Simmel's Law of The Individual and The Relational Self

Theory,http://tcs.sagepub.
com/
Culture & Society
Simmel's Law of the Individual and the Ethics of the Relational Self
Monica Lee and Daniel Silver
Theory Culture Society published online 5 November 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411435569
The online version of this article can be found at:

http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/17/0263276411435569
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University
Additional services and information for Theory, Culture & Society can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
>> OnlineFirst Version of Record - Nov 5, 2012
What is This?
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
K:/TCS/TCS 435569.3d (TCS) [PREPRINTER stage]
Article
Theory, Culture & Society
0(0) 1–22
Simmel’s Law of the ! The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permissions:
Individual and the Ethics sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0263276411435569
of the Relational Self tcs.sagepub.com
Monica Lee
University of Chicago, USA
Daniel Silver
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Georg Simmel’s final work, The View of Life, concludes his lifelong engagement with
Immanuel Kant by ‘inverting’ Kant’s Categorical Imperative to produce an ethics of
authentic individuality. While Kant’s moral imperative is universal to all individuals but
particular to their discrete acts, Simmel’s Law of the Individual is particular to each
individual but universal to all the individual’s acts. We assess the significance of
Simmel’s formulation of the Law of the Individual in three steps: First, as an articu-
lation of an ethical moment consonant with his relational approach to formal soci-
ology, hinted at earlier in Sociology but not developed as such. Second, as a
completion of the framework for Simmel’s formal sociology: the Law of the
Individual conceptualizes a decisive but under-theorized relationship in Simmel’s
vision of ‘society’ that is a woven fabric of social relationships, namely one’s relation-
ship with oneself. We follow with a third proposal about how Simmel might have
continued the line of thought he opens in The View of Life, suggesting that we can take
the Law of the Individual as an invitation to fold the self-relation back into analysis of
social relations, and to theorize how forms of association are shaped by forms of self-
relation. We thus narrow the theoretical gulf between Simmel’s vitalism and his
sociology, which commentators usually hold apart. And in so doing, we sketch a
distinctively Simmelian approach to an ethics of individuality in sociological inquiry.
Keywords
authenticity, ethics, formal sociology, individuality, self, Simmel, theory
Corresponding author:
Monica Lee, University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Email: monicalee@uchicago.edu
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
Georg Simmel considered the final book of his career, Lebensanschauung

(1999 [1918]), recently translated as The View of Life, to be his testament.1
The book concludes Simmel’s lifelong engagement with Kant and Goethe;
it explicates the relation of objective culture to the flow and flux of vital
existence; it shows the immanence of death to life; it grounds ethical exist-
ence in the creative realization of what Simmel saw as authentic individu-
ality. Perhaps most significantly, The View of Life declares the concept of
Life to be the unifying theme of Simmel’s expansive and varied oeuvre
(Silver et al., 2007; see also Müller, 1960; Vandenberghe, 2010).
A number of difficult interpretative questions flow from the fact that
Simmel gave such philosophical priority to his View of Life. What exactly
does Simmel mean by ‘life’ and how does this conception engage with
previous versions offered by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Bergson? To
what extent are the themes analysed by Simmel in The View of Life
already adumbrated in his earlier work? Are Simmel’s later ideas con-
sistent with his earlier ones, and if not, can they be integrated or ordered?
The present article focuses on Simmel’s mature statement of his vital-
istic ethics of individuality. We seek traces of these ideas in his earlier
Sociology of 1908, and argue that The View of Life completes a task
implied by but not carried through in Sociology. This is the task of
building an account of ethical existence on the basis of what Simmel
saw as authentic individuality rather than on adherence to universal
norms. And we ask what it would mean to integrate this conception of
individuality back into the project of formal sociology.
The fourth chapter of The View of Life, ‘The Law of the Individual’
(‘Das Individuelle Gesetz’), is our touchstone.2 ‘The Law of the
Individual’ was Simmel’s ultimate engagement with Immanuel Kant,
an ‘inversion’ of the Categorical Imperative. Where Kant understood
the moral imperative to be universal to all individuals and to govern
discrete acts, Simmel’s Law of the Individual asserts a moral imperative
that is particular to each individual and applies universally to all the
individual’s activities. We assess the significance of Simmel’s formulation
of the Law of the Individual in three steps: First, as an articulation of an
ethical moment consonant with his relational approach to formal soci-
ology, hinted at earlier in Sociology but not developed as such. Second,
as a completion of the framework for Simmel’s formal sociology – the
Law of the Individual conceptualizes a decisive but under-theorized rela-
tionship in Simmel’s vision of a ‘society’ that is a woven fabric of social
relationships, namely one’s relationship with oneself. We follow with a
third proposal about how Simmel might have continued the line of
thought he opens in The View of Life, suggesting that the Law of the
Individual can be taken as an invitation to fold the self-relation back into
analysis of social relations and to theorize how forms of association are
shaped by forms of self-relation. We thus narrow the theoretical gulf

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 3
between Simmel’s vitalism and his sociology, which commentators usu-

ally hold apart (Silver et al., 2007, review this literature).
By joining two of Simmel’s crucial interests that remained largely par-
allel in his own work – forms of selfhood and forms of association – this
article responds to the call for a Simmelian Lebenssoziologie by Lash
(2005), Steinmann (2007), and Levine and Silver (2010). Simmel’s philo-
sophical reflections on authentic individuality and his relational soci-
ology emerge as not merely a series of disparate yet brilliant aperçus
but rather as part of a common project. That is the project of compre-
hending in thought the basic forms of existence consistent with a world in
which the pulsating beat of life provides its most basic figure, whether in
the sociological form of living interactions or the ethical form of the fully
realized living individual. We conclude by suggesting how joining
Simmel’s sociology and philosophy of life offers new directions for a
vitalist sociology based on an ethics of individual authenticity.
The View of Life as an Alternative to ‘Organismic’ Sociology

Kantian Sociology
Kant was one of Simmel’s lifelong interlocutors, and much of Simmel’s
‘formal sociology’ (as set out in the opening pages of his 1908 Sociology,
subtitled ‘Inquiries into the Forms of Association’) rests on Kant’s dis-
tinction between form and content (Levine, 1971). But throughout
Simmel’s career, Kantian thought proved to be both helpful and trouble-
some. In fact, Simmel’s final and comprehensive engagement with Kantian
thought at the moral level could come only after developing his ‘relational’
vision of society, finding Kantian morality irreconcilable with it, and
intensifying his engagement with alternative models of ethical existence
embodied and expressed by especially Nietzsche and Goethe.
The late 19th-century intellectual scene offered a number of competing
ways of understanding the normative dimensions of social formations.3
Though Simmel’s ethical thought engages with strands of all of these
movements, the ‘organismic’ approach provides a particularly fruitful
point of comparison (Wolff, 1958). Often associated with French thinkers
such as Comte and Durkheim, this approach shows affinities with a cer-
tain conception of Kantian morality. By contrast, Simmel’s relational
approach would seem opposed to this version of morality. Indeed, as
Simmel developed his sociology he seems to have left behind the more
Kantian ideas contained in his early Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft
(1991 [1892]), where general societal forces are treated as the fundamen-
tal basis of morality and ambiguous moral categories are subjected to
positive analysis and disambiguation.4 Without a Kantian basis, an alter-
native moral framework, consonant with relational thought, lay uncon-
ceptualized. Simmel began to take up this task in Sociology and
completed it in Lebensanschauung.

