmel observes both poles of the phenomena he investigates. In reality, if we dissect this work, we realize that the lights and shadows are not balanced. The negative aspects of the metropolis outweigh the positive ones. The blasé is the pathological outcome of a stressful process caused by the violence of the metropolis, which attacks the human psyche with no mercy. Man, per se, has nothing pathological; the metropolis has. Inner life suffers because the metropolis is a form that has become autonomous and develops according to a fundamentally anti-vital internal logic.

Although Simmel insists on the retroaction of phenomena, and although he prefers to speak of “interdependencies” among social phenomena rather than “causes” of them to free himself from positivism, his thesis on the metropolis is openly one way, at least in the initial motion of the disruptive psychic process.

The pathology afflicting the metropolitan man proceeds from the outside (the violence of the metropolis) toward the inside (the fragility of the human psyche). Simmel doesn’t like to talk about “causes.” However, the violence of the metropolis is the cause of the psychic crisis of its inhabitants.

It is one thing to say that the effect retroacts on the cause; it is another thing to say that it is impossible to distinguish the cause from the effect. In this regard, I would like to recall a shrewd comment by Durkheim from his The Division of Labor in Society: “The effect reacts upon the cause, but never loses its quality of the effect. The reaction it exercises is, consequently, secondary” (Durkheim 1933, 256).

Let us carefully read the opening words of The Metropolis and Mental Life, in which the metropolis is described as a psychically “violent” force engaged in relentless aggression against subjective life.

Simmel writes:

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. This antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. (Simmel [1903] 1971a, 324)

The process that leads to becoming blasé is accelerated and strengthened by the money economy, which, as we have said, induces us to care much more about quantity than quality, developing a new attitude, or reinforcing an already existing tendency, to no longer distinguish quality of things. From this point of view, the blasé person is like money. It does not grasp the qualitative difference between things. This psychic condition is fully realized when the logic of money has penetrated the deepest part of the human spirit. In short, the inhabitants of the metropolis, attacked on a nervous level, instead of reacting nervously, detach themselves emotionally from the surrounding world to protect its nerves through the devaluation of the entire objective world.

In addition to the dizzying pace of the metropolis and the penetration of money into the human psyche, population density also increases the emotional detachment of the metropolitan person. If, at every meeting on the street, the inhabitant of the metropolis invested the same amount of emotional energy that invests the man of the small town, where everyone knows and greets each other with a certain emotional involvement, its inner being would be disintegrated.

The metropolitan resident encounters and interacts with an infinite number of people. Emotionally granting itself to each of them, its psychic condition would become unsustainable. This psychic siege helps us understand the typical reserve of the inhabitant of the metropolis, often foreign even to the neighbors, which makes it appear cold and insensitive in the eyes of the inhabitant of the small town.

Reserve is an obligatory choice for the inhabitants of the metropolis and is also an example of how the form can impose itself on life in an inexorable way. The external conditions of the big city shape the inner world of its inhabitants, who become unaccustomed to direct human contact to the point that when the inhabitant of the metropolis sees a stranger getting too close, the feeling it experiences is no longer simple indifference, but, very often, of aversion and repulsion. When the closeness becomes excessive and even turns into physical contact, the repulsion turns to hatred and can translate into aggression. Simmel concludes, and this is not an optimistic conclusion, that once individuals fought with nature to conquer food, today, it struggles with the metropolis to conquer man.

What does it mean that man fights for man? It means that, in opulent modernity, man no longer struggles for material survival but for spiritual survival.

To the negative traits of the mental attitude of the people of the metropolis, Simmel also adds the positive ones.

Moving his gaze from the metropolis to the provincial city, Simmel begins to dissect the limits of this small form of society, so narrow that it even appears suffocating to many inhabitants of the metropolis, where the growth of individual freedom has no equal in other previous social formations. Never have men been so free to choose their lifestyle as in the modern metropolis. The first family groups, political and religious, were characterized by closure toward the outgroup and discipline toward the ingroup. Since human groups took shape for the first time, they could not grant any freedom to their members. Otherwise, their too-fresh foundations would have come undone before being cemented. As the group grows, in the number of members and the amplitude of the territory, internal discipline is loosened, and the group’s boundaries become porous. Individuals thus acquire greater freedom of movement and can establish new connections with external groups, acquiring an increasingly accentuated individuality also thanks to the division of labor, which requires members to differentiate themselves. Simmel sees an inversely proportional relationship between the increase in the group and internal surveillance. If the former increases, the latter decreases, and individuals acquire greater freedom of movement.

