The Simmelian Legacy ─ A Science of Relations

While Georg Simmel is widely known, the impact of his work has been far from straightforward, with the ways in which his ideas have been taken up by later thinkers as complex and diverse as the ideas themselves. The Simmelian Legacy is a comprehensive study of the work of this influential sociologist and philosopher and its reception in the Anglophone, German, and French intellectual worlds.

By returning to Simmel and his legacy, this text gives voice to a corpus of vast significance and great potential that has lived too much in the shadows. It examines how his relational mode of thought transforms the landscape of sociological problems to subvert conventional conceptions of Simmel’s oeuvre as well as of sociology’s history. It not only rediscovers key dimensions of Simmel’s thought, but also explores its gradual and uneven re-emergence within subsequent scholarship.

Olli Pyyhtinen is Associate Professor at the New Social Research programme at the University of Tampere, Finland. He is the author of Simmel and ‘the Social’ (Palgrave, 2010), The Gift and Its Paradoxes (2014) and More-than-Human Sociology (Palgrave, 2015), and one of the authors of Disruptive Tourism and Its Untidy Guests (Palgrave, 2014). He has also edited the volume The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel (2016) together with Thomas Kemple. Currently Pyyhtinen is also the editor-in-chief of the Finnish national sociology journal Sosiologia.