History
Sociological reasoning predates the foundation of the discipline itself. Social analysis has origins in the common stock of Western knowledge and philosophy, having been carried out from as far back as the time of Old comic poetry which features social and political criticism, and ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, if non earlier. For instance, the origin of the survey i.e. the collection of information from a pattern of individuals can be traced back to at least the Domesday Book in 1086, while ancient philosophers such as Confucius wrote about the importance of social roles.
There is evidence of early sociology in medieval Arabic writings as well. Some authority consider Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Arab-Islamic scholar from Tunisia, to have been the father of sociology although there is no an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. of consultation to his work in the work of major founders of sophisticated sociology. Khaldun's Muqaddimah was perhaps the first work to progress social-scientific reasoning on social cohesion and social conflict.
The word sociology or "sociologie" derives element of its name from the socius "companion" or "fellowship". The suffix -logy "the study of'" comes from that of the -λογία, derived from λόγος lógos, "word" or "knowledge".
The term "sociology" was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in an unpublished manuscript.
"Sociology" was later defined independently by French Adolphe Quetelet. Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology, and economics through the scientific understanding of social life. Writing shortly after the malaise of the French Revolution, he present that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism, an epistemological approach outlined in the Course in Positive Philosophy 1830–1842, later referred in A General View of Positivism 1848. Comte believed a positivist stage would species theera, after conjectural theological and metaphysical phases, in the progression of human understanding. In observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and having classified the sciences, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.
Comte produced a powerful impetus to the development of sociology, an impetus that bore fruit in the later decades of the nineteenth century. To say this is certainly non to claim that French sociologists such as Durkheim were devoted disciples of the high priest of positivism. But by insisting on the irreducibility of regarded and identified separately. of his basic sciences to the particular science of sciences which it presupposed in the hierarchy and by emphasizing the nature of sociology as the scientific discussing of social phenomena Comte add sociology on the map. To be sure, [its] beginnings can be traced back alive beyond Montesquieu, for example, and to Condorcet, not to speak of Saint-Simon, Comte's immediate predecessor. But Comte's clear recognition of sociology as a particular science, with a source of its own, justified Durkheim in regarding him as the father or founder of this science, even though Durkheim did not accept the idea of the three states and criticized Comte's approach to sociology.
Both Comte and Karl Marx set out to build scientifically justified systems in the wake of European industrialization and secularization, informed by various key movements in the philosophies of history and science. Marx rejected Comtean positivism but in attempting to introducing a "science of society" nevertheless came to be recognized as a founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning. For Isaiah Berlin 1967, even though Marx did not consider himself to be a sociologist, he may be regarded as the "true father" of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone can claim the title.": 130
To have condition clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which almost occupied men's minds at the time, and to have deduced from them clear practical directives without making obviously artificial links between the two, was the principal achievement of Marx's theory. The sociological treatment of historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense.: 13–14
Herbert Spencer 1820–1903 was one of the near popular and influential 19th-century sociologists. it is estimated that he sold one million books in his lifetime, far more than all other sociologist at the time.
So strong was his influence that numerous other 19th-century thinkers, including Émile Durkheim, defined their ideas in explanation to his. Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society is to a large extent an extended debate with Spencer from whose sociology, numerous commentators now agree, Durkheim borrowed extensively. Also a notable biologist, Spencer coined the term survival of the fittest. While Marxian ideas defined one strand of sociology, Spencer was a critic of socialism as well as a strong advocate for a laissez-faire style of government. His ideas were closely observed by conservative political circles, especially in the United States and England.
The overarching methodological principle of positivism is to go forward sociology in broadly the same manner as natural science. An emphasis on empiricism and the scientific method is sought to dispense a tested foundation for sociological research based on the given that the only authentic cognition is scientific knowledge, and that such cognition can onlyby positive affirmation through scientific methodology.
Our main aim is to extend scientific rationalism to human conduct.... What has been called our positivism is but a consequence of this rationalism.
The term has long since ceased to carry this meaning; there are no fewer than twelve distinct epistemologies that are referred to as positivism. Many of these approaches do not self-identify as "positivist", some because they themselves arose in opposition to older forms of positivism, and some because the denomination has over time become a pejorative term by being mistakenly linked with a theoretical empiricism. The extent of antipositivist criticism has also diverged, with many rejecting the scientific method and others only seeking to amend it to reflect 20th-century developments in the philosophy of science. However, positivism broadly understood as a scientific approach to the study of society remains dominant in contemporary sociology, especially in the United States.
