Simmel's arguments in the Philosophy of Money on individual freedom and exchange-value seem... more Simmel's arguments in the Philosophy of Money on individual freedom and exchange-value seems to contradict Marx's arguments in Capital concerning exploitation and labour-value. At the same time, his ideas on the transformation of means into ends as the basis for a new style of life also complement Marx's examination of the dynamics of objectification, alienation, and reification in capitalist money economies. This essay elaborates on this divergence and convergence in the work of Marx and Simmel with reference to how they address the pace and tempo of modern life. To the degree that both thinkers left a lasting impression in the work of Georg Lukacs, some attention is also given to the implications of their ideas for post-Marxist critical theory. In short, the conceptual problem of capital conversion – the spatial-temporal process of valorization and transvaluation of life and labour through money and machines – provides the common ground between their approaches to ...
I. The Revival of Stoic Cosmopolitanism ............................................................ more I. The Revival of Stoic Cosmopolitanism ................................................................... 273 II. Liberal Cosmopolitanism Between Ideology and Utopia ................................... 278 III. The Civil Manners of Liberal Cosmopolitanism................................................. 285 IV. The Return of Kynical Cosmopolitanism?........................................................... 291
Georg Simmel has long been appreciated as a major theorist of the arts in society, as well as of ... more Georg Simmel has long been appreciated as a major theorist of the arts in society, as well as of aesthetic phenomena in general in social life. Yet Simmel’s essays in the area have remained dispersed for many years across the disparate parts of his corpus and have not been easy to survey in their full thematic cohesion and interconnection. This symposium article reflects on Austin Harrington’s comprehensive anthology of these writings in English, published in 2020, which assembles virtually all the relevant titles – many of them appearing in English for the first time. Among the central topics of discussion are Simmel’s fluid style of theorizing, his thinking about representation, reality and modernity in art, his relationships to philosophers and artistic personalities, and his legacy for the present.
Rather than refuting or challenging the claims by Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama to originality, the... more Rather than refuting or challenging the claims by Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama to originality, the objective of this commentary is to flesh out “existence theory” by extending its repertoire of examples and by expanding on its classical and philosophical sources. Drawing on precedents in canonical statements by Vico, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Marx, this response poses questions about the model’s implied assumption of a time-line that traces a “straight” path from the past to the present and future by invoking the alternative imagery of a circular history, cyclical time, or “queer” life course. To support this argument, contemporary queer theories are invoked to supplement the concept-metaphor of “existential milestones” with that of “existential cornerstones,” which do not always suggest that human development follows a single path or a binding timeline. The civil institutions of religion, marriage, and burial, as discussed by both classical sociologists and queer theorists, for i...
The concept of charisma is among the most successful cases in the social sciences of the reverse-... more The concept of charisma is among the most successful cases in the social sciences of the reverse-translation of a technical term from academic discourse into everyday speech (Derman, 2012:176–215). Weber’s distinctive approach to this idea perhaps surpasses the popular dissemination of Marx’s concept of alienation and Durkheim’s anomie, which have been stripped of their social and historical connotations and transformed into psychological cliches, and even Freud’s concept of the ego, at least in everyday speech where it refers to some kind of narcissistic control centre. By contrast, Weber’s classic keyword continues to carry much of the political and rhetorical charge it had in his later writings and speeches, and in his canonical definition in Economy and Society: ‘The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least, superficially ex...
... Recent readings of the Communist Manifesto in light of current world problems might be unders... more ... Recent readings of the Communist Manifesto in light of current world problems might be understood to confirm this speculation. Whether ...
If the impressive new wave of English language commentary is any indication, Max Weber seems to b... more If the impressive new wave of English language commentary is any indication, Max Weber seems to be back in fashion. 1 Metaphors of awe and veneration abound, along with repeated assertions of his contemporary relevance and importance. One veteran commentator dramatically characterizes Economy and Society-considered to be Weber's magnum opus-as a 'sacred object' for comparativehistorical sociologists, and Weber himself, their 'totemic animal'. 2 Another describes the whole Weberian oeuvre (more than thirtyfive volumes in the unfinished Gesamtausgabe, or Complete Works) as a 'deep, ill-lit cavern that faces the miner determined to dig out the seam of scholarly gold that has accrued around the name of 1 The five books reviewed will be cited as follows: 'CC' for Camic, Gorski, and Trubek; 'PCS' for Kim; 'NC' and 'CB' for Sica; and 'D' for Swedberg.
