Sociology, the game
(transcription of a round played on 10 December 2015; Weber/Simmel)
Barbara Thériault
Département de sociologie, Université de Montréal, Canada Rosalie Dion
Département des sciences sociales, Collège Bois-de-Boulogne, Canada
Corresponding author:
Barbara Thériault, Département de sociologie, Université de Montréal, 3200 rue Jean-Brillant, Montreal, QC, H3T 1N8, Canada
Email: barbara.theriault@umontreal.ca
Abstract
In the following transcription, the reader will witness the progress of a board game invented and played by two sociologists. In the round of ‘Sociology, the game’ described here, the two players chose to play two classical sociologists, Max Weber and Georg Simmel. Upon
picking Question cards relating to different themes (on concepts, writing, and methods, among others), they answer with their authors in mind, translating their approach in contemporary language and trying to respond to some of today’s problems. As the game moves on, the reader will observe that the players engage in a dialogue and seem increasingly concerned with the sociological form and the place of imagination in doing sociology: moving back and forth between each author’s stance and their own concerns as contemporary sociologists, the game helps them at once to bring two different thinkers closer together, and to gain perspective on current issues in doing and writing sociology. The reader will note that the format of the game provides an interesting laboratory of ideas, while not precluding humour and entertainment.
Keywords
Weber, Simmel, sociological form and writing, Kracauer, feuilleton, journalism
Introduction: presenting the game
Invited to write a dialogue on Weber and Simmel, Thériault and Dion decided to create a game, the object of which is to shed light on sometimes overlooked questions concerning the nature and mechanics of sociological thinking and writing. They wanted to examine and
— mostly — to confront the works of classical sociologists. This is the transcription of a round of the game played in December 2015 in a Scottish library.
A colourful board had already been set up on the table (see picture 1 below) when the two players took their places. IOn its squares were categories similar to the ones we find in dividing sections of sociological manuals (methods, themes, forms, concepts, ethics) and cards with questions that could well be found on examination papers in the subject. The idea of the game seemed simple enough: after choosing one author each, the teams — or players, in this instance — confront this author’s approach bearing today’s concerns in mind. While the game can be played using any sociologist known to all players (and its creators later stated that they hoped for, and encouraged, the addition of women), the selection of Weber and Simmel on this occasion brought forth specific questions: on writing and form, on imagination and literary devices, on the loci of publication, and on institutional constraints.
At the heart of this game of sociology, the reader might detect an idea, or maybe a plea: for a rigorous yet creative, elegant yet entertaining, sociology. What would Weber’s and Simmel’s takes on such an agenda be, ask the two players, and what — if anything — can this tell us about the object and method of their versions of sociology as well as ours? Clashes were to be expected, of course, as each player answered with his or her author in
mind.
Figure 1. The board of the Sociologist’s game. [insert figure 1 here]
The game and its rules
The set comprises: a board, playing pieces, Question and Duel cards, and Jokers. A playing piece is chosen by each player, the choices ranging from Marx to Bourdieu and including names such as Simmel, Weber, Schütz, Goffman, Elias, and Luhmann. Once the playing pieces are chosen the rest is simple: each player throws the dice, lands on a square, draws a corresponding card and reads it aloud. Two types of cards may be randomly drawn: the Question cards, which each of the players must answer with her or his sociologist in mind, and the Duel cards, which set a challenge for all players.
On the board lies a pile of mysterious cards — the Jokers, intellectual border crossers (Kafka, Kant, Kracauer, Kristeva, Kundera) — each of which can be drawn only once in each game, and only if all players agree. The Jokers must be handled carefully; they can at once help the players to open up new avenues, but also dangerously blur the outlines
of the discipline.
The game ends when the players decide to stop. A third party then decides on the winner.
The players
The first player, RD, teaches sociology in a Montreal college and tries to make the classics appealing to young students. She is currently drafting a project of cinematographic essays aiming to illustrate a sociological take on a variety of contemporary issues ranging from fashion movements to collective action.
The second player, BT, is a sociologist in a university in Montreal. She writes on contemporary Germany taking classical sociologists as a starting point. She teaches German sociology and does translations into French. Between 2007 and 2014, she was editor-in-chief of Sociologie et sociétés and is now responsible for the ‘Feuilleton’ section of the same journal.
