Social Forms

In everyday social life, we often focus on the content of our social interactions with others—for example, “what is the right thing way to react to my boss’ outlandish work demands?” or “what the heck was my husband thinking when he said that to me?” But, for Simmel, the task of the sociologist was less about looking at the contents that distinguish types of social interaction from one another and more about illuminating the shared social forms through which a variety of seemingly different interactions take place. For example, for Simmel, it isn’t the specific demands of your overbearing boss that are of primary sociological interest, but rather that the interaction takes the form of a relationship of domination and subordination, a social form that we can see taking shape not only between bosses and their employees, but also regularly between wealthy and poor, white and black, husbands and wives, and so on.

Simmel was interested in the fact that many different contents could take the exact same social form. Interactions within families, gangs, and businesses, for example, all regularly take on the social form of conflict. Conversely, Simmel noted that the exact same content (the desire for money, for example) could be expressed through a variety of social forms, like cooperation, for example, or competition, or outright warfare. By exploring the many forms by and through which we engage in social interaction, Simmel saw the sociologist as devising what he called a “geometry of social life.”

The Stranger

It’s often noted that many of Simmel’s concepts are characterized by combining seeming opposites into a synthetic whole. Simmel’s understanding of the stranger is perhaps the best example of this aspect of his thought (but so is the Tragedy of Culture, explained below). For Simmel, the stranger is a social role that combines the seemingly contradictory qualities of nearness and remoteness. The stranger is connected to the broader social community by only the most general (and generic) commonalities, yet is still relied on by large groups of people. By virtue of the stranger’s simultaneous nearness and distance from others, the stranger is often valued for his or her objectivity, for being able to take a distanced and dispassionate view of events and relationships. The stranger may also be someone we turn to, paradoxically, as a close confidant because their social distance from us prevents them from judging us too harshly.

The Tragedy of Culture

Simmel viewed human culture as a dialectical relationship between what he termed “objective culture” and “subjective culture.” He understood “objective culture” as all of those collectively shared human products such as religion, art, literature, philosophy, rituals, etc. through which we build and transform our lives as individuals. “Subjective culture,” in turn, refers to the creative and intelligent aspects of the individual human being, aspects of ourselves that Simmel argued could only be cultivated through the agency of external or “objective” culture.

The Tragedy of Culture, Simmel theorized, occurred as societies modernized and the massive amounts of objective cultural products overshadowed (and overwhelmed) the subjective abilities of the individual. Presented with more options than one person can possibly ever hope to experience in a lifetime, the modern individual runs the risk of stunting his or her social psychological growth.