Suchergebnisse

Originally published in 1993, this book opens a new and major line of interpretation, showing that Georg Simmel is the essential sociologist of the postmodern age. The authors trace the important contributions that Simmel's writings can make to current studies of intellectual ethics, textual methodology, sociological theory, philosophy of history and cultural theory

With regard to the American presidency, the prestige media perform the primary function of nonpartisan interested mediation between the president and his supporters and the loyal opposition to the president. This article draws on the formal sociology of Georg Simmel as a theoretical background, the American prestige newspapers as a resource, and the presidency of G. W. Bush before and immediately after 9/11/01 as a case study. When, as in the instance of the crisis following the 9/11 skyjackings, there is no partisan opposition to the president, the prestige media take up that role as interested mediators to try to ensure what they as representatives of hegemonic capitalism consider to be the proper functioning of the office.

A selective appropriation of postmodernist theories is undertaken with special reference to their applicability to macrosociology and to other branches of sociological inquiry that employ conceptions of social and cultural totality. The appropriation is premised on the thesis that theories of culture, such as postmodernism, can contribute to sociology by their analyses of cultural form, providing sociology with general descriptions of what social processes must mediate and with guidance on how to grasp its own cultural form(s). Three notions of cultural totality, "bricolage" (Claude Lévi‐Strauss), "discursive formation" (Michel Foucault), and "deconstruction" (Jacques Derrida), are considered. All have in common a description of cultural form that stresses nonsystematic order. They are contrasted to Talcott Parsons'modernist and systematizing macrotheoretic reflection on culture and society. A deconstruction of Parsons yields the alternative of a less‐than‐systematic, postmodernized (macro)‐ sociology.

George Simmel's sociology was only one expression of his overall project of understanding the modern human condition. Works such as "The Metropolis and Mental Life" have been appropriated by sociology for their substantive insights. These works are more fully understood when they are interpreted in terms of Simmel's late philosophical writings, which are based on an image of man as standing between boundaries and therefore of being a boundary for them. In light of the boundary dialectic the metropolis becomes, for Simmel, a symbol of the failed mediations attempted in modernity between the objective culture of things and the subjective culture of personal development.

A contribution to the theory delineated by Georg Simmel in "Sociology of the Senses: Visual Interaction" (Park, R. E., & Burgess, W. W. [Eds], Introduction to the Science of Sociology, Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1969). Specifically, how social relations are visually constituted through gaze or glance is examined, comparing Simmel's account of the pure form of mutual glance, through which individuals are primordially united beyond the bounds of speech, & Jean-Paul Sartre's description of the look through which human beings objectify one another, again outside of spoken language. It is argued that Sartre & Simmel illustrate two fundamental sides of human sociality, which must be dialectically related to one another in order to provide an adequate phenomenological description. The account is grounded in a set of specific social phenomena that exemplify the operation of the gaze in constituting sociality. 7 References. Modified AA.