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PREFACE 
gation of social phenomena can be placed on a really scien- 
tific basis. Only when this is accomplished can we under- 
take the liberation of the individual from the clutches of 
the great leviathan. Only then will a knowledge become 
available which will make possible a mastery over the 
social environment comparable to the mastery over na- 
ture obtained through progress in the natural sciences. 
It is for the purpose of reopening the discussion of 
methodological problems that this study on Simmel has 
been written. Georg Simmel more than any other philoso- 
pher occupied himself with the methodology of the social 
sciences. During the first part of his career he set himself 
the task of doing for the social sciences what Kant had 
done for science in general, of giving, that is, a critical ex- 
position of their presuppositions. He fiercely attacked in the 
critical writings of his first period the conceptual realism 
that is still rampant in the social sciences, and thereby 
rendered a service which can hardly be overestimated. 
His critical work reached completion, however, only after 
the interest in methodological problems had waned in this 
country, and for that reason it has not had the attention 
which it deserves. A number of his articles have been 
translated in the American Journal of Sociology, but his 
larger works have not been read as widely by English and 
American sociologists as his contributions justify. 
If the discussion of methodological problems is to be 
resumed, as the writer thinks necessary, Simmel’s work is 
the best starting-point. In the original it cannot serve that 
purpose, and it is for that reason that this exposition of his 
work has been written. If a more or less general agreement 
can be reached regarding Simmel’s fundamental proposi- 
tions, this study may eventually serve as a methodologi- 
cal orientation for the social sciences. Whether it can ful- 
fil that function can only be judged from the study as a 
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