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
The organismic approach is rooted in the presupposition that society

as such exists as a unified and interdependent collectivity. It finds an
analog in the physical body, where each subsystem or organ performs
a unique task that is necessary for the proper functioning of the entire
organism. The key to understanding a social subsystem or an individual
is to determine its function within the workings of the whole. Interaction
among people is given little to no attention; the individual’s role in the
societal organism is the primary characteristic by which we can under-
stand him. Emile Durkheim’s Division of Labor in Society (1984 [1925])
contains many passages that may be interpreted as relying on these and
similar organismic assumptions and analogies.5
In Sociology Simmel’s relational approach, or ‘formal sociology’,
stands in direct contrast to the ‘organismic’ approach. Instead of assum-
ing the existence of the societal organism, he stresses the linkages and
interworkings between individual cells as the truly essential components
of whatever we may regard as a social collectivity. Though without
naming specific interlocutors, Simmel critiques the organismic approach
in the first chapter of Sociology:
Limiting sociology to the official social formations resembles the

earlier science of the interior of human bodies, which fixed upon
describing the large organs—heart, liver, lung, stomach, etc., but
missed and neglected the uncounted, the not popularly known, or
those whose purposes were unknown. Without them, the more obvi-
ous organs would never produce a living body. The actually experi-
enced existing life of society cannot be pieced together from the
structures of the aforementioned type. (1992 [1908]: 32)
Instead, ‘society’ for Simmel is social interaction among persons ‘con-

tinuously making connections and breaking them off and making
them again, a perpetual flowing and pulsing that unites individuals,
even when it does not amount to actual organization’ (1992 [1908]: 33).
Social life consists of the living interactions, constantly being made and
remade, that pulse beneath and beyond their ‘service organs’ (Simmel,
1897).
Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society (1984) was not just an
examination of social forms but also a treatise on morality. Durkheim
investigated not only how the division of labor functioned economically
but, more importantly, whether it was moral in the sense of constituting a
source of social solidarity. In crucial respects Kant’s Categorical
Imperative informs Durkheim’s approach to this ethical aspect of his
sociological task.6 The idea that our objective moral duty is to act
‘only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will
that it should become a universal law’ can be understood from the stand-
point of society. On Durkheim’s understanding of this Kantian precept,

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 5
Individual
Society and
morality
Figure 1. Organismic sociology.
it is moral to perform your role in the division of labor because doing so

manifests a will in conformity with universal law. If each individual does
‘right’ by performing his unique duty toward his society, the societal
organism will function properly. Hence, as a first moral principle, an
objective social morality must be universal to all individuals.
Immorality, in this Kantian conception, consists in making an exception
of oneself, holding oneself to norms that cannot apply at the same time to
all others.
We might understand the organismic understanding of the relation-
ship of individual, society and morality in a simple diagram (Figure 1).7
Each one of the circles represents a person in his/her individuality.
Society or collective consciousness – hence, morality – is the common
center. Although this does not convey all the nuances of Durkheim’s
theory, it highlights two fundamental principles it shares with Kantian
morality: (1) the individual is a homo duplex, where only one part – the
rational part – is capable of morality, the other not; (2) what we have in
common is to be regarded as ‘morality’. Thus, morality applies univer-
sally to all people in society, but only to ‘part’ of each person. Actions
and their corresponding maxims are conceptualized as self-contained and
measured against an external moral law that constrains them (Durkheim,
1961 [1925]: 42; Kant, 1997 [1788]: 5:15).8
The Ethical Moment in Simmel’s Relational Sociology

To be sure, both Durkheim and Kant do address the other side of ethical
experience, the one concerned with its attractive rather than constraining
aspect – Durkheim in his studies of the roots of religious values in col-
lective ecstasy (Bellah, 1973) and Kant in his statements about the

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
experience of awe before the majesty of the moral law. Nevertheless,

these elaborations of ‘the good’ (vs. ‘the right’) still find the locus
of moral experience in the relation between the individual and the uni-
versal – in the energizing experience of breaking out of oneself and one’s
personal inclinations to reach something general, whether to collective
fusion or the categorical imperative.9
In renouncing the organismic conception of sociology, Simmel sought
to move beyond a morality sourced in universal demands. This double
renunciation creates significant ambiguities in Simmel’s treatment of
morality in Sociology. Indeed, morality does not seem at the outset a
primary topic there. He addresses ethics primarily as the norms implicit
within social interaction, leaving deeper questions of the individual’s
ethical pattern beyond his vision of a strictly formal sociology. For
instance, in chapter 2, ‘The Quantitative Determination of Group’,
Simmel discusses morality in relation to custom and law. All three mani-
fest the individual’s drive toward a supra-individual form of life, albeit
within different forms of association (Simmel, 1992 [1908]: 76). In chapter
3, ‘Sub- and Superordination’, he discusses morality as a type of subor-
dination under a principle that emerges when social authority is rooted
not in subordination to persons but to general norms (Simmel, 1992
[1908]: 234). In chapter 4, ‘Conflict’, Simmel argues that conflictual
forms of interaction are not disintegrating but in fact bind antagonists
together as antagonists. In chapter 7, ‘The Poor’, Simmel’s most com-
plete statement on morality in Sociology, he discusses ethics as the social
rights and duties that bind individuals to one another (1992 [1908]: 512).
And in the account of sociability in the later Fundamental Questions of
Sociology (1999 [1917]: 120), Simmel suggests that sociable association
produces quasi-aesthetic norms according to which instrumental pur-
poses are to be excluded from interaction in favor of the pure back-
and-forth of social interaction as such.
Despite these links between forms of social interaction and forms of
normativity, Simmel (1992 [1908]) equivocates on the importance of the
moral question for sociological investigation throughout the book. For
example, he states that a moral principle, like the Kantian maxim never
to use a person merely as a means, ‘appears as the formula for every
social interaction’, yet announces in the next paragraph his removal of
the moral aspect from his sociological examination (Simmel, 1992 [1908]:
161), as though the topics could be – or indeed should be – investigated
separately. In chapter 4, ‘Conflict’, Simmel insists on a sharp distinction
between ethics and sociology, treating the former as ‘the activity of the
soul in and toward itself, which does not enter into its external relation-
ships at all’ (1992 [1908]: 295). This inward activity would be robbed ‘of
its deepest and finest content’ if it were simply derived from external
social relations. However, he goes on to suggest in the next sentence
that the ‘intermingling of harmonious and hostile relations’ in conflicts

