This paper explores the intellectual and the biographical relationship between Georg Simmel and Max Scheler. This topic has been examined through correspondences, direct and indirect references, as well as investigations in the Munich Archive. Simmel and Scheler lived in Berlin in the early twentieth century, so they shared the German Jahrhundertwende “Zeitgeist” and many fascinations, anxieties, hopes, and feelings. Scheler was Simmel’s pupil in 1895, but they were destined to meet again and again. Simmel attended some of Scheler’s lectures as (...) he searched for his theoretical path. Their roots of reciprocal influence also spanned many indirect interests and they developed personal acquaintance. There are many similarities and affinities in Simmel’s and Scheler’s work, that behind the reciprocal effect of their respective intellectual work hide an undeniable and unavoidable ambivalence. They converge on many topics, even though their respective philosophical and sociological findings were quite different. Scheler’s “essentialist” position, in opposition to some Simmelian “functionalism”, does not detract from the mighty importance of Simmel’s unique approach, which brought a breath of novelty to both philosophical and sociological fields through its eclectic and innovative inquiry into modernity and from Scheler’s new phenomenological approach. The interaction between Simmel and Scheler was certainly significant for both of them, surely for defining and clarifying their own philosophy of culture as well as their anthropological and sociological achievements. (shrink)

Recent writing in social theory has seen a renewed preoccupation with questions of religion, secularization and civilizational difference. This article reappraises the work of one early twentieth-century thinker in relation to these issues: the German historical theologian and close colleague of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923). The article concentrates particularly on Troeltsch’s late writings on Europe and ‘Europeanism’. The thesis is defended that Troeltsch offers an important gloss on Weber’s famous assertion of the ‘universal significance and validity’ of occidental rationalism. (...) Troeltsch offers a thicker, more concretized reading of Weber’s statement that serves as a precursor to contemporary thinking about ‘multiple modernities’ and also as a fund of trenchant counter-responses to the claims of recent post-colonial critics about Eurocentrism in western social science. Troeltsch’s writings give us one example among many of a current of cosmopolitan reflexivity in European social thought between the wars that avoided both nationalism and chauvinism, on the one hand, and nihilism and obscurantism, on the other. (shrink)

Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of ‘crisis’ tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept’s constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently today, in both ordinary and historiographical usage, this basic openness of the concept of crisis (...) is foreclosed when it is deployed with a solely negative connotation of ‘downfall’ and ‘decline’, or of something being thrown into question or jeopardy. Such uses obscure a way in which a crisis can evoke not only the pessimistic sense of a threat to the old order but also the optimistic scenario of a chance for renewal. A one-sidedly negative understanding of crisis as prelude to calamity, we argue here, is problematic for historical research for two reasons. Firstly, it obscures comprehension of the consciousness of actors in the relevant period who at any particular moment can have had no prior knowledge of the crisis’s outcome. Secondly, it tends to reify the relevant crisis and to occlude its basic character as something narratively constructed in the accounts of both contemporaries and subsequent historiography. (shrink)