Olli Pyyhtinen

M. Soc. Sc., Researcher

Department of Sociology

University of Turku

Assistentinkatu 7

FIN-20014 University of Turku
FINLAND
email: olsapy@utu.fi
tel. +358 (0)2 333 6061

Sociology of associations: Georg Simmel and Gabriel Tarde

Sociology has traditionally been tied up with an overall view of society. Sociology of society has been the name of the game: the social has been identified with society and the latter furthermore with the nation-state (the most evident representatives of this view being perhaps Durkheim and Parsons). But there are alternative conceptions of the social as well. Among the most notable figures in this sense are Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904). In his early phase Simmel – without doubt better known of the two – was impressed by Tarde’s work. He reviewed Tarde’s Laws of Imitation, and the two men were in brief correspondence as well. But what is more important is that they both opposed the way society had been falsely made into an entity by Durkheim for instance. To both Simmel and Tarde, ‘society’ is merely an abstract ghost of an idea. It is something to be explained, not something that explains. Instead of adhering to an abstract idea of society, then, they both put emphasis on microscopic assemblages, minute relationships woven between persons. The presentation hence treats Simmel and Tarde as founders of a sociology of associations: both of them sought programmatically to formulate a “pure sociology” — Simmel that of “social forms” and Tarde that of “imitation” (as a pure form) — that does not take society (understood as a static entity or “container” (cf. Parsons)) but rather associations in their open-ended becoming as its starting point. The main combining features between Simmel’s and Tarde’s sociology will be discussed, along with their possible usefulness to present day sociology. It will be argued that a sociology of associations succeeds in what the ideas of normative integration and nation-state fail: capturing contemporary fleeting social relationships that do not obey territorial nation-state boundaries any more.