This reflection on Freedom and the Individual (Simmel 1971c, 217–226), already fully developed in Simmel’s first sociological work, Social Differentiation published in 1890, appears again in The Metropolis and Mental Life, where the process of liberation of the individual from the chains of small all-pervading groups reaches its peak.

The inhabitant of the metropolis is free from all those meanness, made up of gossip, slander, and prejudice, which afflict and restrict the horizon of the inhabitant of the provincial city. In Social Differentiation, Simmel invited us to note that large social circles favor strengthening the personality (Simmel [1890] 1998, 63). However, this greater individual freedom is not necessarily beneficial to the emotional life of the metropolitan inhabitant. Although the metropolis is dominated by the proximity of a mass of bodies in tight spaces, nowhere can a man feel so alone and abandoned as in the big cities.

It is worth noting that the greater freedom of the individual is not only a consequence of the territory’s size and the metropolis’s large population. A fundamental role is played by “cosmopolitanism,” which Simmel does not define. Still, it seems to indicate the ability of the big city to connect with many cities worldwide, expanding its spaces and horizons more and more. While the life of the provincial city dies in itself, the metropolis increases its links with the outside world in a geometric progression, similar to the capitals, which, exceeding a certain amount, develop by themselves in an accelerated progression.

What Is Individual Freedom?

At this point, Simmel reveals what he thinks of “true” individual freedom in a short passage containing his reflection’s most complex and enigmatic part.

What is individual freedom, for Simmel, and how can we know if we are free with all the mental confusion that the metropolis generates in our psyche?

Simmel’s answer is entrusted to a few cryptic words, which I will quote and then comment on. Since this is a difficult and twisted passage, I will highlight its decisive parts in bold so that the reader can easily link them together and grasp Simmel’s message more immediately:

This is already expressed in the fact that individual freedom, which is the logical historical complement of such extension, is not only to be understood in the negative sense as mere freedom of movement and emancipation from prejudices and philistinism. Its essential characteristic is rather to be found in the fact that the particularity and incomparability which ultimately every person possesses in some way is actually expressed, giving form to life. That we follow the laws of our inner nature—and this is what freedom is—becomes perceptible and convincing to us and others only when the expressions of this nature distinguish themselves from others; it is our irreplaceability by others that shows that our mode of existence is not imposed upon us from the outside. (Simmel [1903] 1971a, 335)

In this passage, Simmel provides two fundamental pieces of information.

The first piece of information concerns what Simmel considers to be the essence of individual freedom. He answers that this “essence” consists of following our inner laws. From a sociological point of view, this is a non-answer. No woman or man knows the “laws” of her/his nature. Even if we set out to discover these inner laws of human nature, we would not know where to start because Simmel doesn’t define them. What are they? No one will ever find it out by reading Simmel’s work. If by “nature” one must generally understand one’s “way of existing,” as Simmel suggests in the passage quoted above, then Simmel teaches us that this way changes depending on whether a man lives in a provincial town or a metropolis.

The second piece of information concerns the method to verify whether we are following our unspecified “inner laws“ and, therefore, whether we are free.

According to Simmel, this verification method consists of understanding if we are behaving differently from others since the nature of each of us is unique and cannot be the same as that of anyone else. In order not to lose the thread of Simmel’s reasoning, I will read again the key passage already quoted: “We follow the laws of our inner nature—and this is what freedom is—[…] only when the expressions of this nature distinguish themselves from others; it is our irreplaceability by others that shows that our mode of existence is not imposed upon us from the outside.”

Simmel provides an answer in this case, but it contradicts his theory on the process that presides over establishing a union. It is not, in fact, imaginable, not even on the basis of Simmel’s sociology, that every single man or woman in a metropolis of millions of inhabitants can express his/her nature in a different way from the others without being subjected to impositions by anyone. If it were to occur, such a condition would not make interaction possible, which implies a certain number of impositions that others ask us to accept in exchange for their willingness to interact.

The conclusion, which the passage on freedom seems to suggest, is that Simmel had a strongly elitist conception of individual freedom. In short, individual freedom can be achieved, but only by some extraordinary personalities, such as Goethe or Nietzsche. On closer inspection, if we consider Simmel’s fundamental theory, based on the conflict between life and form, anyone cannot reach individual freedom. If life can only express itself by assuming a form, every man is condemned to conformism to live. It may perhaps escape conformity for a few moments, theoretically in the instant that marks the transition from one form to another, but not for the whole of existence, so much so that, according to Simmel, even Goethe conducted his entire existence in respect for the forms of his time.

