The Significance of Simmel's Work

※ 자료: Georg Simmel Online, http://socio.ch/sim/work.htm#Social

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Formal Sociology

Sociology, as conceived by Simmel, did not pretend to usurp the subject matter of economics, 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. 

To be sure, the student of warfare and the student of marriage investigate qualitatively different subject matters, yet the sociologist can discern essentially similar interactive forms in martial conflict and in marital conflict. 

Although there is little similarity between the behavior displayed at the court of Louis XIV and that displayed in the main offices of an American corporation, a study of the forms of subordination and superordination in each will reveal underlying patterns common to both. 

On a concrete and descriptive level, there would seem little connection between the early psychoanalytic movement in Vienna and the early Communist movement, but attention to typical forms of interaction among the members of these groups reveals that both are importantly shaped by the fact that they have the structural features of the sect. Sectarians are characterized in their conduct by the belief that they share anesoteric knowledge with their fellow sectarians and are hence removed from the world of the vulgar. 

This leads to intense and exclusive involvements of the sectarians with one another and concomitant withdrawal from "outside" affairs.

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. 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. 

Yet, if one looks at history through the peculiar lenses of the sociologist, one need not concern himself with the uniqueness of these events but, rather, with their underlying uniformities. 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. 

In this way, Simmel wanted to develop a geometry of social life: "Geometric abstraction investigates only the spatial forms of bodies, although empirically these forms are given merely as the forms of some material content. Similarly, if society is conceived as interaction among individuals, the description of the forms of this interaction is the task of the science of society in its strictest and most essential sense."

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. 

The essence of his thought, nevertheless, is clear. 

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. For example, both war and profit-making involve cooperation.

Inversely, identical interests and purposes may crystallize into different forms. Economic interests may be realized in competition as well as in planned cooperation, and aggressive drives may be satisfied in various forms of conflict from gang warfare to legal battles.

In formal analysis, certain features of concrete phenomena, which are not readily observable unless such a perspective is applied to them, are extracted from reality. 

Once this has been successfully accomplished, it becomes possible to compare phenomena that may be radically different in concrete content yet essentially similar in structural arrangement.

For example, leader-follower relations may be seen to be structurally the same both in deviant juvenile gangs and in conformist scout troops. 

On this point Simmel is often misunderstood: he was not asserting that forms have a separate and distinct existence, but that they inhere in content and can have no independent reality. 

Simmel's was far from a Platonic view of essences. 

He stressed that concrete phenomena could be studied from a variety of perspectives and that analysis of the limited number of forms which could be extracted from the bewildering multiplicity of social contents might contribute insights into social life denied those who limit themselves to descriptions of the concrete.

The term form was perhaps not a very happy choice since it is freighted with a great deal of philosophical ballast, some of it of a rather dubious nature. 

It may have frightened away certain modern sociologists intent on exorcising any metaphysical ghosts that might interfere with the building of a scientific sociology. Had Simmel used the term social structure--which, in a sense, is quite close to his use of form--he would have probably encountered less resistance. 

Such modern sociological terms as status, role, norms, and expectations as elements of social structure are close to the formal conceptualizations that Simmel employed.

Futhermore, much of the building of modern sociological theory proceeds precisely with the help of the perspective that Simmel has advocated. 

For example, in a reanalysis of some of the data of The American Soldier, Merton and Rossi, when explaining the behavior of "green" troops and their relationships with seasoned troops in different structural contexts, use this perspective to account more generally for social situations in which newcomers are involved in interaction with oldtimers. 

By abstracting from the concrete content of army life, they explain certain aspects of the behavior of newcomers--from immigrants to college freshmen--in terms of their relation to preexisting groups. 

It follows that the newcomer- oldtimer relationship, or the newcomer as a social type, can now be understood as a particular form that can profitably be studied through abstraction from the various concrete social situations that are being observed. 

It is through such abstraction from concrete social content that the building of a theory becomes possible.

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.

In concrete phenomena, moreover, the presence of a multiplicity of forms leads to their interference with one another, so that none of them can ever be realized in purity. 

There is no "pure" conflict in social life, just as there is no "pure" cooperation. 

"Pure" forms are constructs, that is, typical relationships never to be completely realized. 

Simmel's forms are not generalizations about aspects of reality, but they tend to heighten or to exaggerate "so as to bring out configurations and relations which underlie reality but are not factually actualized in it." 

The art historian may speak of "gothic" or "baroque" style, even though no known work of architecture exhibits all the elements of either style in all their purity; so too the sociologist may construct a "pure" form of social conflict even though no empirically known process fully embodies it. 

Just as Weber's ideal-type may be used as a measuring rod to help calculate the distance between a concrete phenomenon and the type, a Simmelian form--say, the typical combination of nearness and distance that marks the relation of "the stranger" form the surrounding world--may help gauge the degree of "strangerness" inherent in the specific historical circumstances of, for example, the ghetto Jews or other pariah peoples.

From Coser, 1977:179-182.

Social Types

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." 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. By virtue of his partial involvement in group affairs he can attain an objectivity that other members cannot reach. "He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of 'objectivity.' "

Moreover, being distant and near at the same time, the stranger will often be called on as a confidant. Confidences that must be withheld from more closely related persons can be given to him just because with him they are not likely to have consequences. 

In similar ways, the stranger may be a better judge between conflicting parties than full members of the group since he is not tied to either of the contenders. 

Not being "bound by commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given," he is the ideal intermediary in the traffic of goods as well as in the traffic of emotions.

Similarly, the poor as a social type emerge only when society recognizes poverty as a special status and assigns specific persons requiring assistance to that category. 

In Simmel's view, the fact that someone is poor does not mean that he belongs to the specific social category of the 'poor' . . . . It is only from the moment that [the poor] are assisted . . . that they become part of a group characterized by poverty. 

This group does not remain united by interaction among its members, but by the collective attitude which society as a whole adopts toward it. . . .  Poverty cannot be defined in itself as a quantitative state, but only in terms of the social reaction resulting from a specific situation. . . . 

Poverty is a unique sociological phenomenon: a number of individuals who, out of a purely individual fate, occupy a specific organic position within the whole; but this position is not determined by this fate and condition, but rather by the fact that others ... attempt to correct this condition.

Once the poor accept assistance, they are removed from the preconditions of their previous status, they are declassified, and their private trouble now becomes a public issue. 

The poor come to be viewed not by what they do--the criteria ordinarily used in social categorization--but by virtue of what is done to them. Society creates the social type of the poor and assigns them a peculiar status that is marked only by negative attributes, by what the status-holders do not have.

The stranger and the poor, as well as Simmel's other types, are assigned their position by virtue of specific interactive relations. 

They are societal creations and must act out their assigned roles. 

They resemble the character in one of Randall Jarrell's academic novels who "had never been what intellectuals consider an intellectual but other people had thought him one, and he had had to suffer the consequences of their mistake."