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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THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP 211 - p [|= © {- 1= d ts 1- a= at al nt he it is ~f le. i- rN) —- 0. al ut no ot r= $8 at «d en d- 10 ne eS he know his customers and the more is his interest exclu- sively directed toward the price that he can make them pay. The more impersonal his relations are with the con- sumers, the more are his efforts directed toward the purely financial results of his labor. Apart from the widest spheres for which the work can be done only with labor that de- rives its stimulus from an abstract idealism, the worker will put less of his own person into his work and have less of an ethical interest in it in proportion as the relation to his customers becomes less intimate. With the expansion of the group for which he works, he becomes more indiffer- ent about his personal relations to that group, and there disappear a great many factors which might counterbal- ance his individual economic egoism. It seems that human nature and human relationships are so constituted that the individual must rely on himself and is thrown back on his own resources if his relationships surpass a certain number. This holds not only for the quantitative extension of the circle, which must necessarily reduce the personal interest of the individual in each point of the circle. It holds also for the qualitatively increasing manifoldness within the circle, which also prevents the per- sonal interest from attaching itself to one point. This mu- tual paralyzation of conflicting demands on the social sym- pathy leaves the individual egoism as sole survivor in the field. It is, however, an exceptional case, which occurs only if the group surpasses a certain limit.! It will be sufficiently evident from the foregoing exam- ples that the correlation between individual differentiation and sociological expansion is manifest in countless social situations. The relationships which it synthesizes may be found coexisting, in sequence, or alternating; but these are but minor variations of the same fundamental correlation. ! Soz., pp. 746-59.

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