Abstract
It has taken 101 years, but finally we have a complete English translation of Georg Simmel’s masterpiece, the collection of essays known simply as Sociology. For classical sociology this is the last of the major unfinished translation projects. It is an important publishing event, completing the translation into English of the major works of Durkheim, Weber and Simmel.
Published in 1908 in Leipzig by Dunker & Humblot as Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, the original text was never revised by Simmel. However, after his death in 1918 it went through six editions with minor variations, all carefully cataloged in the authoritative version now published as Volume 11 in the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (Suhrkamp, 1992). The present translation is based appropriately on Simmel’s original 1908 text.
The history of Sociology in its German original and in English translation is a complicated affair. Simmel acknowledged in a letter to Célestin Bouglé (March 2, 1908) that the composition of the text had taken fifteen years, a reference to its starting point in the essay “The Problem of Sociology” of 1894. Simmel placed an extensive revision and expansion of that early essay, a product of his first Berlin lectures on the subject (attended by Bouglé), at the beginning of Sociology. The text that followed was a compilation and revision of more than twenty essays published between 1894 and 1908, the vast majority after 1905. Many of these essays appeared in English or French and Italian translations. In the United States, Albion Small published nine of Simmel’s essays or selections from his work in the American Journal of Sociology between 1896 and 1910, translating eight himself. Some of these selections became part of the early sociological canon: “Superiority and Subordination as Subject-Matter for Sociology,” “The Sociology of Conflict,” “The Sociology of Secrecy and the Secret Society,” and “How is Society Possible?” In France, René Worms promoted Simmel’s work, while Émile Durkheim published part of “The Persistence of Social Groups” (Comment les formes sociales se mainteinnent) in L’Année Sociologique, partly in a failed effort to draw Simmel into the orbit of Durkheimian sociology.
Simmel struggled with the text, first trying to articulate a clear definition of the field and its epistemological and methodological foundation, and then making an effort to give the partial sociologies the kind of thematic coherence and grounding he had achieved earlier with The Philosophy of Money (1900). He was never completely satisfied with the results. Nor was his relationship to sociology without ambivalence. At times he saw himself having a career as a sociologist, already in 1893 negotiating with Northwestern University over such an appointment. But six years later he was complaining to Bouglé about his reputation outside Germany as a sociologist, insisting “I am a philosopher, see my life-work in philosophy and engage in sociology only as a secondary specialization” (December 13, 1899; GSG 22: 342). The “great project” kept starting and stopping. Finally in 1905 his enthusiasm for the sociological project returned, and over the next four years Simmel wrote and revised hundreds of pages of text, publishing seventeen essays separately and incorporating all of them in the final version of Sociology. It is the concentrated engagement of these essays on particular topics written in rapid-fire succession that permeate the spirit of the whole, even though the initial foundations come from earlier work. The new material forced Simmel to rethink the foundations too, leading to what Otthein Rammstedt has called his “Kantian turn”: the overcoming of both positivism and psychologism through a conception of social forms not as external frames for action, but as conditional possibilities of social action realized through interactions with the knowing subject. The method of composition also helps explain the unusual juxtaposition of subject-matter chapters and the excursus—ten of the former, and thirteen of the latter. Simmel justified the mode of presentation by noting that in working through the particulars the reader would perceive the unity and coherence of the whole, while warning in the “Foreword” that his singular mode of questioning, the Fragestellung or problem of the first chapter, would have to be grasped continuously in Sociology “because otherwise these pages could appear to be an accumulation of incoherent facts and reflections” (p. ix). The warning was at least perspicacious: the consequences of ignoring it have haunted the work ever since, leading scholars familiar with Simmel, such as Talcott Parsons, to set it to one side.
Simmel’s work entered American sociology in three waves: before World War I thanks largely to the work of Albion Small and Robert Park; immediately after World War II through the efforts of Kurt Wolff, Lewis Coser, and Donald Levine; and then starting in the late 1970s through the translations of Guy Oakes, David Frisby, Tom Bottomore, Horst Helle, Deena and Michael Weinstein, and others. For the influential second wave the major accessible translations of parts of the text were Kurt Wolff’s selections from Chapters Two, Three and Five (plus three excursus) in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Free Press, 1950), and Wolff’s and Reinhard Bendix’s translation of Chapters Four and Six as Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations (Free Press, 1955). Selections from these and other chapters also appeared in Wolff’s Georg Simmel, 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays (Ohio State, 1959), and Donald Levine’s widely-used reader, Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago, 1971). Notwithstanding the success of these texts in introducing postwar students to Simmel’s contributions, the scattered nature and sequencing of the translations rendered the reconstruction of his arguments difficult, and often did little to counter the impression of Simmel as an unsystematic, if brilliant master of the topical essay. Wolff’s The Sociology of Georg Simmel is problematic, for example, by placing at the beginning a complete translation of one of his last texts, the so-called “minor” sociology, Grundfragen der Soziologie (1917), then following with fragments from the “major” Sociology of 1908 that exclude the first chapter, “The Problem of Sociology,” which Simmel thought essential to understanding his vision of the field. Overcoming such deficiencies and making sense of the logic and biography of the work has long been exceptionally difficult for those without access to the original. From that standpoint alone a translation of the complete text offers the promise of recovering Simmel’s intentions and the problematics of his work.
