What did Georg Simmel seek to demonstrate through his “formal” sociology?

However new you are to sociology it is probable that you have an idea, however vague and general, regarding what sociology is supposed to be about. It may be that you have an idea that sociology is 'about' people. And you would be right to think so. We might start then by noting that sociology is one of the human sciences and as such it is a subject to be distinguished from the so-called 'physical sciences'. Sociology is the study of humanity. However this description of sociology is only partially…

restrictions. There is evidence to suggest that he disliked serfdom. Even his father, Nicholas I, believed that serfdom was an “evil palpable to all,” and Alexander II was certainly even more liberally educated than his father. His arguably most fundamental reform was the emancipation of serfdom in 1861. As he said, “It is best to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until it abolishes itself from below”. This quote demonstrates his realization that reform was needed. Many saw serfdom as Russia's biggest…

Georg Simmel was born in 1858 and for the majority of his life lived in Berlin, Germany. He was the founder of the German Sociological Association. One area of his research included how our spiritual lives were shaped by our social and geographical lives, and in turn how our spiritual lives shaped our environments. Simmel argued that the people within a society build their lives on truth and that all truth is relational. He likened this process as a bridge that connects our separateness to create…

Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel: The Relationship between Society and the Individual Each of the four classical theorists Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel had different theories of the relationship between society and the individual. It is the objective of this paper to critically evaluate the sociological approaches of each theory to come to a better understanding of how each theorist perceived such a relationship and what it means for the nature of social reality. Karl Marx…

Structure, Agency, and Social Reality in Blumerian Symbolic Interactionism: The Influence of Georg Simmel Author(s): Jacqueline Low Source: Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Summer 2008), pp. 325-343 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.2008.31.3.325 . Accessed: 31/03/2015 20:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor…

INTRODUCTION Georg Simmel and Max Weber will first be addressed individually to outline their lives and their works. Even though Simmel and Weber both were born in the same country, they led different lives. The obvious differences among Simmel and Weber are seen in their younger years of their lives. While their works are different, they may have been working for a similar result. Simmel and Weber are now considered to have made an historic impact in the sociological world. Their individual…

1. Introduction. While Simmel is generally not regarded as being as influential in sociology as were Marx, Weber, Durkheim, or even Parsons, several of the early United States sociologists studied with or were influenced by Simmel. This was especially true of those who developed the symbolic interaction approach including writers in the Chicago school, a tradition that dominated United States sociology in the early part of this century, before Parsons. Georg Simmel (1858-1918, Germany) was born…

. Introduction Sociology is described by Layder (2006, p.1) as being “How the encounters of everyday life and individual behaviour influence, and are influenced by, the wider social environment in which we live” Bauman & May (2001. p.1) describe a visual image of the output of sociology, as being a “collection of books in a library”. The discussion within this collection broadly follows main concepts and perspectives, with many authors, but also of key peer tested Authors. I will initially…

studied, have had varying ideas of what culture in society is. However, we examined each article with a central theme in mind being “culture is about meaning-making”. Though meaning making has a general definition that will be discussed later, each writer addressed it differently. The contribution each of these writers has had to our course has been very important when looking at the aspect of culture in society. First, we must address the question of, “What is meaning-making?” Meaning-making is…

What is sociology? We can start by saying that sociology is the systematic study of human society. Sociology should be more than you find in a good documentary on a social issue. It is certainly more than listings of facts and figures about society. Instead it becomes a form of consciousness a way of thinking, a critical way of seeing the social. Seeing the general in the particular. In his short book ‘Invitation to Sociology’(1963) characterized the sociological perspective as seeing the general…