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Thinkers

Georg Simmel

Modern European · Europe · 1858 to 1918

German thinker who held that society is made of everyday forms of interaction, and that city life shapes how people think.

What it is

Georg Simmel (1858 to 1918) was a German sociologist and philosopher. He is known for studying society by looking at the everyday forms in which people deal with one another, and for applying that approach to money.

He was born in Berlin, taught at the University of Berlin from 1885, and in 1914 took a chair at Strassburg, where he died in 1918. He worked in the neo-Kantian tradition, and his essays on how people relate to one another inspired later qualitative work in sociology.

The main ideas

  • Forms of interaction. Simmel looked for the general, recurring shapes of social life that sit beneath particular activities such as politics, trade or art. He described social life in terms of forms and their contents.
  • Everyday relations. The forms he studied are the ways in which people deal with one another, in contrast to the particular political, economic or aesthetic activities in which those dealings take place.
  • Money. In The Philosophy of Money (1900) he applied his approach to economics. He argued that a growing money economy makes social activity more specialised and relations between people more impersonal.

What it looks like in practice

Picture someone watching two colleagues at a meeting, one giving orders and the other accepting them. Simmel would look past the particular people and the particular topic to the form itself, a relation of authority and obedience that shows up in a school, a shop, a family or a government. The same form can carry very different contents. He would say that if the people were swapped for others, the pattern between them would still be there, and that studying the pattern teaches more about society than studying each case alone. This is an illustration of his way of looking, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Berlin, 1885. He began lecturing in philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he stayed until 1914.
  • The Philosophy of Money (1900) is one of his notable works. It applies his general ideas to a single subject, economics.
  • Strassburg, 1914. In 1914 he took a professorship there and spent his last four years in the city.

Questions and criticism

  • What does money do? He saw a money economy as making relations more impersonal. Whether that frees people or flattens them is a question for the reader to weigh.
  • Whose subject is he? He taught philosophy, and he is described as both a sociologist and a philosopher.

Close neighbours

The page on Immanuel Kant shows the philosophy that shaped his approach. The page on Max Weber shows another German thinker of the same years who wrote on society.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Immanuel Kant · He asked in Kant's style how society is possible, and answered from forms of interaction. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Modern European thinkers

Sources we used

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