Home >> Sociology of Georg Simmel

Sociology of Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel rejected the organicist theories of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer and German historical tradition. He did not believe that society can be viewed as a thing or organism as Auguste Comte or Spencer did. For him society is an intricate web of multiple relations between individuals who are in constant interaction with one another society is merely the name for a number of individuals connected by interactions.

Simmel introduced the term sociation that he believed to be the major field of study for the students of society. Sociation implies the particular patterns and forms in which human beings relate to each other and interact. According to him society is nothing more than all the individuals who constitute it. He has also drawn attention to the fact that people in groups of different sizes interact differently from each other. A qualitative change in terms of organization takes place with the increase in number of persons in a group.

There cannot be a totalistic social science which studies all aspects of social phenomenon for even in natural sciences there is no one total science of all matter. Therefore he states that science must study dimensions or aspects of phenomena instead of global wholes or totalities. He believes that the task of sociology is to describe and analyses particular forms of human interaction and their crystallization in-group characteristics such as the state, the clan, the family etc. He says that all human behavior is behavior of individuals but a large part of this human behavior can be understood if we understand the social group to which the individuals belong and the kind of constraints they face in particular forms of interaction. He emphasized the study of forms of interaction and this approach gave impetus to rise of formal sociology.

In the study of society Georg Simmel made an attempt to understand a whole range of social types such as the stranger, the mediator, the poor and so on. His social types were complementary to his concept of social forms. A social type becomes a type because of his /her relations with others who assign a certain position to this person and have certain expectations of him/her. To explain his social type Georg Simmel gives the example of 'The Stranger' in his book The sociology of Georg Simmel. The stranger has been described by Simmel as a person who comes today and stays tomorrow. This stranger is someone who has a particular place in society within the social group that the person has entered. The social position of this stranger is determined by the fact that he or she does not belong to this group from the beginning. It is this status of the stranger, which determines his or her role in the new social group and also the interaction that takes place. As a stranger a person is simultaneously both near to one as well as distant. Not being part of the social group the stranger can look at it objectively without being biased. Thus the stranger can be an ideal intermediary in any kind of exchange of ideas or goods. In this way the position of the stranger is fixed in a society and defined.

Georg Simmel stressed both the connection as well as the tensions between the individual and society. In his opinion an individual is both a product of society as well as the link in all-social processes that take place in society. The relationship between an individual and the society is dual in nature. Individual is at one and the same time within the society and outside it. He/she exists for society as well as for herself or himself.

Social individual cannot be partly social and partly individual. Social individual is shaped by a fundamental unity in which we find a synthesis of two logically opposed elements. These elements are that an individual is both a being and social link in himself as well as a product of society. In Georg Simmel's sociology we find this dialectical approach that brings out the dynamic interlink ages as well as conflicts that exist between social units in a society.

In real life no society can exist with absolute majority. Conflict is an essential and complementary aspect of consensus or harmony in society. He maintains that sociation or human interactions involve contradictory elements like harmony and conflict, attraction and repulsion, love and hatred and so on. He also made a distinction between social appearances and social realities. There are certain relationships of conflict that give the appearance of being negative to both the participants as well as the outsiders. But if we analyze these conflictive relationships we may find that it has latent positive aspects.

According to Georg Simmel in the pre-modern societies the relationships of subordination and superordination between master and servant, between employer and employee involved the total personalities of individuals. As a contrast to this in capitalist modern society there is a progressive liberation of the individual. The concept of freedom emerges and the domination of employer on employee, master on servant becomes partial.

In modern societies segmentation of roles and relations occur. An individual plays multifaceted roles and in this process escapes domination of the total kind found in pre-modern societies such as the relationship between the lord of the manor and his serf in feudal European society. Thus individualism emerges in societies that have an elaborate division of labor and a number of intersecting social circles. But along with the individual freedom in modern societies human beings get surrounded by a world of objects that put constraint on them and dominate their individual needs and desires. Thus according to Georg Simmel modern individuals find themselves faced by another set of problems. In modern societies Simmel say individuals will be frozen into social functions and in which the price of the objective perfection of the world will be the atrophy of the human soul.