Borisyuk Anna
Institute
of Sociology, Psychology and Social Communications, (Ukraine,
Kyiv)
Pet’ko Lyudmila
Ph.D., Associate Professor,
Dragomanov
National Pedagogical University (Ukraine,
Kyiv)
Georg Simmel and Formal Sociology
Sociology, as
conceived by G.Simmel, did not pretend to usurp the subject matter of economics
[1], ethics, psychology, or historiography; rather, it concentrated on the
forms of interactions that underlie political, economic, religious, and sexual
behavior. In Simmel's perspective a host of otherwise distinct human phenomena
might be properly understood by reference to the same formal concept [8].
G.Simmel
is best known as a microsociologist who played a significant role in the
development of small-group research. Simmel's basic approach can be described
as «methodological
relationism», because he operates on
the principle that everything interacts in some way with everything else. His
essay on fashion [13], for example,
notes that fashion is a form of social relationship that allows those who wish
to conform to do so while also providing the norm from which individualistic
people can deviate. Within the fashion process, people take on a variety of
social roles that play off the decisions and actions of others. On a more
general level, people are influenced by both objective culture (the things that
people produce) and individual culture (the capacity of individuals to produce,
absorb, and control elements of objective culture). G.Simmel believed that
people possess creative capacities (more-life) that enable them to produce
objective culture that transcends them. But objective culture (more-than-life)
comes to stand in irreconcilable opposition to the creative forces that have
produced it in the first place [12; 2].
Georg
Simmel (gā'ôrk zĭm'əl) (born March 1, 1858, Berlin, Ger. – died Sept. 26,
1918, Strassburg, France) was the youngest of seven children. His father died
when Simmel was still young, and a family friend was appointed his guardian.
Simmel’s father, a successful businessman, left him with a sizable inheritance,
which would set him up for life as a scholar. G.Simmel studied history and
philosophy at the
University of Berlin and received
his doctorate in 1881 [3; 4].
G.Simmel is best known in contemporary sociology for his contributions
to our understanding of patterns or forms of social interaction. Simmel made
clear that one of his primary interests was association among conscious actors
and that his intent was to look at a wide range of interactions that may seem
trivial at some times but crucially important at others. One of Simmel's
dominant concerns was the form rather than the content of social interaction.
From Simmel's point of view, the sociologist's task is to impose a limited
number of forms on social reality, extracting commonalities that are found in a
wide array of specific interactions.
One of the main
focuses of Simmel's historical and philosophical sociology is the cultural
level of social reality, which he called objective culture. In Simmel's view,
people produce culture, but because of their ability to reify social reality,
the cultural world and the social world come
to have lives of their own and increasingly dominate the actors who created them. G.Simmel identified a number of
components of objective culture, including tools, transportation, technology,
the arts, language, the intellectual sphere, conventional wisdom, religious
dogma, philosophical systems, legal systems, moral codes, and ideals. The
absolute size of objective culture increases with modernization. The number of
different components of the cultural realm also grows [12; 6].
Simmel's
insistence on the forms of social interaction as the domain peculiar to
sociological inquiry was his decisive response to those historians and other
representatives of the humanities who denied that a science of society could
ever come to grips with the novelty, the irreversibility, and the uniqueness of
historical phenomena. G.Simmel agreed that particular historical events are
unique: the murder of Caesar, the accession of Henry VIII, the defeat of
Napoleon at Waterloo are all events located at a particular moment in time and
having a nonrecurrent significance. The sociologist does not contribute to
knowledge about the individual actions of a King John, or a King Louis, or a
King Henry, but he can illuminate the ways in which all of them were
constrained in their actions by the institution of kingship. The sociologist is
concerned with King John, not with King John. On a more abstract level, he may
not even be concerned with the institution of kingship, but rather with the
processes of conflict and cooperation, of subordination and superordination, of
centralization and decentralization, which constitute the building blocks for
the larger institutional structure.
