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Chapter 12 is a close examination of the early philosophy of history of Georg Simmel (1858–1918). The first sections discuss Simmel's early intellectual development and the early influences on the development of his sociology. A separate section is devoted to Lazarus's and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie, which was an important development in the historicist tradition. The heart of the chapter is devoted to Simmel's early idealist theory of history, his views on the laws of history. A final section is devoted to his early historicist critique of ethics.

Georg Simmel, who is well known for his study of the emerging social conditions of sociality and its forms, developed the analysis of psychosocial feelings and emotional categories in order to grasp the phenomenology of socialization. His ideas on trust, more than those of any other scholar, are pertinent to the study and understanding of trust/fear in totalitarian and post-Communist societies. More specifically, Simmel's concept of trust is based on the self/other dialogical interdependence and psychosocial feelings; multifaceted meanings of trust/distrust in their cultural, historical, and political historical conditions; secrets as reciprocal relations and secret societies; and inductive knowledge gained through different forms of socialization. Totalitarian and semi-totalitarian political regimes thrive on distrust and promote a socialization that displays itself in psychosocial feelings of fear and suspicion. This chapter discusses social relations rather than economic relations, trust and language, socialization of distrust, socialization and totalitarianism, and secrecy in the Soviet bloc.

This chapter examines the status of the fledgling but burgeoning field of sociology from the waning days of the Kaiserreich through the last moments of the Republic. Two intellectual giants who did not live very long into the Republic's founding, Max Weber and Georg Simmel, set the agenda for the study of society in Weimar. The chapter suggests that it was the early demise of Weber and Simmel that permitted their heirs, most prominently Karl Mannheim, to render their writings canonical and to pursue the questions of modernity, rationalization, capitalism and the relationship of ideas and ideology to those phenomena with something like a common language—if not a language that facilitated intellectual consensus on any of these themes.

Through a comparison of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, this chapter identifies two patterns in how they conceived the relationship between modern capitalism and the Jews. On the one hand, modern economic life is described as the universalization of a Jewish spirit. On the other hand, modern capitalism is described as superseding Jewish contributions that made it possible. These two patterns, it is argued, reproduce in secularized form cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. The chapter suggests that cultural schemas derived from Christian theology shaped the thinking of Marx, Simmel, Sombart, and Weber by way of their religious backgrounds, formal schooling, and/or the philosophical tradition of German idealism. The chapter concludes that contemporary scholars should not abandon historical inquiry into the social carriers of capitalist rationality in favor of an ahistorical approach to economic life. Instead, social scientists must become more historical in a double sense: in regard to the groups they study, so as to avoid essentializing them, and in regard to themselves, so as to become more attentive to how the social scientist’s own internalized history shapes his or her vision and division of the social world.

This chapter examines the similarities and differences between the bohemian playwright, the urban sociologist, and the socialist politician in their assessments of prostitution, gender relations, sexuality, and respectability. Challenging bourgeois norms both from the outside and from within, these men helped shape the discourse on prostitution in Berlin: August Bebel, one of the early figureheads of the socialist movement; Georg Simmel, one of the founders of modern sociology; and the bohemian playwright and satirist Otto Erich Hartleben. While Bebel was certain that a socialist revolution would bring an end to prostitution and give new life to marriage, Hartleben and Simmel were wary of such radical change. All three men expressed sympathy for the prostitute, but it is in this sympathy that the ambivalence of their writings resides.

This chapter examines John Millington Synge’s use of photography in late Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. Drawing on the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, the chapter discusses Synge’s engagement with photography along with that of his contemporary John Joseph Clarke. Through a discussion of the shifting cultural practices of amateur photography and the industrialisation of camera technologies, the influence of street-photography on Synge’s writings are considered with particular reference to the politics of eye-contact in public spaces. These anxieties about ocular exchange became increasingly embedded within Edwardian modernity, and the cultural practices of street-photography became an arena through which face to face encounter between different classes and genders in urban space could be negotiated. This chapter suggests that Synge played out his own version of these apprehensions about ocular exchange and urban modernity through the use of photography in his ethnographic and journalistic writings.

