Like any cultural category, the concept of society can be used in either a concrete or an abstract sense. Music, for example, can refer either to a set of actual compositions or performances, or else—abstractly—to the general form by which sounds are organized in rhythmic and melodic patterns for aesthetic effects. In its concrete sense, society designates a complex of societalized individuals, an empirical network of human relationships operative at a given time and place. In the abstract sense of the term, society denotes the totality of those relational forms through which individuals become part of such a network.

DEFINE: Distinguishes concrete vs. abstract senses of 'society' — the empirical network versus the relational forms that constitute it.

DEFINE: Distinguishes empirical networks of relationships from the abstract relational forms that constitute them.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 896