SOURCE: "Georg Simmel and the Aesthetics of Social Reality," in Social Forces, Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1973, pp. 320-29.

In the following essay, Davis demonstrates how the aesthetic basis of Simmel's sociology supports an argument that Simmels are theories more unified than commentators generally consider them to be.

Arthur Salz once said he learned from his teacher Georg Simmel, the following about society: "[Simmel] conceives of sociology as the study of the forms of sociation. But whoever speaks of forms moves in the field of aesthetics. Society, in the last analysis, is a work of art."

Society is a work of art? The comparison is an intriguing one. In this article I will try to show that it constitutes Simmel's central vision, and that around this aesthetic model the overwhelming profusion of Simmel's sociological insights—that on first reading appear in such chaotic dissociation from one another—actually cohere. Of...