The social Theory of Georg Simmel

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1024612627

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-166627

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Spykman, Nicholas J. http://d-nb.info/gnd/124229867

Title:: The social Theory of Georg Simmel

Place of publication:: Chicago

Publisher:: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Year of publication:: 1925

Scope:: XXIX, 297 S

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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12 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL merable minor forms of relationship and types of recipro- cal action between persons. Although these are perhaps trivial if viewed separately, in reality they constitute in aggregate that network of relationships which surrounds the larger formations and creates the actual unity of soci- ety. The actual life of society cannot be construed from the structures which constitute the traditional subject- matter of the social sciences. It would be a mere aggregate of discontinuous systems if it were not for the intermedi- ate operations of the innumerable smaller synthetic proc- esses. Sociology therefore has to concern itself also with the thin threads of those minor relationships. It is the continuous repetition of these minor interactions which builds and supports the great objectified structures; and these primary processes which build society out of the im- mediate individual elements must therefore be investi- gated in a manner similar to that in which we investigate the more complex processes and their objectified forms. From this extension of the investigation to the minute processes of socialization we may expect an advance in our knowledge and understanding of the social life similar to that made in physiology since the beginning of micros- copy. Investigation before that time had been confined to the large and separated organs. Since then the life- process has appeared in its relation to its minute bearers, the cells, and has been identified with the innumerable and incessant reciprocities between them. The major or- gans, in which the life-bearers and their reciprocities have assembled in special tissues and functions, would never have made the unity of life intelligible if those countless processes which play between the minutest elements had not unmasked themselves as the real, the fundamental life.l 1 Soz., pp. 18-21: Soz. Diff, p. 16.

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