Chapter 3 - Modernity as Solid Liquidity: Simmel's Life– Sociology

Summary

Introduction

Today, it is still customary in the secondary literature to interpret Simmel's lifephilosophy as denouncing his sociology and to regard his mature cultural project as distinct from the sociological one. The challenge for the present chapter consists in assessing Simmel's mature work as an extension of his concerns and ideas from 1890 to 1908. The research that developed thanks to the impetus from the edition of Simmel's collected works (Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, hereafter GSG) already offered significant contributions to overcome the classical prejudices about the ‘development phases’ of Simmel's reflection (Frischeisen- Kohler 1919). What is lacking, however, is still a compact presentation of the relation of the reciprocal integration between Simmel's ‘early’ and ‘late’ work as successive contributions to sociological theory. The notion of ‘solid liquidity’ should capture and present the core of Simmel's thought on the dynamics of social life and social forms starting from his crucial contribution to the sociological theory of modernity, that is, the theory of money in the Philosophie des Geldes. In contrast to Bergson – or currently to Bauman – who claim ‘liquidity’ as the central category for the understanding of modernity and disregard solidity, Simmel founds his sociological theory of complex societies on the need to inquire into the open- ended dialectics between societal liquefaction and solidification. Complex societies cannot be regarded, as Parsons suggests, as ‘social buildings’, because social structure is produced as a living framework of relationships in an everyday process of establishing and dissolving the action- frames of reference. The solidity of the social fabric thereby draws on its liquidity. Sociology has to inquire into the tension- fraught relationship between social action and social structure to assess how the former grants the validity of the latter, that is, how social creativity develops, institutionalizes and destroys social forms. To show the steps Simmel takes to develop his theoretical construction, this chapter is divided in sections devoted to the following topics: 1. The concept of complex societies as ‘solid liquidity’. 2. The theoretical approach of life- sociology. 3. The ‘solid liquidity’ of social structure. 4. The ‘liquid solidity’ or creativity of social action. 5. The ‘culture conflict’ as the crucial integrating institution of complex societies.