Forms and Contents

Marx built a system. Durkheim built a discipline. Weber built a comparative programme of enormous scope.

Georg Simmel built none of these. He wrote essays — brilliant, scattered, unsystematic — on subjects nobody had thought worth a moment's attention: the stranger, the secret, adornment, meals, the ruin, flirtation, the handle of a jug, the number three.

He is the founder who feels most modern, and he is the one who came closest to answering the question the others mostly assumed: what exactly is sociology's subject matter?

Four situations that have nothing in common.

A medieval guild decides who may practise a trade and admits a new master only with the consent of existing members.

A modern professional body decides who may practise medicine and admits new members only after examination.

A children's playground gang decides who may play and admits a new child only if the leader approves.

An exclusive dining club decides who may join and admits a new member only if nobody blackballs him.

By content these are utterly different: economic regulation, public safety, childhood play, social snobbery. Different centuries, different purposes, different stakes, different everything.

But look at the shape.

Each is a group that maintains itself by controlling entry. Each has an inside and an outside. Each requires existing members to consent. Each thereby makes membership valuable because it is restricted. Each generates the same characteristic phenomena: the anxiety of the applicant, the pleasure of the insider, the resentment of the excluded, the tendency of the criteria to become more elaborate over time, and the way exclusion produces solidarity among those excluded.

The same social form, filled with four different contents.

Simmel's claim: that form is the thing sociology studies. Not guilds, not medicine, not playgrounds, not clubs — those belong to economics, medical history, developmental psychology and social history. Sociology's object is the shape of the relationship, wherever it appears.

Simmel is answering a question that had been quietly evaded.

Sociology in 1900 was in an awkward position. It claimed to study "society" — but every actual thing that happens in a society appeared to belong to some other discipline. Economic behaviour belongs to economics. Political behaviour to political science. Religion to theology and comparative religion. Law to jurisprudence. Art to aesthetics. Family life to... what, exactly?

If sociology studies everything, it studies nothing, and this was precisely the charge its opponents made. Simmel took it seriously:

"The first problem area of sociology... is that of the forms of sociation. Everything else that occurs 'in society' and by means of it... is not sociology but a chapter of some other discipline."

His solution is an analogy with geometry.

Geometry does not study wooden spheres, iron spheres or bubbles. It studies sphericity — a form that can be realised in wood, iron, water or nothing at all, and whose properties hold regardless of the material.

Sociology, Simmel argues, should stand to society as geometry stands to physical bodies: abstracting the forms of association from the contents that fill them, and studying those forms in their own right.

That analogy is either a stroke of genius or a category error, and the argument about which has never been settled.

The idea, in plain words

Content (Inhalt) — the why. The interests, drives, purposes and motives that bring people into association: hunger, ambition, love, fear, piety, curiosity, the desire for gain, the desire for approval.

Contents by themselves are not social. A desire in one head is psychology. It becomes social only when it drives someone towards, against or into relation with others.

Form (Form) — the how. The patterns of interaction through which those contents are pursued: exchange, conflict, subordination and superordination, competition, the formation of parties, secrecy, the division of labour, imitation, exclusion.

And the two vary independently. The same content can be pursued through many forms: hunger through cooperation, through theft, through trade, through supplication. The same form can carry many contents: conflict can be over land, doctrine, love or a football result, and it will exhibit the same characteristic dynamics in each.

The formal method in action

The method is straightforward to state and difficult to do well: take a form, and follow it across every content in which it appears. The essays are the demonstration.

Conflict. Simmel's essay on Streit (translated as "Conflict") makes an argument that scandalised his contemporaries: conflict is a form of sociation, not its breakdown. To fight someone is to be in relation with them — often a more intense relation than indifference. He traces the consequences: conflict sharpens group boundaries; it produces internal cohesion in each party; it generates the leadership, discipline and centralisation that groups otherwise lack; and a group without an enemy may have to find one. He also observes that regulated conflict — litigation, sport, formal duelling, parliamentary opposition — is a mechanism for containing antagonism rather than releasing it. Lewis Coser built an entire tradition on this essay (5.2).

