A Great Sociologist
C., L.
The name of Georg SimmeI is barely known in America, and that only among professional sociologists. This is a pity, since Simmel is one of the handful of eminent European sociological...
...While for most present day theorists conflict is a special case requiring treatment— in both senses of the word—Simmel considers balance a special case...
...As Veblen would have put it, he is a disturber of the intellectual peace...
...The currently fashionable model is static...
...That is the role Simmel assumes in his essays, and the little volume under review may, one hopes, disturb some of the routinized pieties of present-day American social thought...
...This is a pity, since Simmel is one of the handful of eminent European sociological theorists whose work remains alive and significant...
...Without conflict, says Simmel, societies would decay into a sclerotic stasis...
...The name of Georg SimmeI is barely known in America, and that only among professional sociologists...
...The present volume contains, in addition to the conflict essay, a translation of a shorter piece, "The Web of Group Affiliations," which, while perhaps less important, certainly merits being available in English...
...The marginality of his own fate was perfectly clear to Simmel and his marvelous essay, "The Stranger," like a somewhat similar essay by Thorstein Veblen on "The Intellectual Preeminence of the Jews," may be read on two levels, as social analysis and an effort at self-analysis...
...But in the meantime, before he becomes fashionable and tame, this essay might still help teach young intellectuals that the absence of conflict, far from denoting social concord, actually indicates a deep disturbance in society...
...Far from being a merely "negative" element, conflict becomes, in Simmel's view of things, an element of the social structure that is as organic and necessary as harmony...
...An age that has found it possible to pervert Freud's profoundly pessimistic theory, in which the idea of an antimony between the individual and society is basic, into a book of recipes for "adjustment," may yet succeed in devitalizing Simmel's thought...
...The translations by Kurt Wolff and Reinhard Bendix are competent though they sometimes sacrifice elegance for literalness...
...The sick society stifles dissent, the vigorous society welcomes it...
...he lectured for almost thirty years at the Berlin University and though his courses attracted international attention he remained a privatdozent until a few years before his death, when he was accorded a full professorship at the University of Strasbourg...
...Georg Simmel was born in Berlin in 1858, the son of a prosperous Jewish businessman...
...he is not tied down in his actions by habit, piety and precedent...
...At a time when most of what passes for sociological theorizing consists either of painstaking investigations into the obvious or elaborate and formalistic system-making, it is particularly valuable to have Simmel's essay on Conflict translated into English...
...While current theorizing sees equilibrium as a natural and normal condition, and conflict only as a temporary departure from this condition, Simmel sees stability as the temporary balance of conflicting forces in interaction...
...Simmel's is profoundly dynamic...
...The stranger, says Simmel, "surveys conditions with less prejudice...
...his cri teria for them are more general and more objective ideals...
...While most current sociology seems committed to upholding order against disturbers of the intellectual peace, "common norms and values" against "deviants," the status quo against the very idea of conflict, Simmel shows the creative function of social conflict...
...His Jewish origin blocked the successful academic career that would otherwise have been open to him...
Vol. 2 • July 1955 • No. 3
