While far-reaching intellectual influences changed the face of sociology in the 1980s, the development of sociology in the 1990s was first and foremost shaped by a concrete social and political transformation, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Soon after the German reunification, East German sociology almost entirely disappeared and West German sociology extended to the East. The triumph of capitalist society fostered a brief comeback of modernization theory. As the system change came along with severe social problems, theories and research projects focusing on social exclusion, precarious work, and xenophobia moved to the center stage of sociological thinking. The first decade of this century again brought about major changes for society and sociology. Market logic increasingly dominated social and education policy; economic thinking and its involvement in political affairs was on the rise and may have contributed to a marginalization of the influence of sociology on policy making. Characteristic is a further specialization and differentiation, visible through the multiplication of special sociologies. The landscape of sociological theory in Germany continued to change: Earlier, grand theories were dominant, whereas nowadays a trend toward sociological diagnoses of contemporary society can be observed. Overall, contemporary sociology in Germany can be characterized by the following features: (1) historically and philosophically informed sociological theory has always been and still is important, (2) German sociology lacks self-confidence compared to US-American sociology, (3) German sociology has a critical attitude and a strong tradition of public sociology, (4) self-critical debates and internal controversies have always existed and still persist in the field of German sociology. Most recently, this could be observed in the splitting off of the Academy of Sociology from the German Sociological Association and the accompanying debates.

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Georg Simmel’s political position has rarely been discussed explicitly – perhaps because many scholars have assumed that Simmel was ‘apolitical’ before 1914. The present article shows that even before 1914 Simmel held a distinct political position, to wit a peculiar kind of liberal-Nietzschean aristocratic individualism. This individualism is the result of a passage through ‘the hard school’ of egalitarian socialism in order to reach true individuality. It is closely related to Simmel’s central theorem of the so-called ‘individual law’. After a socio-historical contextualisation of Simmel’s political thought, the article follows this motif in detail through his diagnosis of the times, his theory of socio-cultural development, his engagement in cultural politics, his ideal of personality formation and his engagement in the bourgeois women’s movement. Simmel’s thought culminates in a conception of ‘dialectic aristocratism’. In this respect, the normative core of Simmel’s political standpoint is very close to Max Weber’s position. The last section argues that Simmel’s war writings do not mark a break in his political thinking, but rather apply the same theorem of the ‘individual law’ to the German state. Through its various stages, the article shows that Simmel’s political orientation, linked to key theoretical concepts, is deeply rooted in the educated bourgeoisie’s worldview and habitus.

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