Whilst loneliness may be receiving greater media and political attention, the tendency to present the issue as a discrete individual problem separable from wider social concerns has led to some frustration amongst the sociologically minded. The purpose of this paper is to provide a sociological account of loneliness which is not as susceptible to individualist interpretations as other works in the genre have been. As such the paper focuses on how the structure of a society, rather than its culture, might lead to loneliness. To this end, the paper makes original use of the works of Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Specifically, Simmel's account of how we come to know other people through synthetic construction is applied to his better‐known theory of intersecting social circles. The author claims that when taken together these two aspects of Simmel's thought suggest that social structure can create a form of social isolation in which people find it very difficult to get to know one another, due to a lack of multiple‐context interactions with the same people during their day‐to‐day behavioural patterns. This clustering of interactions within narrow interlocuter‐contexts is hypothesised to account for a portion of the variability in loneliness across individuals, societies and historical time, and is provisionally named as structural loneliness.

中文翻译：

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Simmelian的结构孤独理论

尽管寂寞可能会受到媒体和政治上的更多关注，但倾向于将这一问题作为一个独立的，独立于广泛社会关注点的独立问题来提出，这导致了社会学思想上的一些挫败感。本文的目的是提供一种孤独的社会学解释，它不像其他同类作品那样容易受到个人主义解释的影响。因此，本文重点关注社会的结构而不是其文化如何导致孤独。为此，本文最初使用了乔治·西梅尔（Georg Simmel）（1858–1918）的作品。具体而言，西梅尔关于我们如何通过综合建构认识他人的论述被应用于他更为著名的与社会圈子相交的理论。作者声称，将Simmel的思想的这两个方面放在一起，可以认为社会结构可以创建一种社会孤立的形式，由于缺乏与他人的多上下文交互，人们很难相互了解。人们在日常行为模式中的行为。据推测，这种在狭窄的对话者语境中的相互作用集群是造成个体，社会和历史时间之间的孤独性变异性的一部分，因此暂时被称为结构性孤独性。