Sociological Tragedy: Simmel and Weber on Selfhood and Action

Abstract

This dissertation considers whether Georg Simmel and Max Weber’s “canonisation in opposition” to each other in Anglophone sociology has obscured significant thematic and conceptual connections between them. It employs a genealogical method that focuses on episodic sites of interpretive struggle, but more readily accounts for how mobile material objects like books constitute outlets for struggles over textual meaning. The dissertation examines the early translation, publication, and institutionalisation of Simmel’s and Weber’s writings at the University of Chicago and Harvard University during the interwar period. It finds that rival schools of thought weaponised Simmel and Weber against each other in their effort to lay new scientific foundations for sociology. This agonistic process concealed important overlaps and parallels between them regarding selfhood, action, unity, and tragedy. To both thinkers, action is marked by tensions and conflicts experienced between constitutive elements of the self, between different forces in society, and between the different claims individuals experience upon their normative conduct when acting in a world they inhabit with others. Nevertheless, these tensions and conflicts also enable the emergence of new kinds of self through action, which in turn become enabling elements in macro-social change. Since this suggestively explores what makes life worth living and points to how novel forms of unity can arise in terms of both individual personalities and social relations, it is tragic in the non-defeatist sense that one can derive from earlier German cultural and philosophical writers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche. The dissertation then uses these neglected overlaps and parallels to put forward a reading of Simmel more sensitive to traditionally “Weberian” themes, such as life-conduct in accordance with personal value-choice, and a reading of Weber that puts him closer to traditionally “Simmelian” concerns with relational and interactive processes.