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 7
Social circle
Individual and
morality
Figure 2. Relational sociology.
‘presents a case in which the sociological and ethical levels overlap from
the outset’ (Simmel, 1992 [1908]: 295). In Sociology, Simmel finds himself
pulled in two directions: in one direction toward an account of ethical
norms as produced by and implicit in various forms of social interaction
and in the other toward a conviction that moral life cannot be
made intelligible without attention to the individual relationship between
a person and herself. He develops the latter perspective in The View
of Life.
Relational Sociology as an Inversion of Organismic Sociology

By comparing an image of Simmel’s relational perspective (Figure 2) to
Figure 1’s depiction of organismic sociology, we may highlight the under-
lying assumptions that drive Simmel toward rooting morality in the indi-
vidual personality. Chapter 6 of Sociology, ‘The Intersection of Social
Circles’, allows us to visualize this relational approach. Here, Simmel
argues that individuality is composed of a unique convergence of social
circles.
Figure 2 represents this relational approach as a formal inversion of
the organismic one. Each circle is now a ‘social circle’10 and the common
section is now individuality. Rather than focusing on the functioning of a
presupposed collective, the relational approach presupposes only the
existence of individuals and the linkages among them. Thus, each
social circle, rather than each individual, is bisected. We can articulate
this diagram as two qualities of the relationship between the individual
and society, and hence, morality: (1) ethical life covers the entire individ-
ual; it applies universally to the whole individual over the entire
life-course; (2) without a presupposed collective or universal, morality
finds its source not in an appeal to categorical norms but in the

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
individual herself. In contrast to Kant and Durkheim’s universalist

ethics, this is fundamentally an ethics of authentic individuality.
From Relational Sociology to the Law of the Individual

Initial Formulations of the Law of the Individual
Morality as an ethics of individuality, then, would seem an integral elem-
ent of Simmel’s sociological program. But Sociology provides only nas-
cent insights about the inner workings of moral life and how those shape
social interaction. Without a full formulation of the bases of moral life
consistent with it, development of relational sociology would remain
incomplete vis-a-vis its rival. The Law of the Individual, we suggest,
responds to this problem.
Simmel’s ambition to develop an alternative to Kantian morality that
would root ethical life in the realization of vital personal existence resonates
with a tradition of moral thought concerned with overcoming the perceived
antagonism between Kantian morality and individual life. Indeed, along-
side Kantian morality, ethical ideals that sought to develop new ways of
evaluating a life proliferated, such as Rousseau’s notion of sincerity,
Schiller’s aesthetic education, or Herder’s idea of authenticity (Charles
Taylor’s Sources of the Self [1989] and The Ethics of Authenticity [1991]
document key features of this broad movement). For Simmel, these con-
cerns were amplified and energized by the epochal changes brought about
by modernity: the proliferation of the use of money and the rise of urban-
ity. It is fair to say, however, that Simmel’s great inspirations were Goethe
and Nietzsche. Despite their considerable differences, Goethe and
Nietzsche, Simmel believed, both present an alternative to the idea that
‘egoism is overcome only when concern shifts to the welfare of the Thou or
of society’ (Simmel, 1917: 123–4). This alternative is rooted in ‘the possi-
bility that the perfection of the individual as such constitutes an objective
value, quite irrespective of its significance for any other individuals’, often
irrespective of the ‘happiness or unhappiness of this individual himself’
(Simmel, 1917: 124). Tracing the philosophical implications of Goethe
and Nietzsche’s moral perspectives for Simmel meant striving to express
in explicitly metaphysical terms the notion of ethical life as the perfection of
the individual. For him, that meant revising the assumptions of Kantian
morality so that the ethical claim is rendered consistent with the fullest
development of a complete and unique individual life.11
Reversing Kant
Simmel seems to have begun formulating this conception explicitly in the
five years after Sociology, though he had already undertaken sustained
engagements with Kant in chapter 6 of the Introduction to a Science of
Morality (1991 [1892]) and in his 1906 lecture course. The first essay

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 9
developing a concept of the Law of the Individual was a 1913 article

entitled ‘Das Individuelle Gesetz: Ein Versuch Über das Prinzip der
Ethik’. This article would form the basis of chapter 4 of The View of
Life.12 That same year Simmel gave a series of lectures on ‘Ethics and the
Problems of Modern Culture’, which includes a section called ‘The Law
of the Individual: Actuality and Ought’.
Simmel’s main task in formulating the Law of the Individual was to
individualize the Categorical Imperative and root it in ‘the stream of life’,
a task with far-reaching implications that would require a thorough revi-
sion of Kantian moral law (Lotter, 2000). The first reversal of Kant
concerns the integrity of the individual – moral law speaks to the
whole person, not just her rational part. Simmel rejects the Kantian
view because it implies that ‘sensuousness’ does not belong properly to
the ‘I’. He contends that ‘the total person acts at every moment, not now
reason and then sensibility’ (Simmel, 1949 [1913]: 327); sensuousness
belongs fully to the self. In a moment of moral error, for example, our
rational self is not seduced by some sensuous urge that breaks in from the
outside. Rather ‘seduction is our own urge, breaking forth from our
inner self and in this moment representing the ego’ (Simmel, 1918:
355). Reason and sensuousness are equally primary aspects of the inte-
grated self; if we are to ‘give ourselves our own law’, the ‘self’ to which we
speak must not be truncated.
This first reversal continues lines of critique already set forth in
Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1982), linking it forcefully
to nascent 20th-century existentialist themes of an individual’s own
authentic experience. The metaphysical depth of Simmel’s critique
marks his originality. His goal is nothing less than identifying the ultim-
ate reason why Kantian morality is incompatible with the conception of
a unified and integrated individual: Kant’s very conception of life.
Kantian moral theory, according to Simmel, assumes that ethical
claims oppose our actual urges, desires and factual situation with a
higher, extra-actual and extra-vital ideal (1949 [1913]). Although
Simmel does not dispute the moral relevance of the distinction between
‘actuality’ (Wirklichkeit) and ‘ought’ (Sollen), he distinguishes ‘actuality’
from ‘life’, arguing that moral ideals, even if not actual, are vital living
powers. A moral ideal or ‘ought’ can be extra-actual without being extra-
vital. ‘Actuality’ is only one of the forms – albeit one of the most common
ones – through which we relate to our lived experience. ‘The Ought’ is a
form equally fundamental to life. As a primary category of life, the
Ought has no further ‘ultimate source or legal basis’ (Simmel, 1918:
349). Indeed, Simmel claims that the content of life is ‘continuously’
experienced in these two primary forms, as ‘actuality’ and as ‘ought’
(1918: 353). Life may ‘pour itself’ discontinuously into other forms,
like art or science, which predominate and punctuate life for discrete
periods. But actuality and ought – the person I am and the person