Three classics of sociology are discussed for how they treat music as a social symptom of moderni... more Three classics of sociology are discussed for how they treat music as a social symptom of modernity's rationalization process, as a conceptual model of modern sociality, and as a generic resource for sociological writing. Where parts of Max Weber's The Rational and Social Foundations of Music focus on the distinctive `ethos' of creative composition within the rise of modern music, passages in Georg Simmel's Schopenhauer and Nietzsche address the specific `logos' of modern performance as an autonomous expression of metaphysical will, and the final chapters of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk are concerned with the `pathos' of listening as a potential way of transcending social divisions. The social contexts, cultural contents, and personal motivations of these proto-sociologies of music are shown to articulate a contrapuntal or `lyrical' sociology which is attentive to the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural forms along with t...
Against the backdrop of contemporary discourses of "sustainable growth" and "cultures of waste", ... more Against the backdrop of contemporary discourses of "sustainable growth" and "cultures of waste", this essay considers the arguments of early sociologists concerning the relationship between subsistence economies of reproduction and sacrificial economies of symbolic exchange. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, Marcel Mauss and Thorstein Veblen each formulated influential accounts of the social barriers and physical limits to human life which find an echo in later cultural theories concerning economies of excess and overproduction in (post)modern societies. Rather than assess the empirical validity or theoretical accuracy of these arguments, this essay examines how factual descriptions of excess and decay can be read as sociological allegories of a world in ruins. The model for such a reading can be found in the work of another sociological classic, Georg Simmel, whose systematic account of the self-preservation and expansion of social groups anticipates his later more impressionistic and fragmentary reflections on "the tragedy of culture", understood as a struggle for individual autonomy against social and natural forces of objectification. Simmel and his classical contemporaries thus anticipate later thinkers who ask whether "the end of an era" should be understood as a terminal point, an ideal purpose, or a cyclical stage in the "progress" of history.
This essay takes Georg Simmel’s conceptualization of space as a form of sociation ( Vergesellscha... more This essay takes Georg Simmel’s conceptualization of space as a form of sociation ( Vergesellschaftung) in his 1908 masterpiece, Sociology, as a framework for critically re-reading two ninteetnth-century classics in the sociology of empire. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835/1940) is shown to illustrate Simmel’s understanding of social-spatial boundaries by portraying the cultural and historical geography of America as an ‘optic space’ of racial (in)equality. Similarly, Harriett Martineau’s study of morals and manners in Society in America (1837) exemplifies Simmel’s ideas on social-spatial sensibilities with its attention to how everyday settings serve as a kind of ‘acoustic space’ of gendered (un)freedom. Drawing on related arguments by recent thinkers and critics, and rectifying the relative neglect of how socio-spatial dynamics are addressed in the texts of classical sociology, the essay examines a description in each work of a particular personal encounter with ...
Using empirical research drawn from field studies on the policing of ‘skid row ’ communities, thi... more Using empirical research drawn from field studies on the policing of ‘skid row ’ communities, this paper illustrates some of the theoretical, methodological and ethical problems that confront the researcher who studies surveillance and counter-surveillance within these contested settings. We begin by noting how, with the increasing use of the ‘broken windows ’ policing model to regulate deviant individuals and to secure derelict urban spaces, researchers may be implicated in the use of surveillance and counter-surveillance by community stakeholders. Drawing examples from direct and covert field observations, field notes, and photographs, we demonstrate that there is a significant potential for the researcher to become identified as an agent of surveillance, and as a potential target of counter-surveillance, within such settings. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical, methodological and ethical implications of the researcher’s complicity in these dynamics for both the co...
