Georg Simmel in Translation: Interdisciplinary Border Crossings in Culture and Modernity

Though Georg Simmel considered himself a philosopher, his intellectual influence went well beyond the confines of one academic discipline at the turn of the last century. His writings on money, modernity, and the metropolis, as well as the artwork, female culture, and psychologism, left a significant mark on contemporaries like Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Worringer, and Max Weber. Nevertheless, his name soon disappeared from public memory and scholarly discourse. In Georg Simmel in Translation, scholars from the Humanities and the Social Sciences cut through time and space to illustrate ways in which Simmel was, and still is, carried from one context to another. From Imperial Berlin to contemporary Singapore, they trace Simmel’s transgression of disciplinary boundaries in culture and modernity. The collected essays also explore the transformed presence of his scholarship in the works of more well-known artists, writers, and intellectuals between the second half of the nineteenth century and today.