CONCEPT
Formal Sociology
Simmel's methodological revolution — the study of <em>the recurring shapes of social interaction independent of their specific historical content</em> — whose formal precision enables insights to travel across radically different historical periods, including the unanticipated encounter between humans and artificial intelligence.
Against the dominant sociological methods of his time, Simmel argued that sociology should be the study of forms — the recurring shapes that social interaction assumes regardless of what fills them. Conflict between nations and conflict between colleagues share a form. The stranger in a medieval village and the stranger in a modern city share a form. The dyad of lovers and the dyad of business partners share a form. Formal sociology isolates these shapes and investigates their structural properties. The power of the method is that the forms travel: insights about the stranger in 1908 Berlin apply to the AI collaborator in 2026, because the formal position is the same. The limitation is equally consequential: formal analysis describes the geometry of social life without providing a compass for navigating within it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Simmel distinguished his approach from both the historicism of Weber and the functionalism of Durkheim. Where Weber
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