By David Frisby
Till lately little of Simmel's paintings was once to be had in translation and sure key texts have been unknown outdoor Germany. David Frisby, the eminent Simmel pupil, offers not just an advent to the most important sociological writings of this significant determine, but additionally an issue for a reconsideration of his paintings. the writer outlines the cultural and ancient context within which Simmel labored; reports Simmel's most vital writings; and examines his legacy to sociology by way of illuminating his hyperlinks with Weber's theories and his influential courting with Marxism. Simmel, a valuable determine within the improvement of contemporary sociology, and a modern of Weber and Durkheim, was once one of many first to spot sociology as a separate self-discipline. His principles stimulated Weber, the Chicago university, and lots of later sociologists. His advent of a couple of simple suggestions to sociology, similar to trade, interplay and differentiation, attest to his highbrow stature and the far-reaching importance of his paintings.
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Extra resources for Georg Simmel (Key Sociologists)
Sample text
Besides this he conducts a seminar for sociological practice. Here reports are made on sociological books and independent dissertations are read. Simmel himself usually conducts the discussions. This is for the moment very agreeable to the listeners, but it is pedagogically by no means advantageous. [2] A few years later in 1899, Simmel himself declared to Bouglé that his ‘sociology is a very specialised discipline, for whom there is no representative in Germany apart from myself. [3] But it was not merely in the teaching of sociology in Germany that Simmel was already well-known by the mid-1890s.
The eye ‘bores into things, it retreats back, it encompasses a space, it wanders around, it grasps the desired object as if behind it and draws it to itself. [100] Within the city’s on rushing impressions, the rapid gaze and increase in nervous stimulation, this eye, as Mattenklott has argued might be that of the hunter: highly mobile and yet motionless; alert but not disturbed; encompassing everything, but itself never xxxii GEORG SIMMEL grasped. It is the ideal eye of the city dweller and the sociologist….
7] In Simmel’s sociological work we therefore confront the paradox of the social theorist who, especially in the 1890s, sought to establish sociology as an independent discipline whilst at the same time rejecting the aims of many contemporary sociologists ‘who want to describe the human sector of the universe as accurately as possible, uncovering hidden regularities for science’s sake, or to enlarge man’s control over the environment’. [8] Compared with the work of Durkheim or Weber, Simmel’s sociological writings do not display an explicit concern with the role of sociology in society.
