Sociology of theThe first step to a sociology of the past is the realization that our social environment affects the way we remember the past. 1 Like the present, the past is also part of a social reality that, while far from being absolutely objective, nonetheless transcends our subjectivity and is commonly shared by others as well.Most of the study of memory today is done by cognitive psychologists, who are typically interested in how humans remember past events. As evident from their general strategy of choosing their subjects as well as from their absolute indifference to the idiosyncrasies of their biography, they basically view the latter as typical representatives of our species. Such a uni-

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This paper examines social pattern analysis, the yet‐unarticulated research strategy that guides formal sociologists in their efforts to distill generic social patterns from their specific cultural, situational, and historical contexts. Following in the implicit methodological footsteps of Georg Simmel, social pattern analysts view specific sociohistorical configurations as mere instantiations of such patterns, thereby deliberately disregarding various idiosyncrasies of the particular communities, events, and social situations they examine. Analytically focused, they thus draw their evidence from multiple social contexts, thereby making their essentially decontextualized findings more generalizable. Furthermore, in sharp contrast to historians and ethnographers, they try to highlight universality rather than singularity, thereby focusing their attention on the common formal features of any given pattern across those contexts while deliberately ignoring differences among its various specific manifestations. The outcome of such transcultural, transsituational, and transhistorical (that is, transcontextual) mode of inquiry is an empirically grounded “social geometry.”