Simmel, Georg

Bio Sketch

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was a German sociologist and philosopher, a founder of formal sociology, known for his analyses of modern urban life, money, and social forms. His essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) and The Philosophy of Money (1900) profoundly influenced Walter Benjamin and the wider tradition of urban and everyday-life theory.

Key Works

• "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) — the metropolitan type, the blasé attitude, the money economy, and the hypertrophy of objective culture.
• The Philosophy of Money (1900) — the money economy as the reduction of quality to quantity.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Blasé Attitude
• Modernity
• Everyday Life
• Spectacle (indirect — the levelling of distinctions by money)

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Simmel matters to Geoffrey's everyday, capitalism & urbanization, and spectacle areas: his sociology of the modern metropolis — the blasé attitude, money as the "frightful leveller," and the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture — provides a founding sociological account of metropolitan everyday life that prefigures Benjamin's arcades and flâneur, and offers a pre-spectacular diagnosis of the levelling of distinctions that the wiki's critical sources extend.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• The Metropolis and Mental Life
• Benjamin for Architects
• Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — Simmel named (with Norbert Elias) among the cultural sociologists for whom the everyday became significant in the first decades of the 20th century.