ABSTRACT
Of all the great sociologists, Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is without doubt the most original, most subtle and most brilliant. Reflecting his thought process of association and analogy, Simmel is often described as a “brilliant essayist.” Torn “between science and literature” (Lepenies, 1988), Simmel sought to establish sociology as an independent discipline, distinct from other sciences which also analyze the social sphere, for instance social psychology, political sciences, and linguistics. Yet, despite his fertile imagination, which borders on the anti-academic, and despite the new paths that he cut through sociology and its neighboring disciplines, as well as the mass of ingenious and productive hypotheses he left behind, the many theses that others subsequently developed successfully, Simmel was almost forgotten. Even though during his lifetime his fame was comparable to Bergson at the Collège de France, he has only been rediscovered since the 1980s. Simmel predicted his fate with striking lucidity:
I know that I shall die without spiritual heirs (and that’s good and well). The inheritance that I leave behind is like money distributed among many different heirs, each of which will use his share to advance some occupation compatible with his own nature, but which will no longer be recognizable as coming from the inheritance.
