Sunday 1914, Open House at the residence of Professor Ignaz Jastrow,

24 Nussbaumallee, in Berlins West End. Courtesy of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander

(Vancouver, Canada). Jastrow is between Georg and Gertrud Simmel. On the back of the
photo, Mrs Oberlanders mother, Beate Hahn (nee Jastrow), remarks on the characteristic
gestures (typische Bewegungen) that Simmel made when speaking (see Note 1 of the
Introduction).

Article

Introduction: Georg
Simmels Sociological
Metaphysics: Money,
Sociality, and Precarious
Life

Theory, Culture & Society

29(7/8) 725
! The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0263276412459087
tcs.sagepub.com

Austin Harrington
University of Leeds, UK

Thomas M. Kemple
University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract
The articles brought together in this double-length section of the Annual Review of
Theory, Culture & Society focus on two intertwined strands of the thought of Georg
Simmel, both of them neglected until recent years. A first bears on what might be
called Simmels metaphysics of the social, or what he himself once called sociological
metaphysics. A second strand centres on the renewed contemporary relevance of
Simmels ideas about money economies and their relation to precarious individual
life-situations in an age of global economic turbulence. Current sensibilities in the
wake of global economic crisis and the demise of some of the more euphoric sociologies of globalization of the last two decades provide a timely setting for a reappraisal of Simmels thinking. With the completion in 2012 of the Suhrkamp edition of
Simmels collected works, Simmels themes need to be explored more deeply, including particularly his thinking about lived experience, transcendence, death, fragmentary worlds of value, and allegorical representation. This issue of the journal
showcases some of the latest scholarly work and foregrounds several pivotal primary
pieces unavailable in English until now.
Keywords
allegory, life, metaphysics, money, Simmel, sociality, vitalism

Corresponding author:
Austin Harrington, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS29JT, UK
Email: a.harrington@leeds.ac.uk
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)

Since the 1980s, attention has turned increasingly toward Georg

Simmels ideas about culture, aesthetics, urbanism and modernity, building on earlier engagements in the 1960s and 1970s with his theories of
sociation, interaction and individuation. Until recently, however,
Simmels extensive writings on more philosophical or trans-sociological
questions have tended to be left in the dark. At the forefront of these
hitherto neglected dimensions of Simmels corpus are questions about
Life and its meaning in relation to basic structures of existence, value
and death.
Current sensibilities in the wake of global economic crisis and the
demise of some of the more euphoric sociologies of globalization of
the last two decades provide a timely setting for a reappraisal of
Simmels important thinking about how money economies, with their
logics of ctionalization, virtualization, and aestheticization, become displaced from lived realities. Long before ideas of mobility, uidity, ows,
scapes, liquidity and space-time contraction became fashionable in the
1990s as descriptors of globalizing processes, Simmels multifaceted
thinking about exchange and reciprocity and forms of sociation had
already anticipated these themes. But in contrast to much contemporary
globalization commentary (at least until recently), Simmels ideas also
help us understand the signicance of the fragility and fallibility of global
systems for meaningful life-projects and stable gurations of action.
More than 90 years since his death, large chunks of Simmels work still
remain largely unexplored today, as a glance at the 24 volume
Gesamtausgabe quickly reveals (see Otthein Rammstedts overview of
the recently completed Collected Works in this issue). Signicantly,
this neglect includes those parts of Simmels corpus that reach beyond
sociological analysis in any conventional sense, but that can be understood to inform and underpin contemporary social theoretical and cultural inquiry. Especially overlooked have been Simmels wide-ranging
writings in general philosophical anthropology and philosophy of life
(Lebensphilosophie), bearing on themes of death, redemption and selfrealization, on spheres or worlds of value (such as art, religion, science),
on phenomena of totality and fragmentation, immanence and transcendence. No less so have been a great number of vital essayistic pieces that
demonstrate Simmels uniquely gurative, allegorical, and aphoristic
style of writing and thinking in which Simmel experiments with a variety
of literary genres which both comment on and perform social realities
that often seem to elude comprehension in more standard analytical
formats.
In this double issue of Theory, Culture & Society we give special attention to the rich body of philosophical and metaphysical themes that
inform Simmels last great publication, his recently translated
Lebensanschauung or View of Life, a work that stands as the authors

