Postmodernized Simmel by Deena Weinstein Michael Weinstein

Author:Deena Weinstein, Michael Weinstein [Deena Weinstein, Michael Weinstein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317831587
Google: hrVlAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-12-19T04:56:54+00:00

The metropolitan mentality

Simmel’s 1900 masterwork, The Philosophy of Money, marked the decisive shift in his intellectual career from adherence to nineteenth-century positivistic and evolutionary perspectives on socio-cultural change to a more descriptive and phenomenological approach stressing the analysis of cultural forms. In The Philosophy Simmel had performed a Copernican revolution or inversion of evolutionary thought through working out the insight that societies embodied philosophies of value in their institutional life. Whereas neo-Darwinist theories had derived philosophical ideas from processes of economic, political, or technological development to which they gave their own progressive philosophical interpretations, Simmel sought philosophy directly in the practice of social relations; that is, he reached the understanding that doctrines such as Marx’s, Spencer’s, and Comte’s were themselves dogmatic philosophies which served as ideologies to mask the effective standards of judgment in modern society. The Philosophy of Money described and criticized the operative axiology or value theory of a money economy, which is why Simmel called it a philosophy and not a sociology: his work was an analysis of a living value theory which, despite the hopes of progressivism, had, through the medium of money, elevated quantitative value over any qualitative standards. The Philosophy anticipated Simmel’s late move to cultural history but it remained in the sphere of philosophical inquiry by virtue of its demystifying intention: it was the seedbed out of which his later and more precise investigations grew.

As Simmel cultivated the ground that he had worked in The Philosophy during the first decade of the twentieth century he turned his attention to what Karl Mannheim would later call the ‘sociology of mind’; that is, he endeavored to trace the mentality that he had found inherent in the money economy to its most general structural determinants. The major result of his effort was ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’ which exposes the functional relation of the modern mind to modern social organization. Here Simmel turned the tables on his project in The Philosophy, but he did not return to evolutionary naturalism. Rather, he undertook a phenomenological description of the social conditions in which the distinctive features of the urban mentality appeared. ‘The Metropolis’ gives the sociological answer to the question of how a philosophy of money is possible by showing what it is about social life that has favored the triumph of quantitative over qualitative judgment and what the consequences of that victory are for individual subjectivity. In his return to seeking a social ground for mentality Simmel voided sociological theory of any teleological import and freed it from any demystifying intention. He simply gave a pure description of urban society and its characteristic mentality, and provided a functional interpretation of their interrelations.

‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ might have been better entitled ‘The Conflict in Modern Society.’ The great theme of the essay, which would be reworked in ‘The Conflict in Modern Culture,’ is the struggle between individual and society, interpreted as an agonizing tension between what Simmel called ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ culture. ‘The Metropolis’ is the story

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