Exchange and power in social life Book

Sophistication in understanding societies begins first with examining the most atomised individual entities that compose it, then proceeds to examining the larger clusters these entities form. an order of magnitude above this is the recognition that societies exist not so much in the entities themselves but the relationships between them; more sophisticated even than that is seeing that entities at different levels of organization exhibit the same types of inter-entity relationships. peter blau, following simmel, did this in the 1960s. so frustratingly brilliant i paged quickly through the entire book even though i only had to read 60 pages.