Harrington and Kemple

last philosophical reckoning with life in the face of his own looming
death in September 1918 and that until very recently has somehow managed to elude the serious scholarly engagement it deserves. At the same
time, we also emphasize the increasing relevance of Simmels two classic
works, his Philosophy of Money of 1900/1907 and Sociology of 1908 the
latter also recently translated in English in full for the rst time, more
than a century since its release, and despite periodic waves of partial
translations beginning in the late 19th century. The new translation of
Sociology brings home to English readers how many familiar pieces
appear here as distinct contributions to a larger thesis, or as excurses
marked o from the main text by subheadings and smaller print, and
makes more evident the volumes project of mapping an emerging new
eld of scientic investigation by focusing more on the forms and processes of social life than on its empirical contents or experiential substance (Sto). Together with The Philosophy of Money, the recent
availability of Simmels Sociology and View of Life in English now facilitates the task of thinking about how the dual sociological and philosophical polarities of Simmels work relate to one another across the
continuous trajectory of his intellectual biography. English-language
readers of Simmel can now see more clearly how urgent existential questions of life and death wait in the wings of Simmels earlier more scientic
and disciplinary concerns, and conversely how life ultimately emerges as
the thematic capstone of his enduring career as a sociologist.
In all of these respects, a special concern of this special section is to
pay tribute to the work of the late David Frisby (19442010), who did so
much to rescue Simmels work from the threat of oblivion and to protect
him from the risk of being remembered only as the most important and
interesting transitional gure in the history of philosophy, as Georg
Lukacs notoriously judged him (see Thomas Kemples introduction to
the special commemorative e-issue of David Frisbys writings for TCS
(Kemple, 2010) and Chronology of Simmels Writings in English in this
issue). Following in the footsteps of Frisbys work, the contributors to
this issue draw from a broad range of Simmels writings in philosophy,
social psychology, cultural geography, ethics, and modernist aesthetics.
We highlight two key emerging strands from the spread of the latest
scholarly engagement with Simmels work. A rst bears on what might
be called Simmels metaphysics of the social, or what he himself once
called sociological metaphysics. This revolves around such diverse
motifs of his thinking as lived experience, transcendence, fragmentary
worlds of value, and allegorical representation. A second strand centres
on the rich and renewed contemporary relevance of Simmels ideas about
money economies and their relation to precarious individual life-situations in an age of global economic turbulence.

10

Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)

Sociological Metaphysics
In a prominent passage from the closing pages of Sociology, Simmel
deploys the phrase sociological metaphysics to describe what we take
to be a mode or style of reection on trans- or meta-sociological phenomena. In the course of discussing the consequences of philosophical
speculation about the unity of society as a totality of the unique qualities
of each and every individual, and after commenting sociologically on the
intensication of individuality with the extension of social groups, he
ventures a speculative statement which he acknowledges is hard to demonstrate scientically, but which is nevertheless a legitimate and valid
problem of sociological metaphysics:
The more incomparable an individual is, that is, the more someone
stands in the order of the whole in a position reserved for that
person alone, llable only by that persons being, action, and fate,
the more is the whole to be comprehended as a unity, as a metaphysical organism, in which every soul is a member that can be
exchanged for no other but that nonetheless takes all other souls
and their interaction with one another as a presupposition of that
individuals own life. (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: 660; 1992 [1908]: 8423;
translation modied)
The idea of the equality of all as a unity of the greatest possible uniqueness of individuals has its roots, he goes on to say, in the Christian
doctrine of the immortal and innitely valuable soul.
Although sociological metaphysics is not a phrase Simmel deploys
frequently or with any specic technical intention, we use it here to
denote the striking organizing conuence in his work of sociological
investigation and philosophical reection on ultimate questions of existence. The conjunction of sociology and metaphysics entails both a disciplinary duality of empirical social science and speculative philosophy in
Simmels work, as well as a corresponding duality of social structure and
interaction on the one hand and human and non-human existence on the
other. It is this duality that explains how, while Simmels late work may
appear to leave sociology behind in order to retreat into purely philosophical, metaphysical, and aesthetic matters of contemplation of higher
spiritual values, his reections continue to turn around the themes of
social exchange which had been stressed in his early great sociological
works on money, social relations, interaction, and dierentiation.
In this sense of the intersection of two broadly polar dimensions of
inquiry, we understand sociological metaphysics as an idiom of thinking
in Simmels work encompassing core ideas and basic problems central to
the modernist project of critical reexive knowledge about the social
conditions of human existence. It names rst of all an insistence that

