“Constructing a New Storey Beneath Historical Materialism”: Georg Simmel and the Foundations of a “Relational” Critical Theory.

Relational sociology (RS) and historical materialism are often considered as opposite paradigms: on the one hand, RS represents an ontological attempt to “steer” inquiries into the social realm under the relational approach, i.e. the relation is the very sociological matter; on the other hand, Marx and historical materialism are often reduced to methodological holism, referring relations to the economic. First, I argue in this paper for going beyond this dualism and reconciling RS (namely addressing Georg Simmel as the first systematic theorist) and historical materialism within the frame of Critical Theory, according to the recent address given by Axel Honneth and Rahel Jaeggi. The Critical Theory must answer the question of ‘social life’ as relation, focusing on the particular and the individual, disentangling the tie between the rationalization aspect and the vital sphere, as well as the interlacement between ‘the informalization of economic and economization of the informal’ (Honneth). Secondly, I aim to lead Simmel’s relational theory back to his Lebenssoziologie. In his last writings, he focused on the question dealing the origin of ‘forms’ within the social life under the categories of Wechselwirkung and Vergesellschaftung. The intellectualization of modern life (since Simmel’s reflections in ‘Philosophy of Money’) is the mechanism to objectify and ‘monetize’ (the money as a pure mean) any aspect of life, even in the moral and the political sphere. Beyond the inexorable mechanism of modern intellectualization, Simmel also denoted the inner ‘vital’ character of any social relation. He put the basis for a Lebenssoziologie: despite Lash’s interpretation and reduction to the monistic-informational model and Jaeggi’s immanentism, this paper furnishes, finally, a ‘relational and transcendental (emergentist)’ interpretation of Simmel’s sociology.