SUMMARY

I J HIS first book gives Simmel’s methodological analy-|
 sis of the different forms of inquiry into the sociohistorical
 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 relationships.
 It is an analysis in terms of functions, not in
terms of substances; it is an analysis in terms of relationships,
 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 integrating
 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