A Great Sociologist

CONFLICT, by George Simmel. Free Press. $3.50.

The name of Georg Simmel is barely known in America, and that only among professional sociologists. This is a pity, since Simmel is one of the handful of eminent European sociological theorists whose work remains alive and significant. At a time when most of what passes for sociological theorizing consists either of painstaking investigations into the obvious or elaborate and formalistic system-making, it is particularly valuable to have Simmel’s essay on Conflict translated into English.

Georg Simmel was born in Berlin in 1858, the son of a prosperous Jewish businessman. His Jewish origin blocked the successful academic career that would otherwise have been open to him; he lectured for almost thirty years at the Berlin University and though his courses attracted international attention he remained a privat-dozent until a few years before his death, when he was accorded a full professorship at the University of Strasbourg. The marginality of his own fate was perfectly clear to Simmel and his marvelous essay, “The Stranger,” like a somewhat similar essay by Thorstein Veblen on “The Intellectual Preeminence of the Jews,” may be read on two levels, as social analysis and an effort at self-analysis.

The stranger, says Simmel, “surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria for them are more general and more objective ideals; he is not tied down in his actions by habit, piety and precedent.” As Veblen would have put it, he is a disturber of the intellectual peace. That is the role Simmel assumes in his essays, and the little volume under review may, one hopes, disturb some of the routinized pieties of present-day American social thought.

While most current sociology seems committed to upholding order against disturbers of the intellectual peace, “common norms and values” against “deviants,” the status quo against the very idea of conflict, Simmel shows the creative function of social conflict. Far from being a merely “negative” element, conflict becomes, in Simmel’s view of things, an element of the social structure that is as organic and necessary as harmony. Without conflict, says Simmel, societies would decay into a sclerotic stasis. While current theorizing sees equilibrium as a natural and normal condition, and conflict only as a temporary departure from this condition, Simmel sees stability as the temporary balance of conflicting forces in interaction. While for most present day theorists conflict is a special case requiring treatment— in both senses of the word—Simmel considers balance a special case. The currently fashionable model is static; Simmel’s is profoundly dynamic.

An age that has found it possible to pervert Freud’s profoundly pessimistic theory, in which the idea of an antimony between the individual and ...