***
The first throw decides who chooses her author first. RD throws the dice and lands a 5. BT throws the dice and lands a 3. The first choice of playing pieces is thus given to RD.
BT: Your pick!
RD picks Max Weber. BT seems surprised but does not comment on the choice; she smiles. She picks Georg Simmel. They look at each other.
RD throws the dice and gets a 5; she lands on a square marked ‘Approach’. She picks a corresponding card and reads it aloud.
Card 1 — Approach
Duel card! ‘Describe in a maximum of two minutes what you would teach of your author’s approach today’
Figure 2. The Weber card. [Insert figure 2 here]
RD: That’s easy! We all teach Weber. Because of his classical status, of course, but mostly because of his elegant BT raises her eyebrows … RD — annoyed The thinking, the process, is elegant, even if the writing is not, I grant you that. So an elegant, and — at some level — ‘simple’ take on sociology. The Protestant Ethic is mandatory reading for almost
every student in social sciences and teaching it is a charm. Why? Mostly thanks to the magnificent scaffolding of the problem that almost reads like a detective story, as several commentators have noticed. Also thanks to his method, there is creativity behind his conceptual constructions.
We all draw from Weber’s work sociological tools of immediate and (relatively) obvious use, and that is hopefully what we teach. They help us to turn down the noise covering all immediate social phenomena and to grasp their roots, and, therefore, some of their meaning.
BT [mumbling to herself: Hm, yes.
RD: When I teach The Protestant Ethic, this is what I try to teach: continuity, and the tools to spot it. I love to point out to students how their very habitus holds bits and pieces of a religious ethos that most of them have never even heard of before reading this book. It is an easy and efficient way to help them realize how their values, and thus their actions, are at once inscribed in a complex and contingent history, and how they are able to change the very history they’re a part of. Well, I think my two minutes are up. Your turn.
[Insert figure 3 here]
BT: Simmel’s approach… long pause…. Let me start with a form, a form of interaction, contoured by Simmel for answering the question, that of sociability. This example, the theme of Simmel’s opening address at the first congress of the German Sociological Association in 1910, will serve as an illustration of Simmel’s sociology.
Sociability is a form of interaction, in other words, an abstraction, a synthesis of relations of reciprocal influences, which Simmel uses to delve into reality, a chaotic reality (like Weber’s), and to cut through it to make us see it in a new light. Like an art historian, Simmel distinguishes between form and content. Sociability — or Geselligkeit in German — is a form that can occur in all types of associations — regardless of their contents, may they be religious, economic, scientific... Sociability is a form of play, an enclave from reality that is within that reality itself. It expresses, Simmel writes, the pure joy of being together; this is the central idea. An example of sociability could be playing ‘Sociology, the game’ at a conference on Weber and Simmel.
Sociability, like all forms, has a basic law: reciprocity. It is ‘the pleasure of the individual, which depends upon the joy of other individuals’. Reciprocity is a necessity for sociability to exist, but it is also its ethics: ‘[its] principle […] may be formulated thus:
everyone should guarantee to the other that maximum of joy, relief, vivacity which is consonant with the maximum of values she herself receives’.
Taking sociability as an example, I would firstly [BT moves her finger] show in my mini lecture what is a typical form of interaction, Simmel’s main unit, a tool, and point to the possible variety of its contents. I would, secondly, show how a form cuts through individual existences and recomposes them in light of its own conception. I would, thirdly, stress the importance of looking at both relations of reciprocity and at the process of sociation (Vergesellschaftung). [Brief pause] Reading an excerpt with students, I would, fourthly, draw their attention to the movement, the dialectical dimension, characteristic of Simmel’s writing, by notably taking the vocabulary he uses as illustration (both, at the same time [zugleich]; simultaneously [gleichzeitig]; while [wenn]). Fifthly, I would observe how he condenses problems in concise formulas.
