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The Simmelian Turn in Cultural Sociology: The Culturalist Allure of Formal Sociology

Mon, August 10, 8:00 to 9:30am, TBA

Session Submission Type: Invited Session (90 minute)

Description

Along with Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, Georg Simmel was definitely one of the major “Founding Fathers” of sociology. Works such as The Philosophy of Money and “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” for example, are rightly considered “classics.” Yet as also exemplified by “The Stranger,” “Conflict,” “The Web of Group Affiliations,” and his works on domination and subordination, secrecy, and the dyad and the triad, for instance, perhaps even more long-lasting was his explicit attempt to launch a distinct theoretico-methodological agenda he called “Formal Sociology.” As I argue in my book Generally Speaking: An Invitation to Concept-Driven Sociology, such an agenda is driven by concepts rather than by any particular theory or a specific body of data. The novelty it provides, therefore, is analytical rather than substantive, as exemplified by the distinctly Simmelian search for generic, transcontextual (that is, transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, as well as translevel) social patterns using a concept-driven focus, multiple examples from widely disparate substantive contexts, and by the effort to reveal spectacularly analogical “parallels.” This invited panel features three terrific examples of such Simmelian “spirit” of doing sociology.

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