In Simmel, unlike Ferdinand Tönnies, the exaltation of premodern life is absent. According to him, agrarian society exercised violent attacks against the inner world of the person and, as an example, he cited everyday life in the eighteenth century, full of degrading harassment. However, Simmel does not even exalt modern society, so much so that the anthropological figure that characterizes Simmel’s modernity is not the free man but the tragic man. And so, I continue my exposition with the thesis on the tragedy of culture.

In what sense the modern man is tragic?

The Tragedy of Culture

In Simmel’s thesis on the tragedy of culture, a decisive role belongs to the division of labor, which has caused an immeasurable growth of all man-made products, to which Simmel gives the name of “objective culture,” as opposed to “subjective or individual culture,” which it represents the portion of objective culture that the individual can incorporate and manage consciously to enrich itself internally (Simmel 1971d, 233).

Therefore, the thesis on the tragedy of culture is built around this pair of concepts, objective and subjective culture, and the relationship they have between them.

The source of the tragedy is in the fact that the difference in growth between objective culture and subjective culture has become “terrifying” (Simmel 1971e, 63).

The source of the tragedy lies in the fact that the difference in growth between objective culture and subjective culture has become frightful since the first grows dramatically. In contrast, the second quantitatively and qualitatively decreases. In short, the hypertrophy of the objective culture causes the atrophy of the individual culture.

However short it may be, this passage requires special attention because it raises two different questions or aspects of the same tragedy, which I will call the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the tragedy of culture.

The quantitative dimension of the tragedy is easily grasped because it is intuitive. Even those who study in a “mad and desperate way” (Leopardi 1935, Vol. I, 162) are doomed to see objective culture grow faster than their culture. The difference between what men know and what they might know increases with each passing day because objective culture, which includes both humanistic and technical products, including household items, grows faster than the capacity learning of the individual.

Today, there are hundreds of millions of books. If we survey the immense amount of culture that has been incorporated in the last hundred years in things and knowledge, in institutions and in comfort, and we compare it with the cultural progress of individuals in the same period of time—even only in higher classes—between the two processes there is a “frightful” difference in growth, and even a regression of the culture of individuals in terms of spirituality, delicacy, idealism.

If the quantitative dimension of the tragedy is a rather intuitive fact, the qualitative dimension is much less so. Intuitively, it is not intuitive why a man who reads so many books or learns so many things should regress spiritually.

So, why?

Simmel answers that the individual is induced, by the division of labor, to assume a superficial and instrumental attitude toward knowledge. In modern society, culture has become a pragmatic means of surviving in a hostile environment. It follows that not only are men unable to contain all the objective culture produced by humanity over the millennia, but moreover, what little they are able to absorb penetrates their subjective culture in a spiritually inadequate way. On closer inspection, the division of labor always plays a decisive role. On the one hand, the division of labor makes it possible to produce a greater quantity of objective culture; conversely, it induces men to assume a pragmatic and superficial attitude toward culture.

As for how Simmel formulated his thesis on the tragedy of culture, few pages equal, in clarity and richness of content, the one I reproduce below, taken from The Metropolis and Mental Life. This passage insists on the decisive role of the division of labor, without which the tragedy of culture would not be so terrifying.

After clarifying that the development of modern culture is characterized by the predominance of the objective spirit over the subjective, Simmel writes:

This discrepancy is in essence the result of the success of the growing division of labour. For it is this which requires from the individual an ever more one-sided type of achievement which, at its highest point, often permits his personality as a whole to fall into neglect. In any case this over-growth of objective culture has been less and less satisfactory for the individual. Perhaps less conscious than in practical activity and in the obscure complex of feelings which flow from him, he is reduced to a negligible quantity. He becomes a single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces which gradually take out of his hands everything connected with progress, spirituality and value. The operation of these forces results in the transformation of the latter from a subjective form into one of purely objective existence. (Simmel [1903] 1971a, 337)

The Sociology of Conflict

Simmel influenced contemporary sociological theory in the study of conflict.

It is understandable since Simmel’s society is intimately conflictual: “The sociological significance of conflict has in principle never been disputed” (Simmel 1971f, 70).