Of course, all aspects of Simmel’s approach wouldn’t be covered by this example. I think I would use the image of the circle to talk about his circular causality [RD looks at her watch], his relativistic epistemology…
BT: RD, in light of what sociology has evolved into, the question is more of a challenge for Simmel — and thus for me. It’s difficult to adapt Simmel’s writings for an empirical sociology; the form is a tool, but it is used in such different manners and its contents are a mix of impulses, interests, and motives. Simmel uses it to put forth — as he himself stresses — a perspective, a way of thinking, more than a discipline, one that requires a trained eye — not unlike CW Mills’ sociological imagination or Everett Hughes’ sociological eye.
RD: The thing is, in my own opinion, today we mostly wink at Simmel’s work, more than we actually use it; we think of him almost as an oddity.
BT: Yes, but you know I’d like to put him to serious use. Some colleagues are making it possible, I’m thinking of Gregor Fitzi and Denis Thouard in their special issue of Sociologie et sociétés, for example, but also other sociologists who have shown the unity of his work. My turn to throw the dice.
BT throws the dice and gets an 8; she lands on a square marked ‘Writing’. She picks a corresponding card and reads it aloud.
Card 2 — Writing
Question card. ‘Is your author a… a) sociologist, b) journalist, c) philosopher, d) historian, e) novelist, f) fraud?’
BT: What kind of a question is that? Isn’t the game called ‘Sociology, the game’?
RD: I’d play along. As a teacher, I’d say Weber is first and foremost a sociologist.
BT: Sociology as it has evolved today…. Yes. Weber didn’t even call himself a sociologist until late in his life…
RD: I think you should nonetheless take the question seriously.
BT: All right. At the time of Simmel and Weber, sociology was of course not established as we know it today; its forums were different, its ‘venues’ multiple; I mean books, but also conferences and lots of newspaper articles; the ‘sociological style’ had not settled into what we know today, a style characterized by the prevalence of scientific articles. At the risk of exaggerating my depiction, I would argue that sociology initially largely developed — next
to treatises and surveys — in newspapers and weekly magazines through a mixture of what can be called, in today’s sense, sociology, journalism, and literature.
RD: You have the ‘feuilleton’ pages in mind, I guess.
BT: What became the feuilleton later on, after Simmel’s and Weber’s death. If we look at Simmel from the standpoint of this medium for answering the Question card [BT looks at the card], he would be ‘all of the above’, except a historian and, of course, a fraud. He is a sociologist, a journalist, and a philosopher. And because he also wrote for a literary magazine for 10 years, between 1897 and 1907, the Munich-based Jugend, I guess you could also say that he had his shot at being a writer. By the way, Weber was a journalist too.
RD: You can’t compare the two. Weber’s journalistic activities were more applied sociology than anything else, and it came later in his life — no one would seriously wonder whether he was more of a journalist than a sociologist. He himself was always careful to clearly distinguish between these two activities. The question of labels constantly
re-emerges in Simmel’s case, though; he didn’t always seem much inclined to accept the title of ‘sociologist’, if I’m not mistaken.
BT: Yes [pause]. Let’s try for a moment to conceive sociology beyond our author’s own definitions and suspend our own judgements on it. Let’s set Simmel and Weber in a broader production context. A considerable part of Simmel’s and Weber’s work was published in newspapers. Simmel’s Soziologie, to take just one example, is a mosaic of brief texts often published — in previous versions — in newspapers and magazines.
RD: This has been noted on several occasions. We often link this to Simmel’s precarious academic status.
BT: Or one tries to discredit him for it [pause]. Weber also published his fair share of newspaper articles, and even if he indeed made a point of distinguishing between the two, his journalistic activities — like you said — were applied sociology. They are replete with his themes and infused with his method. If Weber’s and Simmel’s critical editions of their work were to be organized by ‘literary genres’, one would see the extent of their journalistic and essayistic activities. The critical attitude, characteristic of both our time and
that of our authors, towards ‘essayistic activities’ or ‘refined journalism’ and their very plausible necessity, does not mean that these texts were not a serious place for sociology, one where its potential could be deployed, and one which could function as a laboratory for new ideas and forms, as Adorno argued.
