Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel (1858 to 1918) was a German philosopher and sociologist, a founding figure of sociology whose neo-Kantian approach helped establish its antipositivist tradition. Born in Berlin, the youngest of seven children of an assimilated Jewish family, he studied philosophy and history at the Humboldt University of Berlin, took his doctorate in 1881 with a thesis on Kant's physical monadology and taught there as a privatdozent from 1885. He asked what society is in analogy with Kant's question of what nature is, and he analysed social and cultural life in terms of forms and contents that change places depending on context. His essay The Metropolis and Mental Life anticipated urban sociology and symbolic interactionism. Though supported by Max Weber and admired by Husserl and Rilke, he long remained an academic outsider. His nonpositivist theory later informed the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.