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
I should be – have ‘monopoly’ (Simmel, 1918: 347) positions in lived

experience; they are always there. This means that ‘ought’ stands not
opposed to life, but is a form of it, its living call to be something
‘more-than-life’ constantly set against the equally vital facts of life.
Simmel’s second reversal of Kant concerns the Kantian assumption
that morality applies universal principles to particular acts. This lie
applies a maxim about lying in general; keeping this promise applies a
maxim to keep all promises (Kant, 1997 [1785]: 4: 399). For Simmel, this
universalizing approach empties morality of living significance for the
individual, since it induces us to take life (improperly) in its external
‘scene-form’, removing a likewise conceptualized discrete act from its
context within an individual life-course (1918: 365). But when we
remove these acts, the significance of the act is erased, since that signifi-
cance lies in the individual life narrative to which it contributes. As
Simmel puts it memorably in one of his aphorisms: ‘One can assert but
not prove the ultimate, highest, objective values – one must prove but not
assert one’s own value.’
While Kant’s ‘ought’ is that which a purely rational being would will,
the Law of the Individual for Simmel calls each of us to form our deeds
into a coherent narrative that defines the person we are living to be. This
is a narrative that includes, but is not limited to, what we normally think
of as ethics. Only in extremely rare cases does an Individual Law emerge
as a formulated or even formulable prescription or proscription. Even the
desire for a complete (or even an incomplete) life provides only one ideal
that life can be ‘about’ (Simmel, 1949 [1913]). The Simmelian ethical
imperative does not provide a general law by which we test our acts; it
articulates the abiding pressure we feel to live in reference to the sort of
person we aspire to be.
Here again is Simmel’s originality. Individual authenticity sets an
even more demanding and inescapable moral task than does Kantian
morality. In this way, his Individual Law resonates with Goethe’s
‘demand of the day’, as well as with Nietzsche’s vision of the sovereign
personality, a moral law that is fully individual and governs uninter-
ruptedly yet creatively the entire ongoing flow of life in body and
spirit, changing its external shape but maintaining its inner form. If
we were to rephrase Kant’s famous dictum in Simmelian terms, then
our moral imperative would be: ‘Can you desire that this action of
yours should define your entire life?’ (Simmel, 1918: 421). Whether each
of these instants belongs also under a law formed beyond the self is of
little interest or consequence, for Simmel’s imperative demands not that
one avoid excepting oneself from standards applied to all others but
rather that one avoid excepting any of one’s individual acts from
one’s whole life-story. To be sure, actual life may be morally inconsist-
ent. But this incoherence is only possible when counterposed to a living
ethical ideal that strives to encompass the whole of life – every

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 11
thought, every feeling, and even to the indifferences of the day

(Simmel, 1918: 360).
Objectivity without Collectivity

Although individual, this Simmelian morality is still objective. This sim-
ultaneous embrace of both individuality and objectivity sets Simmel’s
vitalistic ethics apart from wholly relativistic conceptions. Prima facie,
because his primary engagement with Kant rests on his rejection of the
autonomy of the rational will, Simmel sounds perilously close to a sub-
jectivist who rejects any objective morality. Indeed, when we think of an
individualized moral law, we assume that that morality has been left to
subjective arbitrariness. ‘How can the individual I preserve its value with-
out sinking into anchorless subjectivism?’ (Simmel, 1949 [1913]: 330). If
your morality is ‘only yours’, then certainly it is ‘only up to you’, decided
by your preference and subjective whim. Simmel, however, seeks to
escape anchorless subjectivity by asserting the objectivity of the individ-
ual Ought (1918: 410). His point rests on giving due weight to the
difference between the subjective–objective distinction and the individ-
ual–universal distinction (Simmel, 1918: 408). Traditionally, Simmel
notes, these two distinctions have been treated as one and the same:
whatever is objective must be trans-individual; whatever is individual
must be subjective (1949 [1913]: 329). Simmel rejects this conflation.
Each individual may have her own categorical ‘ought’ toward which
her life aspires but what that ultimate ‘ought’ consists in can only be a
product of vigorous self-reflection on the part of this individual in con-
versation with others. Two people may argue over what each person’s
individual law is or how a particular act expresses or does violence to it.
Yet in so doing, they are arguing about something: they are striving
toward some objective answer to the question about what ‘ought’ defines
my or your life.13 The Law of the Individual is individual without there-
fore being purely subjective.
The Law of the Individual as a Completion of Formal Sociology

Simmel’s moral theory has big implications for his sociology. The Law of
the Individual completes his formal sociological program by finally the-
orizing the conception of the individual implied by that program: a rich
and unique self-relation that is implicated in but stretches beyond any
particular social circle. This rendering of the self is no radical departure
from more familiar elements of Simmel’s sociology. In Simmel’s favored
unit of sociological analysis, the social relation, individuals define each
other and cannot be discussed but in terms of their relatedness. Just as a
social moment is understood through the relationship between individ-
uals, Simmel’s late work proposes that an individual moment may be
understood through the relationship of the individual to herself.

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:29pm] [1–22]
In The View of Life, Simmel conceptualizes the living individual on the

basis of how she relates the two forms that he believes cover life con-
tinuously and completely: actuality and ought. Indeed, as we saw, the
subtitle of the section of lectures in which he first broached the idea of the
Law of the Individual was Wirklichkeit und Sollen. In simplest terms,
vital existence for Simmel consists in the dynamic interplay between our
lived experience of reality and our interpretation of that experience as a
moment in a unifying narrative. What he called the ‘content’ of moral life
previously is defined in terms of that duopoly of forms. For example, I
am a good father in that my deeds (my life content under the category of
actuality) express part of a life-story that includes the task of raising my
children well (that content under the category of the ought). The ethical
challenge I face is to retell that story continuously – while I undertake
new actions – as one in which fatherhood figures as a vital element. My
life is a constant dialogue between what I actually do and the person I
strive to be; the extent to which I am able to relate these vital moments to
one another defines the extent to which my Individual Law is actualized.
Simmel’s individual is constantly oriented at once toward its fullest
unique potential and its actual situation, and the form of its life consists
in the form of the relation of its basic elements to one another.
Figure 3 offers a diagram of this relational conception of the individ-
ual life. It represents that conception of individual life as the relation
between two circles, one representing the ideal version of each
Ideal Life
Ethical Existence
Actual Life
Figure 3. The relational self.

