Learning from Georg Simmel's Concluding Thoughts

• In Event: History of Sociology and Social Thought Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 1: Classical Foundations and Contemporary Critique

Abstract

Georg Simmel was self-conscious about philosophical questions of epistemology, and handled such issues toward the end of his life when he wrote in the tradition of Lebensphilosophie (vitalism), described in a book on this subject by David Beer, Georg Simmel’s Concluding Thoughts: Worlds, Lives, Fragments (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). I relate his approach to some of the benefits, and limits, of the historicist tendencies of his own generation of German scholars, of how this combined with psychological interests that justified a subjective phenomenological approach to social theorizing of which Georg Simmel’s work was somewhat of a precursor, and how this differed from the somewhat more Cartesian and positivist objective approach of major French theorizing of that time, and later, though there were scholars from both Germany and France whose approaches overlapped. I include references to some of the ideas of Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Niklas Luhmann. I emphasize the aesthetic and philosophical interests of Georg Simmel, and how he refrained from engaging with the kind of political theorizing characteristic of the work of Max Weber. I also mention some of the benefits of social theorizing that aims directly at having pragmatic ramifications, I include here the work of Hans Joas, rather than the kind of social theorizing which particularly Simmel engaged in toward the end of life where aesthetic interests predominated. I conclude by discussing in detail David Beer’s book.

Author

• Jerome Braun