ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Simmel's thesis on homology of money, society and the idea of God provides a good argument that, even many decades later, Robert A. Nisbet's appraisal of Simmel as the most relevant of all the pioneers of sociological reflexion still holds true. George Simmel is widely recognised as a prominent turn-of-the-century German philosopher of culture and one of the founding fathers of sociology, but he could quite properly also be described as a classical theorist of religion. The next important equation of Simmel's conceptualisation of the mutual relationship between religion and monetary culture is the thesis on homology of society with the, that is, of God. To sketch this relationship properly the chapter briefly addresses Simmel's general understanding of religion. For Simmel, the objective religion understood as a concrete social and historical reality is like society a result of reciprocal actions and it is structured around the, that is, of God.
