David Beer, Writings about old ideas: A year with Georg Simmel at Medium

An interesting piece on the process of writing his forthcoming book Georg Simmel’s Concluding Thoughts: Worlds, Lives, Fragments (Palgrave, 2019)

For several years I’d been trying to write a book on Georg Simmel’s social thought. Simmel is a tricky thinker to work with, he moves between topics, styles and disciplines, plus his writings are dense with ideas theories and speculations. Initially, around early 2014, I did some background work, secured a book contract and did a little bit of writing. I quickly realised that I couldn’t get my original plan to work. I wanted to look at a variety of ways in which Simmel’s theories were relevant today, but it got out of hand. I couldn’t work out how to make Simmel’s lively ideas containable in a single project. The bits of writing were shelved and I worked on some other projects for a while. [continues here]