Universalist rationality and Simmel’s sacrifice model of value

Abstract

At the turn of the century, Georg Simmel published critical commentaries on what he considered a misguided faith in socialism in the Viennese newspaper Die Zeit. In this article, the implicit presence of Simmel’s own sacrifice model of value in these commentaries is highlighted and its utility for a critical engagement with state efforts to promote a universalist rationality demonstrated. Through measures that promote a universalism, qualitative distinctions between ritual occasions and the everyday are rendered problematic and irrelevant. Resistance to such efforts, it is argued, can be suitably interpreted by way of Simmel’s sacrifice model of value. The discussion is illustrated through case studies of burial practices from late socialist Vietnam where the Party State has long curbed competitive consumption and nowadays promotes cremation as an economical funeral.