To Simmel it is neither realistic nor desirable to strive for a utopia of eternal peace. Humans can only collaborate and develop if some form of conflict among them prevails. Accordingly, they should invent and institutionalize the most humane type of conflict. Rather than subduing each other in war and submit the defeated partner to death or slavery, they ought to compete peacefully and thus provoke each other to higher levels of culture and performance. This Simmel applies to three levels: 1) The worldviews created by religion, art, and scholarship each depict the universe as a whole; they cannot replace each other, they cannot reasonably be in conflict, but they can and should compete. 2) Human groups alien to each other cannot enforce unification but should communicate via an exchange of strangers, reduce differences by competing, and eventually become more and more similar. 3) Businesses, offering goods and services on a market, should compete to gain the approval of the customer and thus perform a non-violent type of conflict in commerce to the advantage of those who pay them money. A summary at the end shows what the three levels have in common.

In this essay is a reflection of the sociological works of Georg Simmel, in the light of the various developments of the classical and contemporary sociological theory. In particular, the notion of sociality and the idea of the individual, discussed elements of the sociological analysis of this author that can be a first-rate tool for understanding social phenomena that characterize the capitalism contemporary and peripheral.

The central problem of the paper is a conflict which outbreaks in a group when one of its participants turns to a purposive action, aimed at disentangling of a lie. It is argued that by this sort of action, the said participant loses the group’s support but wins the autonomy from a lie-ridden narrative. The intricacies of such a conflict for the individual and for the group are analyzed. The author draws on Simmel’s Theory of Opposition, on his concepts of life, form, lie, faithfulness and purpose. Simmel’s theoretical statements are illustrated with vivid examples from literature, film and journalism.

The article intends to suggest a reflection upon the essay The Conflict in the Modern Culture by Georg Simmel; as a matter of facts the author gives a relevant contribution to the direction of an original explanation about the subject of the “opposition to the principle of the shape”, using just the same range of studies. The specific sphere where the article sets the perspective of the analysis of the essay by Simmel – among the most possible ones about the power, the richness of meanings and of contents it has got – is that one of the phenomenon, that can be observed both in the artistic field and the sphere of the culture and of the interpersonal relationships, of the progressive simplification of the exterior shapes. That, starting from the last decade of the nineteenth century, crossing the intellectual and scientific movements that characterized the German and the Austrian cultural life during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The consequences of this long historical process were the birth of the mass individualism of the twentieth century.

The paper aims to investigate the idea of conflict in the polyvocal thought of Georg Simmel. To be correctly interpreted, it must be read through the Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie, manifesting itself as a head problem of its philosophy. Indeed, the life/ form conflict summarizes in itself all the singular contrasts that mark the existence of man. Beginning from the idea of culture and its crisis, through some crucial junctions of the Simmelian philosophy, some moments of its production have been investigated, in order to highlight the adialectic and eternal nature of the conflict in life, which has become the «hidden king» of our Kultur. The conspicuous points that have allowed a not always linear navigation have been identified not only through the particular and original Simmelian philosophy but also by virtue of a not strictly chronological reconstruction of his last production which goes from 1914 to 1918. In this way, it was proposed a key to understanding the conflict and the philosophy of life that highlights the character of reciprocity and of what can be defined as Simmel's uniqueness, the apax of his thought, still decisive for our contemporaneity.

Through the original essays of Simmel we understand why the dynamic flow of life and history, the fallible, reciprocal self, never fully possesses itself as an identity, reliable and secure. This does not translate a negativity that is displaced in the middle, between the negative and the ego: that is, the otherness, the navigator in the in-finite. The non-proper-ego, never identical to itself, is made and generated by the other in conflict. As with Hegel, the ego is made up of the relationship with the other also for Simmel. An alterity that (re) composes it and erodes it in the life of the forms of mutual self. One can not think-of-thinking life as a flow in which consciousness, bodies and things are displaced out of this relationship. The textures of this tangle make life, society, philosophy, politics, science and art, that is culture, make us re-know as individual subjects of desire, power and knowledge, in our limit, in an ontology of the human and of the non-depoliticizing social, in which the principle of reciprocity rises to a constitutive dimension of the uneasy bond of the becoming of being, to which we can be subtracted from the moment that the human being is an imperfect, missing being.

With the Call “Conflict theories and philosophies of peace. 100 years after Georg Simmel’s Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur”, we have aimed at reopening a discussion regarding conflict and peace in a comparison between the Simmelian theory of conflict and other theories of conflict and philosophies of peace, and to, ultimately, establish its heuristic reach in explaining conflicts of various natures, both those that are traditional and well-known and those that are new, from everyday conflicts to those that are social or cultural, and through to armed conflicts.

Scienza e Pace / Science and Peace invites the academic community and the public to the presentation of its last thematic issue "From conflict to Peace. On the way with Georg Simmel". The issue collects the Research Papers received through the call entitled "Theories of conflict and philosophies of peace. 100 years after the publication of Der Konflikt der Modernen Kultur by Georg Simmel".

The presentation will take place on November 29, 2018, at 4 PM, in the Aula Magna of the Department for Political Sciences, via F. Serafini, 3 (ground floor).

Confirmed interventions:

Enza Pellecchia, Director of the Sciences for Peace Interdisciplinary Centre - University of Pisa

Book review of V. Bartolucci, G. Gallo, "Capire il conflitto, costruire la pace", Mondadori, Milano, 2017.

This paper surveys the state of the play with regard to women’s inequality and the processes of changes leading to potential empowerment in selected Muslim majority countries. This paper uses the framework of sociologist Goran Therborn’s existential inequality, which is complemented by the capability approaches of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The main objective of the paper is to bring to light the steady, albeit tardy, empowerment of Muslim women amidst social structural adversities and to highlight diversities in women’s existential inequalities in the selected Muslim majority countries where the narratives of women are often reduced to unverified generalizations and stereotypes. The underlying purpose of the paper is to generate debates and promote further evidence-based investigations on the subject of gender inequality/equality, and gender justice in the Muslim majority countries.