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 13
individual’s existence, the other representing her actuality. The intersec-

tion between these circles designates that part of a life wherein the per-
sonality’s highest ideals are realized in practice and deed. The upper and
lower sections would represent those unrealized – yet nevertheless vital –
aspects of the individual’s ideal potential that are, respectively, idealized
yet not actualized or actualized yet not idealized. Simmel’s individual is
the totality of both circles. As the relation between the circles varies, so
would the form of individual existence, moving between extremes of full
self-realization (complete overlap) or full self-alienation (zero overlap).
Represented this way, the individual life includes both its ideality and its
actuality, and is lived at its fullest when the intersection between the
circles is at a maximum.
This relational conception of the individual is already hinted at in
Sociology, in particular in the excursus to chapter 1, ‘How is Society
Possible?’ After arguing that a condition of social interaction is that
each interactant operates with some generalizing stereotype about the
other, Simmel goes on to suggest that each actor must be presumed to
be more than an instance of a general type. Although the discussion in
these passages is primarily methodological, there is a hint here of the
more richly normative register of ethical thinking with which Simmel is
concerned later in The View of Life:
We form a picture [of the other] directly from the total uniqueness
of a personality that is not identical to its reality, but also not a
general type; rather the picture we get is what it would display if it
were, so to speak, entirely itself, if it were to realize the ideal poten-
tial that is, for better or for worse, in every person. (Simmel, 1971
[1908]: 10).
Every interaction, Simmel is suggesting, presumes that each participant

manifests some ideal potential of what she could be, her unique and total
potential as that individual person. This potential is a ‘hypothetical per-
sonality’ projected from out of the ‘actual fragments’ of life, one that
goes beyond social categories and types. It suggests an irreducible ‘being-
for-onself’ that in some way integrally coexists with that same individ-
ual’s status as a party to interaction, as a ‘being produced by and
occupied by society’ (Simmel, 1971 [1908]: 18).
In these same passages of Sociology Simmel goes on to discuss how the
ethical implications of an individual’s simultaneous existence ‘for oneself’
and ‘for others’ is sociologically relevant. Because individual life includes
an irreducible moment of self-relation, every social interaction ‘is not
entirely social’. Although some relationships such as love or friendship
might leave the most minimal part of the individual in reserve, there is
something in every social interaction held back by the personality for
Simmel, unreachable by ‘social categories’ or as ‘bearers of social roles’

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
(Simmel, 1992 [1908]: 13). Indeed, the fact that there is ‘something else’
beyond the interaction is integral to the very unfolding of the inter-
actions. Simmel attempts to demonstrate this, especially in his analyses
of insider-outsiders such as ‘the stranger, the enemy, the felon, even the
poor’ (1992 [1908]: 13). ‘What kind a person’s socialized being is’, he
states, ‘is determined or co-determined by the kind of one’s unsocialized
being’ (1992 [1908]: 13).
Self-relation and Social Relations: Towards Integrating

Sociology and The View of Life
The Transcendent Character of Life
In The View of Life, Simmel memorably argues that life is at once ‘more-
life’ (mehr-Leben) and ‘more-than-life’ (mehr-als-Leben). Life is more-life
in expanding and growing, in exercising our capacities and heightening
our powers. Life is more-than-life in reaching beyond itself toward tran-
scendent forms that may direct life from above. Whereas most of us ‘see
to live’ or ‘know to live’, the artist ‘lives to see’ and the scientist ‘lives to
know’ (Simmel, 1918: 269). They live lives that are more-than-life. The
Law of the Individual, as we have seen, elaborates the moral theory that
flows from this version of vitalism, a moral imperative to strive for more-
life and more-than-life.
One sociological consequence of this ‘transcendent character of life’ is
that every interaction contains elements that reach beyond that inter-
action, even beyond society and life. Building this insight into socio-
logical analysis in a positive way requires bringing Simmel’s formal
sociology and his vitalism more closely together than he himself did
(not to mention his commentators, who tend to keep these parts of
Simmel’s work strictly separated).14
Now, Simmel does give us some guidance about how to bridge this
gap. In ‘How is Society Possible?’, he proposes that ‘the interior and the
exterior between individual and society are not two agents existing side
by side . . . but that they identify the entirely integral position of the living
social being’ (1971 [1908]: 17). Yet one of the most difficult and puzzling
aspects of Sociology is precisely that fact that the reflections in ‘How is
Society Possible?’ are very loosely connected to the substance of the
remainder of the book (Levine, 1989).15 ‘How is Society Possible?’ out-
lines the preconditions of social interaction. Yet the main body of
Sociology is concerned primarily with delineating the forms in which
actors associate with one another, forms like conflict, exchange and
hierarchy.
To be sure, these discussions often touch on how the extra-social
dimensions of life impinge on associations. In ‘The Quantitative
Determination of Group’, Simmel insists that each partner in a dyadic
relationship operates under the imperative to treat herself as possessing

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 15
‘an other inside the individual soul itself’ (1992 [1908]: 76). Relations of
super- and sub-ordination, moreover, dissolve where a super-ordinate
ceases to treat a sub-ordinate as possessing any trace of ethical agency.
Beyond this limit, the relationship devolves into one between a person
and a thing (Simmel, 1992 [1908]: 97). Conflictual relationships, similarly,
depend on each antagonist treating the other as a potential vehicle for
personal self-realization and as a potentially noble adversary – otherwise,
the relationship mutates into a quest for annihilation (Simmel, 1992
[1908]: 81). Likewise love and friendship strive towards a total mutuality
of ideal and practice between friends and lovers (Simmel, 1992 [1908]:
13). And in ‘Secrecy and the Secret Society’, Simmel outlines how the fact
that we show one another only an ‘extract’ of our inner lives ‘stylized by
selection and arrangement’ (1992 [1908]: 388) is an essential element of
social relationships.
These are pregnant examples with big theoretical implications.
However, Simmel does not seem to have integrated this insight concern-
ing the irreducibly transcendent character of life into his formal socio-
logical method. There are some indications that in his later period
Simmel had intended to develop a notion of social interaction that
included this dimension,16 but he did not explicitly seek to integrate
the late conceptions of the Law of the Individual and of life as simultan-
eously more-life and more-than-life with the precepts of his formal and
relational sociology. Nevertheless, the challenge of understanding how he
might have done so is worth addressing.
The Transcendent Character of Society

How, then, can Simmel’s conception of life be incorporated into or read
through the categories of his relational sociology? The solution, we sug-
gest, is to take seriously the idea that the creative interplay between each
individual’s ideality (‘ought’) and actuality is an integral component of
every social interaction. In this conception of a Simmelian
Lebenssoziologie (Lash, 2005) moral norms are not only or even primar-
ily socially relevant in virtue of their purported function of uniting a
social entity. Rather, tracing the sociological consequences of Simmel’s
concept of the Law of the Individual would mean treating each inter-
action as an occasion for an individual to actualize – or not – his own
ideal, as a potential realization of the self that he strives to be. This
conceptual shift would make the self-relation a formal property of
every social relationship, regardless of what an individual’s ideal poten-
tial is in terms of contents, and without making assumptions about the
socially binding force of morality.17
Integrating the self-relation into social relations in this general way
would extend, we believe, key aspects of Simmelian relational thinking.
First, it elaborates the implications of Simmel’s notion that individuals

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
have their own ideal potentials that constitute an ‘objective value’.

