No sooner has a form been objectified than it seems in some measure constricting or inappropriate to the vital processes which called it into being. From this tension arise the dynamics of culture history, a result of “the deep contradiction between life’s eternal flux and the objective validity and authenticity of the forms through which it proceeds.”

XREF: This parallels the sociological insight that institutions created to serve needs eventually constrain those who produced them — reminiscent of Weber's iron cage and Durkheim's anomie.

DEFINE: Clarifies Simmel's core concept of the tension between life's flux and objectified cultural forms, which drives culture history.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 83