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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76 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL ment, in the history of religions and in that of art. The first point to be determined, therefore, is what competi- tion means as a pure form of human behavior, what kind of relationship between individuals it really is. But, apart from this, sociology must be able to answer the following questions: Under what circumstances does it come into existence? How does it develop? What modifications does it undergo through the peculiar character of its object? Through what contemporary formal or material delimita- tions of society is it intensified or retarded? How does competition between individuals differ from that between groups? The method of sociology is therefore like the method of the social sciences, but applied to a field of investiga- tion which is obtained by abstracting the forms of sociali- zation from the total social actuality. It is because this abstraction must precede that in the application of the method there arise difficulties of technique. There is no unquestioned technique available by which this process of abstraction can be guided and the fundamental sociological concept applied. The technique of the investigation is therefore not free from intuitive and subjective aspects. The methodological necessity for keeping the three as- pects of the social phenomena separate and distinct is crossed by the difficulty of maintaining the series inde- pendent of one another and by a desire for a composite pic- ture of the actuality which shall harmonize all three. Some problems will seem to belong now in one category and now in another, and even when they are definitely recognized as belonging to the one or the other, the complete abstrac- tion is perhaps never possible. Poverty may be regarded merely as a material condition of certain separate individ- ual existences, but it may also be regarded as a sociological phenomenon. It may be viewed as the result of certain

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