Georg Simmel

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Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel (1858-1918) was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of a successful businessman and the youngest of seven children. He formally studied philosophy and history at the University of Berlin, but Simmel was interested in a wide variety of topics including psychology, anthropology, economics, and sociology. This wide intellectual breadth and curiosity would characterize Simmel’s career as a social theorist, as he wrote on just about every social topic imaginable – love, crime, conflict, religion, money, urbanism, ethics, culture; you name it, Simmel probably wrote about it.

Simmel received his doctorate in philosophy from Berlin in 1881 and later took an unpaid lecturer position there in 1885. Simmel was a prolific writer of books, essays, and articles, many of which were as or more popular with the German public than the academic establishment. Along with his writings, Simmel was also renowned for his speaking abilities. He was an intense lecturer and a showman at the podium, and his lectures were well-attended by students and members of the general public. Simmel was well-known and respected as a great intellectual during his lifetime, gaining the admiration of several prominent contemporaries including Max Weber (Weber and Simmel influenced each others’ thinking greatly).

Despite all this recognition, Simmel always remained an outsider within the academic establishment. He was repeatedly denied full professorships and chairs of sociology throughout his career. Simmel’s outsider status was largely based on the fact that he was Jewish in an increasingly anti-Semitic Germany, but it was also partly about his eclectic interests and the fact that he preferred to write more for the general public than for academics.

Simmel died of cancer in 1918, shortly before the end of World War I, but his intellectual legacy has continued to flourish.

How Simmel Matters Today

The quintessential outsider, Simmel never developed what could be called “a school of thought.” But his ideas have heavily influenced a vast array of scholars including renowned sociologists like Norbert Elias and Robert Park, the great European philosophers Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber, as well as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Moreover, Simmel’s century-old ideas on the rise of the city, the tragedy of modern culture, and the generality of particular social forms and social roles in modern life still read like cutting-edge theory, even today. Simmel remains one of the most creative, wide-ranging, and prescient thinkers in social theory and, because of this, his writings continue to inspire.

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برچسب : نویسنده : isocial-mee بازدید : 120 تاريخ : سه شنبه 23 بهمن 1397 ساعت: 8:34