Transcript Simmel 2 - SOC 331: Foundations of Sociological Theory

“Community & Society” (1887)
• Ferdinand Tonnies published “Gemeinschaft & Gesellschaft” or
“Community and Society” in 1887
• Sets out a basic dichotomy describing the foundation of both individual
and social action, as well as the nature of the broader social order
• Ideal types serve as polar ends of the dichotomy
• Gemeinschaft: or “community”; the principle that structures
agricultural and handicraft life within families, villages and towns
• Gives rise to a “natural will” or mentality that inclines individuals and
groups to associate with one another on basis of concord (harmony),
folkways, and religious beliefs
• Gesellschaft: or “society”; outlook that predominates in industry,
commerce, city life, national and cosmopolitan life
• Rooted in “rational will” that promises cold, instrumental relationships
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Individual and Society
• Simmel makes 3 assumptions about the individual & society:
1) Individuals are both within and outside society
2) Individuals are both objects and subjects within networks
of communicative interaction
3) Individuals have the impulse to be self-fulfilling and selfcompleting, that is, they seek an integrated self-concept
• Society also tries to integrate itself (like Durkheim noted),
although this may undermine individual integrity
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“Fashion” (1904)
• Fashion is another aspect of social life built on the coupling of
opposites
• Fashion allows personal values to be expressed at the same
time as norms are followed
• The two exist together, and the one without the other would be
meaningless
• Social interaction is of the essence - what others think, what
one thinks that others think, how one conceives of fashion, etc.
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Duality of Fashion
FASHION
eccentricity
(adopted by very few)
conformity/imitation
(widespread acceptance)
“From the fact that fashion as such can never be generally in vogue,
the individual derives the satisfaction of knowing that as adopted by
him it still represents something special and striking, while at the
same time he feels inwardly supported by a set of persons who
are…actually doing the same thing.” (Simmel 1904/1971:304)
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Fashion and the city
• Fashion develops in the city because the city intensifies a
multiplicity of social relations, increases the rate of social
mobility and permits individuals from lower strata to become
conscious of the styles and fashions of upper classes
• In traditional and small circle settings, fashion would have no
meaning or be unnecessary
• Since modern individuals tend to be detached from traditional
anchors of social support, fashion allows the individual to signal
or express their own personality or personal values
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Fashion is dynamic
• Fashion is dynamic and has an historical dimension
• Typical pattern:
acceptance of a fashion  deviation from it  change in fashion
• perhaps ultimate abandonment of the original norm and
establishment of new norm
• Dialectical process in the success of the fashion: the emulation
involved in its initial and then widespread acceptance also leads
to its eventual abandonment and failure
• “As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom”
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Fashion and time
• Fashion is transitory , and this is part of its attraction
• The break with the past makes the consciousness turn more and
more to the present
• Accentuation of the present emphasizes the element of change
• Anything else similarly new and suddenly disseminated, when
we’re convinced of its continuance, is not called fashion - but if we
feel certain it will vanish as rapidly as it came, we call it fashion
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Fashion moves in circles,
recycling the past
• Fashion repeatedly returns to old forms
• “As soon as an earlier fashion has partially been forgotten
there is no reason why it should not be allowed to return to
favor and why the charm of difference, which constitutes its
very essence, should not be permitted to exercise an influence
similar to that which it exerted conversely some time before.”
(313)
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“The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)
• Again for Simmel, it’s about numbers:
As the group grows in numbers and extends itself spatially, "the group's direct,
inner unity loosens, and the rigidity of the original demarcation against others is
softened through mutual relations and connections.”
• Implies greater possibility of individual freedom and flexibility, with
the common culture and form of association greatly weakened
• The metropolis or city is where the division of labor is the greatest
and where individuality and individual freedom is most expanded
• For the individual this creates the “difficulty of asserting his own
personality within the dimensions of metropolitan life.”
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Mental life: city vs. country
• Intellect and personal psyche develop in a different way in
traditional and in modern society
• In rural and small town settings, impressions of others are built
up gradually, over time, on the basis of habit
• Many of these impressions are less conscious and are built on more
deeply felt and emotional relationships
• In the city, there is sharp discontinuity, single glances, a multitude
of quick impressions
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Blasé attitude
• “Thus the metropolitan type of man -- which, of course, exists
in a thousand individual variants -- develops an organ
protecting him against the threatening currents and
discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot
him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart. ....
Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against
the overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and
intellectuality branches out in many directions and is
integrated with numerous discrete phenomena.”
 blasé attitude
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Objective and Subjective Culture
• The growth of the city, the increasing number of people in the
city, and the "brevity and scarcity of the inter-human contacts
granted to the metropolitan man, as compared to the social
intercourse of the small town" makes the "objective spirit"
dominate over the "subjective spirit"
• Modern culture in terms of language, production, art, science,
etc. is "at an ever increasing distance”
• As a result of the growth of the division of labor and specialization
• Subjective culture is "the capacity of the actor to produce,
absorb, and control the elements of objective culture”
• Individual culture shapes, and is shaped by, objective culture the problem is that objective culture takes on a life of its own
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The city and the “tragedy of culture”
• "The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous
organization of things and powers which tear from his hands
all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them
from their subjective form into the form of objective life."
• This sounds much like Marx's alienation, Durkheim's anomie, or
Weber's rationalization, although Simmel associates this with the
city, rather than with the society as a whole, as do the other
classical writers
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Social types
• Simmel constructed a gallery of social types to complement his
inventory of social forms
• Fine-grained descriptions of such diverse types as "the mediator,"
"the poor," "the adventurer," "the man in the middle," and "the
renegade"
• Each social type is cast by the specifiable reactions and
expectations of others
• Types form through relations: people assign “other” a particular
position and expect him/her to behave in specific ways
• Types’ characteristics are seen as attributes of the social structure
• based on social position rather than categorical memberships
determined by individual attributes
• each social type is transposable to wide array of settings
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“The Stranger” (1908)
• The Stranger is perceived as being in the group but not of the
group
• The stranger is different from the “outsider” who has no specific
relation to a group and from the “wanderer” who comes today
and leaves tomorrow
• The stranger comes today and stays tomorrow
• The stranger is a member of the group in which he lives and
participates and yet remains distant from other – “native” –
members of the group
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Duality of the “Stranger”
STRANGER
remoteness / wandering
nearness / attachment
• The stranger is “near” in a spatial sense, but “distant” in a social
sense
• the distance of the stranger has to do with his “origins”
• The stranger is perceived as extraneous to the group and even
though he is in constant relation to other group members, his
“distance” is more emphasized than his “nearness”
• “The Stranger is an element of the group itself, not unlike the poor
and sundry ‘inner enemies’ - an element whose membership
within the group involves both being outside it and confronting it”
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Consequences & expressions of social position
• Social position has effects on the stranger and on other group
members
• Strangers often carry out special tasks that the other members of
the group are either incapable or unwilling to carry out (e.g., in
pre-modern societies, most strangers were involved in trade)
• Due to their distance from local factions, they might be employed
as arbitrators, even judges
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