Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies, sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world.
and how they relate to macrolevel phenomena remain valuable in contemporary
sociology.
Simmel’s sociology focused on the key question, “How is society possible?” His
answer led him to develop what he called formal sociology, or the sociology of
social forms. In his essay “The Problem of Sociology,” Simmel reaches a strange
conclusion for a sociologist: “There is no such thing as society ‘as such.’” “Society”
is just the name we give to the “extraordinary multitude and variety of interactions
[that] operate at any one moment” (Simmel 1908). This is a basic insight of micro-
sociology. However useful it is to talk about macro-level phenomena like capitalism,
the moral order, or rationalization, in the end what these phenomena refer to is a
multitude of ongoing, unfinished processes of interaction between specific
individuals. Nevertheless, the phenomena of social life do have recognizable forms,
and the forms do guide the behaviour of individuals in a regularized way. A
bureaucracy is a form of social interaction that persists from day to day. One does
not come into work one morning to discover that the rules, job descriptions,
paperwork, and hierarchical order of the bureaucracy have disappeared. Simmel’s
questions were: How do the forms of social life persist? How did they emerge in the
first place? What happens when they get fixed and permanent?
Simmel notes that “society exists where a number of individuals enter into
interaction” (1908). What he means is that whenever people gather, something
happens that would not have happened if the individuals had remained alone. People
attune themselves to one another in a way that is very similar to musicians tuning
their instruments to one another. A pattern or form of interaction emerges that begins
to guide or coordinate the behaviour of the individuals. An example Simmel uses is
of a cocktail party where a subtle set of instructions begins to emerge which defines
what can and cannot be said. In a cocktail party where the conversation is light and
witty, the effect would be jarring of someone suddenly trying to sell you an insurance
policy or talking about the spousal abuse they had suffered. The person would be
thought of as being crass or inappropriate. Similarly in the pleasant pastime of
flirtation, if one of the parties began to press the other to consummate the flirtation
by having sex, the flirtation would be over. Flirtation is a form of interaction in which
the answer to the question of having sex—yes or no— is perpetually suspended.
In both examples, Simmel argued that the social interaction had taken on a specific
form. Both were examples of what he called the play form of social interaction, or
pure “sociability”: the pleasure people experience from the mere fact of being
together, regardless of the content of the interaction (Simmel 1910). If the cocktail
party conversation suddenly turns to a business proposition or an overly personal
confession, it is no longer playful. The underlying form of the interaction has been
violated, even if the participants were not consciously aware that they had adopted
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