Conflict, being the basis of the relationship between life and form, is everywhere. The conflict is between objective and subjective culture, between the mental life and the metropolis, and between the small all-pervading group and the individual. Even knowledge is a means of fighting in the struggle for existence (Simmel 1950b, 41). Simmel worked hard to leave no doubts about the centrality he attributed to conflict. To him, the mere fact of living together causes conflict. In addition to showing off a marked tendency to continually divide into parties to fight each other, men are also in permanent conflict among themselves. Simmel sees three types of conflict: Between individuals, within the individual, and between the individual and society. In the final phase of his thinking, Simmel, expressing a Durkheimian idea, holds that society seeks to subjugate the individual, who resists and fights against its overwhelming power. Man opposes society, aimed as it is at making violence to the individual, oppressing him with the multiplicity of his interests, and bending him, sometimes completely, to his own needs. Simmel embraces a Durkheim idea and overturns another. Society is often egoistic, and the individual altruistic: “The very quest of society is an egoism that does violence to the individual for the benefit and utility of the many” (Simmel 1950b, 59).

One of Simmel’s most popular contributions concerns the study of conflicts in small groups. By comparing the dyad with the triad, Simmel was interested in understanding how interaction changes in groups that increase the number of their members.

In the dyad, everyone can interact, preserving their individuality, without subjecting themselves to group dynamics. However, the dyad is a particularly fragile group because losing a single member would cause its demise. The dyad can also give great psychological gratifications due to the emotional depth of her bonds (think of two lovers).

When a new member is added to the dyad, the triad is born, which modifies the structural configuration of the group. In the triad, individuals experience a leveling effect, which limits their individuality. Furthermore, the outbreak of a conflict places one of the three members, the “third,” in a position to play a plurality of different roles. It can function as a non-partisan, mediator, and tertius gaudens element. It functions as non-partisan when it withdraws after making direct contact between two colliding members to produce concord or it can function as an arbiter by balancing their contradictory claims or eliminating incompatible quests. Still, it can also take advantage of the conflict when it sows discord to benefit from the “divide et impera” strategy (Simmel 1950b, 162). All this creates a structured system. One member can be in a prominent position over the others, but it can also form a two-on-one coalition.

Criticism: Simmel’s Contradiction

As regards the criticisms of Simmel, I would like to focus on three issues: Simmel’s tendency to contradict himself, his nationalism, and the reason for Lukács’s corrosive criticism.

As for the contradictions, I will cite one example to clarify how complicated it is to summarize Simmel’s thought.

Consider the essay on fashion that originally appeared in the International Quarterly in October 1904 (Simmel 1904, 130–155) and was reprinted by The American Journal of Sociology in 1957 (Simmel 1957, 541–558). I must go back to the original article because one of the passages I am about to quote was deleted in the 1971 collection of Simmel essays edited by Donald L. Levin, titled On Individuality and Social Forms. Selected Writings (Simmel 1971a). This short work of historical reconstruction of Simmel’s writings is useful.

Simmel compares the Kaffirs and the Bushmen to argue that fashion is absent in classless societies, having however made an opposite statement a few pages earlier, where we read that fashion is also present in societies in the state of nature.

Societies in a state of nature, Simmel explains, do not have overlapping strata or monetary systems. Yet, family groups use the fashion to strengthen internal cohesion and external differentiation with other parental nuclei. Even more, fashion imported from outside is appreciated in these classless societies (Simmel 1971b, 209).

Now let’s compare three contradictory pieces, which Simmel placed at close range.

In the first passage, Simmel states that fashion is a peculiar product of class society:

Fashion, as noted above, is a product of class distinction. […] Fashion on the one hand signifies union with those in the same class, the uniformity of a circle characterized by it, and, uno actu, the exclusion of all other groups. Union and segregation are the two fundamental functions which are here inseparably united. (Simmel 1957, 544)

In the second passage, Simmel reiterates that fashion is typical of class societies, and, citing the case of the Kaffir and Bushmen, he also states that fashion is absent from classless societies:

Among the Kaflirs the class-system is very strongly developed, and as a result we find there a fairly rapid change of fashions, in spite of the fact that wearing-apparel and adornments are subject to certain legal restrictions. The Bushmen, on the other hand, who have developed no class-system, have no fashions whatsoever,—no one has been able to discover among them any interest in changes in apparel and in finery. Occasionally these negative elements have consciously prevented the setting of a fashion even at the very heights of civilization. (Simmel 1957, 547)