This chapter examines how the groundlessness of language is converted into a tool for describing the groundlessness of art by focusing on Negro Sculpture (1915), Carl Einstein's text on visual art. It argues that Negro Sculpture was not a primitivist manifesto in any of the shopworn modernist senses; it was rather the result of a unique encounter between a lost wanderer and a set of uprooted objects. Far from abandoning the groundlessness of literature for the origin of art, Einstein instead discovered the former in the latter. This chapter suggests that groundlessness mattered in Negro Sculpture as both method and phenomenology and that Einstein's African sculpture ungrounded itself from the context into which it had been abducted. It also reads Einstein's Negro Sculpture in relation to Adolf von Hildebrand's relief and the freestanding sculpture of Georg Simmel's Auguste Rodin.

This chapter focuses on Theodor Fontane’s late “Gesellschaftsroman,” Der Stechlin. It explores his investment in divinatory readings via omens, anecdotes, names, and the natural world in earlier novels, and notes their changed function in this last novel, wherein futurity comes into question and ‘magic reading’ is recast in terms of Stimmung, sociability, and the “great connectedness of things.” An exegesis of Georg Simmel’s notion of “Geselligkeit” in relation to its magical, sympathetic properties and to Stimmung is deployed to help explicate Fontane’s model of sociability. Weakened connections to the future, the nonhuman world, and language are posed as symptomatic of the simultaneous fading of Fontane’s magical and realist worlds here at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Weimar Republic was one of the most fertile epochs in German philosophy, and its effects are still being felt today. The call for “new thinking” was shared by otherwise disparate approaches. The phenomenologists sought to find the “beginnings” of knowing in pre-scientific phenomena, while thinkers at the forefront of what would later be known as analytic philosophy found a new approach to philosophy in the analysis of language. A third approach took its starting point from the fact of culture and sought to find a new orientation for philosophy in the study of the historical world. This movement, known as “Kulturphilosophie” (the philosophy of culture), was often regarded as a more conservative approach to philosophy. This chapter highlights the characteristics of Kulturphilosophie. The discipline was pioneered by the sociologist Georg Simmel and perfected by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer especially in his monumental, three-volume masterpiece, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.

This chapter opens the dialogue of flirtations by offering six theses that draw extensively from and play on Georg Simmel's attempt to situate flirtation this side (the playful, artistic, sociable side) of seduction, followed by a caveat from the other side. It demonstrates how Simmel borrows from the philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant) and puts him into dialogue with twentieth-century thinkers (Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Barthes, and Luhmann). It addresses flirtation in Simmel as a gestural mode, to be distinguished from the explicit discursivity of love as discussed by Barthes or Luhmann. The six theses are: seduction may be an art, but only flirtation is art; love has its discourse; flirtation has its gestures; flirtation offers a unique mode of mitsein; flirtation is an advanced version of fort-da; flirtation is permanent extradecisionism; and flirtation is out of time.

This chapter presents a response to Paul Fleming's contribution “The Art of Flirtation: Simmel's Coquetry Without End”. It is divided into two parts. The first part is a close engagement with one of Fleming's six theses on flirtation and its textual basis in Simmel's “On Flirtation”. Specifically, it addresses Thesis 3: “Flirtation offers a unique mode of Mitsein.” It attempts to elaborate the problematic of relation (or “withness”) that Fleming opens in Simmel. The second part deals with the author's own caveat, which attempts to account for the specific exemplarity of flirtation as a topos for theory.

Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams’ (1860) offers a lyrical and dramatic re-inflection of an ill-fated investment made by the poet in the early 1840s. In this chapter, Tennyson’s poem, which frames a marital colloquy about financial misdealings with a resonant evocation of coastal scenery, is contextualised by reference to the nineteenth-century literary figure of the ‘confidence man’. The sociological ‘philosophy of money’ propounded by Georg Simmel and the Benjaminian concept of ‘caesura’ inflect this reading, while attention is also paid to the poem’s evocation of place as resonating with Tennyson’s response to the local coastal features of the Isle of Wight. This neglected text, the author suggests, is marked by what Angela Leighton more generally characterises as those Tennysonian ‘drowning places, of cavern and stream, of rumours, moans and melodies’ – places which offer a potent counterpoint to the poem’s overall theme of fiscal impropriety and compassionate forgiveness.

