Response Paper

Introduction

Sociology is the study of human beings in relation to the groups, organizations and institutions affecting their lives. The sociological perspective encompasses a number of analytic tools designed to look beyond the obvious aspects of everyday life and to detect new levels of reality. As a member of the social sciences, which also include anthropology, economics, political science and psychology, sociology is rooted in moral philosophy. Its history an organized and systematic discipline is linked with the industrial and social revolutions of the eighteenth century and has become solidified in three major sociological traditions. The postwar period of the twentieth century played host to several new developments (Ritzer, pp. 11-99). The discipline was augmented with American pragmatism, became increasingly interdisciplinary, and adopted the scientific research process. Most recently, attempts to remove bias relative to gender and other measures of marginality have exposed sociology to the realm of postmodernism. This paper in connection to the sociology, will discuss the George Simmel's sociological theories.

Discussion and Analysis

Georg Simmel is a German sociologist and philosopher whose work has been influential on the Chicago tradition of sociology and has recently been rediscovered by scholars of consumer culture. His production is vast, and besides pure philosophical works, he wrote two key texts in sociological theory, often called the Große Soziologie and the Kleine Soziologie, as well as fundamental works on money (Philosophy of Money), metropolitan lifestyles, and fashion (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” and “Fashion” in On Individuality and Social Forms). Simmel's approach to sociology can be seen as a reflexive attempt to reject the organicist theories of August Comte and Herbert Spencer. Like Max Weber, Simmel favored an idiographic and interpretive method, namely, one concerned with historically situated events and human subjectivities, rather than a nomothetic one concerned with establishing general laws predicated on variables abstract from ordinary experience (Collins, 123-145). In particular, he proposes that society consists of a web of interactions and that it is the task of sociology to study the forms of these interactions as they occur in diverse historical periods and cultural settings, something that today is the province of so-called microsociology (Carter, 221-287).

From this chapter, I take away that Georg Simmel is, as he would put it, the stranger to or in a group of sociological theorists. It says in the reading that he is a stranger from the academy because of his odd teaching style, but I would say he is somewhat of a stranger in the society of sociological thinkers because his practices are very different from those of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Simmel says that the stranger is “freer practically and theoretically; he surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria for them are more general and more objective ideals; he is not tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent” (257) which is exactly how Simmel acts in regard to his teaching habits and his study habits. As it shows throughout this chapter, Simmel was always kind of the oddball thinker about ...