No. 5 (2009): Georg Simmel, environment, conflict, globalization

Coordinated by Grégoire Lits.

Often considered as the unsung father of sociology, Georg Simmel proposes a specific sociology that consideres individuals as the “immediate and tangible places of all historical reality” This affirmation that sums up the main characteristic of his practice of sociology has often been wrongly interpretated as a methodological individualism. Contrary to a widespread conception, Simmel’s sociology is not one in which norms, social constraints and even society are absent.

The specificity of his sociological vision lies in the never-ending analytical articulation between the individual who is, when he acts, “assaulted by strange subjective states” and who is, at the same time, always part of a set of reciprocal actions that possess a formal and objective existence. What is a stake in simmelian analysis is to grasp such duality of human lives in its modernity, to seize this modern condition as Danilo Martuccellu calls it. Individualism is only possible in the crystallization of a tension within action between subjective experience and subjective globality. If the individual is the tangible place of all historical (and thus social) reality it is because the overlooking objectivity in society can only function when confronted subjectively to such objectivity – that is, to other individuals. This is why, according to Simmel, we are all caught in “reciprocal actions”.

Drawing from here, the articles proposed in this issue of Émulations all answer to the question of how this vision of the social life – of the modern condition – can allow us today to grasp in a renewed way what individuals previously experienced.