Book review of The Simmelian Legacy. A Science of Relations, by Olli Pyyhtinen (Palgrave, 2018)

The Simmelian Legacy offers a wide and accurate overview of Simmel’s intellectual heirs throughout the 20th century, an excellent account of the whole of Simmel’s oeuvre and, furthermore, it proposes a contemporary rereading of this oeuvre that may awaken the interest of many sociologists and social theorists who are not particularly Simmel scholars. Thus, this book combines three great achievements: tracing Simmel’s legacy in contemporary social thought and sociology (a task which has been only carried out in a fragmented way until now), highlighting Simmel’s major achievements for philosophy and the social sciences, and proposing what elements of Simmel’s thought, which we have been inherited, remain the most interesting to explore as well as work and dialogue with.