Though ethics may manifest as rights and duties between individuals,
the form of ethical life is not at all limited to its social facet. A’s realiza-
tion of his fullest potential through a social relationship may contribute
to B’s ethical fulfillment, as in a teacher–student relationship or a conflict
between warriors whose fight permits mutual realizations of courage. But
this self–other mutuality does not exhaust the ethical component of their
relationship. A’s ideal potential may go far beyond his ‘practical devo-
tion’ to B. For instance, A may pursue an ideal potential of artistic
creativity (‘the fanaticism of the artist’, Simmel calls it) with no reference
to the ‘improvement or well-being of others’ (Simmel, 1917: 124). Yet
that fact about A – that his ideal potential can reach beyond the lives of
those with whom he interacts, indeed beyond life itself – influences all of
his relationships.
Participants in social interactions, for Simmel, therefore have tran-
scendent dimensions to their lives that stretch over and above those
interactions. An essential element of a Simmelian formal analysis of
the ethical character of sociality follows: because some part of each par-
ticipant in an interaction exceeds the interaction, there is an inherent
moral dynamism in social relationships. Social interaction reveals and
hides aspects of participants’ ideal-transcendent potentials; it is marked
by moral distance and nearness, repulsion and attraction. Sometimes the
other appears as an attractive realization of my ideal, sometimes as repel-
lent obstacle, sometimes as a transparent window, sometimes as an
inscrutable mystery. Interactions unfold not only as conflicts, exchanges
or hierarchies, but also as ethical dramas in which the conflict, exchange
or hierarchy provides the material for discovering the extent to which the
ideal potentials of each participant affirm or contradict those of the
another and are expressed in or hidden by their deeds.
Conclusion: New Directions for a Vitalist Sociology

By highlighting the importance of the transcendent to the social, this
proposal for integrating the Simmelian notion of the self-relation into
the Simmelian conception of social interaction suggests some new direc-
tions for contemporary sociological inquiry. First, Simmel’s late ethical
theory suggests that the social significance of morality, contra Durkheim,
lies not primarily in its power to constitute the social relationship as such.
The Simmelian proposal is much more modest: the individual’s ideal
potential is an element in the relationship. This does not mean that part-
ners in interaction necessarily take the life of the other as their moral
duty. Instead, it suggests that the patterns according to which each inter-
action partner’s ideal potential overlaps with the life – ideal or actual – of
the other is a variable for empirical examination. Regardless of what an
individual’s moral law is in terms of contents (from fanatical artist to

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 17
religious virtuoso), the vitality of that ideal and its relation to the
individual’s actuality is a formal element of every interaction. Who I
strive to be and its relation to what I do define how I relate to you,
and vice versa.
The second key Simmelian idea captured by our proposal is that the
analysis of individuality in society should be moved away from the ‘indi-
vidual vs. society’ dichotomy and towards questions about forms of
association. To be sure, Simmel participated in the former discourse,
sometimes worrying about great individuals being absorbed into the
social mass (as in chapter 3 of Lebensanschauung (1999 [1918]), or chap-
ter 2 of Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1999 [1917]). But the pas-
sages quoted above from ‘How is Society Possible?’ (in 1992 [1908]) and
‘The Law of the Individual’ (in 1999 [1918]) suggest a relational
alternative.
This alternative would start from investigating individuality as a
dynamic component of relationships, asking how the processes and
forms of interaction are shaped by the patterns of self-relations among
their participants. Social life as a mutual interplay of the ‘oughts’ and
actualities of interaction partners would then have properties similar to
the ones Simmel discusses in Sociology. We could investigate, for
instance, how the distance or nearness between interaction partners’
‘ideal potentials’ – religious, erotic, aesthetic, political – alter the char-
acter of their relationships (in conflict, exchange, hierarchy, love). Are
there features common to interactions when the conflict, exchange or
romance is informed by converging transcendent ideals with little left
in reserve versus a relationship informed by distant ideals with little in
common and much left to mystery? Or we can inquire into the ways in
which social relationships are altered by the level of symmetry between
the opportunities the relationships offers for each interactant’s Individual
Law to be realized. Are there, for example, features common to inter-
actions in which the conflict, exchange, romance or friendship is sacrilege
for one and glorious for the other? We do not answer these questions
here. But we believe that our proposal puts them on the theoretical
agenda in such a way that they might be further pursued in an authen-
tically Simmelian way. Thus, psychological motivations for interaction
and beyond – ‘erotic, religious, or merely associative impulses, purposes
of defense, attack, play, gain, aid, or instruction’ (Simmel, 1992 [1908]:
23) – otherwise treated as a-sociological ‘content’, can be raised to the
level of form, and can thus figure into the formal sociological project.
In completing the ethical project implied by his sociology, Simmel laid
down a challenge to his followers: can a conception of authentic indi-
viduality as an abiding ethical imperative be integrated into a conception
of society as forms of interaction? Bridging this apparent divide between
Simmel’s sociology and his trans-sociological vitalistic ethics leaves us
with a richer understanding of Simmel. It also helps to sketch a

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
distinctively Simmelian approach to an ethics of individuality in socio-

logical inquiry.
Notes
We dedicate this essay to Donald N. Levine, who brought us together for the
Lebensanschauung project and has spent decades teaching students to think from
a Simmelian perspective.
1. See Levine and Silver (2010). An English translation of this work, The View
of Life, appeared in 2010 (University of Chicago Press).
2. See Lotter (2000) for a very helpful discussion of the distinctiveness of
Simmel’s notion of the Individual Law in contrast to standard ‘individual-
istic’ positions in moral philosophy. For statements about Simmel’s
Individual Law in the historical context of the rise of individualism, see
Landmann (1968) and Gerhardt (1997).
3. These ranged from the (typically) British focus on the social conditions
under which individual needs and rights may be maximally satisfied, to
the (typically) Italian focus on the coordinating activities of elites, to the
(typically) American focus on human group life as an ongoing, pragmatic
set of responses to emergent problems, to the complex mix of hermeneutics,
voluntarism and a priorism in Germany, to the ‘French’ ‘organismic’ ‘func-
tionalist’ school, with its focus on how individuals are integrated into col-
lective structures. See Levine (1995) for more detailed discussion of these
‘visions of the sociological tradition’.
4. See Levine (2010) for an overview of Simmel’s changing understanding of
morality.
5.
Every society is a moral society. In certain respects this feature is

