IN ENGLISH, the primary definition of sociability dates back to the fifteenth century, when it designated ‘the character or quality of being sociable, friendly disposition or intercourse’ (Oxford English Dictionary). In France, the word sociabilite was first used in 1665, and was later defined in the Dictionnaire de l'Academie francaise in 1798 as ‘l'aptitude de l'espèce humaine à vivre en société’ and ‘l'aptitude de l'individu à fréquenter agréablement ses semblables’. From the seventeenth century, the theories of natural rights and social contract included the essential issue of people's propensity to join into society. While in The Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes pointed out a number of limits to man's sociability in a state of nature: man's selfishness, man's cunning and intellectual strength, man's quarrelsome nature, in An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government, John Locke justified man's willingness to ‘join in society with others’ by his desire for self-preservation. In 1711, Joseph Addison offered a more precise, refined definition of a model of sociability:

Addison's stance helped the German sociologist Georg Simmel to define a somewhat artificial model of sociability in which the individual renounces his own ‘personal features’ to experience the pleasure of collective interaction as a goal in itself. Simmel's theories informed research into sociability throughout most of the twentieth century.