Simmel on the war for national spirit and cosmopolitan culture

Abstract

Building and expanding on significant pre-existing scholarship, this article surveys Georg Simmel’s public reactions to the war, concentrating on his most widely circulated statements of the period, before moving on to some further considerations on the significance of the war for Simmel’s sociological and philosophical vision as a whole. At the forefront are three or four main emphases of Simmel’s thinking in the relevant texts. These include the politics of Europe and the nation in Simmel’s thought; themes of death and finitude in modern culture; the West and Western hubris on the stage of world history; and money, law and violence in international affairs at the outset of the 20th century. Though there can be little doubt of the sheer virulence of Simmel’s and other German writers’ reaction to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the war’s profoundly transformative experience could move Simmel gradually to embrace another, more reasoned and self-reflective form of salient struggle with ‘the West’ and Western ‘civilization’ in European relations, disabused of nationalistic anguish and resentment.