Harrington and Kemple

11

the traditional philosophical eld of metaphysics has a sociology, that is,

a relative and conditional position within denite historical contexts of
social relations and institutions. But second, it also denotes the idea that
compelling grounds exist for probing the liminal area at the intersection
of experiences that are open to denite empirical scientic observation
and to other dimensions of reality that can only be disclosed by other
means (see Kemple, 2007). Such a view rejects the positivist precept that
rational discourse cannot meaningfully and coherently transgress the
limits and boundaries of observable experience, and that talk of such
abstract ideas as beauty, freedom, salvation, or God must therefore be
removed from the competences of scientic writing and thinking and
surrendered to the purview of artists, poets and religious visionaries.
Sociological metaphysics in this sense remains continuous with the various uses that have been made of the terms philosophical anthropology
and philosophy of culture in German thought of the last eight or nine
decades, many of them substantially indebted to Simmels legacy
(Fischer, 2008).
To be sure, the specic language of philosophy that drives Simmels
writings from the rst two decades of the last century is no longer one we
can take for granted today in an age shaped by the linguistic turn and
by broadly postmodern approaches to cultural inquiry and by the rise
of the new cognitive and behavioural sciences of the last 40 years or so
(cf. Habermas, 1994). Undoubtedly, some work of conceptual translation
and reconstruction is required today a near-century after Simmels death.
But to think of metaphysics as simply an obsolescent paradigm of
thought today would be an unnecessary conclusion. Simmels and
other early 20th-century European thinkers existential questions
remain impossible to ignore today, even if the tropes mobilized to resolve
them in their time can on occasion seem perplexing or alien to us.
A number of texts in this issue of Theory, Culture & Society address
this thematic in Simmels work. We begin with some comments on a
series of essays by Simmel himself that have been translated into
English here for the rst time. A rst set of writings comprises the gurative, allegorical, and aphoristic pieces he contributed to the avantgarde journal Jugend from 1897 to 1907 (see the selections translated in
this special section), which also happens to be the decade when he was
writing and revising his monumental Philosophy of Money and assembling the components of Sociology. In contrast to his well-crafted books,
systematic treatises, and scholarly essays which advance key theoretical
arguments while portraying a repertoire of standard social types the
stranger, the city-dweller, the prostitute, the pauper, the miser, and so on
these pieces try out dierent, often ironic registers of voice. In the brief
epigrammatic sketches he published in the journal under the title
Momentbilder sub specie aeternitatis (literally, Snapshots under the
aspect of eternity), for instance, issues examined in the longer more

12

Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)

serious and systematic works are dealt with more playfully and even
comically. Judging from the title he gave to his series, Simmel is oering
a satirical spin on Spinozas wish to view things purely according to their
inner necessity and signicance, released from the contingency of the
here and now and dissolved from the relationship between before and
after, as if to provide positive content to the conception of absolute,
unied being where Spinoza could not, as Simmel suggests elsewhere
(Simmel, 1992 [1895]: 967; 2010: 11).
Although these literary stills of everyday scenes and ordinary encounters were produced in the early days of popular photography, they were
not accompanied by any actual snapshots, but rather by stylized designs
and graphic drawings characteristic of the Jugendstil movement which
celebrated individual creativity against the technological reproducibility
of art forms (Frisby, 1981: 101; Rammstedt, 1991; see the examples
reproduced in this issue and in TCS 8(3) 1991). Nevertheless, we might
consider for a moment the photographic snapshot (Momentbild) reproduced here of Simmel with his wife and friends at a Sunday garden party
in Berlins Westend in the summer of 1914, presumably taken just before
the outbreak of the rst World War and around the time Simmel was

Figure 1. Simmel, 1914, Open House in the garden of Professor Ignaz Jastrow,
24 Nussbaumallee, in Berlins West End. Courtesy of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander
(Vancouver, Canada).1

Harrington and Kemple

13

making the transition to his rst permanent position at the University of

Strasbourg.
As many of his students and acquaintances remember, Simmel had a
characteristic way of moving his hands and twisting his body as he spoke,
as if gesturing to grasp a moment of creative thought in the course of
expressing his own turn toward an idea (die Wendung zur Idee), as he
would later title a chapter from The View of Life (see also Stewart, 1999).
Viewed sub specie aeternitatis, or at least from the vantage point of the
personal fates, historical transformations, and political upheavals in the
lives of the people depicted here in the years that would immediately
follow, this image might suggest to us that not only on the lecture
podium or in the published work but also in private, improvised
moments of sociable conversation Simmel was grappling with those
metaphysical and sociological problems which can rst be glimpsed in
an instant and in statu nascendi. One could imagine the conversations
that Simmel reports overhearing in the comical Snapshots called
Money Alone Doesnt Bring Happiness, Relativity and La Duse,
or even the internal dialogue which frames the ironical Beyond
Beauty (all published in Jugend), to have emerged from just such intimate scenes of friendship and sociability.
Judging from his private correspondence and his writings in Jugend, by
the early years of the new century Simmel appears to have been ready to
withdraw from sociology altogether. As recent commentators have noted
(Tyrell, 2007; Tyrell et al., 2011), one motivation for Simmel in completing the Sociology volume may have been to settle accounts with one
aspect of his interests and professional ambitions in order to turn unencumbered to another to the trans-social validity-claims of art, philosophy and religious thought. It is notable in this regard that neither art
nor religion occupy any thematically central position in Sociology,
and it may be that around 1905 Simmel began to view art and religion
not only as social forms of relationship and interaction as
Vergesellschaftungsformen or soziale Beziehungsformen but also as
forms of consciousness sui generis, as quasi-apriori dimensions of
mental life tout court. Life, consciousness and mind in this sense
seem to be beckoning in Simmels thinking from this point onward as
higher limit-situations for which social science can provide only partial
illumination (Harrington, 2011; Krech, 1998).
This train of thought can be seen in a late essay of Simmels from 1916
on the theme of The Fragmentary Character of Life (translated in this
issue), a preliminary study for what would later become the second chapter of The View of Life. Here Simmel conveys a vision of conict between
multiple worlds of value and meaning such as art, religion, and science,
including implicitly social science. Life, Simmel arms, is embroiled
not only in the world but also in dierent perspectival worlds, each
with dierent ultimate claims to authority but whose conictual relations

