Georg Simmel’s political thought: Socialism and Nietzschean aristocratism

Abstract

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.

Import and export of ideas: Georg Simmel in Chicago, George M. Beard in Berlin

“…Simmel was the one who had pointed out a certain mentality peculiar to city dwellers. His remarks were still in the tradition of German cultural criticism and certainly took up several motifs from the Nietzschean hatred of cities (Moebius, 2023). It was in Chicago that they finally found their most enthusiastic readers, who not only freed this text of its sceptical tone, but also transformed it into a tangible and workable research programme.…”

Strangeness as home. Georg Simmel in Berlin

“…Despite his sympathy for social and gender-related issues Simmel became a partisan of individualism (Moebius, 2023). The concomitant question of "How is society possible?"…”

“…Despite his sympathy for social and gender-related issues Simmel became a partisan of individualism (Moebius, 2023). The concomitant question of “How is society possible?” (Simmel, 1971a, 1992a [1908]) thus reads as “How is individuality possible?” (Müller, 2015).…”

Women of courage and the seedbed of autonomy in modernity: On the transnational influence of cultures on social structure in the work of Rose Laub Coser

“…. ., namely that it would first take a passage through economic, political and legal ‘egalitarianism‘ for the real differences and natures of the sexes to emerge and come to the fore.” (Moebius, 2023: 16.) Moreover, Simmel discussed the role of the women’s movement as an example in his essay on cross-cutting circles that is of core conceptual relevance for the work of Laub Coser.…”