On games counterexamples – your rule (3) seems to fall foul of the way many players in English Premier League Football approach their task!

Yes, Rashdall made racist comments, which I’ve quoted disapprovingly myself. But it hardly follows that nothing he wrote is worth reading. If we were to dismiss every past thinker with some racist or sexist views no one would read Aristotle. But as I recall one or two people do.

BTW Rashdall gets a skewering for his appalling racism from Jeremy Waldron in his God, Locke and Equality .

Ben: Rashdall says that “’sport’ has been well defined as the overcoming of difficulties simply for the sake of overcoming them.” A more elaborate development of the same idea is in Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, (1978), about to be reprinted by Broadview Press and, though little known, one of the great philosophy books of the 20th century. (Philosophers: the reprint has glowing blurbs by Simon Blackburn and Shelly Kagan.) According to Suits, a game, or the activity of playing a game, has three main elements. (1) It’s aimed a goal that can be described independently of the game, such as that a ball go into a hole in the ground or that you stand on top of a mountain. (2) It has rules that forbid to you use the most efficient means to that goal, such as carrying the ball down the fairway by hand and dropping it in the hole or taking a helicopter to the top of the mountain. And (3) in playing the game you accept the restrictions the rules impose willingly, because they make the game possible. Or, in Suits’s summary statement, playing a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” (If counterexamples spring to mind, Suits discusses them all.) And it’s a hilarious book, written as a parody of a Platonic dialogue with the Grasshopper from Aesop’s fable in the role of Socrates and all sorts of wild imaginary scenarios. As Shelly and Simon say, it’s a one-of-a-kind book. And it completely puts the boot to old Wittgenstein.

GOD DAMNIT! All of my best ideas turn out to not be original. Back to the draw board…

He studied philosophy at Berlin, I believe, and wrote a philosophical dissertation on Yodeling. But it was rejected, so he wrote another one on Kant’s philosophy of nature instead. (This is from memory, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.)

I know of a dissertation or two that could be characterized that way. (Maybe one of them is the person you knew: I think they’re Scandinavian.) I have some (very underdeveloped notes) of my own for a seminar of this sort (which I’ve never given). Maybe one day I’ll offer it—assuming I have a good enough grip on the stuff. Though there are people in my department who have a lot more expertise than me in that area…

If one looks broadly at relational sociology, particularly in its comparative-historical variant (e.g., Tilly), I think it is fair to say that one finds basically an interesting combination of Weber and Simmel: Weberian in its approach to assessing causal processes, Simmelian in its emphasis upon recurrent forms and their related processes/dynamics.

A side note: Back when some of us in Columbia PhD program in Political Science were trying to work our way through White’s Identity and Control, one of us approached him (during a Contemporary Civilization meeting) and mentioned that he was reading the book, but was having trouble understanding it. White’s response was, IIRC, “that’s okay, I don’t think I understand it either” :-). I relied mostly on Chuck Tilly’s “skeleton key” to the book; I also tried to absorb whatever I could from the one class I took with Peter.

At one point the contentious politics seminar had a graduate student who was visiting form elsewhere and working on an analysis of White’s social theory. I wonder if that ever came to anything. Kieran, has anyone published anything like that in sociology? Anyway, Fascinating stuff.

They do in my class! And in many others, too. I’d say his stock has been on the rise since the late 1980s.

Are there prominent sociologists who are considered Simmelian in their approach?

Sure. At least three quite different styles of sociology trace themselves at least in part to him. One is a tradition of small-group research on the structure of dyads and triads, etc. A second is a (mostly British) line of cultural analysis that takes Simmel’s writings on the city and individual identity as foundational. And a third is a branch of modern social network theory, of which my colleague Ron Breiger is a leading exponent. His classic paper on The Duality of Persons and Groups (JSTOR link; summary here) takes its inspiration from Simmel.

And this:
“Sebastian, a doorman who has worked in Midtown on the East Side for seven years, describes his coworkers as “a little bit of everything. Jamaican, Trinidad, Peru.” This is a little bit of everything within the scope of the Monroe Doctrine.”

Not so simple.

I’ve been riding in service elevators in Manhattan- I’m a carpenter/plasterer/construction mechanic- for the last 25 years. On Park and 5th until recently at least, preferably white in the front (often Irish) niggers in the back. 95th and Park last year?: Russian, Romanian and Trini. A lot of Poles as well.
And as you’d expect there’s a racial difference between west and east. McGeorge Bundy’s building, white. Al Franken’s building mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican.
Franken gets good marks from the help, but his wife gets raves. Same with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson (same building)
The wives are loved.

A book I’d love to read:
Status Seeking and Philosophical Naturalism: a study of modern academic life