Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms
ISBN: 9789047426684
Platform/Publisher: BRILL / BRILL
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Art and vision disorders.; Visual perception.; Blindness.; Art and vision disorders.; Blindness.; Visual perception.;

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.

Georg Simmel, a German sociologist, was a brilliant scholar who wrote about many aspects of human existence but never developed a systematic theory. He lectured at Berlin University for many years but was never given a permanent position because of his Jewish origins, his nonprofessorial brilliance, and what some took to be his destructive intellectual attitude. He is remembered in the United States for a number of insightful essays on such topics as the social role of the stranger and the nature of group affiliation. His book on conflict formed the basis of Lewis A. Coser's The Functions of Social Conflict, one of the classics of American sociology. (Bowker Author Biography)

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