Volume 29, numéro 1, 2025 Simmel and Critical Theory Sous la direction de Arthur Bueno et Vincenzo Mele

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This essay provides a brief overview of first-generation Frankfurt School reception of Georg Simmel’s work with focus on Theodor W. Adorno’s evaluation of Simmel’s sociology. In presenting a collection of direct notes from part of Adorno’s writings, the essay underlines Adorno’s seemingly ambivalent but predominantly negative and often insulting comments on Simmel thus distancing him from Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer whose works were self-admittedly influenced by Simmel, and bringing him closer to Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács whose writings largely ‘renounced’ and often damaged Simmel’s legacy.

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This paper explores some common theoretical points between the sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), the director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, “spiritus rector” and a key figure of the early Frankfurt School. In addition to some biographical connections linking Horkheimer to Simmel, they share particular views about the profound transformations in social and cultural life brought about by modernity. Both Simmel and Horkheimer focus on socialization processes resulting from rationalization, as well as the increasing individualization that characterize the stage of social agency. They both believe that modern life is defined by new forms of rational organization, largely influenced by the “metropolization” of social and cultural life. Horkheimer refers to this as “instrumental reason,” while Simmel describes it as the “intellectualization of life.” Moreover, they emphasize the concept of the “objectification of culture” - the growing necessity for individuals to engage with and incorporate the “objective” products of culture in order to affirm their identities (this is compounded by what Simmel calls the “externalization of life”). These last aspects for both authors may lead to new forms of social pathologies and alienation. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates Horkheimer’s reliance on Simmel’s social philosophy as he seeks to formalize his Critical Theory program.

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This article examines references to Simmel’s thinking in contemporary critical theory. With regard to Axel Honneth’s conception of social philosophy, Rahel Jaeggi’s critique of alienation, and Hartmut Rosa’s resonance theory, it discusses the extent to which the classic reservations against Simmel of earlier critical theory are less relevant in a situation where a broad understanding of capitalism has become established that considers cultural, social, and economic factors in their interaction.

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This paper uses a constellation of motifs and figures from the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin to unfold the legendary character of Tyll Eulenspiegel as portrayed in Daniel Kehlmann’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, Tyll (2017; English translation 2020). A motley of trickster, acrobat, hoaxer and clown, Tyll is transplanted by Kehlmann from the fourteenth century into the midst of the Thirty Years War (1618-48) and plies his itinerant trade across the devastated territories of central Europe in a series of episodic and picaresque exploits and encounters. As a wandering will-’o’-the-wisp, the ‘daemonic character’ of Tyll is suggestive of a number of Simmelian social types and Benjaminian dramatis personae: the stranger, the adventurer, the ‘destructive character’ and, above all, the courtly intriguer. I suggest how Tyll intriguingly embodies various attributes and qualities of these figures and, at the same time, playfully eludes and elucidates such constructions and characterizations.

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This article examines Simmel’s dialectics of the money-form by reconstructing his account of “hypertrophied” behaviours in the Philosophy of Money – greed, avarice, squandering, ascetic poverty, cynicism, and the blasé attitude. Developing his earlier diagnosis of the colonisation of ends by means, Simmel shows how the money-form is structurally marked by an “abstract form of enjoyment which, none the less, is not enjoyed”. Read as successive and ultimately failed attempts to secure an ultimate purpose within a money-mediated culture, these hypertrophied behaviours displace the tension between means and ends only to reproduce it in new registers, such that each apparent resolution yields renewed dissatisfaction. By foregrounding the peculiarity of Simmel’s tragic, non-reconciliatory dialectic in contrast to dialectical models oriented towards sublation, the article concludes by indicating how his account prefigures later diagnoses of social and subjective regression in critical theory.