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Georg Simmel. (1908) 1950. “Excerpts on Truthfulness, Relationships, Secrecy, and the Secret
Society.” Pp. 307-376 (Chapters 1-4) in The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, IL:
Free Press.
The most fundamental sociological problem is one of making “forms of sociation”
(Vergesellschaftungsformen) explicit, Simmel counseled his fellow sociologists. At issue are not
the particular contents of sociation, but its self-sustaining dynamic form. In this reading Simmel
discusses martial and societal secrecy within modern civil societies—that is, societies
characterized by public scrutiny and associated reduction in occasions for privacy, and potential
secrecy. The idea is that people are simultaneously motivated toward socialization and
individualization (i.e., respectively toward cooperatively preserving the form and competitively
embodying the content of their sociation). For example, modern marriages lapse into habits,
devoid of content, if partners come to believe they have nothing more to give (no more secrets to
reveal to) each other. Likewise, “secret societies” afford members occasions to express their
autonomy from the normative order of the larger society within which they exist but without
which their self-important contents would lack appeal.