even more pronounced in organized societies. Because no individ-
ual is sufficient unto himself, it is from society that he receives all
that is needful, just as it is for society that he labours. Thus there is
formed a very strong feeling of the state of dependence in which he
finds himself: he grows accustomed to valuing himself at his true
worth, viz., to look upon himself as a part of the whole, the organ
of an organism. Such sentiments are of a kind not only to inspire
those daily sacrifices that ensure the regular development of every-
day social life but even on occasion acts of utter renunciation and
unbounded abnegation. For its part society learns to look upon its
constituent members no longer as things over which it has rights,
but as co-operating members with whom it cannot do without and
towards whom it has duties. (Durkheim, 1984 [1925]: 173)
6. See Tiryakian (2009) for a helpful discussion of Kant as part of the ‘matrix’
out of which Durkheim’s thought developed and Schmaus (2004) for a his-
torical reconstruction of the version of Kant current in Durkheim’s milieu.
Joas (2004), while acknowledging the great debt Durkheim owes to Kant

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 19
and Comte, stresses that Durkheim’s social thought is not merely philosoph-
ically derivative but itself makes philosophical innovations to its Kantian
moral framework, most strikingly in linking the genesis of values to collect-
ive ecstasy. Though highlighting this aspect of Durkheim’s thought might
well open new theoretical vistas and bring it closer to Simmel’s, as we sug-
gest below a fundamental difference between the two remains. In contrast to
Durkheim, Simmel resisted identifying morality (and religion) with society.
7. Of course, for both Durkheim and Simmel, ‘individuality’ and ‘the individ-
ual’ as such are not identical concepts. For this broad initial sketch, how-
ever, using the terms interchangeably is linguistically convenient and
theoretically unproblematic.
8. As with any statement about Kant, there are considerable controversies
about these, in particular whether the Categorical Imperative amounts
only to a moral check on inclinations or carries independent motivating
power, whether a person’s maxim is determined by his intention at the
moment of action or is expressed in his living a certain sort of life, and
the extent to which Kantian morality includes a virtue ethics (see Pippin,
1997: chs 3 and 4). From Simmel’s perspective, the very ambiguities around
these questions are evidence of the limitations of the Kantian picture, in that
such puzzles can only arise from separating moral experience from life and
applying universal laws to particular acts, as we will see.
9. See Joas (2001) for an illuminating discussion of the distinction between the
Good and the Right, as well as an account both of Durkheim’s notion of
collective ecstasy and its inability to ‘take account of the individual’s inter-
pretative self-reflexivity’ (2001: 68). This ‘interpretative self-reflexivity’ is a
centerpiece by contrast to Simmel’s approach, in which ‘distance’ of various
sorts was a crucial sociological and ethical category.
10. A ‘social circle’ is by no means a ‘society’; it merely suggests a group of
people who are linked together for any given reason.
11. To be sure, Kant himself grounded morality in the transcendental Ego, but
his is a Self that is not unique to each person; it in fact registers their equality
under the moral law: the ‘true person’ in each of us is the same (Simmel,
1917: 137). Durkheim expresses a similar thought in sociological form in
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life:
Man is double. There are two beings in him: an individual being

which has its foundations in the organism and the circle of whose
activities is therefore strictly limited, and a social being which rep-
resents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that
we can know by observation – I mean society. In the realm of
practice, this duality of our nature makes it impossible to reduce
a moral ideal to a utilitarian motive; and in the realm of thought,
this duality makes it impossible to reduce reason to individual
experience. (1995: 18)
12. See Levine and Silver (2010) for a discussion of the differences.
13. Although Simmel does not discuss the origins of an individual’s objective
ought in The View of Life, his discussion of ethics in chapter 7 of Sociology,
‘The Poor’, provides clues as to the formation of one’s moral obligations.

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
Here, Simmel attempts to synthesize a ‘sociological’ conception of right and

duty as the binding force in social relationships with an ‘ethical’ understand-
ing of an individual consciousness that determines its own sense of morality –
that is, to explain how social relationships dynamically interact with indi-
vidual moral behavior. Simmel’s answer is ‘moral induction’. Though never
fully formulated, he broaches the idea that, in some sense, one’s life narra-
tive determines one’s obligations to others. He illustrates moral induction
with the process by which the performance of ‘a good deed of any kind, even
the most spontaneous, most singular, in no way obligatory duty’ brings
about the obligation to continue with the good deed. This demand lives
on not only as a claim of the receiver but also in a feeling on the part of
the giver. As we travel through life, whether by accident or by intention, our
interactions with others clarify our life-story and thereby sharpen the claim
to live up to what that story implies, that is, to become who we are both for
ourselves and in our relations with others (Simmel, 1992 [1908]: 514).
14. See Silver et al. (2007) for discussion.
15. This is not to suggest, of course, that commentators have not attempted to
find traces of a prioris discussed in ‘How is Society Possible?’ in Sociology’s
substantive chapters. See for instance Backhaus (1998).
16. In the posthumously published ‘Eros, Platonic and Modern’ (1971 [1923]),
for instance, he highlights the fact that love is a ‘relation existing in the
subject’ in contrast to the Greek notion, where love is possession. Just as:
in the moral sphere the ‘Individual Law’ hovers over us – the strict
normative regulation of individual conduct which nonetheless we can
no longer apprehend within an abstract universal imperative – so
must there also be something like an Individual Law of erotic Life.
Love is ‘not dominated or justified by a universal idea of Beauty, of Value,

or of Amiability, but just by the idea of these individual existences and their
perfection’ (1971 [1923]: 243). These statements show Simmel broaching,
however haltingly, a new question: how to treat the transcendent character
of life (here as Love) not, as in Sociology, as a presupposition of social
relationships, but rather as an integral element of social relationships.
17. To be sure, the ‘otherness’ to which an Individual Law is oriented may also go
beyond self–other dyads. But from a sociological perspective life’s transcend-
ent character is significant because it defines social relations. A vitalist
Simmelian sociology would feature objective social forms that foster rather
than reject the cultivation of a self that stretches beyond them, embracing the
ambiguity between ‘life’ and ‘more-than-life’ as a crucial feature of the social
process. Going beyond self–other dyads in a research program would involve,
to adapt another Simmelian phrase, investigating those conditions under
which transcendence is immanent to society. It would study for instance
those objective aspects of the educational system that cultivate in students
the abilities to creatively redefine and reach beyond the skills and principles
they are taught. Akin to Pierre Rosanvallon’s (2008) notion of ‘counter-
democracy’, it would attend to new modes of democratic participation that
institutionalize citizen distrust of formal political acts like voting, treating
citizens as at once formed by but becoming more than their citizenship.

