Georg Simmel (1858-1918) 1É 241
plurality, and yet it does not constitute a mere conceptual generalization and abstraction.
Herewith is expressed the profound relation between relativity and society, which is the most immediate demonstration of relativity in regard to the material of humanity: society is the supra-singular structure which is nonetheless not abstract. Through this concept" historical life is spared the alternatives of having to run either in mere individuals or in abstract generalities. Society is the generality that has. simultaneously, con-:: crete vitality. From this can be seen the unique meaning which exchange, as the economic realization of the
relativity of things, has for society. It lifts the individual thing and its significance for the individual man out of their singularity, not into the sphere of the abstract but into the liveliness of interaction, which is. so to speak, the body of economic value. We may examine an object ever so closely with respect to its self-sufficient properties, but we shall not Find its economic value. For this consists exclusively in the reciprocal relationship which comes into being among several objects on the basis of these properties, each determining the other and each returning to the other the significance it has received therefrom.
Introduction to "The Stranger"
Simmel juxtaposed his analysis of the forms of social interaction with a discussion of social types. Social types ■derive not from qualities intrinsic to the individual in question, nor from an individual's choice to be one "type" or another. Rather, being assigned or identified as a type of individual is a product of one's relationship to others. Simmel identified a number of social types, including "the poor," "the nobility,'' "the miser," "the spendthrift," and "the adventurer," but it is his analysis of "the stranger" that has become most well known.
The relationship of the stranger to the group is rooted in a unique synthesis of opposites: "nearness" and "remoteness" (see Figure 6.5). As a distinct social type, the stranger is near or close to us insofar as '.ve share with him general, impersonal qualities, such as nationality, gender, or race. But because such /similarities connect us with so many others, the stranger is indistinct or "remote." No unique or specific qualities are shared with him that could in turn form the basis of a personal relationship. As a result, the stranger is seen not as an individual, but, rather, as a "type" of person whose particular characteristics make him fundamentally different from the group. Yet, this unique position of the stranger relative to the group allows him to provide services that are otherwise unattainable or "unfit" for the in-group to perform. Often this attachment makes the stranger an indispensable element of the group, though his positive contributions are dependent on his outsider status. Though he is part of the group, the stranger, then, exists outside of and is thus confronted by the group.
For Simmel, the classical example of the stranger was the European Jew who served as a trader. The baderis a "middleman" who makes possible the exchange of goods with people who live beyond the boundaries of the group. Jews became traders because they were denied many of the legal, political, and property rights granted to ordinary citizens.1 As a result, European Jews were often restricted in their Professional activities to "mobile" occupations such as trading and finance. Simmel argued that it is 'he mobility of the stranger within a group—he is "no landowner"—that makes the position a "syn-thesisof nearness and remoteness." As Simmel remarked, "The purely mobile person comes incidence, contact with every single element [of a group] but is not bound up organically, through shed ties of kinship, locality, or occupation, with any single one" ([1908c] 1971:145, emphasis original).
't\ t]U W''^reaC't'1C neX' c^aPter' t'lere are many interesting parallels between Simmel's notion of the "stranger" U:S°'S s notion oP'doubte consciousness" and the "place" of African Americans in the United States.
242 3 CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY Figure 6.5   Duality of the "Stranger"
I Stranger
remoteness/wandering nearness/attachment
In addition to these occupational consequences, the unique relation of" the stranger to the larger group allows the stranger to adopt an objective attitude toward internal conflicts. Nonpartisanship grants the stranger a position of objectivity in efforts to resolve disputes. In other words, the stranger is not likely to be committed in advance to any one party should disagreements arise between individuals who possess full group membership. Furthermore, the remoteness and freedom from prejudiced understanding that objectivity entails can also make the stranger a valued confidant. Certainly, in modern society it is not uncommon to be willing to share otherwise unaired, intimate details about one's life and relationships with a complete stranger. Indeed, now such strangers—professional therapists and counselors—are paid.