14

Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)

to one another create eects of fragmentation for life. Yet life, Simmel
also says, evinces a practical capacity for mediation between fragmented
worlds, for insofar as these worlds cannot themselves exist other than as
objectivations of the ow of lifes creative energies, they presuppose that
life has a wholeness of which they are but parts. Life is thus at one and
the same time something fragmentary and whole, both articulated into
multiple discrete frames of ultimate relevance and nevertheless seamlessly
owing forward in a process of creative self-reconstitution (Harrington,
2012).
It is this conception of simultaneous fragmentation and ongoing reelaboration of life that Simmel explicates more fully in The View of Life
of 1918, available now in full in English with an appendix of aphorisms
and brilliant fragmentary sketches of thoughts from Simmels diaries
(Simmel, 2010 [1918]). Concluding with two engrossing chapters on
death and its meaning for individual life and individual ethical styles of
life (to which we turn shortly), Simmel begins here with a meditation on
life as a work of intellectual and emotional self-overcoming or transcendence of limits. Echoing Nietzschean musings about virtues of personal philosophical asceticism, he writes of life nding more-life only
through more-than-life, through limits to itself, through form and
objectivity as challenges to subjective will (Simmel, 2010 [1918]: 13).
Transcendence in this sense describes a way in which any Beyond or
transcendent condition, such as the religious or aesthetic, is not a place or
space or meta-physical domain of some kind but always only an inection of lifes immanent ow and diversity through time, space, and history, and across natures, cultures, and their associations (see
Kantorowicz, 1959 [1923]). Absolute ideas or limit-experiences on this
understanding have potentially coherent and important meanings for life
but only from a starting-point of this-worldly relativity. Absolutes absolve or break o from life and constitute their own independent fragmented worlds; but they also continuously dis-solve back again into
lifes ongoing ux and variety of cultural and historical forms.
As with his essay on The Fragmentary Character of Life, Simmels
View of Life resonates in numerous ways with some central concerns of
20th-century thinking about epistemological and axiological pluralism
and perspectivism from, say, William Jamess pluriverse or Alfred
Schutzs multiple realities (Schutz, 1966) to books such as Cornelius
Castoriadiss modernist World in Fragments (1997) or Zygmunt
Baumans postmodern Life in Fragments (Bauman, 1993) and the last
published work of Gilles Deleuze (1997, 2001). His arguments anticipate
more recent attempts to revive metaphysics in philosophy and sociology,
not all of which acknowledge Simmel as a precursor (Latour, 2005;
Harman, 2005; an exception is Lash, 2010: 313). As for Deleuze,
rather than posit some ancient scholarly doctrine about what exists
beyond the plane of the physical world, or promote popular ideas

Harrington and Kemple

15

about the mystical basis of reality, metaphysics for Simmel refers to

how life unfolds, intensies, and eervesces into more life, ultimately
augmenting, overcoming, and transcending itself into more-than-life.
As all of his major philosophical and exegetical writings indicate,
Simmel came to sociology only via an all-encompassing engagement
with the German classical humanistic tradition and the legacy of the
visions of social and self-formation, or Bildung, from Herder and
Goethe to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Robert Buttons essay in this issue
shows how the contemporary tragedy of culture for Simmel re-performs
and transforms ancient Greek motifs of resignation in the face of an
immutable destiny (moira) through modern meaning-making practices
which strive to make sense of accident, arbitrariness, danger, and
chance. In similar connections, Efraim Podoksiks contribution highlights how Simmels famous lecture on the modern metropolis and
mental life needs to be set against the background of a classical humanistic interest in the legacies of Roman antiquity, as illustrated by
Simmels three less well appreciated essays on the Italian cities of
Rome, Florence, and Venice. The three cities for Simmel suggest diering
images of unity and integration of the human collective creative mind in
its urban setting that become obscured or thrown into question under
conditions of modern industrialization with its dynamism of ruin and
renewal, even as they retain a symbolic validity as trans-historical reference-points for individual self-formation. Analogously, Donald N.
Levine pinpoints the continuous presence of Simmels engagement with
the writings of Kant and Goethe at all stages of his mature intellectual
development from the 1890s to his death in 1918. As Levine indicates, on
each occasion the great authors stand for Simmel as contrasting yet
ultimately complementary progenitors of two rival visions of unity and
division in the cosmos and society. Levines insight is crucial in showing
us how the social sciences and humanities are productively blended in
Simmels work to articulate the compelling norms of individual personhood that take shape out of lifes energies and emergent forms (see
also Levine, 1985; and Levines introduction with Daniel Silver to
Simmel, 2010).
Shortly after Simmels death, in Germany under the Weimar Republic
the question of the precise integration of humanistic education and social
science took on a heightened and more politicized signicance as the
governing coalition parties headed by the Social Democrats found themselves confronted with reactionary elements in the German professoriate
vehemently opposed to the demystication of long-dominant elite canons
of culture. This question would become an especially decisive preoccupation for the young Karl Mannheim, who, in Budapest in the spring of
1918, gave a lecture on Simmels thought entitled Soul and Culture
(translated from the Hungarian in this issue). As David Kettler points
out in his commentary on this address, Mannheim here takes up

