SUMMARY 
I J HIS first book gives Simmel’s methodological analy- 
| sis of the different forms of inquiry into the socio- 
historical actuality. His relativistic viewpoint leads 
him to a conception of society which might be called an 
intermediate position between the nominalistic and the 
realistic view. He finds a certain amount of justification 
for both, but escapes the resulting antinomy by attributing 
only a relative value to each and by introducing a third 
way of looking at society. That third way is the functional, 
relativistic way. 
If he is to be called a nominalist because in the last 
analysis only the individual has for him existential reality, 
his nominalism is of a special type. It results from the 
special type of analysis with which he works. It is not the 
analysis so often criticized with the trivial remark that 
the machine is more than its parts and the molecule more 
than its atoms. Society is analyzed in terms of component 
elements, not as individual existences, but as bearers of re- 
lationships. It is an analysis in terms of functions, not in 
terms of substances; it is an analysis in terms of relation- 
ships, not in terms of individuals. Society as content is the 
totality, is the sum of all individuals, together with all their 
interests and all their relationships and all the products 
which result from the transformations of these interests 
through their realization in socialization. But society as 
form, as association, is nothing but the sum of the integrat- 
ing functional relationships. A machine as a going concern 
consists of component parts together with the functional 
relationships, the power that drives the machine, the raw