RD: I must admit I am torn. A part of me — and my author — is very mindful of frontiers, especially in regards to the legitimacy and validity of science. But another part of me — and perhaps of Weber? — is intrigued by the idea, especially given the highly collaborative nature of science: what you propose there could perhaps help open up and circulate our work and, thus, help it to be more easily ‘surpassed’ by other scientists, as Weber states our work should be… But where would you draw the line?
Let’s try another question; perhaps it will help. It’s my turn to roll.
RD throws the dice (she gets a 4) and lands on a square marked ‘Method’. She picks a corresponding card and reads it aloud.
Card 3 — Method
RD: Well, it’s at the very heart of any valid approach in my opinion; we absolutely need imagination if we want to be the least bit creative.
BT: So you’ll agree that creativity has its place in sociology. I was worried for a moment…
RD: Creativity, yes, of course. Imagination plays as big a part in Weber’s work as it does in any scientific reflection — and, just to be clear, I think it plays a huge part in any scientific endeavour. Pause I’ve always remembered this part in Science as a Vocation where he refers to inspiration as a crucial driving force of scientific work. I’ve kept this vision of him strolling in the countryside, in stormy weather, under a grey and low and heavy sky, and suddenly seeing this image of what has been contestably translated as the ‘iron cage’, the stahlhartes Gehäuse… Be it artistic or scientific, a creation needs imagination; at least that’s what I’ll choose to call the ‘inspiration’ he refers to in this conference, the philosopher’s stone that turns hard work into an idea.
We know that the only way to ask good questions is to step back from the immediate perceptible situation — to escape from the ‘literalness’ of reality as Nisbet puts it. This moment of escape is in my view a moment when creative artist and scientist are indistinguishable. Being a conceptual construct, the ideal-type obviously goes beyond and
beneath immediate reality to help us grasp aspects of it that could not otherwise be visible to us.
When we think about it, Weber’s initial hypothesis literally stems from a kind of fiction — but he answers it with very real material indeed.
With a half-smile Simmel accusation!!, on the other hand, apparently said that he could just as well have used fictitious examples in his Sociology, instead of empirical ones.
BT: Their assemblages are the products of imagination, but the examples are not imaginary. Simmel’s sociology aimed more at crafting forms of interaction than at understanding a concrete reality; observations often served as illustrations, examples.
RD: Like any other act of creation — and again, Weber himself had pointed this out — sociological creativity obviously needs to be sustained by observation and experience, and that is why he leans so heavily on the empirical. But something like the concept of verstehen cannot be ‘discovered’ or ‘scientifically proven’; it will always remains an interpretation. It simply does not have the degree of veracity that, say, 2+2=4 has. The identification of a given group’s motivations is obviously no more than an educated guess; a guess that is very much educated in Weber’s case — but still a guess [BT shows surprise
and incomprehension. Still, and I want to emphasize this: if interpretation is at the heart of Weber’s approach, and if it indeed relies heavily on creative processes akin to art and literature, empirical demonstration is what gives it its sociological pertinence.
BT throws the dices (she gets an 8) and lands on a square marked ‘Writing’. She picks a corresponding card and reads it aloud.
RD: Again? That’s odd…
Card 4 — Writing
Duel card! ‘Delineate one fictional character in your author’s sociology’.
BT: Ah! Let’s take one character from the sociable circles I’ve mentioned before, the coquette. She first appeared in a short text now made available in the Gesamtausgabe, ‘Koketterie’. It is a two-page piece first published in 1901 in the weekly magazine Jugend, a publication meant for both an intellectual and a popular readership. Simmel stages a conversation between a woman, a coquette, and a philosopher — the latter narrates the conversation from the first-person perspective.
The philosopher reproaches his friend for flirting with one of his acquaintances. Prompted by the coquette to be more precise, he defines flirtation as an unrealized promise. This is a wonderful formula, one pointing to the simultaneity of consent and denial characteristic of the form. Upon hearing the definition, the woman remarks that God and life do just the same: they promise what they do not give. And since they do so, she sees no harm in her behaviour.
The dialogue illustrates a form — flirtation — while pointing to a variety of contents: from an erotic promise to God’s promises.