16

Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)

Simmels theme of the crisis or tragedy of culture (Simmel, 1997

[1911]) in a novel way. In Mannheims subtly dialectical reading, soul
is, on the one hand, only a discourse of the age that reects a romantic
yearning for escape into putatively transcendent but essentially illusory
orders of being. But soul is also, on the other hand, an authentic expression of protest against rationalistic structures of social organization and
against reifying categories of perception that close down lifes potential
richness of sensuous understanding. As Kettler shows, the Simmelian
polarities of idealism and realism here become intertwined referencepoints for Mannheims diagnosis of the contradictions of European
societies over the course of the 1920s (see also Kettler, 1995; Loader
and Kettler, 2002).

Money, Sociality, and Precarious Life

In light of the return today of many of the features of degraded social
security and democratic breakdown that dominated European history in
the inter-war period, Simmels work speaks on many levels to the problem of a search for last fundaments of value for human social life and to
the impossibility of xing these fundaments in any determinate way. In
the face of capitalisms ever accelerating winds of creative destruction,
Simmels sense of the need and elusiveness of some denite anchoring
criterion of collective value in social life becomes more and more urgent.
In Simmels terms, which resonate with those used today, life consists in
self-evidently important qualities and experiences that need to be protected; yet life also turns out to be perpetually under construction, a
precarious product of always shifting and often conicting frames of
social transaction (cf. Butler, 2010). The resonant core of this problem,
which chimes with Simmels reections in The Philosophy of Money on
money-mediated processes of sociation and circulation, is that disputes
over value can never be expunged from public discussion about collective
ends. Several articles in this issue of Theory, Culture & Society respond to
this constellation of issues.
The relevance of this striking commutability in Simmels thinking
between the ow of life on the one hand and the ux of monetary transactions on the other stands at the forefront of Hans Blumenbergs brilliant essay on Simmel of 1976, translated into English here for the rst
time. Best known for a series of dense philosophical monographs on the
theory of myth and metaphor and on the concept of the legitimacy of
modernity in relation to antiquity and religious cognitive tradition,
Blumenberg (1985, 1988, 2010) was a close reader of Simmels works
until his death in 1996. For Blumenberg, the paradox at the heart of
Simmels corpus consists in arriving at a thematic of Life only via the
concept of money. In Blumenbergs suggestive formulation, money is
Simmels proto-metaphor for Life. The very phenomenon that might

Harrington and Kemple

17

seem most opposed to Life and to higher spiritual values is also the
phenomenon that most dynamically unlocks lifes plenitude of creative
forms even as it threatens constantly to destroy this plenitude through
eects of reication and objectication. As Blumenberg reads Simmel,
Life itself turns out to be pure circulation, sociation, and interactivity, an
endless cycle of extensions and intensications of value emerging through
processes of social exchange.
To be sure, any discussion of uctuation and uidity as features of
contemporary modernity runs a risk of false naturalization. It is important that any age of so-called liquid modernity, in Zygmunt Baumans
(2000) phrase, be seen in terms of a contingent product of complex yet
highly deliberate decision-making processes conducted at elite levels since
the 1970s, with the turn toward neoliberal global economic governance
policies. What often appears uid in this perspective is in many ways the
symptom of something that is the reverse of uid, namely rigid, doctrinaire and dictatorial. David Graebers recent account (2011) reminds us
that money is that invention of human civilization that attens out customary ties of economic reciprocity into rigid monetized debt relations
and takes on the veneer of a spurious moral authority in an age of global
nance capitalism and IMF-led structural adjustment programmes.
One of the many ironies of the global nancial crisis of 2008 in this
respect is that the banks and other nancial institutions at its centre
suddenly found themselves confronted not with too much but with too
little liquidity. The dynamic of liquefaction propelling the banks hegemonic nancialization of neoliberal economies the melting of all that is
solid into air now found itself faced with blockage and petrication.
The result has been that liquid modernity has come to look more and
more like an automobile running out of gas and spluttering to a halt. In
this regard, Simmels motifs of the ow and elan of modern life need to
be cross-checked with themes from Marx and Weber concerning political
economy and state power. Where for Simmel, and for the multifaceted
artistic and literary avant-garde movements of his day, vitalistic philosophical vocabularies once stood as forces of expressive protest against
the deadening hand of the capitalist market and techno-industrial civilization, today these same vocabularies are deployed to reinvigorate the
creative capitalist economy. Lebensphilosophie, having once been an
intellectual sub-culture of outsiders and romantic anti-capitalists,
becomes entrenched at the frontier of the contemporary entrepreneurial
culture (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Lash, 2010).
It is partly this situation that Isabelle Darmon and Carlos Frade
address in their account of the scope of Simmels vision of reective
subjectivity for purposes of anti-capitalist critique today. On one level,
it is clear that the premium Simmel places on self-distance in multiple
arenas of social form renders problematic any simple appeal to a truer
self that needs to be liberated from inauthentic states of being under

