Chapter 5 - The Real as Relation: Simmel as a Pioneer of Relational Sociology

Summary

Introduction

The relation between the individual and society has long been one of sociology's key concerns. It is a widely accepted view among scholars that it is insufficient to limit one's analysis on either the level of individuals or that of large macro- scale social forces or structures alone. This idea is the cornerstone of C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination ([1959] 2000), for example. Mills insists that the individual and society cannot be understood apart from each other. On one hand, the individual is an upshot of society and its historical dynamics. And, on the other hand, with their lives and actions individuals also affect – to a lesser or greater extent – the making of society and the course of its history. For Mills, the crucial contribution of sociological imagination, then, is to connect biography and history. The sociological imagination amounts to ‘the capacity to shift from one perspective to another’ ([1959] 2000, 7), from the individual to the social and back. Mills maintains that the sociological imagination makes it possible to understand broad historical changes from the perspective of what they mean to the lives, fates and experiences of individuals, and what the individuals could do about the prevailing state of affairs. It is along these lines that Mills stresses the public and moral mission of social scientific studies. For him, the political task of the social scientist is ‘continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals’ ([1959] 2000, 187).

As we know, Simmel, too, was preoccupied with the problem of the individual and society, actually pretty much throughout his career (though in his philosophy of culture the conflict was replaced by that between subjective and objective culture and in his life- philosophy by the contrast of life and form). In Grundfragen der Soziologie ([1917], in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe 16, hereafter GSG), for example, Simmel sketches three different sociological approaches to it: general sociology, pure sociology and philosophical sociology.