Finally, in the third passage, Simmel states that fashion is present in classless societies:

In addition to the element of imitation the element of demarcation constitutes an important factor of fashion. This is especially noticeable wherever the social structure does not include any super-imposed groups, in which case fashion asserts itself in neighboring groups. Among primitive peoples we often find that closely connected groups living under exactly similar conditions develop sharply differentiated fashions, by means of which each group establishes uniformity within, as well as difference without the prescribed set. On the other hand, there exists a wide-spread predilection for importing fashions from without, and such foreign fashions assume a greater value within the circle, simply because they did not originate there. The prophet Zephaniah expressed his indignation at the aristocrats who affected imported apparel. As a matter of fact the exotic origin of fashions seems strongly to favor the exclusiveness of the groups which adopt them. Because of their external origin, these imported fashions create a special and significant form of socialization, which arises through mutual relation to a point without the circle. (Simmel 1957, 545)

It is clear that in the face of such a contradictory series of passages, it becomes difficult to attribute a precise theory to Simmel.

Is fashion born and rooted in the class structure of society? Simmel states this at the beginning of the essay but then quickly denies himself. Could we say that Simmel has a theory about fashion?

I am inclined to conclude that he has at least four.

The first states that fashion arises from the conflict between life and form; the second argues that fashion is rooted in the structure of class society; the third says that fashion is also found in societies with no class system because fashion is a phenomenon rooted in the human psyche and, as such, it is found in all kinds of class and classless societies. The fourth says that fashion is a social group phenomenon, not a social class phenomenon. If there are no classes in a society, but there are groups, then fashion appears.

A similar problem arises with Simmel’s theory on the dualism of human nature. In Durkheim, the theory of dualism remains unchanged from the first work, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), to the last, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).

Simmel’s Nationalism

Now, I deal with Simmel’s nationalism.

Like Weber, Simmel held a certain degree of nationalism, which pervaded him at the outbreak of World War I. While Weber had a temperament inclined to participate in the debates of his time, Simmel did not engage in any major political or intellectual dispute. However, some of his writings and public speeches were inflamed by the initial phase of World War I. In one of these, Simmel exclaims emphatically that he loves Germany and is ready to defend it in defiance of any rational reflection (Wolff 1950, XXI).

There was also a propagandist, Simmel, for a very short time, and many readers would not like today some aspects of Simmel’s thinking. In the first phase of his reflection, when he was strongly affected by the strong influence of Spencer and Darwin—evident in his first sociological work, Social Differentiation (1890)—Simmel worried about the “fatal degeneration of the race” and also thought that the propensity to crime was hereditary. Furthermore, he was strongly opposed to helping the weak as he believed this charitable attitude would favor their reproduction, harming society (Honigsheim 1965, 170).

Lashed by Lukács, Praised by Weber

The harshness with which Lukács attacked Simmel should be understood and explained.

In The Destruction of Reason (1954), a “philosophical-ideological” work (Bedeschi 1970, 125) in which Lukács, retracing the German thought of the imperialist age, identifies a dangerous line of irrationalistic development, which would go from Schelling to Hitler.

Lukács writes that Simmel was the promoter of a “modern skeptical relativism” enemy of science and that, for this reason, he contributed to favoring a “reactionary obscurantism.” Lukács defined “comical” Simmel’s thesis, according to which the laws of nature and all the doctrines that we believe to be infallible will be proven wrong in the centuries or millennia to come (Lukács [1954] 1981, 446).

To understand the attacks against Simmel, it is necessary to know the aim of Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason, that is a sort of hunt for the enemy, the bourgeois intellectual, encompassing celebratory passages toward Lenin and a constant attack on capitalism. Criticizing Simmel’s relativism, Lukács writes: “This destructive relativism was imperialistic philosophy’s self-defence against dialectical materialism. With Spengler this tendency emerged clearly and overtly, but it was already present in Simmel” (Lukács [1954] 1981, 446).

After a flood of praise for Marxism and attacks on the bourgeoisie and capitalism, Lukács writes that Lenin helps us understand the world, while Simmel takes us away from the right path of intellectual honesty. For Lukács, Simmel is a bourgeois intellectual whose philosophy of life is a functional doctrine to the ideology of imperialist capitalism. According to Lukács, Simmel would be co-responsible for plenty of humanity’s evils, including the attempt to avert the influence that dialectical and historical materialism could have exerted on bourgeois intellectuality and to destroy all hope in a life full of meaning in the human community. In sum, Lukács accused Simmel of saying that all systems of thought are destined to be outdated and that men should renounce the idea of the absolute true.