18

Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)

capitalism. But as Darmon and Frade emphasize, Simmels project

cannot ultimately rest content with an ethos of lives led in diuse fragments and masks. Driving Simmels interest in mystic and religious
thought is a passionate search for the prospect of ontological unity
across multiplicity, where diverse lived experiences can be expressed
through shared commitments to life-enhancing social transformation,
including emancipatory political struggle. Nigel Dodds essay takes up
some of these questions by examining Simmels insight into the absence
of conceptually correct money in capitalist economies, that is, the lack
of a stable, neutral, and balanced standard of value. The inevitable disproportion between value and reality can also serve as a critical ideal for
assessing the shortcomings of liberal and socialist schemes of labour
money and just pricing, as Simmel does in The Philosophy of Money,
along with countless projects devised since then for micro-nancing, local
currencies, time-dollars, time-to-time credit, mutual nancing, and so on.
As Dodd argues, rather than presenting alternatives to the capitalist
money economy, these utopian schemes are just as likely to expose and
entrench its fundamental logic.
Further aspects of debates about globalization over the past 20 years
have revolved around the resurgence of regional, ethnic, and religious
identity politics and movements that react, sometimes violently, to
experiences of eroded social solidarity and security. It is useful here to
recall Simmels three famous sociological aprioris, from the canonical
Excursus on the Problem: How is Society Possible? inserted into the
opening chapter of Sociology, which examine the ontological unity of
social life despite the drift toward fragmentation (Simmel, 2009 [1908]:
4052; see Kemple, 2007). Simmels rst apriori, on the dynamics of
typication versus singularization, informs Gregor Fitzis contribution
to this issue, which proposes a novel way of thinking about the politics of
social solidarity in an age of ows of capital and people over national
boundaries. As Fitzi suggests, for all the talk today of the crisis of multiculturalism in mainstream political discourse, structures and practices of
social integration in complex interdependent global societies have in
many ways ceased to presuppose denite substantive values or norms
as preconditions for consensus building. In this sense they have
become, in Fitzis phrase, post-normative or trans-normative.
In a similar way, Simmels second apriori on the extremes of inclusion
and exclusion oers a perspective on the contradiction within the neoliberal project of capital accumulation and mobility: between the call for
open, transparent, corruption-free communication, on the one hand, and
the apparatuses of surveillance, security, and secrecy, on the other.
Charles Barbours contribution to this issue examines how Simmel
addresses these aporias of secrecy and mendacity in both collective and
personal terms, in a way that implies that the impossibility of society may
be ultimately constitutive of its possibility. Like Simmels curious poem

Harrington and Kemple

19

Only a Bridge and the piece, conceived as narrative fable, titled The
Maker of Lies (which Barbour discusses in some detail), the social relation and its pitfalls must be believed in and enacted rather than simply
declared or imagined. Both Barbours and Fitzis essays also suggest the
relevance of Simmels third apriori, on the tension between the force of
external necessity and the freedom of inner purpose, to contemporary
conditions. Following Simmel, they draw our attention to the reexive
process by which social relations are made possible as participants in a
collective become conscious of and actively synthesize a social unity
which does not wait for the sociologist and needs no spectator
(Simmel, 2009 [1908]: 41). Simmel assumes the dual experiential standpoint of the engaged observer and objective participant (or stranger)
who is marked o simultaneously as a part of and apart from intersecting
social circles, both inside the social whole as a subject of rights and
outside as an object of obligatory concern.
In all these connections, Simmels focus on individuality and individualization is relevant to current thinking about networked sociality and
the decline of conventional concepts of the social group predominant in
early post-war sociology. As Olli Pyythinen explores in this issue, in the
third chapter of The View of Life Simmel unfolds a vision of individual
self-identities that evolve through narrative relations to death a vision
strikingly redolent of Martin Heideggers famous conception of beingtoward-death in Being and Time, and indeed an explicit source of inspiration for the Black Forest philosopher in his early career, as rst documented by Michael Theunissen (1991). Pyyhtinen considers this vision of
individual selfhood from a sociological point of view as it emerges in
Simmels later life-philosophical writings, overlaying the rich spectrum of
contrasts he draws in his earlier works between the quantitative expansion of individuality on the one hand and its qualitative intensication
on the other, or between 18th-century egalitarian-mechanistic views on
the one side and 19th-century expressive-organic outlooks on the other
(Simmel, 1950 [1917]). Simmels preoccupation in his last years with a
third proto-existentialist conception of selfhood acutely raises the question of how an individual is to nd a sense of inner autotelic self-realization, even and especially in a lifeworld seemingly marked by thickening
webs of relations to the fragments, faces, or functions of other persons.
Neither a retreat back into 19th-century organic romantic outlooks on
the one hand, nor an appeal to Heideggers appeal to authentic Dasein
over against an anonymous mass of the They (das Man) on the other
hand, seem defensible options in this perspective.
In the last chapter of The View of Life Simmel formulates his concept
of the individual law (das individuelle Gesetz), understood as a search
for personal ethical self-justication without recourse to ready-made general moral precepts. Here we nd a broadly Nietzschean conception of
the importance of generalizable moral norms in modern times that

