Simmel, Georg

Georg Simmel is considered to be one of the four founders of the academic discipline of sociology, the first to have established a notion of society that is not derived from any biological or collective substratum, and the first true sociologist of modernity. Using controversies with contemporaries and his own close and sensitive observation of the dynamics and antinomies of modern culture and society, Simmel developed a conception of society that was strictly individualistic in its epistemology. In several major books and numerous seminal essays, Simmel elaborated on the relations between individuals and social forms, studied the intricate relations between individuality and the social process of typification, and observed the effects of the processes of modernization on alienation and the fragmentation of life and experience.