SOURCE: "Sociological Relativism," in Georg Simmel, edited by Lewis A. Coser, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965, pp. 64-73.

In the following excerpt from his 1914 study Le relativisme philosophique chez Georg Simmel, Mamelet finds that Simmel's work is distinguished from that of his contemporaries by its philosophical qualities.

Simmel's conception of sociology is, from the outset, clearly opposed to contemporary French sociology. The latter is predicated upon regarding social facts as something possessing two characteristics: exteriority and constraint. French sociology has its origin in traditionalism and positivism. It is anti-individualist; and political and historical contingency has effected a link between this anti-individualism and the notion of the existence of a social order. Preoccupied above all with putting restrictions on individual initiative in areas of social and political organization, the traditionalists and Auguste Comte endeavored to show that the social order, like the physical order, has its own laws which are superior to...