While the coquette appears again in a text entitled ‘Psychologie der Koketterie’ — ‘Flirtation’ in English — and in the text I mentioned before on sociability — this time she gets to talk back to the sociologist, the philosopher, and to beat him at his own game. I love it!
Thanks to this brief text, we see Simmel using a narrative form to illustrate — and develop — a form while bringing the character back in. It’s like having the Chinese in the essay on ‘objectivity’ arguing about methods with a Weberian sociologist.
RD laughs: I don’t think the Weberian sociologist would truly be interested in a conversation with him. But then again… She pauses for a moment. We have to admit that
the flicker of life that Simmel acknowledges so explicitly in his works shimmers in a quite different way in Weber’s; if we have to adopt a literary stance, the life of what would be Weber’s characters is indeed much less obvious than Simmel’s lively portraits. Your Chinese makes me think of the ‘Occidental Man’ meeting the ‘Asian Man’ in his general remarks on Asian religiosity, where Weber describes the unavoidable misunderstanding between the two: the Occidental man taking the Asian man’s withdrawal as a sign of intense reflexivity, while — Weber argues — such an attitude is merely ritualistic and devoid of any ‘affective content’.
Again, if we took a literary point of view, one could be shocked by how little those ‘characters’ really come to life; Weber himself states that neither of them actually grasps the meaning of their own actions, so what autonomy could they possess once they have served their single purpose, which is to set forth the dynamics that drive them? In my opinion, that’s mainly where our efforts to draw a parallel between literature and Weberian sociology stumble. Weber of course acknowledged that the object of sociology happened to have a heart and a soul — even though such a poetic take is mostly translated in his work as ‘having values’ and ‘adhering to a certain soteriology’…
The fact is that Weber’s gallery of characters — the puritan, the capitalist, the monk, the Chinese or Asian, the bureaucrat, and all the others — are created in order to
bring out the rationale or the structuring principles of selected aspects of reality, and not to translate any immediately perceptible reality. These people can only populate the mind — you could no more find them in a Tolstoïan novel than you could bump into them in the streets. Their very nature precludes it, since the whole point of the ideal-type is to think reality in order to be able to order it in thought.
This point is obviously moot when it comes to a specific curiosity like the coquette — because, let’s face it, that’s what it is. Simmel’s exercise is cute, just like the coquette…
BT: Simmel achieves, at the sociological level, quite a lot in less than two pages. The form he presents might not be as sharply formulated as in other essays — and it might seem so convincing that we find it difficult to think beyond it — but everything is there: the form, its possible contents, the relations of reciprocity…
RD: I think we have time for one more throw of the dice; let’s see where it leads.
RD throws the dice and gets a 3; she lands on a square marked ‘Forms’. She picks a corresponding card and reads it aloud.
Card 5 — Form
Duel card! ‘Identify one critique your author would formulate towards contemporary sociological form’.
RD: I’m not really sure… The lack of scope? Or of creativity, perhaps? It’s hard to say in Weber’s case, since certain versions of his ideas mostly won and shaped our discipline, on an institutional level at least. But maybe he’d criticize a form of entrapment of our work. Maybe he’d see us as victims of our own stahlhartes Gehäuse, to a point where the means overshadow the goal. I’m even hesitant to call the scientific article a writing form: it reads much more like a never-ending and repetitive academic exercise, don’t you think?
BT: I don’t know if I want to play a ‘what if’ game here on this one. You know what? I’d suggest picking a Joker at this point. Besides, this would be our last chance to do so and it may give us a satisfying conclusion.
RD: You’re probably right. Let’s see what we’ve got…
RD lays out the five Joker cards on the table. RD picks one and shows it to BT Figure 4. The Kracauer card.
RD: I don’t want to appear a sore loser, but you have to admit that such a Joker mostly serves your own — I mean, Simmel’s — approach. He was after all Simmel’s student... He was a master of the feuilleton, and I highly doubt Weber would ever have considered the feuilleton as a form of sociology. Never mind the method (if there even is one), the phenomena it focuses on are so… small!
