ABSTRACT
The mainspring of the movement which has come to be known as formal sociology lay in the recognition that sociology is about social relationships and that it is necessary to distinguish between them. Ferdinand Tonnies' social thought was much influenced by his interest in Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth century English political theorist. The description of the forms of this interaction is the task of formal sociology; the method is to abstract the societal forms. Both Alfred Vierkandt and Leopold von Wiese made contributions to this development in sociology. He argued that sociology should be limited to the study of the principal forms of social organisation with special emphasis on power relations, conflict, leadership and so forth. In 1932, von Wiese, in collaboration with Howard Becker, an American sociologist, brought out in English an enlarged version of the original work entitled Systematic Sociology.
