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Simmel helped invent sociology as a discipline, asking what makes society possible in the same spirit that Kant had asked what makes nature possible. His essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" anticipated urban sociology and the study of social networks decades before those fields had names, describing how city life reshapes the individual mind through overstimulation and detachment. His method of analyzing social "forms" apart from their content influenced Max Weber and, later, the Frankfurt School's critical theory.