Georg Simmel and the Masculinity of Modernity

Abstract

Current evaluations of Simmel’s theoretical writings on men, women and modernity have read these too generously, relying on a curate’s egg motif culling the good parts from the bad parts. The good parts are judged insightful and prescient, revealing the workings of a sociological imagination and even anticipating elements of contemporary feminist epistemology. The bad parts reveal the unfortunate incursion of ideological baggage or blinkered romanticism that periodically surface and impede the productive workings of the sociological imagination. A more astute reading is proposed here: one which recuperates the bad parts as symptomatic of the workings of Simmel’s philosophical imagination where he crafts a deep ontology of gender, in the form of an a priori, absolute duality of incommensurate modes of male and female being. This deep ontology of gender fatefully consigns woman to the wastelands of his philosophical imagination, whilst releasing man, and man alone, into the more fertile and productive workings of his sociological imagination. Hence, Simmel constructs a masculine ontology of the social. This is induced by Simmel’s ontological grounding of the objective in the male and by the ‘radical dualism’ he recommends as a more women-friendly alternative to ‘relative dualism’.