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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238 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL life of our period is the fact that in many fields objective culture has outrun personal culture. The things which form the factual contents of our lives, such as household goods, means of transportation, products of science, art, and technique, have become much more cultivated, while personal culture, at least of the higher classes, has not ad- vanced to the same degree. Our language has been greatly enriched; yet the writing and speech of individuals has be- come more careless, trivial, and worthless. The machine has become more intelligent than the workman. The ad- vance of objective over subjective culture which occurred in the nineteenth century found expression in a change in educational ideals. The eighteenth-century education, in so far as it aimed at the formation of cultured individuals, was directed toward the development of inner values and personal qualities. The cultured individual of the nine- teenth century was an individual with an extensive knowl- edge of the objectivity and of the forms of objective be- havior. This discrepancy is merely one of the phenomena which indicate the strange relationship between social life and its products on the one hand and the fragmentary contents of the individual existence on the other hand. In language, morals, political structure, religious dogma, literature, and technique, there has accumulated the labor of countless generations. They form the substantialized spirit of the past, the crystallized thought of our ancestors, in which a single individual participates as much as he will or can without ever being able to exhaust it. It is this objectiva- tion of cultural values in special structures which guaran- tees their permanence and continuity, which creates the social heritage. But for that objectivation, each genera- tion would have to start anew. But it is also that objectivation of these cultural prod-

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