Class Notes for Sociology, Culture, and Modernity 2020/21
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Course
CC2015 Sociology Culture And Modernity (CC2015)
Institution
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR)
Class Notes for Sociology, Culture, and Modernity 2020/21 including all classes/lectures and additional information from seminars added into the same file later on
• Context of most readings: modernity
• Industrialism
• Capitalism
• Population growth
• Connection between three elements:
• Subjective culture
• Internalised within people
• Bearers of culture (person, individual)
• Culture that we have internalised
• Lives inside of us
• Example: ideas, attitudes, feelings
• Subjective experience
• Socially influenced but fully possessed by individual
• Makes up personality
• Possibility for change/creativity/agency
• Going against the grain of culture in a society
• Studies do not concern only norms and values but also expression thereof
(behaviour, linked to psychology)
• Objective culture
• Content of culture
• Outcome of human action, thinking, appreciation, meaning and sense making
• Before it was objective culture it was subjective culture
• Anything that a person produces
• Can be as small as saying creative idea in head out loud
• It is now separate from the individual
• Somebody else can do something with it
• The environment we live in
• Tangible
• Shoes, architecture, fashion, goods manufacturing
• Intangible
• Language, science, religion, law, art, politics, ideas,
• We live inside objective culture
• We influence it and it influences us in turn
• Simmel: objective and subjective culture are in exchange
• Social structure
• Forms of interaction
• The social positions of people and groups of people in relation to one another
• Example: hierarchical relationships, competition, division of labor, family structure
• Sociology as geometry (Simmel) of social forms, abstracted form
• Content (objective culture)
• Those who embody that content (subjective culture)
• Theoretically separate from content and those who embody the content
• Three elements cannot be separated from one another
• Mutual connections between these three are central in any sociological study
• Always make connections between the three
• Georg Simmel
• Biography
• Born in 1858 in Berlin
• Very important city
• Growing and rich
• Son of jewish businessman
• Trained as a philosopher (sociology did not really exist)
• Jewish background made it difficult to get official position
• Publications received a lot of attention
, • Gave lectures in rented private rooms at university about sociology
• Tried to establish new scientific discipline
• Founded German Society for Sociology in 1909
• With Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies
• In late 50s he was officially appointed at university in Strasbourg
• About 20 books and 200 articles
• Influences:
• Founder of sociology as a scientific girls
• Founding father of urban sociology (Chicago school)
• Basis for network analysis (types of relationships)
• The Problem of Sociology
• What makes sociology an autonomous discipline?
• Anything thats “human”? No. (It would be economy or psychology)
• Group psychology? No.
• Social relationships? yes.
• Study of social forms
• Sociation: form of relations in which people and groups of people interact with each
other separate from content
• Entering into relationship with one another and arrangement thereof
• Social structure over objective and subjective culture
• Latter are outcomes of sociation
• Sociation is about the amount of relationship
• From 2 to infinite amount of people
• Requires at least two people
• With every added individual things start to change
• Arrangement: hierarchical or horizontal
• Society is not a fruitful concept
• It does not say anything
• Merely the sum of interactions
• The metropolis and mental life
• Simmel was fascinated with change from premodern to modern society
• Quantitative increase in sociation
• More and more people means more and more relationships
• Universal law of increasing sociation
• The more complex forms of relationships become the more the cultural content and
people change with it (subjective and objective)
• Leads to functional differentiation, rationalisation, individualisation
• Functional differentiation
• Expansion of number of relationships causes expansion of functional differentiation
• Fewer people means many things have to be done by one person at the same time
• Multiple functions in a small society
• Huge growth in population
• Competition but then the realisation that there can be exchange of ideas
• Can become really good at one thing and differentiate ones self
• Specialisation goes quite far today
• Some people only make coffee while others make only sandwiches
• Makes possible increasingly complex objective culture
• Example: aviation
• So many people in a metropolis a bunch of people can specialise in small parts of a
plane
• Some are specialised in wings others in jet engines etc.
• Would not have been possible in a small town
• Example: bars
• Have to distinguish themselves
• Signature drinks, higher ratings etc.
• Rationalisation
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