What I have called the third wave of interest in Simmel was a legacy of socio-cultural changes stemming from the 1960s. It swept through sociology, but also beyond the discipline to domains Simmel would have thought of as “philosophical sociology” or simply “philosophical.” This last movement of thought essentially ignored the textual problems of Sociology, instead focusing attention on Simmel either as an astute “diagnostician” of the times, a path-breaking modernist, a phenomenologist of modern life, or a postmodern enthusiast avant la lettre for whom characterizations like “fragmentary” and “ambivalent” were badges of honor. The advantage of illuminating these hitherto unexamined regions of Simmel’s thought, such as his writings on women and sexuality or his reflections on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, were a broadened appeal and an opening onto a range of problems in contemporary culture and cultural analysis. In these settings Simmel now seemed to be in touch with the Zeitgeist and to speak the language of the times. Yet his explicit contribution to sociology continued to remain at a distance, so to speak, an often poorly remembered collection of comments on various “social forms”—interesting perhaps, but hardly essential.
The translators of Sociology want to correct this imbalance in the reception of Simmel’s work. Their ambitious aim is a text written “in twenty-first century standard English” that will “make Simmel accessible in ways he has not been heretofore” (p. xiii). To reach this goal they might have based their text on previous translations, as did Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich in editing and translating Weber’s Economy and Society. Instead, they have proceeded on their own; their translation of the text is entirely new. Why? One reason is that there are indeed special problems in translating Simmel that require a consistent approach. It is not only a matter of finding a settled vocabulary for major concepts. There is the more formidable challenge of converting Simmel’s idiosyncratic syntax and grammar into readable prose. Simmel was aware of the difficulties of his stylistic habits, commenting on them to editors, such as Martin Buber as he sought to bring clarity to Simmel’s phrasing in Die Religion (1906). Simmel often stretched conventions in the German language governing noun and pronoun references, adjective endings, declension of articles, case and gender—as if searching for a new linguistic form to express his most complex thoughts. Thus, the other important reason for translating de novo is to try to achieve something not done before: to capture that new mode of expression, to present a Simmel whose language has come of age in the present and for the future.
In view of such purposes and complexities, the translators of Sociology have proposed what might be called a “semantic” translation that is accurate, conceptually consistent, true to the original metaphors, yet rendered into readable contemporary English. They have with good reason avoided the freer paraphrasing of previous translations, favoring their own “project of giving Simmel himself a voice” (p. xvi). But they have also avoided the stilted literalisms that would sometimes leave the reader guessing at Simmel’s meaning.
Have they succeeded in retrieving Simmel’s own voice and making his work accessible in new ways? There are obvious advantages to having the ten chapters of Sociology in their intended format, with the methodological preliminaries of “The Problem of Sociology” followed by the substantive problematics. The rationale for the various excursus then becomes clearer as commentary on specific problems that appear at the boundary of the kind of social interaction under discussion. Returning to the overarching design helps us see that to interpret Simmel’s contribution as only a “formal sociology” is to elide his emphasis on the ways in which social relations are constituted through interaction. Much of Simmel’s text is really about social processes, their generation, development, distinctive characteristics, and consequences for individuals and group life. The text unfolds by way of abstract generalization alternating with concrete illustrations which then provoke further generalization. Moreover, like the translation of The Philosophy of Money by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, the text now possesses a stylistic unity and coherent rhythm that can make it a pleasure to read. The language is gender-inclusive, as Simmel often intended it to be, and more archaic locutions are rendered in a modern idiom. This is no small accomplishment. It may well be, as Horst Helle mentions in his introduction to the translation, that native speakers will end up preferring Simmel’s Soziologie in English translation.
As for the conceptual building blocks, the translators have chosen to handle the noun Vergesellschaftung, an essential and ubiquitous relational concept for Simmel and Weber, in a somewhat unconventional way. Small used the misleading term “socialization,” while Wolff preferred the more precise, but less intelligible “sociation.” In Economy and Society, Roth and Wittich favor “association” or “associative relationship.” In the new Sociology, this term for the formation of social relationships is sometimes “association” and in other contexts “social interaction” or “creating society,” the different usages governed by whether Simmel is referring to the creation or construction of a social form (as in the subtitle), or to the process of social interaction. While it is true that Simmel uses Vergesellschaftung in both senses, the elasticity in the English-language concept can have mixed results. For example, when we read in the chapter on conflict that “every pattern of interaction among people is an association” (p. 227), the leap in clarity over Small’s “every reaction among men is a socialization” is dramatic and obvious. But when we turn to Simmel’s characterization of sociology and read “it would inquire only into these interworkings [Wechselwirkungen], these kinds and forms of social interaction [Vergesellschaftung]” (p. 23), the gain is less convincing. Wolff’s version—“it must exclusively investigate these interactions, these kinds and forms of sociation”—has the advantage of maintaining the precision of Simmel’s terminology and the logical relationship between “interaction” and “association.” There is, of course, no perfect solution to such terminological and conceptual problems. Though it is a minor quibble, there is nevertheless something to be said for consistently translating these foundational concepts as “interaction” and “association,” while letting the interpretive emphasis emerge in the mind of the reader.
Considering the strengths of the new translation, it is unfortunate that the publisher has chosen to divide the text into two volumes with a price tag well beyond the means of most scholars. As of this writing the best one can do on Amazon.com is a used copy for $260. It should go without saying that the labors of translation will go unnoticed and unappreciated without access to the results. Having reunified the text and modernized the translation, what we now need is an affordable one-volume paperback edition of Simmel’s Sociology, equivalent to that marketed by Suhrkamp for a mere 22 Euros. For the English-language audience anything less will leave Simmel’s sociological masterpiece where it has been for generations: known not as a timely treatise, a coherent whole and first-hand; but as a dated commentary, an assemblage of fragments and by report.