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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CONCLUSION 269 ences seemed to monopolize all the energy. What should have been a means had become an end in itself, and the sociologists were hardly less satisfied with their institu- tional genealogies than the Greeks were with their personal genealogies. It might therefore easily be maintained that from the point of view of science, the concept of social evolution has done more harm than good. The great advance of the nat- ural sciences is perhaps to a large extent due to the fact that they were well under way before the evolutionary viewpoint invaded scientific thinking in those fields. An- other element which has no doubt contributed is the fact that they have always been imbued with a spirit which was directed toward ultimate practical results and not toward the discovery of material for philosophic or historical spec- ulation. Modern chemistry would not be where it is today if most of its energy had been spent in trying to find out how the lead atom has developed out of the helium atom in the course of time. That problem indicates the existence of an- other legitimate field of inquiry, but it does not mean that the inquiry regarding the properties of elements is of no importance. It is because chemistry has been directed pri- marily toward the processes of function and not toward the process of growth that it has reached a stage where it is of practical value and can supply the answers to ques- tions regarding the means to definite ends. In the medical sciences, the great advance is due in similar fashion to the study of functional processes as independent of species, and not primarily to evolutionary biology. The evolutionary viewpoint, which in practice turned out to be merely a reversed teleological viewpoint, has led in the social sciences to an emphasis on the time series and a neglect of the timeless aspect. And even the study of the

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