David Frisby

The Philosophy of Money.

Acknowledgements Foreword to The Routledge Classics Edition Preface to the Third Edition Introduction to the Translation Analytical Part 1. Value and Money 2. The Value of Money as Substance 3. Money in the Sequence of Purposes Synthetic Part 4. Individual Freedom 5. The Money Equivalent of Personal Values 6. the Style of Life Appendix: The Constitution of the Text

Simmel and Leisure

It should not be surprising that Georg Simmel (1858–1918), one of the first sociological analysts of modernity and metropolitan experience, should also have concerned himself in direct and roundabout ways with the problem of modern leisure. This is not least because his social theory, grounded in the study of forms of social interaction or sociation, enabled him to view society as the totality of social interactions, as a complex web of interrelationships and social interactions, within which one could legitimately focus on any interaction, however fleeting and insignificant, and both arrive at its connection with any other interaction as well as view it as the locus of the meaning of the totality of interactions.1 Simmel’s aesthetic sensitivity to the tempo, rhythm and symmetry of social interactions, so distinctive a feature of much of his sociological writings — especially after his seminal article on ‘Sociological Aesthetics’ (1896)2 — suggests the influence of an aesthetic distance which he himself practised. Was it perhaps part of the psychological defence mechanisms with which he argued metropolitan dwellers should go armed in order to withstand the tumultuous shocks of endlessly new impressions and encounters in big-city life? Certainly leisure is often seen as an escape, a distancing, either physical, social, mental or aesthetic, from the demands of external life, or as Simmel would have it, from the growing objective culture.

Georg Simmel’s Concept of Society

I would like to draw attention to the diversity of Simmers conceptions of what was once viewed as a foundational question in sociology, without whose satisfactory answer it was often claimed the discipline could not exist: namely, the concept of society. Simmel is one of the first sociologists who sought to secure grounds for the new discipline of sociology without having recourse to the then — and often subsequently — seemingly unproblematical answer: sociology is the study of society. Indeed, Simmel maintained that only by abandoning society as a hypostatized and totalized object could sociology develop successfully as an independent academic discipline.

Georg Simmel and the Study of Modernity

If it is true that all major social theorists and sociologists since the mid-nineteenth century have sought to delineate and sometimes explain the origins of that which is “new” in modern society, then why might we wish to single out the endeavours and contribution of Georg Simmel in delineating the study of modernity? If we turn to classical social theorists and sociologists, then we do indeed find important attempts to investigate modernity. Marx, for instance, highlights three dimensions of modernity: as the revolutionary new destruction of the past, as the ever new destruction of the present and as the ever same reproduction of the “socially necessary illusion” of the commodity form as a barrier to a qualitatively different future. Marx’s investigation of modernity goes in search of the laws of motion of capitalist society that will explain the phenomenal and illusory forms in which that society appears to us, especially in the sphere of circulation and exchange of commodities. What is largely absent in Marx’s analysis is the detailed investigation of the phenomenal forms, of “the daily traffic of bourgeois life”, of “the movement which proceeds on the surface of the bourgeois world”, of how individuals actually experience modernity in everyday life.

Introduction to Georg Simmel's `On the Sociology of the Family'

The Introduction to Simmels early article on the family locates it in the context of his sociological concerns in the 1890s. The article is also placed in the context of his probable anthropological sources. Brief mention is made of some of his other contributions to the study of love and eroticism.

Reviews : Wilhelm Dilthey (trans. Ramon J. Betanzos), Introduction to the Human Sciences: an attempt to lay a foundation for the study of society and history, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1989, paper £10.95, 386 pp

Caplan, P. (ed.) (1987) The Cultural Construction of Sexuality , London/New York. Flandrin, J. (1979) Families in Former Times: kinship, household and sexuality , Cambridge. Foucault, M. (1980) The History of Sexuality , Harmondsworth. Jackson, M. (1987) ’Facts of life, or the eroticization of women’s oppression? Sexology and the social construction of heterosexuality’, in P. Caplan (ed.) The Cultural Construction of Sexuality ,London/New York, Ortner, S. and Whitehead, H. (eds) (1981) Sexual Meanings: the cultural construction of gender and sexuality, Cambridge. Shepherd, G. (1978) ’Transexualism in Oman?’, Man 13 (1). Weeks, J. (1977) Coming Out: homosexual politics in Britain from the 19th century to the present, London.

Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin

Fragments of Modernity provides a critical introduction to the work of three of the most original German thinkers of the early 20th century. In their different ways, all three illuminated the experience of the modern in urban life, whether in mid-19th-century Paris or in Berlin at the turn of the century or later as the vanguard city of the Weimar Republic. They related the new modes of experiencing the world to the maturation of the money economy (Simmel), the process of rationalization of capital (Kracauer), and the fantasy world of commodity fetishism (Benjamin) - in each case focusing on those fragments of social experience that could best capture the sense of modernity.David Frisby is Reader in Sociology at Glasgow University. Fragments of Modernity is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

The Alienated Mind: The Sociology of Knowledge in Germany 1918-33

that on the controversy surrounding the sociology of knowledge in Germany, for here Frisby introduces to an Englishspeaking audience the otherwise inaccessible debates at the German Sociological Congresses of 1924 and 1928 and, more importantly, the critical reviews of Mannheims Ideology and Utopia. Frisby notes the paradox that, in the works of a sociology developed as a response to the crises of German society, one searches in vain for any concrete analysis of that society. A similar criticism might be made of Frisbys work. His justification for the exegetical approach of the book is that the concerns of the sociology of knowledge are most likely to be made intelligible if they are considered in the context, intellectual and social, of their time, but it is the intellectual rather than the social context which Frisby delineates and it is difElcult to imagine how, employing such a method, it could have been otherwise. In consequence, little light is shed on the practical, pedagogical mission of the sociology of knowledge which Frisby rightly believes to be so important.