Simmel and Ethnomethodology: Foundational Sociological Issues from a Nondualist Perspective

Georg Simmel, despite being a founding father of sociology, is often excluded from the list of the discipline’s principal founders. This neglect of Simmel’s work was perpetuated in ethnomethodology even though, like ethnomethodology, Simmel’s work concerns the minute organization of everyday interaction. It can, therefore, be of considerable importance for ethnomethodological inquiries. A group of ethnomethodologists devoted two years to reviewing Simmel’s corpus to identify and reveal resources that are useful for contemporary sociologists at large. What we discovered exceeded our expectations, and this article discusses some of these conceptual tools and theoretical resources, including praxis as the object of sociological investigations, objectivation practices, membership as degrees of commonness-and-strangeness, and the individual-“unity” relationship. We also review connections between Simmel, Husserl, Garfinkel and other scholars. Both Simmel and Garfinkel were relentless in their refusal to replace the dynamic character of social life with static theoretical constructs. We argue that thinking through their theories together fruitfully impedes sociologists in pursuing dualistic reasoning and re-orients them towards phenomena and issues of great sociological import that have remained largely overlooked, or have receded from view, in current sociology. We conclude that Simmel’s notion of “purely sociological” forms is perfectly consonant with the motivating interest of ethnomethodological researchers, who might employ his conceptual insights to address the lived objectivity of social phenomena empirically. At the same time, this also shows how ethnomethodology is concerned with foundational sociological issues. And, finally, it illuminates Simmel’s textured heritage beyond set, traditional readings of sociological thought and its history.