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Simmel ► Simmel's approach to sociology can best be understood as a self-conscious attempt to reject the organicist such as the theories of Comte ► He advanced, instead, the conception that society consists of a web of patterned interactions, and that it is the task of sociology to study the forms of these interactions as they occur and reoccur in diverse historical periods and cultural settings ► Simmel rejected both the organicist and the idealist schools. He did not see society as a thing or an organism in the manner of Comte or Spencer, nor merely as a convenient label for something that did not have "real" existence. In his view, society consists of an intricate web of multiple relations between individuals who are in constant interaction with one another: "Society is merely the name for a number of individuals, connected by interaction." ► The larger superindividual structures--the state, the clan, the family, the city, or the trade union--are only crystallizations of this interaction, even though they may attain autonomy and permanency and confront the individual as if they were alien powers. The major field of study for the student of society is, therefore, sociation, that is, the particular patterns and forms in which men associate and interact with one another. ► Sociology, as conceived by Simmel, did not pretend to usurp the subject matter of economics, ethics, psychology, or historiography; rather, it concentrated on the forms of interactions that underlie political, economic, religious, and sexual behavior. ► the student of warfare and the student of marriage investigate qualitatively different subject matters, yet the sociologist can discern essentially similar interactive forms in martial conflict and in marital conflict. ► Although there is little similarity between the behavior displayed at the court of Louis XIV and that displayed in the main offices of an American corporation, a study of the forms of subordination and superordination in each will reveal underlying patterns common to both Form and Content ► ► his distinction between the form and the content of social phenomena is not always as clear as we should like. He gave variant definitions of these concepts, and his treat ment of particular topics reveals some obvious inconsistencies. The essence of his thought, nevertheless, is clear. It attempts to show that however diverse the interests and purposes that give rise to specific associations among men, the social forms of interaction in which these interests and purposes are realized may be identical. For example, both war and profit-making involve cooperation. Inversely, identical interests and purposes may crystallize into different forms. Economic interests may be realized in competition as well as in planned cooperation, and aggressive drives may be satisfied in various forms of conflict from gang warfare to legal battles ► ► Simmel constructed a gallery of social types to complement his inventory of social forms. Along with "the stranger," he describes in great phenomenological detail such diverse types as "the mediator," "the poor," "the adventurer," "the man in the middle," and "the renegade." Simmel conceives of each particular social type as being cast by the specifiable reactions and expectations of others. The type becomes what he is through his relations with others who assign him a particular position and expect him to behave in specific ways. His characteristics are seen as attributes of the social structure. ► For example, "the stranger," in Simmel's terminology, is not just a wanderer "who comes today and goes tomorrow," having no specific structural position. On the contrary, he is a "person who comes today and stays tomorrow. . . . He is fixed within a particular spatial group . . . but his position . . . is determined . . . by the fact that he does no belong to it from the beginning," and that he may leave again. The stranger is "an element of the group itself" while not being fully part of it. He therefore is assigned a role that no other members of the group can play. ► The stranger and the poor, as well as Simmel's other types, are assigned their position by virtue of specific interactive relations. They are societal creations and must act out their assigned roles.