The dualisms inherent in social forms stem both from man’s ambivalent instinctual dispositions and from society’s need to have some ratio of discordant to harmonious tendencies in order to attain a determinate shape. Publicity and privacy, conformity and individuation, antagonism and solidarity, compliance and rebelliousness, freedom and constraint are some of the many specific sociological dualisms which Simmel finds compresent in social interaction and utilizes to analyze the structure of various social forms.

DEFINE: Explains Simmel's concept of sociological dualisms as constitutive necessities for social form, not mere tensions.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 85