PERSON
Georg Simmel
The Berlin sociologist who built a formal science of human interaction from its simplest social forms—
the stranger, the dyad, the web of affiliations, the tragedy of culture—and whose framework turns out to be the most precise sociology available for understanding what AI does to the social texture of human intellectual life.
Georg Simmel is the sociologist who studied the shapes of human togetherness before their contents. Born in Berlin in 1858 and spending most of his career at its university, he founded
formal sociology—the study of the recurring structures of social interaction, independent of the particular purposes those interactions serve. A handshake, a dyad, a secret society, and a fashion trend all involve the same form of reciprocal action even as their contents differ absolutely; the form is what sociology can analyze. His major works—
Soziologie (1908),
The Philosophy of Money (1900), and the essays collected across his career—produced a gallery of social forms so precisely described that they have survived every theoretical fashion since his death in 1918.
The Stranger,
the metropolis,
the tragedy of culture,
the crossing of social circles,
conflict as sociation,
the sociology of secrecy