Georg Simmel believed that individuals were shaped by their position and role in society. In his epochal work "The Stranger," Simmel charts out the social interactions that define the personality of the title character. Simmel believed that a person's standing in society and his interactions with others in that society assigned to him a social archetype. A person's character, then, is but a part of the greater whole that is society.
This relationship can be seen in Simmel's depiction of the stranger. The stranger is different from the rest of society because he is from elsewhere and was not raised within the social group he finds himself in now. He is nevertheless a part of the social group, and his identity is wrapped up in this sense of belonging and not belonging, of being within and without the social group. The Stranger "is fixed within a particular spatial group . . . but his position . . . is determined . . . by the fact that he does no belong to it from the beginning." Indeed, the very fact that he has the potential to leave again and return to his own society imbues the stranger with a certain standing in the group. He sees it with fresh eyes, and is better able to judge the group than its members.
George Herbert Mead picks up on this dichotomy between a person and their relationship with society in "The Self, The I, and The Me." Mead notes this distinction by pointing out that "There is a very distinct separation between the self and the body. The body can operate in a very intelligent fashion without there being a self involved in the experience" (Mead 1). Mead notes the dichotomy within the idea of self, which has both a subject and an object, and notes that in the case of a man running for his life, the man is entirely occupied in the action of running and his experience is swallowed up in the objects about him, leaving him with no consciousness of self at all. Mead, like Simmel, believed that the ...