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Georg
Simmel (1858 -
1918)
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 Money
and the Modern Mind : George Simmel's Philosophy of Money by
Gianfranco Poggi
A major representative of the
German sociological tradition, Georg Simmel (1858-1918) has influenced
social thinkers ranging from the Chicago School to Walter Benjamin. His
magnum opus, The Philosophy of Money, published in 1900, is nevertheless
a difficult book that has daunted many would-be readers. Gianfranco
Poggi makes this important work accessible to a broader range of
scholars and students, offering a compact and systematically organized
presentation of its main arguments. Simmel's insights about money are as
valid today as they were a hundred years ago. Poggi provides a sort of
reader's manual to Simmel's work, deepening the reader's understanding
of money while at the same time offering a new appreciation of the
originality of Simmel's social theory.
About the Author
Gianfranco Poggi is W. R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the
University of Virginia.
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here for more information on this book
 Georg
Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology by Ralph M. Leck
"My legacy will be like cash, which is distributed
to many heirs, each transforming his portion into a profit that conforms
to his nature: this profit will no longer reveal its derivation from my
legacy." -- Georg Simmel (1918)
These prophetic words, written shortly before Georg
Simmel's death in 1918, have held true to the present day. His immense
cultural capital was distributed to many heirs, but after his death
little trace of his legacy remained. Although he was a member of the
Department of Philosophy at Berlin University for most of his life,
Simmel is most widely recognized not as a philosopher but as the
founding father of the discipline of sociology. This important work
recovers Simmel's reputation among his contemporaries as "the
philosopher of the avant garde" by revealing the cultural origins
of his sociological thought.
Georg
Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology
pioneers a new interpretation of Simmel as a thinker whose critical
ideas were shaped by the aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural
movements of his era: Naturalism, Nietzscheanism, and feminism,
respectively. Here, Simmel emerges as a public intellectual who had an
enormous impact on German modernism. He is revealed as the intellectual
godfather of major cultural and political crusades, including literary
Expressionism and the antiwar movement known as Activism. Author Ralph
M. Leck also examines Simmel's seminal influence on the feminist and
homosexual rights movements, as well as his meaningful contribution to
Western Marxism. Leck's groundbreaking research shows Simmel for the
first time as a key figure in the intellectual history of European
counterculture, vividly demonstrating why Simmel is to sociology what
Newton is to physics.
This is the first study to investigate systematically
the breadth of Simmel's body of work and his cultural legacy. Simmel's
wide-ranging social theories--dealing with such themes as alienation,
money culture, social hierarchy, and social trends--are still relevant
to current debates and theories about gender, sociology, culture, and
politics. Georg
Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology
will appeal to both students and scholars who are concerned with the
origins and aesthetics of modernity.
About the Author
Ralph M. Leck teaches in the University Honors Program and the Women's
Studies Program at Indiana State University.
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here for more information on this book
Click
here for more books by and about Georg Simmel
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here for 20th Century Philosophy Books
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Excerpt:
Georg Simmel was born on March 1, 1858, in the very
heart of Berlin, the corner of Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse.
This was a curious birthplace--it would correspond to Times Square in
New York--but it seems symbolically fitting for a man who throughout his
life lived in the intersection of many movements, intensely affected by
the cross-currents of intellectual traffic and by a multiplicity of
moral directions. Simmel was a modern urban man, without roots in
traditional folk culture. Upon reading Simmel's first book, F. Toennies
wrote to a friend: "The book is shrewd but it has the flavor of the
metropolis." Like "the stranger" he described in his
brilliant essay of the same name, he was near and far at the same time,
a "potential wanderer; although he [had] not moved on, he [had] not
quite overcome the freedom of coming and going"
One of the major theorists to emerge in German
philosophy and social science around the turn of the century, he remains
atypical, a perturbing and fascinating figure to his more organically
rooted contemporaries...
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This site hosts texts on Simmel, English translations
of Simmel texts, and much more.
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Online Essays in English
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| Georg Simmel on
Philosophy and Culture
Postscript to a Collection of Essays by
Jürgen Habermas, Translated by Mathieu Deflem
Excerpt:
Georg Simmel first published Philosophische Kultur
(Philosophical Culture) in 1911; the third and last edition
appeared in 1923. The fact that this collection of essays has not been
available for over 60 years and only reappears today could be an
indication for the fact that, in a strange way, Simmel as a critic of
culture is both near to, and far away from, us...
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Jörg
Heinke, University of Kiel, Germany
Excerpt:
In David Malouf's novels An Imaginary Life,
Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek the phenomenon
of strangeness appears in different shapes. One way to understand the
concepts of starnger and strangeness is to employ the sociological
approach advanced by Georg Simmel's brief "Essay about the
Stranger" ("Exkurs über den Fremden," 1908). He sees the
stranger as a wanderer who comes today and may stay tomorrow. The
attributes of that stranger are his differences of time and place of his
origin, his socially not belonging to the host society and also his
independence in moving, staying and in his way of behaviour compared to
the rest of society which he enters. If we communicate with strangers we
have - at the same time -- the impression of being close to someone from
a distance and of being far away from someone who is in our immediate
environment. While wandering the stranger moves from outside the society
towards the inside. This opposition of inside and outside is, however,
the basis of our conscience...
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Edited by Donald Levine
Excerpt:
I. Philosophy of the Social Sciences; Chapter
3: The Problem of Sociology (1908)
Society: exists where a number of individuals enter
into interaction (interaction is the key to everything with Simmel),
which arises on the basis of certain drives or for the sake of certain
purposes. Unity (or sociation) in the empirical sense constitutes the
interaction of elements (ie. individuals in the case of society).
Individuals are the loci of all historical reality,
but the materials of life are not social unless they promote
interaction. This follows since only this sociation can transform the a
mere aggregation of isolated individuals into specific forms of being
with and for one another...
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