BT: Kracauer is an excellent Joker for both of us — of our authors I mean. He is a legitimate heir of Simmel and Weber. RD frowns Yes! He contributed to reinventing, transforming the ‘small form’ — in particular, in the pages of newspapers — and developed it as a locus of the sociological avant-garde, a laboratory to study modernity. But his approach — in contrast to Simmel’s and in vicinity to Weber’s — is often an empirical one. Kracauer is attentive to the surface; his material is as real as you could ask it to be, just like you said earlier about Weber [pause]. He writes shorter, lighter texts, definitely informed by sociological questions that only thea trained eye of a sociologist cal eye could raise; the theory that we find in his writings is often a wink at fellow sociologists. I don’t know what Weber would think of us today, but I think he would have ‘critically enjoyed’ reading Die Angestellten, the feuilleton series Kracauer published in 1929/1930. And I’m
sure you love the series too, RD?
RD: I would be incapable of naming anyone who has read it and didn’t enjoy it.
BT: Kracauer pushed the idea of the small form further; together with others — people around Benno Reifenberg at the Frankfurter Zeitung, for instance, he gave it its credentials. Although the small form was not as highly considered as the political and economic sections of newspapers, it was still on the first page, as a text ‘below the line’ — unter dem Strich, as the feuilleton used to be called. Plus, your Weber himself contributed to the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Zeitung between 1915 and 1919, just before it reached its zenith. It looked like this space was expanding and would have expanded further and enhanced its value had it not been for the political context of the 1930s. The Nazis’ accession to power marked the end of the feuilleton as it was practised in Germany, and in Central Europe more generally. Reading Kracauer’s texts gives us, I think, insight into a sociology practised after Weber’s and Simmel’s deaths and what it could have become had it not been for the war — if things had gone differently, what would the dominant sociological form be today?
RD: That’s a good question, but to be honest I’m not sure if it would have been very different. The question today is not so much ‘do social scientists and universities accept a blurring of the frontier?’, but rather ‘does mass culture welcome it?’. Still, I can think of quite a few people at the university today who would readily dismiss any attempts at reviving something like the feuilleton.
BT: Well for us, today at least, I think a broader understanding of sociology and its forms represents a chance, a challenge to what has become the scientific ideal — standard articles in journals; it represents an invitation to engage in a rigorous yet creative, elegant yet entertaining sociology. Maybe its forum is not the newspaper anymore. Other times, other media. Internet platforms could play, already do play, such a role.
RD: Sure, but this is easy to say once you have secured a position at a university, harder when you’re still seeking that.
BT: Yes, you’re right, though things are maybe not as bad as we think; there seems to be a general interest in creative forms and this conference bears witness to it.
RD: Yes, and this is refreshing. In this game, as in sociology itself, the most important thing is the questions we choose to ask. Hopefully they force us to constantly re-examine our usages — and misusages — of classical authors, and keep us from reifying them too much. I like to remind myself that, just like society, sociology is what we choose to make it.
BT: I guess that’s the end of the game, an unending one… The organizer indicates to us that time is up.
Transcriber’s note:
This is the only recorded ending that we have. We notice that the players agreed more and more towards the end, which gave this interaction a sociable, Simmelian, flavour; in the end, and contrary to what was stipulated in the official rules of the game, no third party settled the dispute. Taking into account both the nature of the game and the cultural rituals involved in such gatherings, the most solid hypothesis is that this round was indeed unofficially continued outside the gates of University of Edinburgh — most likely over a drink.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Sophie Coulombe and Erick Desforge for their drawings (both of them for picture 1, the latter for pictures 2, 3 and 4).
Reconstituted bibliography
Adorno TW (1984 [1974/1958]) The essay as form. New German Critique 32: 151–171. Aulinger B (1999) Die Gesellschaft als Kunstwerk. Fiktion und Methode bei Georg Simmel. Wien: Passagen Verlag.
Bayatrizi Z, Kemple T (2012) Un problème de chiffres: l’utilisation des connaissances empiriques en statistique dans la théorie sociale classique. Sociologie et sociétés 44(2): 45– 73.
Bruhns H (2015) Présentation. In: Weber M, Discours de guerre et d’après-guerre. Paris: Éditions EHESS, pp. 9–70.
