ll" to membership in a state; from the temporary
aggregation of the guests in a hotel to the intimate bond of a medieval
guild.

Everything now which is present in the individuals--the immediate
concrete locations of all historical actuality--in the nature of
impulse, interest, purpose, inclination, psychical adaptability, and
movement of such sort that thereupon or therefrom occurs influence upon
others, or the reception of influence from them--all this I designate as
the content or the material of socialization. In and of themselves,
these materials with which life is filled, these motivations which impel
it, are not social in their nature. Neither hunger nor love, neither
labor nor religiosity, neither the technique nor the functions and
results of intelligence, as they are given immediately and in their
strict sense, signify socialization. On the contrary, they constitute it
only when they shape the isolated side-by-sideness of the individuals
into definite forms of with-and-for-one-another, which belong under the
general concept of reciprocity. Socialization is thus the _form_,
actualizing itself in countless various types, in which the
individuals--on the basis of those interests, sensuous or ideal,
momentary or permanent, conscious or unconscious, casually driving or
purposefully leading--grow together into a unity, and within which these
interests come to realization.

That which constitutes "society" is evidently types of reciprocal
influencing. Any collection of human beings whatsoever becomes
"society," not by virtue of the fact that in each of the number there is
a life-content which actuates the individual as such, but only when the
vitality of these contents attains the form of reciprocal influencing.
Only when an influence is exerted, whether immediately or through a
third party, from one upon another has society come into existence in
place of a mere spatial juxtaposition or temporal contemporaneousness or
succession of individuals. If, therefore, there is to be a science, the
object of which is to be "society" and nothing else, it can investigate
only these reciprocal influences, these kinds and forms of
socialization. For everything else found within "society" and realized
by means of it is not "society" itself, but merely a content which
builds or is built by this form of coexistence, and which indeed only
together with "society" brings into existence the real structure,
"society," in the wider and