In descriptions of the interior drama of the wager, or of the game, or of the convoluted sequence of emotions suddenly untethered and allowed free expression, we see not only the ways that gambling generated emotional intensity in players, but also how it invited closely detailed descriptions of the ways emotions were experienced. Play and the creation of Blanc-style casinos created a social space and a set of images of gambling that provided Europeans from differing backgrounds a common language of emotion that was developed through a discussion of the ways that emotion was contained and expressed in the environment of the casino, an entity typically described as being passionless.

Siddiqui explains how British multiculturalism has ceded to a politics of resentment, fuelled by anti-immigrant and often anti-Muslim sentiment. Siddiqui draws on the writings of Georg Simmel for whom gratitude fosters emotional and social bonds, countering a narrative of resentment with one of recognition. Rather than seeking an answer in abstract theories of multiculturalism, Siddiqui argues for a refocusing on emotional well-being through gratitude rooted in empathy.

Why did women and men want more stuff? What did such goods mean to those who produced, marketed, purchased, and used them? This chapter examines the social and cultural context of the consumer revolution. Borrowing from sociologists Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and Norbert Elias, historians have long explained the rise of consumption in terms of social emulation. According to this theory, lower social groups imitated higher social groups, spreading new practices of consumption down the social hierarchy. However, while social emulation did occur, it does not explain everything. Patterns of consumption did not always reflect traditional social hierarchies. Examining eighteenth-century material culture, this chapter suggests an alternative approach, which considers how producers, retailers, commentators, and consumers attached meanings to consumer goods and creating a host of new consumer values, including novelty, fashion, selfhood, domesticity, comfort, simplicity, authenticity, cleanliness, health, and exoticism. Such values reflected the development of a modern Enlightenment consumer culture that valorized the present over the past. The social ramifications of eighteenth-century consumer culture were complex. Rising consumption was accompanied by egalitarian ideas, but it did not always promote social mobility. Many consumers bought into the world of goods to reinforce horizontal claims of respectability, not to leap into a new class. Poor laborers who could ill afford to express new consumer values through consumption were marginalized.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is widely recognized as an important forerunner of the social network approach. This chapter discusses the impact of Simmel’s writings on the develop-ment of social network analysis and its relevance for contemporary research. I argue that Simmel’s work was both more influential and more systematic than has usually been acknow¬ledged. In the first part I trace Simmel’s influence on social network analysis by distingui¬shing between a general structural perspective and the adoption of concrete ideas, particularly formulated in his chapters on quantitative aspects and the “web of group affiliations”. In the second part the focus is on Simmel’s concept of forms of sociation (Formen der Vergesell¬schaftung). I argue that reference to so-called basic structural properties such as group size, time or space is key to an analytical perspective that provides a specific explanation of how relationships and networks matter. The “power of structural properties” with respect to the dynamics of social relationships is illustrated by a qualitative study on changes in personal networks following the loss of the spouse. I close with implications for research into personal networks.

One hundred years have passed since the death of Georg Simmel (1858–1918), one of the most fascinating minds of the Second German Empire (Kaiserreich). Simmel’s intellectual brilliance and productivity have never been in doubt, and they are themselves sufficient grounds for writing about him. Indeed, there is no shortage of studies that grapple with various aspects of his thought. Simmel scholarship has recently received fresh impetus with the collection of all his available texts in the monumental twenty-four-volume edition of the Gesamtausgabe coordinated and edited by Otthein Rammstedt.

This chapter analyses Simmel’s worldview during his last years (ca. 1910 – 1918). It argues that under the influence of life philosophy, he developed a peculiar philosophical formula in which unity and contradictions (dualisms) coexisted on two different planes without cancelling another. Various forms in which this idea is addressed are analysed through Simmel’s writings on Goethe, Rembrandt and his essays on the First World War. The chapter argues that initially this approach allowed Simmel to subscribe to an encompassing universalism which he found in Goethe. However, via his preoccupation with Rembrandt and especially in his polemics about the First World War, he used this formula to move in the opposite direction: that is, it allowed him to justify single-mindedness and the fanaticism of action. Thus, the question of whether this worldview should be seen as the ultimate philosophical solution to the question of unity versus variety, or rather represents the highest degree of philosophical aporia, remains unresolved.