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Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)

individuals can arm for themselves as sovereign personalities. In this

picture, Kants categorical imperative and by extension all conventional Judaeo-Christian moral doctrines fail to enable this quest for
personal ethical self-expression. As Daniel Silver and Monica Lee consider in their contribution to this issue, Simmels chapter on individual
law leaves readers asking themselves how these thoughts relate to
Simmels work from ten years previously on social structures and
forms of sociation. Silver and Lee attempt a response by showing how
The View of Life marks the nal stage in Simmels shift away from the
conventional Kantian sociology of morality that underlies his early writings from the 1890s, and that in large part continues in the work of
Durkheim. Both The View of Life and Sociology show Simmel in the
process of thinking through how the ethically mandated conduct of the
individual need not concur or coincide with the generalizable morality of
the collective of society, understood in Durkheims strong Kantian
sense. Simmels work in this regard shines light on recent debates in
philosophy over contextualist ethical worldviews (see, for example,
Williams, 1985), and in sociology over the problem of legislative moral
codes or frameworks (see, for example, Bauman, 1992). It also provides a
source for network analyses of the complex shifting character of dyadic
and triadic relations, and more generally of the quantitative conditioning
and objective conditions of modern social life. Like the naturalistic performances of La Duse, the famous Italian actress celebrated in one of
Simmels Snapshots (translated here), the ethical principle of action for
the modern individual can be expressed as a kind of stage direction or
inner imperative, namely, that the essence of the soul is movement.
***
Simmel was fortunately mistaken in believing that he would leave no
appreciable intellectual legacy, or that his ideas would not end up
being acknowledged as a signicant source for later thinkers. I know,
he wrote, in an oft-cited journal entry, that I shall die without spiritual
heirs (and this is good). The estate I leave is like cash distributed among
many heirs, each of whom puts his share to use in some trade that is
compatible with his nature but which can no longer be recognized as
coming from that estate (Simmel, 2010: 160; translation modied).
Simmels path-breaking diagnoses of the crises of European civilization at the beginning of the last century oer bridges and doors to an
understanding of the conditions of ux, contingency, and precariousness
that mark the fragmentary character of life in the early 21st century.
His manifold analyses of forms of sociation and individualization oer
rich resources for understanding cultures of individuality and their relation to systemic social logics today. The multi-disciplinary focus of the

Harrington and Kemple

21

articles brought together here highlights Simmels distinctive understanding of modernity not just in terms of a new aesthetic style or popular
fashion, but also as a mode of inner experience, sense perception, and
knowledge. What emerges is a challenging image of modernity dened by
the precarious, painful and perplexing aspects of contemporary existence.
Not only city streets, fashions, mealtimes, jewellery and seances but also
wars, revolutions and stock market crashes all these things confront us
with tasks of nding in each of lifes details the totality of its meaning,
as Simmel says in his Preface to The Philosophy of Money (1978 [1900/
1907]: 55). At issue are exemplary instances of modernity (Frisby,
1985b) that suggest synecdochal glimpses of the whole through its parts.
Thanks now to the publication of complete English translations of
Simmels three masterworks The Philosophy of Money of 1900/1907,
Sociology of 1908, and The View of Life of 1918 not to mention the
many shorter pieces which present us with new surprises, we can now
revise and rene our understanding of Simmel as a philosophical relativist or a post-modernist. As the contributions to this collection suggest, it
is impossible to settle on a portrait of Simmel as a philosophical aneur
leisurely strolling through the ruins of the modern metropolis, or of a
sociological bricoleur tinkering with the debris of the money economy to
project merely a miscellaneous collection of postmodern perspectives. It
would be misleading to conclude that Simmels eeting snapshots of
ordinary experience are not organized in a methodical way, or that
such fragmentary impressions of modern life never add up to a coherent
theoretical argument. Despite the impressionistic presentation of the
eclectic topics which make up the ten chapters of Sociology, for instance,
and the bewildering array of issues noted by Simmel in his index (which is
unfortunately omitted from the English translation; see Simmel, 1992
[1908]: 86575; Tyrell et al., 2011: 395406), Simmels stated objective
is to establish sociologys position in the system of the sciences and the
legitimacy of its cognitive purposes and methods, as he notes in his
Foreword (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: ix). Beneath its scintillating surface,
Simmels systematic corpus of works provides us with a sustained insight
into the preconditions for a fundamental interrogation of the bases of
value and meaning in contemporary capitalist societies. It is these systematic as well as essayistic, allegorical and aesthetic contours of
Simmels style of writing and thinking that this special section seeks to
illuminate.

