Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel was a German sociologist and philosopher regarded as a founder of formal sociology, the study of the recurring forms taken by social interaction independent of their particular content. Rather than building grand theories of society as a whole, Simmel analyzed specific social forms and processes, including exchange, conflict, fashion, secrecy, the stranger, and the effects of the modern metropolis on mental life, most famously in his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life. His attention to the texture of everyday interaction and to numerical forms such as the dyad and the triad influenced the Chicago School of sociology and later symbolic interactionism.