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18 - Sociology

from PART II - THE DISCIPLINES IN WESTERN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA SINCE ABOUT 1880

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Robert Bannister
Edited by
Theodore M. Porter  and
Dorothy Ross
Theodore M. Porter
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Dorothy Ross
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Summary

Sociology emerged in response to the problem of social order in modern society in the wake of the American and French Revolutions and the rise of industrialism and market capitalism. A precondition of the project was the recognition of a civil society apart from any particular political form. Combining skepticism and a faith in reason, sociologists insisted that society is not a reflection of a natural or divine order but is nonetheless subject to rational analysis. Whereas Enlightenment theorists had viewed society in terms of a “social contact” and a convergence of individual interests, sociology explored the forms and structures that make “society” possible.

Taking sociality as its subject, sociology differed from the other social sciences in claiming no specific area as its own, such as primitive society, politics, or the economy. While the other social sciences took their subjects as given, the first academic sociologists expended vast energy arguing that there was such a thing as “society” to be studied. As a result, the discipline developed a decade or more later than anthropology, political science, and economics. Strategies to legitimate the new discipline ranged from claims that it was the capstone of the social sciences to more limited proposals to study social relations.

Sociology had its roots in the theories of August Comte and Herbert Spencer and in empirical work previously conducted by census bureaus, state labor boards, and reform organizations. A tension between theory and practical knowledge persisted throughout the various stages of its history: (1) a preacademic era, during which the concept of “sociology” emerged (1830s–1860s); (2) the proliferation of organicist and evolutionist models of society (1870s–1890s); (3) parallel traditions of statistics and social investigation (1830s–1930s); (4) a “classical period” coinciding with mature industrialization and the formation of modern nation-states, during which sociology became an academic discipline (1890s–1910s); (5) the interwar flowering at the University of Chicago in the United States, paralleled in Europe by a relative decline and virtual disappearance following the rise of fascism; (6) a worldwide revival under United States influence after 1945, when, ironically, American sociological theory was being re-Europeanized; and (7) fragmentation and continuing crisis following the radical assaults of the 1960s.

Type
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The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 329 - 353
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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