Conversely, the facts accumulated in diverse kinds of history provide invaluable material for the sociological study of social forms. They do so in three ways. First, to determine the origins and structural properties of any social form one must look at its realization in a great variety of contents. One can learn something about competition, for example, from a great many fields—economic history, history of art, history of religion, and so on. After looking at a variety of actual instances of competition one can then abstract the common structural features from these cases, in order to determine what competition is as a pure form of human behavior.

DEFINE: Explains the methodological role of history in sociology: concrete instantiations across domains enable abstraction of a form's essential structural features.

DEFINE: Clarifies the methodological relationship: history supplies material from which sociology extracts pure structural forms via abstraction.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 60