To Simmel, the
forms found in social reality are never pure: every social phenomenon contains
a multiplicity of formal elements. Cooperation and conflict, subordination and
superordination, intimacy and distance all may be operative in a marital
relationship or in a bureaucratic structure [8].
Simmel's
insistence on abstracting from concrete content and concentrating on the forms
of social life has led to the labeling of his approach as formal sociology.
However, his distinction between the form and the content of social phenomena
is not always as clear as we should like. He gave variant definitions of these
concepts, and his treatment of particular topics reveals some obvious
inconsistencies. Formal sociology
isolates form from the heterogeneity of content of human sociation. It attempts
to show that however diverse the interests and purposes that give rise to
specific associations among men, the social forms of interaction in which these
interests and purposes are realized may be identical [8; 5].
Simmel's interest in creativity is manifest in his discussions of the
diverse forms of social interaction, the ability of actors to create social
structures, and the disastrous effects those structures have on the creativity
of individuals. All of Simmel's discussions of the forms of interaction imply
that actors must be consciously oriented to one another. Simmel also has a
sense of individual conscience and of the fact that the norms and values of
society become internalized in individual consciousness. In addition, G.Simmel
has a conception of people's ability to confront themselves mentally, to set
themselves apart from their own actions, which is very similar to the views of
George Herbert Mead [12; 10].
G.Simmel
constructed a gallery of social types to complement his inventory of social
forms. Along with «the stranger», he describes in great phenomenological detail
such diverse types as «the mediator», «the poor», «the adventurer», «the man in
the middle», and «the renegade». G.Simmel conceives of each particular social
type as being cast by the specifiable reactions and expectations of others. The
type becomes what he is through his relations with others who assign him a
particular position and expect him to behave in specific ways. His
characteristics are seen as attributes of the social structure. For example,
«the stranger», in Simmel's terminology, is not just a wanderer «who comes
today and goes tomorrow», having no specific
structural position. On the contrary, he is a «person who comes today and stays
tomorrow. He is fixed within a particular spatial group. But his position is
determined by the fact that he does no belong to it from the beginning, and
that he may leave again. The stranger
is «an element of the group itself» while not being fully part of it. He
therefore is assigned a role that no other members of the group can play [9;
11].
Society: exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction
(interaction is the key to everything with G.Simmel), which arises on the basis
of certain drives or for the sake of certain purposes. Unity (or sociation) in
the empirical sense constitutes the interaction of elements (ie. individuals in
the case of society).
Individuals are the loci of all historical reality, but the materials of
life are not social unless they promote interaction. This follows since only
this sociation can transform the a mere aggregation of isolated individuals
into specific forms of being with and for one another.
In terms of Simmel's famous form/content dichotomy: any social
phenomenon is composed of two elements which in reality are inseparable
(distinction is only analytical): 1) Content: the interest, purpose, or motive
of the phenomenon or interaction; 2) Form: the mode of interaction among
individuals through/in the shape of which the specific content achieves social
reality.
G.Simmel
conceives sociology as the science of social forms (in a sense affording form
analytic primary over content – although in reality they are inseparable). He
makes use of a helpful analogy of geometry as the study of forms (ie. shapes)
which may exist in an unlimited variety of physical materials. G.Simmel
believes that sociology should leave the examination of the content of societal
interaction to other sciences (such as psychology or economy) in the way that
geometry leaves content analysis to the physical sciences [7].
Bibliography
1. Corey
Anton. Georg Simmel: The Philosophy of Money (Video-Lecture) [Web site]. – Access mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOdvuElyvTw
4. Coser Lewis A. Georg Simmel: Biographic Information / Masters of
Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. Second edition. –
New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977 [Web site]. – Access mode: http://www.socio.ch/sim/biographie/index.htm
5. Daibes Peter. Simmel Metropolis (Video)
[Web site]. – Access
mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8SCUtdg6N8
[Web site]. – Access
mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8gxz3MZDUA