Philosophy Today

published on July 18, 2023

Goldschmidt and Social Theory
Conflict and Dialogue

The concepts of contradiction and dialogue are crucial to Hermann Goldschmidt’s Contradiction Set Free. In this paper, I place Goldschmidt into dialogue with two social thinkers for whom similar ideas were equally crucial: Georg Simmel and Donald Levine. In the case of Simmel, I highlight his theory of conflict specifically, but more generally his commitment to duality and ambiguity. In the case of Levine, I feature his attempt to articulate what he calls a “dialogic” narrative of the sociological tradition. I seek to evaluate Goldschmidt’s own thinking by his own criteria, by asking whether the sociological and the philosophical approaches to these questions are parallel, in opposition, or an instance of a contradiction in Goldschmidt’s sense.