This passage by Simmel invites us to be wary of any system of thought considered absolute and universal. Lukács—who was used to political struggle and held important government posts, including Minister of Education under the second Nagy government in Hungary—did not like it. In fact, Simmel does not criticize a particular doctrine; he criticizes men’s tendency to believe in absolutes and not to recognize the power of sentiments over their reasoning. It is paradoxical, but the passage, which Lukács uses to discredit Simmel, serves us to criticize Lukács, who, after having portrayed Simmel as an enemy of Marxism, hurls his doctrinal curse with an ideological posture. The real fault of Simmel, for Lukács, is that he fights “in a most vulgar and superficial way the materialism,” as well as its concrete historical-social consequences (Lukács 1981, 451).

Box 8.2: Simmel and Weber

Unlike Lukács, Weber’s judgment of Simmel is very positive.

Let us now consider the similarities between the two.

Even Simmel, starting from Kant’s philosophy, thinks mental categories mediate the relationship between the individual and empirical reality. Knowledge is a construction of the mind. Kant, in contrast to Hume’s empiricism, had argued that knowledge of nature would not be possible if man were not provided with some innate categories, such as space and time. Simmel expresses the same idea with reference to the study of history. Like any neo-Kantian, Simmel denies the knowability of an objective reality independent of consciousness. In the book, The Problems of the Philosophy of History, anticipating Weber, Simmel explains that historical research is not a simple listing of facts in chronological succession and adds that the human mind cannot grasp reality entirely (Simmel [1892] 1977).

Simmel sets out three ideas that Weber would make his own. First, the historian must select the infinite events of history through a specific point of view that gives order to the chaos of pure empirical reality. Second, science rests on abstraction. Third, ideal types are abstract intellectual tools indispensable to the development of social science. One of Simmel’s most beautiful phrases is this: “Mind is the material of history,” as he writes in the Preface to the Second Edition (1905) of The Problems of the Philosophy of History (Simmel 1977, VII).

It is no surprise that Weber held Simmel in such high esteem.

Interpreting Kant, Simmel writes that “all knowledge is a function of the intellect” (Simmel 1977, 42). History is a “theoretical construct” (Simmel 1977, VII). After reading these sentences, Lukács wrote that Simmel is a “subjectivist”; “the reality of the outside world, for Simmel, is no longer even a problem” (Lukács 1981, 452).

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have explored five concepts of Simmel’s sociology—life, interaction, form, sociation, and sociability, and learned how the rigidity of form and the plasticity of life struggle to gain the upper hand. The flow of life, falling into the forms of its being, creates works of art, religions, science, technology, and law. What Simmel teaches us about fashion is incredibly current. Fashion is a need that arises rather spontaneously in individuals. However, capitalism exploits this need to increase profits by creating a fashion industry that pushes individuals to dress fashionably.

The tragedy of culture, which distinguishes between “objective culture” and “subjective culture,” invites scholars to recognize the limitlessness of knowledge and maintain humility.

Simmel’s reflections on the metropolis are also very current. All those who live in big cities know well how the metropolis creates strong psychological stress in its inhabitants, who react by becoming indifferent to others and their problems not to consume all their mental energy.

We have learned that conflict is an inevitable part of human coexistence, according to Simmel’s conflict theory. Society often tries to dominate individuals, but the latter resist and fight back against its power.

Finally, we have seen that Lukács’s harshest criticisms of Simmel are unfair and ideologically motivated.

Self-test Path

  1. 1.

    What is “sociation”?

  2. 2.

    Describe the opposition between life and form.

  3. 3.

    What do the three a priori of Simmel’s sociology say?

  4. 4.

    What is the heterogony of ends?

  5. 5.

    In what sense is sociability the playful form of association?

  6. 6.

    What is microsociology?

  7. 7.

    How does the “fashion game” work?

  8. 8.

    How do the violent stimuli of the metropolis affect mental life?

  9. 9.

    Who is the blasé man, and what causes him/her to become emotionally detached?

  10. 10.

    What does the “tragedy of culture” consist of?

  11. 11.

    Talk about the triad and the role of the “third.”

  12. 12.

    Talk about Lukács’s criticisms of Simmel.

  13. 13.

    What aspects of Weber’s sociology did Simmel influence?