The German Genius

Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Adolf von Harnack, despite the fact that he was a close friend of both Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George, and that with Tönnies and Weber he was a cofounder of the German Sociological Society, Simmel was constantly rebuffed by university authorities when chairs became available. When he was finally made professor, at the University of Strasbourg, it was already 1914 and within a short time the university was closed and converted into a military hospital. He didn’t let anti-Semitism get him down. His predicament was eased by financial security when his guardian left him a considerable fortune. Instead of growing bitter, he perfected his performance as a lecturer, “punctuating the air with abrupt gestures and stabs, dramatically halting, and then releasing a torrent of dazzling ideas.” As one admiring American observer described it, “Simmel ‘simmelifies.’” 14
    C APITALISM AS P ROSTITUTION
     
    For the Paris exhibition of 1900, the American sociologist Lester Ward presented a report on the state of sociology on both sides of the Atlantic. After referring to the absence of any chairs of sociology in Germany at the time (a situation not rectified until after World War I), the report singled out Simmel who, it said, had been offering courses in sociology “for the last six years.” Simmel was thus the first professional sociologist in Germany, his rise coinciding with what Thomas Nipperdey describes as the “collapse of philosophy.” 15
    Simmel had first come up with what he called “a new concept of sociology” in the 1880s. Darwinism and Social Darwinism were in the ascendant, but Simmel in his lectures argued that no single element can be identified as decisive in the ceaseless interaction of society. For Simmel it was the “ interaction of the parts” that counts. He thought there was a key difference—insufficiently appreciated—between “what takes place merely within a society as a framework and that which really takes place through society.” 16 The latter was the concern of the sociologist.
    He was particularly interested in the wider ways in which people in the new social circumstances (post–industrial revolution) organized themselves. Accordingly, in Über sociale Differenzierung ( On Social Differentiation ) his early contribution was to show that, as the social group to which the individual belongs gets larger (as in the great metropolises), the individual achieves greater moral freedom: “the purely quantitative enlargement of the group is merely the most obvious instance of the moral unburdening of the individual.” 17 He also made the point, though, that much of this freedom is illusory, “since beneath the choice there is a relentless pressure, and the capacity to choose itself is a sign of rootlessness.” 18 He also enlarged the concept of collective responsibility—in a closely woven urban society, where people live cheek by jowl, we must all bear a share of the guilt for various forms of pathology, and this is not an easy thing to do. We are both more free and more responsible. 19 At the same time, with the stronger development of individuality that occurs in urban society, there is bound to be a weaker sense of group belonging. Simmel observed an “increase in nervous life” in the cities, brought about by the fact that a city has more differentiated social circles. This promotes superficiality and imitation—“one of the lower intellectual functions.” The most obvious form of imitation is the phenomenon of fashion—not just in clothes but, for example, in musical consumption, a way of belonging and differentiating. 20
    The climax of On Social Differentiation was Simmel’s differentiation between objective and subjective culture. By the former he meant books that had been published, paintings painted, operas performed—achievements “out there” to which individuals can relate and define themselves, responses they can share, benchmarks and canons that can be agreed upon (or argued about) and which mark where someone belongs and differs from his or her fellows. By subjective culture, Simmel meant mainly business culture, where he saw bankers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, and shopkeepers sharing much less, having far fewer benchmarks with which to compare themselves, leading more private (but not necessarily more intimate) lives. He thought such life impoverished but saw at the same time that small town life was