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
Lee and Silver 21
References
Backhaus, G. (1998) ‘Georg Simmel as an Eidetic Social Scientist’, Sociological
Theory 16(3): 260–81.
Bellah, R. (1973) ‘Introduction’, in Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Durkheim, E. (1961 [1925]) Moral Education. New York: Free Press.
Durkheim, E. (1984) The Division of Labor in Society, trans. W.D. Halls. New
York: Free Press.
Durkheim, E. (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. K.E. Fields.
New York: Free Press.
Gerhardt, V. (1997) ‘Das individuelle Gesetz. Über eine sokratisch-
platonische Bedingung der Ethik’, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie
22(l): 3–22.
Joas, H. (2001) The Genesis of Values. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Joas, H. (2004) ‘Preface’, in Durkheim’s Philosophy Lectures: Notes from the
Lyceé de Sens Course, 1883–1884, ed. and trans. N. Gross and R.A. Jones.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1997 [1785]) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1997 [1788]) Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Landmann, M. (1968) ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–29 in M. Landmann (ed.) Das indi-
viduelle Gesetz: Philosophische Exkurse. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Lash, S. (2005) ‘Lebenssoziologie: Georg Simmel in the Information Age’,
Theory, Culture & Society 22(3): 1–23.
Levine, D. (1971) ‘Introduction’, in On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Levine, D. (1989) ‘Simmel as a Resource for Sociological Metatheory’,
Sociological Theory 7(2): 161–74.
Levine, D. (1995) Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Levine, D. (2010) ‘Adumbrations of a Sociology of Morality in the Work of
Parsons, Simmel, and Merton’, in S. Hitlin and S. Vaisey (eds) Handbook of
the Sociology of Morality. New York: Springer.
Levine, D. and D. Silver (2010) ‘Introduction’, in Georg Simmel, The View of
Life, trans. J. Andrews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levine, D. and D. Silver (forthcoming) ‘Modalities of Morality in Parsons,
Simmel, and Merton’, in S. Hitlin and S. Vaisey (eds) Handbook of the
Sociology of Morality. New York: Springer.
Lotter, M. (2000) ‘Das individuelle Gesetz. Zu Simmels Kritik an der
Lebensfremdheit der kantischen Moralphilosophie’, Kant-Studien 91(2):
178–203.
Müller, H. (1960) Lebensphilosophie und Religion bei Georg Simmel. Berlin:
Duncker und Humblot.
Pippin, R. (1997) Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. Cambridge:
Rosanvallon, P. (2008) Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

XML Template (2012) [13.9.2012–12:30pm] [1–22]
Schiller, F. (1982) On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed.

E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schmaus, W. (2004) Rethinking Durkheim and his Tradition. Cambridge:
Silver, D., M. Lee and R. Moore (2007) ‘The View of Life: A Simmelian Reading
of Simmel’s Testament’, Simmel Studies 17(2): 262–90.
Simmel, G. (1991 [1892]) Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. In Georg Simmel
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4, ed. K.C. Köhnke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Simmel, G. (1897) ‘The Persistence of Social Groups: I’, American Journal of
Sociology 3: 662–98.
Simmel, G. (1949 [1913]) ‘Ethik und Probleme der modernen Kultur.
Vorlesungen 1913’, Philosophische Studien 1: 310–44.
Simmel, G. (1999 [1917]) Grundfragen der Soziologie. In Georg Simmel
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16, ed. G. Fitzi and O. Rammstedt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Simmel, G. (1999 [1918]) Lebensanschauung. In Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe,
vol. 16, ed. G. Fitzi and O. Rammstedt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Simmel, G. (1992 [1908]) Sociology: Untersuchungen über die Formen der
Vergesellschaftung. In Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 11, ed.
O. Rammstedt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Simmel, G. (1971 [1923]) ‘Eros, Platonic and Modern’, pp. 235–48 in D. Levine
(ed.) Simmel on Indviduality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Steinmann, L. (2007) ‘Geselligkeit und ‘‘Formale Sociology’’. Die lebensphilo-
sophische Perspektive in Georg Simmel’s ‘‘Grundfragen der Sociology’’’,
pp. 9–29 in Jahrbuch für Sociologiegeschichte, ed. C. Klingemann.
Wiesbaden:VS Verlag.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Tiryakian, E. (2009) For Durkheim: Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology.
Burlington: Ashgate Publishing.
Vandenberghe, F. (2010) ‘Immanent Transcendence in Georg Simmel’s
Sociology of Religion’, Journal of Classical Sociology 10(1): 5–32.
Wolff, K. (1958) ‘The Challenge of Durkheim and Simmel’, American Journal of
Sociology 63(6): 590–6.
Monica Lee is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of

Chicago and a research associate at the Institut für Sozialforschung at
the J.W. Goethe University-Frankfurt.
Daniel Silver is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of

Toronto.

Simmel's Law of The Individual and The Relational Self

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Simmel's Law of The Individual and The Relational Self

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Theory,http://tcs.sagepub.

The online version of this article can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

>> OnlineFirst Version of Record - Nov 5, 2012

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

Individual and the Ethics sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

of the Relational Self tcs.sagepub.com

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Georg Simmel considered the ﬁnal book of his career, Lebensanschauung

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

Lee and Silver 3

between Simmel’s vitalism and his sociology, which commentators usu-

The View of Life as an Alternative to ‘Organismic’ Sociology

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

The organismic approach is rooted in the presupposition that society

Limiting sociology to the oﬃcial social formations resembles the

Instead, ‘society’ for Simmel is social interaction among persons ‘con-

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

Lee and Silver 5

Figure 1. Organismic sociology.

it is moral to perform your role in the division of labor because doing so

The Ethical Moment in Simmel’s Relational Sociology

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

experience of awe before the majesty of the moral law. Nevertheless,

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

Lee and Silver 7

Figure 2. Relational sociology.

Relational Sociology as an Inversion of Organismic Sociology

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

individual herself. In contrast to Kant and Durkheim’s universalist

From Relational Sociology to the Law of the Individual

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

Lee and Silver 9

developing a concept of the Law of the Individual was a 1913 article

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

I should be – have ‘monopoly’ (Simmel, 1918: 347) positions in lived

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

Lee and Silver 11

thought, every feeling, and even to the indiﬀerences of the day

Objectivity without Collectivity

The Law of the Individual as a Completion of Formal Sociology

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

In The View of Life, Simmel conceptualizes the living individual on the

Figure 3. The relational self.

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

Lee and Silver 13

individual’s existence, the other representing her actuality. The intersec-

Every interaction, Simmel is suggesting, presumes that each participant

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Self-relation and Social Relations: Towards Integrating

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

Lee and Silver 15

The Transcendent Character of Society

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV TORONTO on November 10, 2012

16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

have their own ideal potentials that constitute an ‘objective value’.