Georg Simmel





Georg Simmel

Author profile


born
in Berlin, Germany
March 01, 1858

died
September 26, 1918

genre


About this author

Georg Simmel was a major German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.

Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?', presenting pioneering analyses of social individuality and fragmentation. For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history". Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomena in terms of "forms" and "contents" with a transient relationship; form becoming content, and vice versa, dependent on the context. In this sense he was a forerunner to structura...more


Average rating: 4.05 · 532 ratings · 19 reviews · 85 distinct works · Similar authors
Georg Simmel on Individuali...
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3.99 of 5 stars 3.99 avg rating — 143 ratings — published 1971 — 2 editions
The Philosophy of Money
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4.14 of 5 stars 4.14 avg rating — 78 ratings — published 1900 — 23 editions
Conflict And The Web Of Gro...
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4.17 of 5 stars 4.17 avg rating — 23 ratings — published 1964 — 4 editions
Simmel On Culture: Selected...
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4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 avg rating — 19 ratings — published 1997 — 2 editions
Die Großstädte Und Das Geis...
3.83 of 5 stars 3.83 avg rating — 18 ratings — published 2006
Le metropoli e la vita dell...
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4.14 of 5 stars 4.14 avg rating — 14 ratings
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
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3.18 of 5 stars 3.18 avg rating — 17 ratings — published 1907 — 12 editions
Philosophie de l'argent : P...
3.86 of 5 stars 3.86 avg rating — 7 ratings — published 2009
Philosophische Kultur
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4.2 of 5 stars 4.20 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 2008
Suurkaupunki ja moderni elämä
3.6 of 5 stars 3.60 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 2005
More books by Georg Simmel…
“By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.”
Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms

“The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones.”
Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel

“Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one’s worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it up.”
Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms