Review Essay: "Personal Relations" as a Sociological Category?

Abstract

This review essay discusses the question raised by the handbook "Personal Relations": whether and to what extent personal relations can be understood as a fundamental sociological category, one that is uniform and covers social relations such as pair relationships, brother-sister and parent-child relationships, family relations, friendships, neighbourhoods or informal working groups. It examines the different criteria which—according to the publishers—plead for establishing personal relations as a joint structural form. However, it also considers further aspects, such as the ways in which these forms of personal relations differ from other social relations, and raises the question of whether these differences can only be reconstructed through the means of an a-historical, systematic comparison of social relations—as suggested by the handbook. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1003187