Thinking with Simmel

A ‘Companion to Simmel’ must come to terms with the many ways in which Georg Simmel (1858– 1918) himself can be considered a ‘companion’ for understanding the complexities of modern life. Simmel's voluminous writings do not so much guide or direct readers on how to examine their experiences of change and continuity as much as they complement and form a counterpart to those experiences. At most, the intellectual distance he exemplifies offers a kind of means for probing and coping with the stresses and stimuli of contemporary existence. In a similar way, this volume does not offer a set of instructions or a comprehensive overview for reading Simmel's works, but rather, more modestly, it aims to accompany readers in their efforts to think and move through these works. Like a pet, a friend or a fellow traveller, this Companion follows some of the paths Simmel took in his journey to the very core of sociology, which he understood as the study of how the socius, generally speaking, holds together and falls apart. These contributions are therefore made in the spirit of Simmel's own pieces on ‘The Sociology of Sociability’ ([1917a] 1971) and ‘The Sociology of the Meal’ ([1910a] 1997), where he describes how the regard each of us has for ourselves is linked with the frequency and felicity we have of being together with others. The chapters that follow are therefore meant to participate in and sustain a conversation in our time that Simmel initiated in his own with friends, listeners and readers through his books, lectures and essays.

Compared to the mounting masses of works on other sociological giants like Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber, until recent years the Anglophone secondary literature on Simmel has remained somewhat scarce. While there may be several reasons for this relative neglect, it cannot be explained by his work remaining unfamiliar to an English- speaking readership. On the contrary, throughout much of the twentieth century Simmel was the only European classic to exert a lasting influence on North American sociology (Levine, Carter and Gorman 1976, 813).