Simmel's arguments in the Philosophy of Money on individual freedom and exchange-value seem... more Simmel's arguments in the Philosophy of Money on individual freedom and exchange-value seems to contradict Marx's arguments in Capital concerning exploitation and labour-value. At the same time, his ideas on the transformation of means into ends as the basis for a new style of life also complement Marx's examination of the dynamics of objectification, alienation, and reification in capitalist money economies. This essay elaborates on this divergence and convergence in the work of Marx and Simmel with reference to how they address the pace and tempo of modern life. To the degree that both thinkers left a lasting impression in the work of Georg Lukacs, some attention is also given to the implications of their ideas for post-Marxist critical theory. In short, the conceptual problem of capital conversion – the spatial-temporal process of valorization and transvaluation of life and labour through money and machines – provides the common ground between their approaches to ...
I. The Revival of Stoic Cosmopolitanism ............................................................ more I. The Revival of Stoic Cosmopolitanism ................................................................... 273 II. Liberal Cosmopolitanism Between Ideology and Utopia ................................... 278 III. The Civil Manners of Liberal Cosmopolitanism................................................. 285 IV. The Return of Kynical Cosmopolitanism?........................................................... 291
Georg Simmel has long been appreciated as a major theorist of the arts in society, as well as of ... more Georg Simmel has long been appreciated as a major theorist of the arts in society, as well as of aesthetic phenomena in general in social life. Yet Simmel’s essays in the area have remained dispersed for many years across the disparate parts of his corpus and have not been easy to survey in their full thematic cohesion and interconnection. This symposium article reflects on Austin Harrington’s comprehensive anthology of these writings in English, published in 2020, which assembles virtually all the relevant titles – many of them appearing in English for the first time. Among the central topics of discussion are Simmel’s fluid style of theorizing, his thinking about representation, reality and modernity in art, his relationships to philosophers and artistic personalities, and his legacy for the present.
Rather than refuting or challenging the claims by Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama to originality, the... more Rather than refuting or challenging the claims by Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama to originality, the objective of this commentary is to flesh out “existence theory” by extending its repertoire of examples and by expanding on its classical and philosophical sources. Drawing on precedents in canonical statements by Vico, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Marx, this response poses questions about the model’s implied assumption of a time-line that traces a “straight” path from the past to the present and future by invoking the alternative imagery of a circular history, cyclical time, or “queer” life course. To support this argument, contemporary queer theories are invoked to supplement the concept-metaphor of “existential milestones” with that of “existential cornerstones,” which do not always suggest that human development follows a single path or a binding timeline. The civil institutions of religion, marriage, and burial, as discussed by both classical sociologists and queer theorists, for i...
The concept of charisma is among the most successful cases in the social sciences of the reverse-... more The concept of charisma is among the most successful cases in the social sciences of the reverse-translation of a technical term from academic discourse into everyday speech (Derman, 2012:176–215). Weber’s distinctive approach to this idea perhaps surpasses the popular dissemination of Marx’s concept of alienation and Durkheim’s anomie, which have been stripped of their social and historical connotations and transformed into psychological cliches, and even Freud’s concept of the ego, at least in everyday speech where it refers to some kind of narcissistic control centre. By contrast, Weber’s classic keyword continues to carry much of the political and rhetorical charge it had in his later writings and speeches, and in his canonical definition in Economy and Society: ‘The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least, superficially ex...
... Recent readings of the Communist Manifesto in light of current world problems might be unders... more ... Recent readings of the Communist Manifesto in light of current world problems might be understood to confirm this speculation. Whether ...
If the impressive new wave of English language commentary is any indication, Max Weber seems to b... more If the impressive new wave of English language commentary is any indication, Max Weber seems to be back in fashion. 1 Metaphors of awe and veneration abound, along with repeated assertions of his contemporary relevance and importance. One veteran commentator dramatically characterizes Economy and Society-considered to be Weber's magnum opus-as a 'sacred object' for comparativehistorical sociologists, and Weber himself, their 'totemic animal'. 2 Another describes the whole Weberian oeuvre (more than thirtyfive volumes in the unfinished Gesamtausgabe, or Complete Works) as a 'deep, ill-lit cavern that faces the miner determined to dig out the seam of scholarly gold that has accrued around the name of 1 The five books reviewed will be cited as follows: 'CC' for Camic, Gorski, and Trubek; 'PCS' for Kim; 'NC' and 'CB' for Sica; and 'D' for Swedberg.