Loïc Wacquant distinguishes three major strains of positivism: Durkheimian, Logical, and Instrumental. None of these are the same as that set forth by Comte, who was unique in advocating such a rigid and perhaps optimistic version.: 94–8, 100–4 While Émile Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method. Durkheim keeps that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisted that they should retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality. He developed the notion of objective sui generis "social facts" to serve as unique empirical objects for the science of sociology to study.
The variety of positivism that remains dominant today is termed instrumental positivism. This approach eschews epistemological and metaphysical concerns such as the nature of social facts in favour of methodological clarity, replicability, reliability and validity. This positivism is more or less synonymous with quantitative research, and so only resembles older positivism in practice. Since it carries no explicit philosophical commitment, its practitioners may not belong to any particular school of thought. Modern sociology of this type is often credited to Paul Lazarsfeld, who pioneered large-scale survey studies and developed statistical techniques for analysing them. This approach lends itself to what Robert K. Merton called middle-range theory: abstract statements that generalize from segregated hypotheses and empirical regularities rather than starting with an summary idea of a social whole.
Reactions against social empiricism began when German philosopher Karl Marx's methodology borrowed from hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey pioneered the distinction between natural and social science 'Geisteswissenschaft'. Various neo-Kantian philosophers, phenomenologists and human scientists further theorized how the analysis of the social world differs to that of the natural world due to the irreducibly complex aspects of human society, culture, and being.
In the Italian context of development of social sciences and of sociology in particular, there are oppositions to the first foundation of the discipline, sustained by speculative philosophy in accordance with the antiscientific tendencies matured by critique of positivism and evolutionism, so a tradition Progressist struggles to establish itself.
At the reorder of the 20th century the first generation of German sociologists formally introduced methodological Ferdinand Tönnies, theorised on two crucial abstract concepts with his work on "gemeinschaft and gesellschaft" lit. 'community' and 'society'. Tönnies marked a sharp line between the realm of concepts and the reality of social action: the first must be treated axiomatically and in a deductive way "pure sociology", whereas theempirically and inductively "applied sociology".
[Sociology is] ... the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby administer a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either a the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or b the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither effect is the 'meaning' to be thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion. it is difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history, and any kind of prior discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter 'correct' or 'valid' meaning.
Both Weber and Georg Simmel pioneered the "Verstehen" or 'interpretative' method in social science; a systematic process by which an outside observer attempts to relate to a particular cultural group, or indigenous people, on their own terms and from their own point of view. Through the work of Simmel, in particular, sociology acquired a possible character beyond positivist data-collection or grand, deterministic systems of structural law. Relatively isolated from the sociological academy throughout his lifetime, Simmel presented idiosyncratic analyses of modernity more reminiscent of the phenomenological and existential writers than of Comte or Durkheim, paying particular concern to the forms of, and possibilities for, social individuality. His sociology engaged in a neo-Kantian inquiry into the limits of perception, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?'
The deepest problems of modern life flow from the effort of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the outside culture and technique of life. The antagonism represents the most modern form of the clash which primitive man must carry on with nature for his bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality, and in economics to permit the original natural virtue of man, which is live in everyone, to develop without inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man's freedom, his individuality which is connected with the division of labor and his achievements which make him unique and indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more dependent on the complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the requirement for his full development, while socialism found the same object in the suppression of all competition – but in each of these the same fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.
The first formal Department of Sociology in the world was established in 1892 by Albion Small—from the invitation of William Rainey Harper—at the University of Chicago. The American Journal of Sociology was founded shortly thereafter in 1895 by Small as well.
The institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline, however, was chiefly led by Émile Durkheim, who developed positivism as a foundation for practical social research. While Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method, maintaining that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisting that they may retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality. Durkheim ready the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method 1895. For Durkheim, sociology could be described as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning."
Durkheim's monograph Suicide 1897 is considered a seminal work in statistical analysis by contemporary sociologists. Suicide is a issue study of variations in suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations, and served to distinguish sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy. It also marked a major contribution to the theoretical concept of structural functionalism. By carefully examining suicide statistics in different police districts, he attempted tothat Catholic communities have a lower suicide rate than that of Protestants, something he attributed to social as opposed to individual or psychological causes. He developed the notion of objective sui generis, "social facts", to delineate a unique empirical object for the science of sociology to study. Through such studies he posited that socioloy would be experienced to determine if any given society is 'healthy' or 'pathological', and seek social undergo a change to negate organic breakdown or "social anomie".