Simmel, Georg | Ferdinand Tonnies (essay date 1918)
Ferdinand Tonnies (essay date 1918)
SOURCE: "Simmel as Sociologist," in Georg Simmel, edited by Lewis A. Coser, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965, pp. 50-2.
[In the following essay, which was originally published in Frankfurter Zeitung in 1918, Tönnies argues that Simmel is better described as a social psychologist than as a sociologist.]
After Schäffie's precedent, and apart from books of momentary importance, Simmel was the first to give the title Soziologie (Sociology) to a major work in the German language. The objection has been raised that the title does not correspond to the content, which offers nothing of a systematic nature. But Simmel appears to defend himself against this criticism in advance, by prefacing the work only with the demand that the reader keep firmly in mind throughout the book the question raised about the problem of sociology in the first chapter, "since otherwise these pages might appear as a collection...
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