SOURCE: Review of The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, in American Anthropologist, Vol. 72, No. 1, February, 1970, pp. 109-11.

In the following essay, Levine examines Simmel's contributions not only to theories of social relationships but also to culture in general.

It is ironic that George Simmel is known to American anthropologists solely as a student of social relations when in fact his devotion to the study of culture was equally constant and nearly as fruitful. Simmel himself is largely to blame for this. He not only drew a sharp boundary between cultural "contents" and social structural "forms"—for which he was roundly rebuked by Durkheim—but also tried to keep inquiry into the two domains segregated. Only the latter domain, he argued, provides a proper subject matter for the discipline of sociology. Inasmuch as Simmel's ideas were imported into American social science by sociologists who followed his focus...