Introduction: Simmel in the Shadow of Darwin

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the natural and social sciences seemed to be on the verge of finding a new relationship to one another. Charles Darwin would famously signal this shifting accommodation in terms of the intimate affinity of evolution and economics in his Introduction to the first edition of On the Origin of Species (1859): ‘[T] he Struggle for Existence amongst all organic beings throughout the world, which inevitably follows from their high geometrical powers of increase […] is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms’ (Darwin 2003, 97). Darwin's inspiration from Thomas Malthus’ Essay on Population (1798) suggests that evolutionary biology can largely be conceived in economic, historical and sociological terms, insofar as both nature and society are treated as processes of conservation, growth, conflict and survival. Economic thought had already defined itself in terms of natural processes, such as the concern for how circular rhythms of the seasons, the physical needs of humans or the organic composition of the land may determine the circulation of goods or the value of profits, wages and rents. As Margaret Schabas points out, up to the nineteenth century ‘not only were economic phenomena understood mostly by drawing analogies with natural phenomena, but they were also viewed as contiguous with physical nature. Economic discourse was […] considered to be part of natural philosophy and not, as we would now deem it, a social or human science’ (Schabas 2006, 2). J. S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy (published in multiple editions between 1848 and 1871) appears to mark the turning point in which economic science, understood as the moral and psychological knowledge of social and institutional relations, is separated from the physical knowledge of the biological and climatological conditions of nations. Henceforth, natural philosophy (including evolutionary biology) would advance by adopting the vocabulary of economics while economics (including classical political economy) would become increasingly ‘denaturalized’ by developing its own methods of sociological analysis.

In this chapter, I situate Georg Simmel's career- long concern with the forms of association (Vergesellschaftung) and the life of interaction (Wechselwirkung) within the shift from classical economic science to its sociological and philosophical successors.