Secrecy. The secret is a form: some know, others do not, and the knowers know that the others do not. Simmel follows it from personal confidences to secret societies to the "secret" of bureaucratic office (4.3.4) to the ordinary reticence that makes social life bearable. His key finding: the secret creates a bond and a boundary in one move. It also, remarkably, argues that a certain quantity of concealment is necessary to all relationships — that total transparency would destroy intimacy rather than perfect it, because a relationship needs something to reveal.

Subordination and superordination. He classifies the forms: subordination under an individual, under a plurality, and under an impersonal principle (which is Weber's legal-rational authority, 4.3.5, arrived at independently). And he makes the striking argument that subordination always involves reciprocity — even the most oppressed subordinate retains some capacity to affect the superior, and the relationship is therefore always two-directional, however asymmetric. This is not a claim that domination is mild; it is a claim about the structure of the relation.

Group size. The one he pursued furthest, and the subject of 4.4.2.

Take a single form and run it across the map, and you can see what Simmel thought sociology could do.

Exchange — I give you something, you give me something, and each of us values what we receive more than what we give.

Economic: goods for money. Marital: in societies with dowry or bride-price, wealth and status for alliance. Political: support for patronage. Religious: sacrifice for divine favour. Conversational: attention for interest.

And here is the point — the same formal properties appear in every one.

Both parties must gain, or the exchange does not recur. True of trade, marriage alliance, patronage and conversation alike.

The relative valuation determines the terms. What each party wants more strongly, and what alternatives each has, sets the rate — and this is as true of a marriage market as of a fish market.

Repeated exchange generates obligation and trust, and thereby produces a relationship that outlasts any single transaction.

And an imbalance in what each can offer produces subordination. If I need what you have and you do not need what I have, the exchange occurs on your terms — and continues to, and hardens into a permanent asymmetry.

Simmel's conclusion — developed at book length in The Philosophy of Money (4.4.4) — is that exchange is one of the fundamental forms of human association, more fundamental than the economy, which is merely its most elaborated instance.

And notice what this makes possible. You can now say something about a marriage, a patronage network and a currency market in the same vocabulary — not by reducing all of them to economics, but by identifying the form they share. That is a genuine analytical achievement, and it is the ancestor of exchange theory (Homans, Blau), of network analysis, and of Bourdieu's extension of "capital" beyond the economic (5.10).

Go deeper

The problems with the geometry analogy

The programme is beautiful and it has real difficulties, which honest teaching should not skate over.

How do you know where form ends and content begins? Simmel never supplies a criterion. Is "the market" a form or a content? Is "the family"? In practice he decides case by case, with brilliant intuition and no rule, which means the method cannot be taught or checked.

Is there a finite list of forms? Geometry has axioms and can prove its theorems. Simmel offers no axioms, no enumeration and no proof — just a growing collection of extraordinarily perceptive essays. His successors could admire him but could not continue his programme, which is one reason he founded no school.

Does abstracting from content lose what matters? A conflict over religious doctrine and a conflict over a parking space may share formal properties. They are also not remotely the same thing, and a sociology that treats them as equivalent has lost something important. The Marxist objection is precisely this: Simmel's method makes power and material interest into mere "content," analytically secondary to form, which is a way of not seeing them. Lukács — who had studied with Simmel and admired him — made this criticism sharply.

And the charge of aestheticism. Simmel was accused in his lifetime of writing beautifully about trivia — a "philosopher of the interesting," producing dazzling essays on the handle of a jug while Europe fell apart. Even sympathetic readers find him unsystematic to the point of frustration.

His career, because it is part of the argument.

Simmel was born in Berlin in 1858, the youngest of seven children of a Jewish family that had converted to Christianity. His father died when he was young; he was raised by a guardian who left him an inheritance that supported him for decades.

He was an extraordinary lecturer. His courses drew hundreds — students, journalists, artists, and, unusually for the period, large numbers of women, who could attend as auditors when they could not enrol. Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim, Robert Park and Max Weber all attended or corresponded.

And he spent almost his entire career as a Privatdozent — an unsalaried lecturer paid directly by student fees, without a chair, without institutional standing. He applied repeatedly and was repeatedly refused.

The reasons were three, and they compounded. Antisemitism — an official report on one of his applications described him as "an Israelite through and through, in his outward appearance, his bearing and his manner of thinking." The unsystematic character of his work, which senior academics regarded as feuilletonism rather than scholarship. And the very popularity of his lecturing, which was held against him as evidence of showmanship.

