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This article examines the sociological work of Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Toennies on social action and the elements of action. Simmel is most generally know to sociologists as the author of the view that sociology should be a special science concerned with forms of social relationship as distinct from other social sciences which are concerned with their content. In introducing the subject, Simmel takes the position that a new science is not normally constituted by the discovery of a new class of concrete facts which has never been the object of scientific analysis before, but by drawing a new line through facts, which brings them into relations to each other which had hitherto not been adequately understood. It is as such a new line drawn through the facts that he wishes his concept form of relationship or social form to be understood. It should proved fruitful to start by inquiring what it is that Simmel primarily distinguishes his form from. It is what he calls content. He is very careful to state that nothing is to be inferred from the terms form and content as such. Their meanings in logic or epistemology must above all be held to constitute at best analogies. The meaning in the present context is to be taken directly from observation of the particular facts.

This article discusses the contributions of Georg Simmel to sociology and the methodological problems of sociology. Simmel as a general social theorist is primarily known as the author of a formula for defining the scope and the subject-matter of sociology, that sociology should be the study of social forms. It is common knowledge that in the earlier stages of self consciousness of sociology as a science, the tendency was strong to conceive it in synthetic or encyclopedic sense, as the systematic statement of all our established generalized knowledge of the concrete social life of man. Simmel was one of the first to revolt against this encyclopedic tendency, strongly advocating that sociology be constituted as a special and not an encyclopedic science. He maintained that there was no concrete class of social phenomena which was not already the subject of social science. Hence the only place for sociology lay, in his opinion, not in the discovery of a new class of phenomena hitherto neglected, but in a new analytical point of view according to which the same concrete phenomena which were the subject matters of other social sciences had not yet been studied. It is in this context that he formulated his famous distinction between social form and content.