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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.

The article discusses theory of behaviorism. Like all theories of life, behaviorism makes a fundamental assumption as to the nature of life and that assumption is that the whole world, or universe, is one continuous mechanism, as it were; that everything in human life and civilization can be explained on this basis without introducing the separate agency of any force not obeying the same natural laws as those we know. In psycho-analysis we have a comparatively recent phase of the science of human behavior. The essence of the theory, after it has been stripped of Freud's strong emphasis on sex, which is not essential to our purpose and of some of its mentalistic traits, is that the behavior reactions of the individual are organized into interrelated groups of ideas, or complexes. These complexes are gradually built up by the association of more or less closely related ideas so that a reference to one idea will bring out a large number of those closely associated with it. The psycho-analysts then conceive that complexes are built up which are in more or less direct conflict at some point at which they come in contact. Since the complexes are built up around one central idea it is natural that they should not always be in complete harmony with all sides of a group of ideas built up around a totally different central idea. This conflict of complexes will cause a more or less complete dissociation of the personality of the individual which the individual attempts to overcome either by harmonizing the conflict, or by the repression of one complex or the other.

The article presents a behavioristic conception of the moral order. The term moral is often used in a very limited sense to designate a class of actions which are supposed to depend upon the exercise of the will, and which generally have a good deal of mystical connotation. The article consider the moral order to denote the whole organization of social behavior and as such attempt to analyze it, to bring out its principal characteristics and their relations and in particular to show how the portion of it which might in the narrow sense be called moral or ethical fits in with the rest. It seems reasonable to look at society as we know it from three main viewpoints. In the first place there is its actual societal structure, the facts of the organization of civilization. These facts are all related and intertwined, but just as in the mammalian body we can distinguish a circulatory system, a nervous system, a digestive system, though none of them has any significance by itself, we can pick out three principal phases of societal structure. The principal element in the structure of a society consists in the rites and ceremonies, the ritual. To bring out its relation to the other main elements, this denotes the relation of man to the unknown forces, the supposedly supernatural elements.

The article presents a text of a memorandum sent by Talcott Parsons to Henry H. Fowler in 1944 regarding a study on the Japanese economy. The most significant suggestion that Parsons thinks he can make appropos of the plans for study of the control of the Japanese economy is that very special attention should be devoted to the prewar status of small and medium-sized business in Japan and of the prospects for stimulating its postwar development. His reason for special interest in this sector of the economy is not in its economic significance as such, but in its potential significance for the social structure and orientation of the country. It is a very striking feature of Japanese society that in modern times at least there has been no strong locally independent middle class which could form a stabilizing factor in the society. Japanese feudalism was highly centralized lacking a small and moderate-scale gentry with strong roots in the land of their local communities. The Samurai were directly dependent on the Daimyo and controlled from his court, and this circumstance largely explains the fact that it was possible to shift so abruptly from feudalism to a westernized capitalistic economy. There was no Japanese equivalent for the Chinese town-dwelling, land-owning gentry who were the real backbone of the traditional Chinese class structure.