Note
1. Mrs Oberlanders mother, Beate Jastrow, is on the far left behind the pear
tree; her aunt Ebith (Elisabeth) is hiding behind their mother, Anna Jastrow
(nee Seligman); her grandfather, Ignaz Jastrow, stands between Georg and

22

Theory, Culture & Society 29(7/8)

Gertrud Simmel (who wrote books under the name Maria Louise
Enkendorff). As fate would have it, this photograph was brought to
Thomas Kemples attention by a student in one of his undergraduate classes,
Rayka Kumru, who befriended Mrs Oberlander by chance on the ski slopes
of British Columbia.
Professor Ignaz Jastrow (18561937), a noted economist and historian at
the University of Berlin who published countless books and articles, and one
of the original members of the German Sociological Association along with
Simmel and Max Weber, was one of Simmels closest friends. Simmel reportedly called Jastrow the smartest man he ever met in his life, and the two were
said to engage in such long and intense conversations that the one could
hardly hear what the other one was saying (see the reminiscences of
Michael Landmann, Rudolf Pannwitz, and Fritz Jacobs, in Gassen and
Landmann, 1958: 13, 35, 170). Not long before this photograph was taken,
Simmel wrote an editorial, later printed in the October edition of the
Akademische Rundschau, protesting the firing of his friend from the staff of
the Berlin Handelshochschule which Jastrow helped to found. Jastrows dismissal was ostensibly on financial grounds, but in Simmels view it was
carried out in a way which threatened the academic freedom of university
lecturers and could lead to the commodification of higher learning (Simmel,
2005 [1914]); see the editors remarks on pp. 4635).
In a note on the back of the snapshot reproduced on the cover, Beate
Jastow recalls the characteristic movements Simmel typically made when
speaking, a peculiarity many of his students remarked on as well: His
voice, apparently slightly laborious, his language and art of speaking, were
incomparable, completely original. His voice circled around the object so to
speak, encircling it, holding, vibrating and then raising a little, intoning
strangely and finally wrapping itself in the object, boring into it; it matched
his form of thought exactly, this process of winding, slowly unwinding, everything he concerned himself with. He shaped things so that they assumed and
expressed his incomparable spirit, but at the same time reflected their own
essence and truth (Richard Kroner in Gassen and Landmann, 1958: 228;
translated in Stewart, 1999: 7; see also Fechter in Gassen and Landmann,
1958: 160; and Salz, 1959: 235).
In his unpublished Autobiographical Sketch of 1920, Jastrow comments
that even as Simmels influence and reputation began to grow after his death,
the most deeply and uniquely influenced by him were those who knew him
personally. With the most composed of gazes he would find a concept and a
context for every object he beheld or contemplated, taking his audience with
him into philosophical heights and depths, and all the while ready to offer his
brilliant mental counsel to others without any desire to show off or impress
(quoted by Otthein Rammstedt in note 3 of his essay in this issue). Although
Simmel had little to say about the musical arts, he seems to have embodied
their rhythms and movements in the way that he orchestrated words, ideas,
and gestures in the lecture hall; conducted them in everyday conversation; or
composed them on the written page (see Simmel, 2010 [1918]: 47; Kemple,
2009: 1958).

Harrington and Kemple

23

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Austin Harrington is Reader in Sociology at the University of Leeds. For

seven years he taught in Germany at the University of Erfurt and the
European University in Frankfurt an der Oder. His publications include
Art and Social Theory (Polity Press, 2004) and Modern Social Theory: An
Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005, editor). He is completing a
monograph on Weimar and European thought, to be titled, provisionally, Social Theory in Western Civilization: The German Liberal Voice in
European Ideas, 1914 to the Present.
Thomas M. Kemple teaches social and cultural theory at the University of
British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His recent work on the intersections of classical and contemporary theory has appeared in Theory,
Culture & Society (including the special section on Simmels aesthetics,
ethics, and metaphysics in 2007), Journal of Classical Sociology,
Sociologie et societes, and Max Weber Studies.