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Simmel's first published study is examined for its current relevance to the sociological study of music. It is found to be rich in suggestions [or research while it does not present a coherent theoretical scheme or program for the sociology of music. Simmel's empirical examples, however, suggest that key areas for this discipline are (1) the social meanings which are represented and expressed in music, and (2) the position and function of music in society. Implications for a theory of taste groups on the basis of differential socialization are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on sociologists Georg Simmel. He is said to be very eloquent about the claims that "pure sociology" is a crucial area of the larger field and that the object of pure sociology is the abstraction of the element of social interaction from the heterogeneity of contents and purposes which life reveals. Simmel says that pure sociology thus proceeds like grammar, which isolates the forms of languages from their contents. Elsewhere he compares sociology in this sense to geometry, also a study of forms in abstraction from content. When Simmel sets himself to the study of actual forms, he loses a good deal of his purity. The author says that had Simmel held chastely to his methodological commandments when he turned to such subjects as secrecy, subordination, and the stranger, sociology would be the poorer. Form and content cannot, in practice, be separated, and although there is a pleasantly tantalizing note in Simmel's earlier call to the forms, his own studies of concrete forms of association make him less than and a great deal more than, a formal sociologist.

Most nineteenth century sociologists followed the pattern of social analysis and explanation set by Comte. This pattern assumes that the factual basis for the study of human society is already established. Each theorist proposed a different principle to account for all manifestations of social life. These efforts fell far short of their goal. By suggesting that the social realm is a mode of existence that concretely expresses itself in reciprocal relations between human beings, and that the unity of society is a derivative of these relations and does not recede them, Georg Simmel opened the way to modern sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews several studies in which instruments were developed to measure the superordinate-subordinate marital roles relationship in marriage. The significance of the superordinate-subordinate relationship as the basic form of socialization was proposed by Georg Simmel who also regarded this relationship as the main factor in the unity of groups. In the family group, the superordinate-subordinate relationship is expressed through marital roles which indicate attitudes associated with the source and kind of authority exercised by the spouses within the family. Yi Chuang Lu defined the superordinate-subordinate marital roles relationship in terms of dominant, equalitarian and submissive roles. In developing her instrument, Lu postulated that the selection of questions for a scale will depend upon the relevance of the questions to the common sense estimation of the dominance and submissiveness of one's own personality, and upon the subject's reaction toward and his relationship with his spouse. The final form of the instrument which Lu utilized in her study included personality and relationship factors which she considered to be the essential symptoms of roles in marriage. On the other hand, the superordinate-subordinate marital roles relationship was defined by Alver Hilding Jacobson as the traditional male-dominant or conservative attitude and the emergent feminine equalitarian or liberal attitude.

The article focuses that significant rural to urban shifts and increasing centrality of the industrial city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were clearly reflected in the writings of German social thinkers. Georg Simmel's "Metropolis and Mental Life" and Ferdinand Tonnies' "Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft," for instance, reflected the rapidly changing society of which the scholars were a part, and involved a major intellectual concern with the city as a central social phenomenon. To Simmel, for instance, it was a bustling Berlin which crowned the significant social transformations of the times, embodying the complexity and flux of urban life. Berlin, then, was the metropolis of Simmel's "Metropolis and Mental Life," and closely approximated those elements of Tonnies' Normalbegriff, "Gesellschaft." At the turn of the century, the city numbered 1.9 million inhabitants and was growing rapidly. In 1911, the independent suburbs were annexed to Berlin. Steglitz bei Berlin, the home of the scholar Friedrich Paulsen, who corresponded with Ferdinand Tonnies in a significant dialogue spanning thirty years, was one of the many suburbs incorporated into Greater Berlin.