Significantly, then, the stranger is not the same as the complete "outcast." The stranger has elements of nearness and remoteness—he is attached, but not completely—while the social outcast is only remote. However, despite the services that strangers are able to provide to a community, nonetheless we should be careful not to romanticize the position of this social type. Strangers often are exceptionally vulnerable to discrimination, if not violence.2
--- "The Stranger" (1908)--
Georg Simmei
If Wandering, considered as a state of detachment from here in the usual sense of the term, as the wandeicr who
every given point in space, is the conceptual opposite of comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the man
attachment to any point, then the sociological form of who comes today and stays tomorrow—the potential .
"the stranger" presents the synthesis, as it were, of both wanderer, so to speak, who, although he has gone no ,
of these properties. (This is another indication that spa- further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming
tial relations not only are determining conditions of and going. He is fixed within a certain spatial circle—or
relationships among men, but are also symbolic of those   within a group whose boundaries are analogous to sp relationships.) The stranger will thus not be considered   boundaries—but his position within it is fundamentally
_
SOURCE: From On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald Levine (1971). Copyright © 1971 by The In Chicago. All rights reserved. Used by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
3 While Jews historically hove been strangers throughout Europe, America has its own history of "strangers." Afriean; first were enslaved, then, after abolition, were kept "second-class" citizens with the establishment of Jim Crow laws Durin late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe faced intense hatred and disenn tion. Most ironic, however, is the plight suffered by Native Americans and Mexican Americans, who have always been in -as strangers in their own land as a result of colonization. All the while, they have played important roles by risking their liv-the armed forces, building the nation's infrastructure, and performing jobs that are considered "beneath" the dominant grot
Georg Simmel (1858-1918) IS 243
affected by the fact that he does not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it.
In the case of the stranger, the union of closeness and remoteness involved in every human relationship is patterned in a way that may be succinctly formulated as follows: the distance within this relation indicates that one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near. The state of being a stranger is of course a completely positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction. The inhabitants of Sinus are not exactly strangers to us, at least not in the sociological sense of the word as we are considering it. la that sense they do not exist for us at all; they are beyond being far and near. The stranger is an element of the group itself, not unlike the poor and sundry "inner enemies"—an element whose membership within the group involves both being outside it and confronting it.
The following statements about the stranger are intended to suggest how factors of repulsion and distance work to create a form of being together, a form of union based on interaction.
In the whole history of economic activity the stranger makes his appearance everywhere as a trader, ■and the trader makes his as a stranger. As long as production for one's own needs is the general rule, or products are exchanged within a relatively small circle, there is no need for a middleman within the group. A ^trader is required only for goods produced outside the ■group/Unless there are people who wander out into foreign lands to buy these necessities, in which case they are themselves "strange" merchants in this other ..region,.the trader must be a stranger; there is no opportunity for anyone else to make a living at it. - This position of the stranger stands out more sharply tf, instead, oHeaving the place of his activity, he settles down.there. In innumerable cases even this is possible only if he. can live by trade as a middleman. Any closed economic group where land and handicrafts have been apportioned in a way that satisfies local demands will still support a livelihood for the trader. For trade alone niakes.possible unlimited combinations, and through it "tfeiligence is constantly extended and applied in new areas, something that is much harder for the primary producer with his more limited mobility and his depen-ence 0n a circle of customers that can be expanded only v®y slowly. Trade can always absorb more men than npnmary:production. It is therefore the most suitable "         ivho intrudes as a supernumer-oup in which all the economic
positions are already occupied. The classic example of this is the history of European Jews. The stranger is by his very nature no owner of land—land not only in the physical sense but also metaphorically as a vital substance which is fixed, if not in space, then at least in an ideal position within the social environment.
Although in the sphere of intimate personal relations the stranger may be attractive and meaningful in many ways, so long as he is regarded as a stranger he is no "landowner" in the eye of the other. Restriction to intermediary trade and often (although sublimated from it) to pure finance gives the stranger the specific character of mobility. The appearance of this mobility within a bounded group occasions that synthesis of nearness and remoteness which constitutes the formal position of the ..stranger. The purely mobile person comes incidentally into contact with even' single element but is not bound up organically, through established ties of kinship, locality, or occupation, with any single one.