This chapter explores analogies between the law, the circulation of money and the circulation of linguistic signs. Theories of modernity (Simmel) see money as the universal measure of value; law also has this role, and requires that language provide a set of labels. This leads to an interplay between foreground and background, whereby some aspects of a case are held fixed, so that others can be interpreted in the light of the facts of the case itself. Language is required to play both these roles. It is required to provide an external and reliable frame of reference, yet in many cases it is also at the heart of the interpretative uncertainties. The distinction between ordinary language and legal language is thus highly unstable and reflects the interpretive dilemma of particular cases. Law appeals to fictions but also monitors and on occasion undermines its own fictions.

This essay examines the relationship between intellectual history, spatial analysis, and digital neogeography. It considers how intellectual history has or has not participated in various “spatial turns,” and tries to imagine the intersection of the two traditions in the future. It concludes with a case study of recent attempts to apply spatial theory and digital mapping techniques to the history of Europe’s Enlightenment.

This chapter traces the historical origins of social assistance (including social cash transfers) in North and South, and maps the field in conceptual terms. It is argued that the emergence of social assistance was part of the rise of the modern state, and later of the welfare state, involving a bureaucratization and nationalization of poverty. Since the 1990s and the 2000s, poverty and social assistance respectively have been ‘globalized’: international organizations have turned to the issue, and cash transfers have spread across the global South and have even become an electoral issue. Drawing on Georg Simmel and T. H. Marshall, the chapter shows that social assistance may involve exclusions and stigma, but can be a vital component of social citizenship rights if society recognizes the legitimacy of the claims of the poor. The chapter also shows how social assistance has contributed to social citizenship in European countries.

This chapter explores the concept of value in relation to human interaction and exchange. It first considers the linguistic and cultural etymology of the term “value” before turning to the sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, who in his book The Philosophy of Money regards money as a “category of thinking” that produces the impersonal relations from which the modern concepts of the individual, independence, and freedom emerge. It then discusses Nishida Kitarō's question of whether there is a common value judgment for the cultures of different nations. It also examines the ideas of Watsuji Tetsurō, who in his major opus Ethics offers a radically different understanding of relationality and its social consequences that ultimately derives from the logic and the corollaries of giving primacy to the betweenness of persons.

Beginning from the premise (discussed in the Introduction) that modernist description turns away from the form of a visualizing prose of things, this chapter takes seriously Henry James’s pervasive attention to things “in the air” in his late works. Arguing that the atmosphere of an interaction becomes a key object of James's attention, it challenges the prevailing critical opinion that he “underdescribes” by asking not only what kind of perception is blocked by his vague descriptions but also what kind of perception is enabled by them. Illuminated through a contrast with his contemporary and fellow enthusiast of atmosphere, Joseph Conrad, the chapter shows that in the Jamesian world the air is a key medium for communicating social facts and norms, capable of exerting influence and producing effects on the world while remaining ontologically elusive and unlocalizable. Moreover, the metaphorics of atmospheric and spatial inhabiting casts new light on James’s well-known architectural images, which he uses to describe the affective qualities of social relations. By bringing this elusive dimension of social experience within the descriptive scope of the novel, James exhibits a continuity with the social hermeneutic project of realist fiction, albeit keyed to a different aspect of the real.

Through Wilde, ephemeral sociality emerges as a full-fledged aesthetic project. Taking up the epigram, Wilde’s miniature signal literary form, this chapter shows how what Wilde calls the “burden” of other people gives rise to innovative social and literary modes of deferring their claims. Often passed over even by Wilde’s best critics as too slight or too embarrassingly catchy to bear critical weight, the epigram functions as a rhetorical crystallization of social transience, the means of inoculating the individual against the expansive forces of social determination Wilde’s work registers so vividly. At the heart of the passing exchanges central to Wilde, the epigram is image and instrument of both engaging the social and evading the more enduring forms of social life, thus also offering an emblem of the book’s intertwined formal and social concerns. Rather than dissolve social bonds altogether, however, Wilde’s work posits forms of association drained of their obligatory dimensions, new forms of promiscuous relationality that help the reader rethink social theory’s place in some queer theoretical work. Wilde underscores aestheticism’s affinity with what Georg Simmel terms “sociability,” the “play form of sociation,” and the epigram’s unexpectedly socializing function.