A German professor of philosophy who wrote extensively on aesthetics, epistemology , the philosophy of history as well as sociology, Simmel's views were formed by opposition both to the structural sociology of writers like A. Comte and to the German tradition of Geisteswissenschaften (q.v.), in which social and historical events were to he seen as unique and not generalizable. Simmel's solution was to picture society as a web of interactions between people. He stressed the interaction. For example, in his analysis of power, he argued that the powerful could not exercise their power without the complicity of their subordinates; power is an interaction. If there are social structures like the family, they are to he considered as mere crystallizations of interactions between individuals.
Simmel's proposed method of analysing human interactions was by formal sociology (q.v.). He suggested that one could isolate the form of interactions from their content, so that apparently very different interactions (with different contents) could be shown to have the same form. For example the relationship between a writer and an aristocrat in eighteenth-century England and the relationship between a peasant and his landlord in twentieth-century Latin America are apparently different interactions. However, they do have the same form, in that they are both examples of patronage relationships.Simmel was particularly fascinated by numbers. For example, he argued that social situations involving two or three parties have the same formal similarities whether the parties are people or nation states. This similarity of form means that certain properties of the relationships are manifested in very different situations. For example, the options open to three nation states, and their consequent behaviour, are much the same as those applying to three people. Another way in which Simmel applied his formal sociology was in the analysis of social types. Thus he argued that certain social types, the stranger for example. appear in different societies at different times and the behaviour of the stranger and the behaviour of others towards him or her, is very similar in these different social situations.
Although subsequent commentators have concentrated on his formal sociology, his analyses of social interaction and his views about the functions of social conflict,Simmel was also concerned with the study of social development, as characterized by social differentiation and the emergence of a money economy. The translation into English of The Philosophy of Money (1900), which, among other topics presents an alternative to the Marxist labour theory of value, has inspired a new interest in the whole corpus of Simmel's work. The evolution of economic exchange from barter to paper money to credit represents a rationalization of daily life. This economic quantification of social interaction was a further illustration of the separation of the form from the content of social life.Simmel's analysis of money provided a phenomenological alternative to Marxist economic categories.
Simmel's main works available in English include The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892) and two collections of essays. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K. Wolff (1950) and Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations (1955).
[Nicholas Abercrombie et al., The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology. 3rd edition. London: Penguin Books, 1994:378]
