Style as Substance: Georg Simmel's Phenomenology of Culture

Georg Simmel is a man of many renaissances. Discovered and rediscovered with disheartening regularity by sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural theorists of all stripes, he seems ever on the verge of bursting into the mainstream without ever quite doing so. This posthumous fate is an unfortunate repetition of his own professional frustration: Simmel spent most of his adult life on the verge of receiving the professorship that, with his twenty-five scholarly books and hundreds of articles, he so richly deserved.