Weber campaigned for him repeatedly and failed. Simmel finally obtained a full chair in 1914, at the age of fifty-six, at Strasbourg — a peripheral institution — and the university closed for war use almost immediately. He died in 1918 of liver cancer.

The relevance to this lesson: Simmel's exclusion from the institutional core is a substantial part of why he founded no school, why his work reaches us as scattered essays, and why he is the most under-read of the founders in Europe. It is also, as 3.3.3 showed with Martineau, a demonstration that canons are made by institutions and not only by ideas.

His enormous American afterlife

While Simmel was marginal in Germany, he was central in America — through one man in particular.

Robert Park studied with Simmel in Berlin in 1899–1900. It was, he later said, the only formal sociology instruction he ever received. He then became the driving figure of the Chicago School (5.4), and Simmel's questions — the stranger, the metropolis, social distance, the marginal man, conflict and accommodation — became Chicago's research agenda. American urban sociology is Simmelian in its bones.

Lewis Coser's The Functions of Social Conflict (1956) systematised the conflict essay into sixteen propositions, and gave American sociology a way to take conflict seriously in a period dominated by functionalism (4.2.7).

Erving Goffman is Simmel's closest heir in spirit: the same eye for microscopic interaction, the same conviction that small forms carry large meanings, the same essayistic brilliance (2.4.2, 5.4).

Network analysis claims him directly. Simmel's essay on the web of group affiliations (Die Kreuzung sozialer Kreise — the intersection of social circles) argued that modern individuality arises precisely from belonging to multiple, non-overlapping groups, so that the intersection of one's memberships is unique to oneself. This is a formal argument about network structure written in 1908, and network sociologists have formalised it — including the concept of the Simmelian tie, a relationship embedded in a triad, which behaves differently from a dyadic one (Krackhardt).

Relational sociology — Mustafa Emirbayer's "Manifesto for a Relational Sociology" (1997) and the tradition around it — takes Simmel's Wechselwirkung as its founding insight: that the unit of analysis is neither the individual nor the group but the relation.

And formal sociology as such — the study of structural patterns independent of content — runs through Leopold von Wiese to Peter Blau's structural theory and into contemporary network science.

Where the method earns its keep now

The formal move is genuinely powerful when it reveals a shared structure across domains that nobody had connected.

The triad. Any third party in a two-person relationship generates the same three possible roles — mediator, exploiter of conflict (tertius gaudens), or divider (4.4.2). This holds for a child in a marriage, a broker in a market, a superpower between two rivals, and a manager between two feuding staff.

Exclusion producing value. Anything restricted becomes desirable because restricted, and the restriction generates both insider solidarity and outsider resentment. Applies identically to guilds, gated communities, elite universities, invite-only platforms, and scarce sneakers.

The stranger. The person who is near and far at once — a formal position, not a personality — with predictable consequences for what they are told and what they are trusted with (4.4.3).

Secrecy and the group. Everything from intelligence agencies to family secrets to encrypted messaging exhibits the same dynamics of bond-and-boundary.

And a caution worth stating. The formal method is at its worst when the shared form is trivial or when it is used to flatten real differences — when "these are both conflicts" becomes a way of not noticing that one is a war and the other is an argument about a fence. The discipline is to ask whether identifying the form tells you something you did not know, and to abandon the comparison when it does not.

"Form means the shape of an organisation." It means the pattern of interaction — exchange, conflict, subordination, exclusion — abstracted from the interests it serves.

"Simmel said content doesn't matter." He said content belongs to other disciplines. He wrote a six-hundred-page book about money, which is not the work of a man indifferent to content.

"Society for Simmel is a thing." The opposite: "society" names the ongoing process of Vergesellschaftung — sociation — and exists only where interaction is occurring.

"Simmel was a micro-sociologist." He worked at every scale, and his point is that the same forms recur across scales — a triad of friends and a triangle of great powers exhibit the same structure.

"His work is unsystematic, so it's not real sociology." The essays generated the Chicago School, conflict theory, network analysis, exchange theory and relational sociology. Systematicity is not the only kind of productivity.

