Simmel, Georg

Bio Sketch

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was a German sociologist and philosopher, a founder of formal sociology, known for his analyses of modern urban life, money, and social forms. His essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) and The Philosophy of Money (1900) profoundly influenced Walter Benjamin and the wider tradition of urban and everyday-life theory.

Key Works

"The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) — the metropolitan type, the blasé attitude, the money economy, and the hypertrophy of objective culture.
The Philosophy of Money (1900) — the money economy as the reduction of quality to quantity.
"Fashion" (1904) — the essay on fashion as the dual movement of imitation and differentiation; cited (via Donald N. Levine's ed., On Individuality and Social Forms) in Houze's Viennese account (see below). Not yet ingested as a source in this wiki.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

Blasé Attitude
Modernity
Everyday Life
Spectacle (indirect — the levelling of distinctions by money)

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Simmel matters to Geoffrey's everyday, capitalism & urbanization, and spectacle areas: his sociology of the modern metropolis — the blasé attitude, money as the "frightful leveller," and the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture — provides a founding sociological account of metropolitan everyday life that prefigures Benjamin's arcades and flâneur, and offers a pre-spectacular diagnosis of the levelling of distinctions that the wiki's critical sources extend.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

The Metropolis and Mental Life
Benjamin for Architects
Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — Simmel named (with Norbert Elias) among the cultural sociologists for whom the everyday became significant in the first decades of the 20th century.
Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — Simmel's boundary thesis as the chapter's philosophical ground, quoted at length: "the 'boundary is not a spatial fact with sociological consequences but a sociological fact that is formed spatially'" — boundaries "make social orders more concrete, more intensely experienced," "indeterminate in themselves," their significance "springing from interaction on either side of the line" (via Lechner and Frisby's Simmel scholarship, note 7); applied to the Holy Trinity screen and Broadgate's gates. See thick-edge, boundaries.
From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — Simmel's fashion sociology applied to the interior: "Loos's interiors simultaneously, as George Simmel suggests, allow one to display one's individuality, while assuming a degree of anonymity; they are both public and private; and domestic and urban" (p. 159) — the double function of dress (individuality displayed, anonymity assumed, from Simmel's 1904 essay 'Fashion') transferred from costume to architectural space. The citation extends Simmel's relevance from the metropolis to the designed interior: the room as the garment of modern self-presentation. See interior-as-garment, fashion.