Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings

by Georg Simmel, David Patrick Frisby (Editor), Mike Featherstone (Editor)

The German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is recognized as a leading early twentieth-century European social theorist. This collection enables the reader to engage with the full range of Simmel′s dazzling contributions to the study of culture. It opens with Simmel′s basic essays on defining culture, its changes and its crisis. These are followed by more specific explorations of: the culture of face-to-face interactions; spatial and urban culture; leisure culture; the culture of money and commodities; the culture of belief; and the politics of female culture.

Genres: Sociology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Cultural

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 26, 1997

About the 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 structuralist styles of reasoning in the social sciences. With his work on the metropolis, Simmel was a precursor of urban sociology, symbolic interactionism and social network analysis. An acquaintance of Max Weber, Simmel wrote on the topic of personal character in a manner reminiscent of the sociological 'ideal type'. He broadly rejected academic standards, however, philosophically covering topics such as emotion and romantic love. Both Simmel and Weber's nonpositivist theory would inform the eclectic critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Simmel's most famous works today are The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892), The Philosophy of Money (1907), The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Soziologie (1908, inc. The Stranger, The Social Boundary, The Sociology of the Senses, The Sociology of Space, and On The Spatial Projections of Social Forms), and Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917). He also wrote extensively on the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well on art, most notably his book Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art (1916).

Reviews

[Диана · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simmel is such an original thinker. His interests span a large range and his writings are full of observations too subtle to be made even by most people who are considered intellectuals. It's a shame he isn't more well-known - as far as I know little of his work has been translated into English until Frisby's translations in the 1980s; and in any case Simmel's work is certainly still hard to come across.

This volume is a collection of essays which in some way relate to the topic of culture. The individual essays focus on aspects of culture as varied as its definition, fashion, leisure, and religion. Arguably the best-known Simmel essay 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' is also included. And 'On the Sociology of Religion' might as well be the single most decent writing on the theme of religion that I've come across.

[aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think Simmel's influence on all aspects of philosophy, sociology, psychology and ensuing criticism can possibly be overstated enough. Some of his essays from the late 19th century don't find artistic expression or consonance until the high Modernist period... and some others remain startlingly relevant even today.

[dasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

co?

[Alexandra Owens]

Read for class didn't finish..