This chapter analyses Simmel’s intellectual explorations during his middle period (ca. 1900 – ca. 1910). Having despaired of the possibility of finding a grand synthesis, Simmel developed a radically pluralistic vision of the world, in which no comprehensive unity was envisioned, but each particular form of experience served as a symbol of unity. This view formed in his mind as he engaged with the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The chapter examines Simmel’s attempts to find a symbol of unity in the aesthetic and religious experience, as well as in the experience of femininity. These explorations, however, did not bring about any general philosophical solution. In the end, none of these experiences was shown by to be a fully satisfactory answer to the discontents of modernity.

This chapter analyses Simmel’s worldview during his early period (until ca. 1900). It argues that Simmel held an unusually optimistic view regarding the contradictions of modernity at that time, subscribing to the idea that modern differentiation leads to a comprehensive unity which naturally emerges from variety. This claim is supported by an analysis of Simmel’s writings of the period, starting from his early monograph on Dante and ending with his early sociology and his interpretation of Kant’s philosophy. In respect of sociology, it is argued that the young Simmel subscribed to a kind of reductionist sociologism in the spirit of the founders of Völkerpsychologie, Lazarus and Steinthal. In respect of Kant, it is argued that the young Simmel conceived of his thought as the ultimate philosophical solution to the problems of modernity, and that he distanced himself from Kant once he began to doubt the possibility of reconciling the contradictions of modernity.

In his treatise on the epistemological foundations of historical research, Simmel broadened the Kantian understanding of a priori, reformulating it in the neo-Kantian fashion as signifying ‘relational forms [Verbindungsformen], serviceable to that peculiar capacity of the mind which classifies, defines, and stresses each given mental content in such a way that it can be moulded to fit the most diverse constitutive forms’.1 Challenging the strict dichotomy between abstract perspective and empirical content, he believed that the notion of a priori could be used in a much more flexible way than had been envisioned by Kant and include contents which are themselves empirically derived and yet function in an a priori fashion, serving as presuppositions for specific branches of knowledge, such as history. Following Simmel in this regard, I will conclude my book with a few remarks on the methodological foundations of the work, or what can be described as the a priori of intellectual history, especially the kind of intellectual history which focuses on the ideas of individual minds.

This chapter provides a general contextual setting for the subsequent analysis of Simmel’s work. It discusses the emergence and significance of a particular perception of modernity that became very common among German intellectuals in the last third of the nineteenth century. They believed that the central conflict of modernity lay in the tension between two polar imperatives: those of general culture and specialisation, or universality and particularity. In Germany, this particular tension acquired a high degree of significance and was often accompanied by strong feelings of urgency and even despair. The chapter offers a brief history of this issue as well as a genealogy of the related conceptual apparatus that included notions such as Bildung, Cultur, Beruf and Civilisation. The final section of the chapter introduces the central aspects of Simmel’s philosophy of culture that may elucidate this general context and are in turn elucidated by it.

In this chapter I show that it is possible to identify across a range of different thinkers a shared analytical investment in collective behaviour that allows one to distil the notion of social avalanches or social avalanching. The fundamental claim I make is that Durkheim, Simmel, Tarde and many others sought to respond to an experience that gained particular prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: various forms of social change increasingly produced situations in which individuals felt the ground disappearing beneath them, carrying them away in a collective turbulence which, once set in motion, acquired its own self-organising properties. In addition to developing the notion of social avalanching from late-nineteenth-century social theory, this chapter explores the prosocial character of avalanches. Elaborating on the concept of social avalanching, I examine the extent to which a metaphor such as ‘avalanche’ merits inclusion in the realm of proper sociological concepts and connect it to discussions within physics about self-organised criticality. Finally, I discuss the notion of social avalanching in relation to social action as conceived in the sociology of Max Weber.

This chapter examines cities and urban life from the perspective of social avalanches and tensional individuality. I discuss the ways in which contemporary sociologists and other commentators on nineteenth-century urbanisation saw modern cities as constituting the optimal habitat for the emergence and rapid diffusion of contagious ideas. Several argued that in the metropolis one’s immunity against corrupt ideas is constantly weakened, paving the way for contagion dynamics that could escalate into social avalanches carrying urban inhabitants away in collective frenzy. I also show how sociologists examined metropolitan life as wedded to a notion of tensional individuality: in the city, the individual is at once exposed to a bombardment of external mimetic forces which threaten to undermine individuality and is characterised by an anti-mimetic core which works to counteract such external influences. Finally, the chapter argues that many of the concerns that sociologists expressed concerning late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century cities were shared by architects and urban planners at the time. Their contemplations led to a series of design proposals: suggestions for urban planning believed to eliminate the problem of social avalanching in cities and minimise the mimetic component of urban individuality.