ABSTRACT
In the beginning, sociology was mainly holistic. Most sociologists saw society as a reality sui generis, with laws of its own, irreducible to the acting individuals. But there were also some early sociologists, who took a more individualistic view of society: Gabriel Tarde, George Simmel and Max Weber, for instance. The early Simmel and Weber conceived of society as constituted by the subjectively meaningful action of individuals. The most important sources of this conception of society were German Völkerpsychologie and the descriptive psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey, who also saw society as interaction. Simmel, who, like Dilthey, had intellectual roots in Völkerpsychologie, saw society as both subjective meaning and interaction. Borrowing a distinction from Kant, he saw society as both form and content. Society consists of forms of interaction, but its content is subjective meaning. This is, I believe, the main sociological version of the individualistic theory of society. It differs from the theory of the social contract and the economic theory of the market by taking a broader view of social action, but, above all, by its interest in the meaning of social phenomena.1
