The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies documents the richness, variety, and creativity of contemporary international research on Georg Simmel’s work. Starting with the established role of Simmel as a classical author of sociology, and including the growing interest in his work in the domain of philosophy, this volume explores the research on Simmel in several further disciplines including art, social aesthetics, literature, theatre, essayism, and critical theory, as well as in the debates on cosmopolitanism, economic pathologies of life, freedom, modernity, religion, and nationalism. Bringing together contributions from leading specialists in research on Simmel, the book is thematically arranged in order to highlight the relevance of his oeuvre for different fields of recent research, with a further section tracing the most important paths that Simmel’s reception has taken in the world. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities, and to sociologists, philosophers, and social theorists in particular, with interest in Simmel’s thought.
Author(s): Gregor Fitzi
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Notes on contributors
General introduction
PART I: Biography
1. Simmel’s life: an unexplored continent
PART II: Sociology
2. Simmel’s resonance with contemporary sociological debates
3. Relations, forms, and the representation of the social life: Georg Simmel and the challenge of relational sociology as Lebenssoziologie
4. Boundaries as relations: Georg Simmel’s relational theory of boundaries
5. The actuality of a sociological research programme
PART III: Philosophy
6. Relativism: a theoretical and practical philosophical programme
7. The art of complicating things
8. Georg Simmel, Hans Blumenberg, and philosophical anthropology
9. Simmel’s ‘late life metaphysics’
PART IV: Art and aesthetics
10. Art and knowledge in Simmel’s thought and writing style
11. Social aesthetics
12. Philosophy of art
13. Framing, painting, seeing: Simmel’s Rembrandt and the sense of modernity
PART V: Literature and theatre
14. Literary practice and immanent literary theory
15. The Goethean heritage in Simmel’s work
16. Simmel: the actor and his roles
PART VI: Essayism and critical theory
17. Georg Simmel and the ‘newspaper sociology’ of the 1920s and 1930s
18. Georg Simmel and critical theory
PART VII: Topics of debate
19. Freedom: an open debate
20. Georg Simmel’s theory of religion
21. Georg Simmel: war, nation, and Europe
22. Simmel’s cosmopolitanism
23. Economic pathologies of life
PART VIII: Lines of reception
24. Simmel’s American legacy revisited
25. Goffman, Schutz, and the ‘secret of the other’: on the American sociological reception of Simmel’s ‘das Geheimnis des Anderen’
26. Traces of Simmel in Latin America: modernity, nation, and memory
Index
