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SOCIOLOGY
1.9
Sociology, then, will have to investigate the whole
range of socializations from the most simple to the most
complex, from the most fleeting to the most permanent.
It will have to deal with all the relationships and interactions
which constitute human association: with imitation,
representation, the creation of parties, the formation
of classes and secondary subdivisions, and the incorporation
of social reciprocities in special structures. It will
have to investigate specialized problems, such as the social
relations of the non-partisan and the poor, the effects of
numerical limitation on the form of the group, and the
sociological significance of the primus inter pares and the
tertius gaudens. It will have to examine the more complex
phenomena, such as the intersection of social circles, and
study the more intricate modifications of social forms due
to local concentration or spatial dispersion of elements.
The task of sociology is to investigate the pure forms
of socialization in abstraction from their material content,
to give their psychological explanation, and to trace their
historical development. Sociology is to determine what is
really socialization in society, just as geometry determines
what is really spatial extension in material objects. Both
geometry and sociology resign to other sciences the investigation
of the contents which manifest themselves in their
respective forms and the examination of the totality of phenomena
whose mere formal aspect they observe.!
The historical development of the forms of socialization
does not, of course, occur in actuality in that clearcut
form nor in strict accordance with the sociological
scheme of explanation, but always in devious courses and
obscured by all sorts of collateral phenomena. The sociological
type is always an abstraction, even if not different
from that at the basis of every other science. The object
1 Soz., pp. 12-14.
