Overview

The significance of the German philosopher and social thinker, Georg Simmel (1858–1918), is only now being recognised by intellectual historians. Through penetrating readings of Simmel's thought, taken as a series of reflections on the essence of modernity and modern civilisation, Efraim Podoksik places his ideas within the context of intellectual life in Germany, and especially Berlin, under the Kaiserreich. Modernity, characterised by the growing differentiation and fragmentation of culture and society, was a fundamental issue during Simmel's life, underpinning central intellectual debates in Imperial Germany. Simmel's thought is depicted here as an attempt at transforming the complexity of these debates into a coherent worldview that can serve as an effective guide to understanding their main parameters. Paying particular attention to the genealogy and usage of the concepts of Bildung, culture and civilisation in Germany, this study offers contextual analyses of Simmel's philosophies of culture, society, art, religion and the feminine, as well as his interpretations of Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe and Rembrandt.

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9781108964975

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Efraim Podoksik is Associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was a Humboldt Fellow at Max Weber Kolleg, Erfurt. He specialises in modern intellectual history, focusing on German and British thinkers, including Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies and Michael Oakeshott. He is the author of In Defence of Modernity: Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott (2003) and the editor of Doing Humanities in Nineteenth-Century Germany (2019) and The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott (2012). His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Journal of the History of Ideas, Modern Intellectual History and New German Critique.

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