Social Objectivity and the Third in Georg Simmel Sociology

Possibilité d’approche des sociabilités au temps de la mondialisation ?

Abstract

The concept of “third” – that is, a social presence outside person-to-person relationships – appears in various texts of Georg Simmel. Without being systematically conceptualized by the author, this notion nonetheless helps us to understand which idea of the social world lies beneath his sociology. From the analysis of two chapters of Simmel’s Sociology, we clarify this notion in a way to show that instead of reducing society to a sum of interactions, Simmel’s sociology rather implies holistic aspects. In a second part, we argue that such a notion of the “third” is useful in many ways for the study of contemporary global societies, in the line of Vincent Descombes's holistic conception of society