SIMMEL, GEORG

born March 1, 1858, Berlin died Sept. 26, 1918, Strassburg, Ger. German sociologist and Neo-Kantian philosopher whose fame rests chiefly on works concerning sociological methodology. He did much to establish sociology as a basic social science in Germany. He taught philosophy at the universities of Berlin (18851914) and Strassburg (191418). Simmel sought to isolate the general forms or recurrent regularities of social interaction from the specific content of definite kinds of activity, such as political, economic, and aesthetic. He gave special attention to the problem of authority and obedience. In Philosophie des Geldes (1900; 6th ed., 1958; The Philosophy of Money) he applied his general principles to a particular subject, economics; he stressed the role of a money economy in specializing social activity and depersonalizing individual and social relationships. In the last decade of his life he devoted himself to metaphysics and aesthetics. Simmel's sociology first became influential in the U.S. through translations and commentaries by Albion W. Small (18541926), one of the first important U.S. sociologists. The Sociology of Georg Simmel (trans. and ed. by Kurt H. Wolff, 1950) comprises translations from Soziologie (1908) and other works. Additional reading Studies of Simmel's ideas include Nicholas J. Spykman, The Social Theory of Georg Simmel (1925, reprinted 1992); Rudolph Herbert Weingartner, Experience and Culture: The Philosophy of Georg Simmel (1962); David Frisby, Georg Simmel (1984), and Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel's Social Theory, 2nd ed. (1992); and Gary D. Jaworski, Georg Simmel and the American Prospect (1997).