Sociologists claim that their work, to put it bluntly, will replace the idealist speculation of philosophers. It is a measure of the discipline that sociologists do not even mention theologians in the same breath, believing, it seems, that their metaphysical ranting is way beyond the pale and not even worth consideration. All the “founding fathers” saw a need to break with religious and metaphysical conceptions to found a new rational discipline to study the modern order. The sociological claim is seen at its most explicit in the work of the young Karl Marx, who declared he had found a more reliable method for investigating the material practices that lay behind social life and the abstract ideas that held them in place. Marx saw this as a political rather than philosophical endeavour.

This raises an issue, incidentally, of the role of Marxism and other more recent theoretical work: to what extent is it sociology? Marxist perspectives, by and large, have been incorporated, perhaps rather tactically, as in the claim that Marx was a founding parent, despite the claim raised above that Marxism also replaces sociology. As with feminist theology, below, other disciplines, strictly speaking, have been incorporated into the sociological canon to stave off critique. A boundary problem arises quite frequently and it is addressed in a way that is almost certainly not coherent or consistent. So, for example, various linguistic approaches claiming to replace sociology altogether, whether based on Wittgenstein, Hans-Georg Gadamer or variants of discourse theory, have been discussed here as aspects of sociology.