George Simmel - Conflict and the web of group affiliations

GEORG SIMMEL

Conflict
AND
The Web of Group-Affiliations

TRANSLATED BY REINHARD BENDIX

Conflict,
TRANSLATED BY KURT H. WOLFF

GEORG SIMMEL

WITH A FOREWORD BY EVERETT C. HUGHES

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Copyright 1955 by The Free Press

First Free Press Paperback Edition 1964

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 54-10671

ISBN 0-02-928840-1
eISBN: 978-1-451-60251-7

K URT H. W OLFF AND T HE F REE P RESS did American scholars a distinct service by translating and publishing important parts of the sociological work of Georg Simmel in a volume entitled The Sociology of Georg Simmel (1950). Reinhard Bendix has joined them in a further service by making an additional chapter of Simmels Soziologie available. Their contribution is made the greater by the fact that those Americans whose mother-tongue is English (including those among them whose mothers tongue was not English) are extremely loath to learn other languages. Translations from other languages are also relatively few and are slow in appearing. If we should now stop the stream of immigrants of some measure of higher learning acquired in other languages, our linguistic isolation may become even more embarrassing than it is now. We are already peculiarly dependent upon translations.

The major intellectual danger of this dependence is that we Americans will often simply not know of work written in other languages. A minor danger is that we may take the translated part for the whole of a mans work. This second risk is much reduced, for Simmels work, by the appearance of the crucial chapters which make up this volume. As a matter of fact, Simmels work is less subject to this danger than is that of many scholars. For his style of thought shines clearly through in nearly every piece of his writing, even in many of the smaller essays which he wrote for magazines and for the feature sections of newspapers. But if less is lost by eading only a small part of his work, it does not follow that there is less gain in reading more. Quite the contrary, for his pages are so full of brilliant insights, and of applications of his style of analysis to concrete cases, that the reward for reading on and on is especially great.

One might apply to Simmels work his own dialectic of form and content. The basic form of his thought is recognizable in almost any small part of his work, but it is elaborated in being applied to each new content. And since, as he says, content and form are relative terms, every new content enables him to raise the level of abstraction with which he conceives social forms; but the higher the level of abstraction, the richer the variety of contents suggested by the form and the greater the number of facets of social reality perceived through it. Simmels thought nearly completes its circle again and again; but just as the circle is about to be closed, his thought takes wing in some new arc that almost becomes another circle. This gives his work a tentative, never quite complete, which some mistake for an unsystematic, quality.

Critics of Simmel say that he never proves anything by empirical test. That is true. As his thought develops, he flashes an illustration before us; say, the Catholic clergy. The clergy gives him a model (ideal-type or pure case) of a social group which, although it draws its postulants from all classes and nations, is free of all complicating overlapping memberships. Celibacy frees the postulants from their past and keeps their present uncomplicated. The case is an example, and a stimulus to thought, not a demonstration. It may not even be a true example of the form he describes. But his case will suggest others which approximate the form in question; and approximations can be tested as absolutes never can be.

In Simmel, movement from pure model (form) to particular case (content) and back again is incomparably more rapid than in any other of the classic sociologists. The variety of both forms and contents presented for analysis and illustrations is correspondingly greater. If he is wrong in fact more often than others (I do not say that he is), it is because he alludes to a greater variety of fact, of times, places and circumstances. Until we can do much better than we now do at fitting data to the needs of insights and ideas (much of our present empirical ingenuity is exerted in exactly the opposite direction) we will do well to temper our criticism of Simmels fashion of illustrating his ideas by examples drawn from wide historical knowledge and great social sophistication rather than testing them by experiment or controlled observation.

The title of this volume is Conflict and The Web of Group-Affiliations. It might well have borne also the sub-title: Essays on Social Organization. For Simmel sees conflict as part of the dynamic by which some men are drawn together (and others, by the same token, driven away from each other) into those uneasy combinations which we call groups. The inter-weaving or, better, the entangling of social circles (group formation and group affiliations in Bendix translation) is viewed, in the same way, as part of the dynamic both of groups and of the individual personalities who compose them. Simmel is thus the Freud of the study of society. Instead of seeing change as disturbance of a naturally stable thing called society, he sees stability itself as some temporary (although it may long endure) balance among forces in interaction; and forces are by definition capable of being described only in terms of change. This is strikingly similar to what Freud did for the study of human personality. Like Freud, he has many intellectual children. Not all of them have that wisdom which makes them know their own father.

E VERETT C HERRINGTON H UGHES

TRANSLATED BY KURT H. WOLFF

The title of this essay is Der Streit. Streit is usually translated as quarrel, but has a broader meaning for Simmel; hence conflict seems better. The essay is Chapter 4 of Soziologie (1908); it is translated from the third edition of this work (1923; pp. 186-255). All sub-headings are supplied, as are passages in brackets. An earlier translation of a considerably different original by Albion W. Small (The Sociology of Conflict, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. IX, 1904), has been examined, but is not the basis of the present rendition. For a fuller bibliographical reference to Smalls translation, see The Sociology of Georg Simmel, transl., ed., and with an introd. by Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1950), p. lviii.Tr.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE of conflict (Kampf) has in principle never been disputed. Conflict is admitted to cause or modify interest groups, unifications, organizations. On the other hand, it may sound paradoxical in the common view if one asks whether irrespective of any phenomena that result from conflict or that accompany it, it itself is a form of sociation. At first glance, this sounds like a rhetorical question. If every interaction among men is a sociation, conflictafter all one of the most vivid interactions, which, furthermore, cannot possibly be carried on by one individual alonemust certainly be considered as sociation. And in fact,