Another expression of this constellation is to be found in the objectivity of the stranger. Because he is not bound by roots to the particular constituents and partisan dispositions of the group, he confronts all of these with a distinctly "objective" attitude, an attitude that does not signify mere detachment and nonparticipation but is a distinct structure composed of remoteness and nearness, indifference and involvement. I refer to my analysis of the dominating positions gained by aliens, in the discussion of superordination and subordination, typified by the practice in certain Italian cities of recruiting their judges from outside, because no native was free from entanglement in family interest and factionalism.
Connected with the characteristic of objectivity is a phenomenon that is found chiefly, though not exclusively, in the stranger who moves on. This is that he often receives the most surprising revelations and confidences, at times reminiscent of a confessional about matters which are kept carefully hidden from everybody with whom one is close. Objectivity is by no means nonparticipation, a condition that is altogether outside the distinction between subjective and objective orientations. It is rather a positive and definite kind of participation, in the same way that the objectivity of theoretical observation clearly does not mean that the mind is a passive tabula rasa on which things inscribe their qualities, but rather signifies the full activity of a mind working according to its own laws, under conditions that exclude accidental distortions and emphases whose individual and subjective differences would produce quite different pictures of the same object.
244 II CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
Objectivity can also be defined as freedom. The objective man is not bound by ties which could prejudice his perception, his understanding, and his assessment of data. This freedom, which permits the stranger to experience and treat even his close relationships as though from a bird's-eye view, contains many dangerous possibilities. From earliest times, in uprisings of all sorts the attacked party has claimed that there has been incitement from the outside, by foreign emissaries and agitators. Insofar as this has happened, it represents an exaggeration of the specific role of the stranger: he is the freer man, practically and theoretically; he examines conditions with less prejudice; he assesses them against standards that are more general and more objective; and his actions are not confined by custom, piety, or precedent.
Finally, the proportion of nearness and remoteness which gives the stranger the character of objectivity also finds practical expression in the more abstract nature of the relation to him. That is, with the stranger one has only certain more general qualities in common, whereas the relation with organically connected persons is based on the similarity of just those specific traits which differentiate them from the merely universal. In fact, all personal relations whatsoever can be analyzed in terms of this scheme. They are not determined only by the existence of certain common characteristics which the individuals share in addition to their individual differences, which either influence the relationship or remain outside of it. Rather, the kind of effect which that commonality has on the relation essentially depends on whether it exists only among the participants themselves, and thus, although general within the relation, is specific and incomparable with respect to all those on the outside, or whether the participants feel that what they have in common is so only because it is common to a group, a type, or mankind in general. In the latter case, the effect of the common features becomes attenuated in proportion to the size of the group bearing the same characteristics. The commonality provides a basis for unifying the members, to be sure; but it does not specifically direct these particular persons to one another. A similarity so widely shared could just as easily unite each person with every possible other. This, too, is evidently a way in which a relationship includes both nearness and remoteness simultaneously. To the extent to which the similarities assume a universal nature, the warmth of the connection based on diem will acquire an element of coolness, a sense of the contingent nature of precisely this relation—the connecting forces have lost their specific, centripetal character.
In relation to the stranger, it seems to me, this constellation assumes an extraordinary preponderance in. principle over the individual elements peculiar to the relation in question. The stranger is close to us insofar as we feel between him and ourselves similarities of nationality or social position, of occupation or of general human nature. He is far from us insofar as these similarities extend beyond him and us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people.
A trace of strangeness in this sense easily enters even the most intimate relationships. In the stage of first passion, erotic relations strongly reject any thought of generalization. A love such as this has never existed ■ before; there is nothing to compare either with the person one loves or with our feelings for that person. An estrangement is wont to set in (whether as cause or effect is hard to decide) at the moment when this feeling of uniqueness disappears from the relationship. A skepticism regarding the intrinsic value of the relationship and its value for us adheres to the very thought that in this relation, after ail, one is only fulfilling a general human destiny, that one has had an experience that has occurred a thousand times before, and that, if one.had not accidentally met this precise person, someone else would have acquired the same meaning for us.
