Georg Simmel
German philosopher and sociologist (1858–1918), born in Berlin into a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family, educated at the University of Berlin, where he built most of his academic career while suffering for decades from persistent institutional discrimination — owing both to his Jewish origin and to the essayistic, unsystematic style of his work, regarded with suspicion by the Wilhelmine academic establishment — which prevented him from obtaining a full professorship until almost the end of his life, despite already enjoying by then a considerable European intellectual reputation and remarkable success as a public lecturer in Berlin. Regarded, together with Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies, as one of the founders of modern German academic sociology, Simmel developed a distinctive method known as 'formal sociology', focused not on the concrete content of social institutions but on the universal, abstract forms of social interaction — conflict, competition, subordination, secrecy, fashion, gratitude — recurring across widely diverse historical and cultural contexts. His masterwork, The Philosophy of Money (1900), transcends purely economic analysis to offer a complete cultural philosophy of modernity: money, as a universal and abstract medium of exchange, dissolves traditional social bonds grounded in concrete personal relationships, simultaneously generating unprecedented individual freedom and an experience of alienation, emotional detachment and the 'blasé attitude' characteristic of modern urban life, a theme he developed masterfully in his most cited essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), a pioneering analysis of the social psychology of the modern metropolis that anticipates central themes of later urban sociology. A revered teacher of an entire generation of thinkers — his students and intellectual interlocutors included Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Max Scheler and Weber himself — Simmel also exerted a decisive influence on the Chicago School of urban sociology and, more broadly, on the entire sociological tradition concerned with the microstructure of everyday social interaction.