302 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
If we speak of social sciences according to the former sense, their object is everything which occurs in and with society. Social science in the latter sense has as its matter the forces {sic),^^ relationships, and forms, through which human beings arrange themselves in association, which thus in independent exhibition {in selhststdndiger Darstellung) constitute "society" sensu strictissimo. Of course, this is not altered by the circum- stance that the content of socialization, the special modifications of its material purpose and interest, often or always decide about its specific formation. It would be wholly mistaken to object that all these forms — hierarchies and corporations, competitions and forms of marriage, friendships and societary customs, autoc- racy and oligarchy — are merely occurrences which we may call "constellative" in already existing societies : that is, if a society were not already present the pre-condition and the opportunity would be lacking for the occurrence of such forms. This repre- sentation takes its rise in view of the fact that in every known association a great number of such forms of combination, that is, of socialization, are operative. If, consequently, a single one of these disappeared, "society" would still remain, and thus it may appear, in the case of each particular one, that it came as a varia- tion of an already complete society or had its rise within one. If we eliminate in thought all these particular factors, no society remains. Only in and through such reciprocal relationships, called forth by certain motives and interests, does society come into being. ^* True as it is, therefore, that the history and the laws of the so-occurring aggregated structure are the affair of social science (Gesellschaftswissenschaft) in the wider sense, yet since social science has already split up into special social sciences, there remains for a sociology in the more restricted sense, i. e., in the sense which proposes a special task, nothing (sic!) but consideration of the abstracted forms, which do not so much
- Here Simmel seems to me to estop his own restriction of subject-matter
to the forms. I shall return to this below, p. 304.
" By such casual concessions as this Simmel again invalidates his own re- striction of the science of socialization to the mere form of socialization, instead of extending it to include the more fundamental consideration of the "motives and interests" which produced the forms.