Bussiek D (2011) Benno Reifenberg 1892–1970. Eine Biographie. Göttingen: Wallstein. Coser LA (1972 [1963]) Sociology through Literature. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Despoix P (1995) Éthiques du désenchantement. Essais sur la modernité allemande au début du siècle. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Fitzi G, Thouard D (2012) Réciprocités sociales. Lectures de Simmel. Sociologie et sociétés (special issue) 44(2): 5–18.
Frisby D (2002 [1984]) Georg Simmel (revised edition). Chichester London, E. Horwood: Tavistock Publications.
enjeux dans la société des 19e et 20e siècles. Lausanne: Éditions Antipodes.
Kracauer S (1998 [1930/1929]) The Salaried Masses. Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. London: Verso.
Kracauer S (2011 [1930]) Presse und öffentliche Meinung. In: Mülder-Bach I (ed.) Werke (5.3). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 340–346.
Lepenies W (1988 [1985]) Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Cambridge; New York; Paris, Cambridge University Press: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.
Mills CW (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Nisbet RA (1976) Sociology as an Art Form. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rammstedt O (1999 [1992]) Editorischer Bericht. In: Simmel G, Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (GSG/11). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 877–905.
Rammstedt O (2008) La ‘littérature de l’anse’ de Georg Simmel. Une approche de l’essai. Société. Revue de sciences humaines et sociales 101(3): 7–22.
Roth, J (2013 [1921] Feuilleton. In: Nürnberger H (ed.) Ich zeichne das Gesicht der Zeit. Essays, Reportagen, Feuilletons. Zürich: Diogenes, pp. 24–28.
Simmel G (1949 [1911]) The sociology of sociability. American Journal of Sociology 55(3): 254–261.
; (1911) Soziologie der Geselligkeit. In: Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (ed.)
Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 19.–22. Oktober 1910 in Frankfurt a. M. Tübingen: Verlag JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), pp. 1–16.
Simmel G (1950 [1917]) The field of sociology. In: Wolff KH (ed.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe: The Free Press, pp. 3–25.
Simmel G (1984 [1909]) On flirtation. In: Oakes G (ed.) Georg Simmel, on Women, Sexuality, and Love. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 133–152.
Simmel G (1992 [1908]) Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (GSG/11). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Simmel G (1996 [1919]) Philosophische Kultur. In: Kramme R, Rammstedt O (eds) Hauptprobleme der Philosophie. Philosophische Kultur (GSG/14). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 159–459.
Simmel G (1999 [1917]) Grundfragen der Soziologie. In: Fitzi G and Rammstedt O (eds) Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen. Grundfragen der Soziologie. Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens (GSG/16). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 59–149.
Simmel G (2005 [1901]) Koketterie [Momentbilder sub specie aeternitatis]. In: Köhnke KC, Jaenichen C and Schullerus E (eds) Miszellen, Glossen, Stellungnahmen, Umfrageantworten, Leserbriefe, Diskussionsbeiträge 1889–1918 (GSG/17).
Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 414–416.
Thouard D (2012) Comment lire Simmel? Sociologie et sociétés 44(2): 19–41.
Tokarzewska M (2010) Der Feste Grund des Unberechenbaren. Georg Simmel zwischen Soziologie und Literatur. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag.
Vien LP (2014) Gouverner le monde désenchanté: le parlement du Reich et l’émergence d’hommes d’État dans la pensée politique de Max Weber, MA Thesis, Université de Montréal (https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/11098).
Weber, M (1949 [1904]) ‘Objectivity’ in social sciences and social policy. In: Shils E and Finch H (eds) The Methodology of Social Sciences. New York, The Free Press, pp. 50–112. Weber M (1988 [1914–1918]) Zur Politik im Weltkrieg. Schriften und Reden 1914–1918. Mommsen WJ and Hübinger G (eds). Tübingen: JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
Weber M (1998 [1921/1917–1916]) Allgemeiner Charakter der asiatischen Religiosität. In: Weber, Marianne (ed.) Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie II. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 363–378.
Weber M (2004 [1919]) Science as a vocation. In: Owen D and Strong TB (eds) The Vocation Lectures. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, pp. 1–31.
