Simmel’s approach to sociology differs from those of Comte and Durkheim in that he rejects the notion that one can study society as a whole and attempt to discover its laws of evolution and development. Society is a moral and cultural enterprise involving the association of free individuals, and therefore must be approached differently from the way in which we study nature and nature’s laws in the physical sciences. For Simmel, society is made up of the interactions between and among individuals, and the sociologist should study the patterns and forms of these associations, rather than quest after social laws.

Simmel attempts to capture the complexity and the ambiguity of social life by viewing it dialectically. Although individuals are free and creative spirits and not the mere objects of social determination, they are nevertheless part of the socialization process and play a role in its continuation. It is this dynamic tension that Simmel wishes to capture in his social theory. Simmel’s explorations of social forms and social types place the reader in a vortex of interactions. Thus, for example, Simmel’s typology of the stranger not only addresses the marginality of the person who exists on the fringes of a group, but also describes how the stranger becomes an element of the life of the group when its members seek to confide in the stranger. The marginality of the stranger connotes a role that is in but not of the group. Thus the stranger can have detachment and objectivity and be sought after by the group members as an intermediary or as someone who can keep secrets. It is this interactive relationship, from the perspective of the individual and the group, that Simmel so effectively captures in his writings.

Simmel began his inquiries from the bottom up, observing the smallest of social interactions and attempting to see how larger-scale institutions emerged from them. In doing so he often noticed phenomena that other theorists missed. For example, Simmel observed that the number of parties to an interaction can effect its nature. The interaction between two people, a dyad, will be very different from that which is possible in a three-party relationship, or triad. Within a dyadic relationship, each individual can maintain his or her identity. When one party to the interaction is no longer interested in maintaining it, the relationship is over. As soon as another person is added, however, the situation and its possibilities change markedly, and group structures which are separate from and influence the individuals involved begin to emerge. Two of the people can form a group against the third, one person can become the mediator or the object of competition between the remaining two, and so on. Simmel saw the forms of these interactions as entailing similar options and strategies whether one was dealing with roommates, nation-states, or corporate groups.

Simmel was very interested in and troubled by this relation between the individual and society, and he was particularly acute at relating the most intimate details of individual psychology to larger social structures. Modern civilization in his view was both an aid and a hindrance to the free development of the individual.

Simmel’s reflections on culture and alienation as well as his writings on the philosophy of money point to his willingness to write about weighty themes that have moral implications. But Simmel does not moralize: He approaches his subject dialectically and analyzes the tensions that define the modern experience.

Modern society has moved to liberate individuals from the stifling constraints of earlier forms of association. Urban life today allows individuals to play a variety of roles in different social spaces thereby enhancing freedom from the constraints of a fixed, static, and communal life of an earlier era. Yet the price of this freedom is to be found in the increasing sense of alienation that people experience in respect to the culture of urban life.

The latter theme forms the focus of the essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," which appears on the following pages. On the one hand, Simmel sees the modern emergence of cities and cosmopolitan living as having freed individuals to an unprecedented degree from the narrow constraints of small town life, a promising development; on the other, the impersonal nature of city life, especially its tendency to cause people to treat others merely as means toward ends, and in purely monetary terms, threatens to become an alienating structure that would dominate and distort this new found individualism. The essay is a good example of Simmel’s eclecticism: He borrows heavily from Durkheim in his analysis of the relation between personality type and the division of labor, and from Marx in his discussion of alienation and objectification. In the end, however, he comes closest in his overall vision, to Weber’s pessimistic view of the "iron cage," seeing the new metropolitan way of life as threatening to personal freedom and the quality of mental life.

Georg Simmel was born in 1858 in Berlin, the youngest of the seven children of his prosperous and cultured Jewish parents. After graduating from the German equivalent of high school, the Gymnasium, he studied at the University of Berlin, then a locus of intellectual activity in central Europe. Although he was officially a philosophy student, Simmel quickly acquired what was to be a lifelong taste for intellectual eclecticism, studying a broad array of disciplines including history, social psychology, art, anthropology, and sociology, and cultivating a mild contempt for academic procedures such as extensive footnoting and the establishment of strict disciplinary boundaries.

This rebelliousness and the refusal to limit himself to a single academic subject, combined with the considerable anti-Semitism of German university administrations, caused Simmel significant setbacks in his academic career. After receiving his doctorate he became a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1885, and despite the many books and articles he was to write, the international fame he was to acquire during his years there, and the efforts of many of his fellow professors, including Max Weber, to obtain him a professorship, he was repeatedly to be denied a regular academic appointment. It was not until 1914, four years before his death, that Simmel received a normal professorship, at the University of Strasbourg, and even this achievement was marred by the fact that the university shut down almost immediately with the outbreak of World War I.

Despite his ostracism from mainstream academic life, Simmel became a noted figure in the intellectual circles of Berlin and even worldwide. Because he was one of the most brilliant lecturers of his day, his classes were not only favored by students but became intellectual events, with many of the cultural elite of the city in attendance. He was friends with many of the leading intellectual figures of the day, including Max Weber and Edmund Husserl, and he was a frequent guest at dinner parties and social events. Many of his six books and over seventy articles were translated into English, French, Italian, Polish, and Russian.

Simmel has had an enormous effect on sociology and is considered perhaps the major founding figure of microsociology. His influence has been particularly strong in America. Albion Small, a translator of several Simmel articles, Robert Park, who studied with Simmel in Berlin in 1899 and 1900, and George Herbert Mead (Chapter 6), who reviewed Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, all played a major role in the founding of the Chicago School and its main theoretical bent, symbolic interactionism (Chapter 13).