Something of this feeling is probably not absent, in any relation, be it ever so close, because that which; common to two is perhaps never common only to fhera but belongs to a general conception which includes much else besides, many possibilities of similarities.No matter how few of these possibilities are realized and how often we may forget about them, here and there, nevertheless, they crowd in like shadows between men, like a mist eluding every designation, which must congeal into solid corporeality for it to be called jealousy. Perhaps this is in many cases a more general, at feast more insurmountable, strangeness than that due ta differences and obscurities. It is strangeness caused by tbe fact that similarity, harmony, and closeness are accompanied by the feeling that they are actually not the exclusive property of this particular relation, but stem from -more general one—a relation that potentially includes us and an indeterminate number of others, and therefore prevents that relation which alone was experienced from having an inner and exclusive necessity.
On the other hand, there is a sort of "strangeness' in which this very connection on the basis of a general quality embracing the parties is precluded. The relation of th" Greeks to the barbarians is a typical example; so are al the cases in which the general characteristics one takes 2
Geor» Simmel (I858-I9I8) Is 245
peculiarly and merely human are disallowed to the other. But here the expression "the stranger" no longer has any positive meaning. The relation with htm is a non-relation: he is not what we have been discussing here: the stranger as a member of the group itself.
As such, the stranger is near and far at the same time, as in any relationship based on merely universal human similarities. Between these two factors of nearness and distance, however, a peculiar tension arises, since the consciousness of having only the absolutely general in . common has exactly the effect of putting a special : emphasis on that which is not common. For a stranger to the country, the city, the race, and so on, what is stressed is again nothing individual, but alien origin, a quality "which he has, or could have, in common with many other ^strangers. .For this reason...strangers are not really perceived as individuals, but as strangers of a certain type. "Their remoteness is no less general than their nearness. This form appears, for example, in so special a case as the tax levied on Jews in Frankfurt and elsewhere during the Middle Ages. Whereas the tax paid by Christian citizens varied according to their wealth at any given time,
for every single Jew the tax was fixed once and for all. This amount was fixed because the Jew had his social position as a Jew, not as the bearer of certain objective contents. With respect to taxes every other citizen was regarded as possessor of a certain amount of wealth, and his tax could follow the fluctuations of his fortune. But the Jew as taxpayer was first of al! a Jew, and thus his fiscal position contained an invariable element. This appears most forcefully, of course, once the differing circumstances of individual Jews are no longer considered, limited though this consideration is by fixed assessments, and all strangers pay exactly the same head tax.
Despite his being inorganically appended to it, the stranger is still an organic member of the group. Its unified life includes the specific conditioning of this element-Only we do not know how to designate the characteristic unity of this position otherwise than by saying that it is put together of certain amounts of nearness and of remoteness. Although both these qualities are found to some extent in all relationships, a special proportion and reciprocal tension between them produce the specific form of the relation to the "stranger."
as mm
introduction to "The Metropolis and Mental Life"
"The: Metropolis and Mental Life" addresses several key themes that we have already discussed. For instance, you will find Simmel examining the nature of the struggle for individuality in modern societies as well as the relationship between objective culture and subjective or "individual" culture. You will also.read Simmel's views on money and its psychological effects on the individual and her relationships with others.
This essay also contains an important theme not discussed previously: the intensity of stimuli created by the urban environment and its consequences for the psychology of the city dweller. Unlike the slower tempo and rhythms of small-town life, city life is characterized by a "swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli ... the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance" (Simmel [1903] 1971:325). While the slower tempo and limited social contacts within small towns foster the development of emotional bonds that tie its inhabits together, the metropolis, with its unceasing fluctuations of stimuli and expansiveness of interpersonal contacts, is antithetical to nurturing a rich emotional life. Indeed, it is impossible for the city , 7 to absorb or become emotionally invested in all the happenings and encounters that make up his dailyfife. Attempt! ng to do so would lead to an overstimulation of the senses that would in turn Produce a virtual psychological and emotional paralysis. This leaves the urbanite to react to her world Primarily in a rational manner. . . . Thus the reaction of the metropolitan person to those events is tfp a,   ° a s^nere °f mental activity which is least sensitive and which is furthest removed from the