Three classics of sociology are discussed for how they treat music as a social symptom of moderni... more Three classics of sociology are discussed for how they treat music as a social symptom of modernity's rationalization process, as a conceptual model of modern sociality, and as a generic resource for sociological writing. Where parts of Max Weber's The Rational and Social Foundations of Music focus on the distinctive `ethos' of creative composition within the rise of modern music, passages in Georg Simmel's Schopenhauer and Nietzsche address the specific `logos' of modern performance as an autonomous expression of metaphysical will, and the final chapters of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk are concerned with the `pathos' of listening as a potential way of transcending social divisions. The social contexts, cultural contents, and personal motivations of these proto-sociologies of music are shown to articulate a contrapuntal or `lyrical' sociology which is attentive to the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural forms along with t...
Against the backdrop of contemporary discourses of "sustainable growth" and "cultures of waste", ... more Against the backdrop of contemporary discourses of "sustainable growth" and "cultures of waste", this essay considers the arguments of early sociologists concerning the relationship between subsistence economies of reproduction and sacrificial economies of symbolic exchange. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, Marcel Mauss and Thorstein Veblen each formulated influential accounts of the social barriers and physical limits to human life which find an echo in later cultural theories concerning economies of excess and overproduction in (post)modern societies. Rather than assess the empirical validity or theoretical accuracy of these arguments, this essay examines how factual descriptions of excess and decay can be read as sociological allegories of a world in ruins. The model for such a reading can be found in the work of another sociological classic, Georg Simmel, whose systematic account of the self-preservation and expansion of social groups anticipates his later more impressionistic and fragmentary reflections on "the tragedy of culture", understood as a struggle for individual autonomy against social and natural forces of objectification. Simmel and his classical contemporaries thus anticipate later thinkers who ask whether "the end of an era" should be understood as a terminal point, an ideal purpose, or a cyclical stage in the "progress" of history.
This essay takes Georg Simmel’s conceptualization of space as a form of sociation ( Vergesellscha... more This essay takes Georg Simmel’s conceptualization of space as a form of sociation ( Vergesellschaftung) in his 1908 masterpiece, Sociology, as a framework for critically re-reading two ninteetnth-century classics in the sociology of empire. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835/1940) is shown to illustrate Simmel’s understanding of social-spatial boundaries by portraying the cultural and historical geography of America as an ‘optic space’ of racial (in)equality. Similarly, Harriett Martineau’s study of morals and manners in Society in America (1837) exemplifies Simmel’s ideas on social-spatial sensibilities with its attention to how everyday settings serve as a kind of ‘acoustic space’ of gendered (un)freedom. Drawing on related arguments by recent thinkers and critics, and rectifying the relative neglect of how socio-spatial dynamics are addressed in the texts of classical sociology, the essay examines a description in each work of a particular personal encounter with ...
Using empirical research drawn from field studies on the policing of ‘skid row ’ communities, thi... more Using empirical research drawn from field studies on the policing of ‘skid row ’ communities, this paper illustrates some of the theoretical, methodological and ethical problems that confront the researcher who studies surveillance and counter-surveillance within these contested settings. We begin by noting how, with the increasing use of the ‘broken windows ’ policing model to regulate deviant individuals and to secure derelict urban spaces, researchers may be implicated in the use of surveillance and counter-surveillance by community stakeholders. Drawing examples from direct and covert field observations, field notes, and photographs, we demonstrate that there is a significant potential for the researcher to become identified as an agent of surveillance, and as a potential target of counter-surveillance, within such settings. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical, methodological and ethical implications of the researcher’s complicity in these dynamics for both the co...
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