ABSTRACT
The Simmel-Weber programme for sociological categorisation aims at nothing less than the systematic classification of the possible forms of social interaction, social relations, social groups, and other structures which can exist in history. It distinguishes the study of social structure and social relations in the humanistic Simmel-Weber tradition from all forms of systems theory and, particularly, from the structural-functionalism of Talcott Parsons. Marxism was another source from which a humanistic concept of sociology as the study of social relations could be extracted, despite the fact that the standard version of dialectical and historical materialism which was accepted in the English-speaking world before 1939 tended to assume a scientistic and anti-humanist form. Radcliffe-Brown's conception of social structure as consisting of the total network of social relations is unlikely to be improved by attempts to subject it to quantitative refinement or to the attempt to explain the notion of networks of social relations on a higher level of abstraction.
