Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms

Download or read book Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms written by Georg Simmel and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-02-23 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georg Simmel's highly original take on the newly revived field of sociology succeeded in making the field far more sophisticated than it had been beforehand. He took insights from dialectical thought and Kantian epistemology to develop a "form sociology" method that remains implicit in the field a century later. Forms include such patterns of interaction as inequality, secrecy, membership in multiple groups, organization size, and coalition formation. While today texts and professional societies are organized around "contents" rather than "forms," a fresh reading of Simmel's chapters on forms suggests original avenues of inquiry into each of the contents--family, business, religion, politics, labor relations, leisure.