"The geometry analogy works." It is suggestive and it has never been made rigorous — no axioms, no enumeration of forms, no criterion for separating form from content. That is a real limitation, not a quibble.

Why it matters

It gives sociology a defensible object. Not "everything social," which is no object at all, but the forms of association — a domain no other discipline claims. Whether the boundary can be drawn precisely is disputed; that the question had to be asked is not.

It licenses comparison across unlike things, which is where a great deal of sociological insight comes from. Seeing that an exclusive club and a professional licensing body are the same form is the beginning of understanding both.

It makes society a process rather than a container. This is the idea that has aged best. Simmel's Wechselwirkung — reciprocal effect — anticipates network analysis, relational sociology and interactionism by decades, and it dissolves the structure/agency dichotomy (1.3.1) by refusing the premise that structure and individual are two separate things.

And it demonstrates that a founder can be indispensable without a system. Simmel left no method that can be taught and no school that carried his name. He left a way of seeing — that the smallest interaction has a form, that the form recurs elsewhere, and that noticing this is what sociology is for. Four generations of sociologists have been trained by that gaze without always knowing whose it was.

Simmel's answer to "what is sociology's object?": the forms of sociation, abstracted from their contents.

Content (Inhalt) = the interests and motives that bring people together — hunger, love, ambition, piety. Form (Form) = the patterns of interaction through which they are pursued — exchange, conflict, subordination, competition, secrecy, exclusion. The two vary independently: one content through many forms, one form carrying many contents.

The geometry analogy: as geometry studies sphericity rather than spheres of wood or iron, sociology should study the forms of association rather than the particular interests that fill them.

Vergesellschaftung (sociation) is a process, not a thing. Society "exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction" — it is neither Durkheim's external reality nor merely Weber's aggregate of individual actions, but the reciprocal effect (Wechselwirkung) itself. Society is a verb that has not stopped.

The method in action: conflict as a form of sociation rather than its breakdown; secrecy as bond-and-boundary in one move; subordination as always reciprocal however asymmetric; exchange as more fundamental than the economy.

Real problems: no criterion separating form from content; no axioms or enumeration; the loss of power and material interest to the category of "content" (Lukács's objection); and the charge of aestheticism.

His career: a Privatdozent without a chair until fifty-six, refused repeatedly on grounds of antisemitism, unsystematic work and excessive popularity as a lecturer — which is a substantial part of why he founded no school.

The afterlife is nonetheless enormous: Park and the Chicago School, Coser on conflict, Goffman in spirit, network analysis (the web of group affiliations, the Simmelian tie), exchange theory, and relational sociology.

Form (Form) — a pattern of interaction, abstracted from the interests it serves.

Content (Inhalt) — the drives, interests and purposes that bring people into association.

Sociation (Vergesellschaftung) — the ongoing process of association; Simmel's term for what society actually is.

Reciprocal effect (Wechselwirkung) — mutual influence between interacting parties; the basic unit of social reality for Simmel.

Formal sociology — the study of the forms of association independent of their contents.

Web of group affiliations (Kreuzung sozialer Kreise) — the intersection of a person's multiple group memberships, whose unique combination constitutes modern individuality.

Simmelian tie — a network relationship embedded in a triad, behaving differently from a purely dyadic one.

Privatdozent — an unsalaried university lecturer paid from student fees; Simmel's position for almost his entire career.

One — find a form across four contents. Take exclusion, or exchange, or secrecy, and find four completely unrelated situations exhibiting it. Then ask what properties they share. If the shared properties are interesting, the form is real; if they are trivial, discard it.

Two — map your own circles. List every group you belong to — family, work, neighbourhood, interests, online communities, religion, nationality. Simmel's claim is that the intersection is unique to you, and that this is what modern individuality consists of. Check whether anyone you know shares the whole set.

Three — test the conflict argument. Take a group you know that has an adversary. Ask what the adversary does for the group's cohesion, discipline and leadership. Then ask what would happen internally if the adversary vanished.

Four — study a secret. Identify a piece of information that some people in a group have and others do not. Trace what the boundary does: who is bonded, who is excluded, how the knowers behave towards each other, and what happens when it leaks.

Five — read one essay. "The Stranger" is four pages; "The Metropolis and Mental Life" is fifteen. Both are freely available and both are better written than most of what has been written about them. Start with either.