Beyond all particulars, Simmel's image of society may provide a continuing challenge to conceptions of social facts and social order which lay primary emphasis on systemic requirements and normative constraints, offering the counterparadigm of a fluctuating field of self-regulating transactions—an alternative which stresses the phenomenology of individual experience and the dimension of distance in social relations.

DEFINE: This captures Simmel's counterparadigm—society understood not as systemic constraints but as fluid, self-regulating interactions emphasizing individual experience and social distance.

XREF: Contrasts with structural-functionalist and normative-consensus theories of society, echoing Durkheimian and Parsonian frameworks that emphasize systems and constraint.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 147