The social Theory of Georg Simmel

Bibliographic data

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

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

230 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL equivalent in money received. But the money economy has also permitted the growth of the free professions and made possible the functioning of civil servants. For these individuals there is no immediate relation between a spe- cific task or a specific service and the money received. The payment and the salaries of these classes are directed rath- er toward giving the individual as a whole a sufficiently high standard of living to enable him to fulfil his functions. In this case the function has also differentiated from the personality, although not so completely, and the mainte- nance of the individual becomes part of the economic world, while the single service or function does not find its immediate and specific equivalent in money. But, in the last analysis, this differentiation between the person and the object or function is still a differentia- tion within the latter. The money economy merely gives the different spheres of interest and activity of the indi- vidual a relative independence of each other. If money lifts the economic function out of the totality of the per- sonality, it remains none the less an activity of the indi- vidual. The opposite of the economic activity is merely the totality of the personality minus the economic function. What money does is to atomize the mental life of the indi- vidual, to individualize the different spheres within the individual. This is merely a continuation of the process of individualization and the growth of individual liberty within the group. The money economy has given the in- dividual a relative independence of the immediate inter- ests of his group, a relative self-sufficiency which finds expression in the pronounced individualism that accom- panies all money economy and that was as characteristic of imperial Rome and of Florence as it is of the present-day Western world. But money does not only lead to a liberation of the in-

Access restriction

Copyright

fullscreen: The social Theory of Georg Simmel

Monograph

Table of contents

Download

Monograph

This page

Image fragment

Citation links

Citation recommendation