History of Scientific Sociology Sociology emerged from enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolutio n, as a positivist science

of society. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge. Social analysis i n a broader sense, however, has origins in the common stock of philosophy and ne cessarily pre-dates the field. Modern academic sociology arose as a reaction to modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, and secularization, bearin g a particularly strong interest in the emergence of the modern nation state; it s constituent institutions, its units of socialization, and its means of surveil lance. An emphasis on the concept of modernity, rather than the Enlightenment, o ften distinguishes sociological discourse from that of classical political philo sophy. Within a relatively brief period of time the discipline greatly expanded and div erged, both topically and methodologically, particularly as a result of myriad r eactions against empiricism. Historical debates are broadly marked by theoretica l disputes over the primacy of either structure or agency. Contemporary social t heory has tended toward the attempt to reconcile these dilemmas. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretati ve, and philosophic approaches to the analysis of society. Conversely, recent de cades have seen the rise of new analytically and computationally rigorous techni ques. Quantitative social research techniques have become common tools for governments , businesses and organizations, and have also found use in the other social scie nces. This has given social research a degree of autonomy from the discipline of sociology. Similarly, "social science" has come to be appropriated as an umbrel la term to refer to various disciplines which study society or human culture. Ancient times Sociological reasoning may be traced back at least as far as the ancient Greeks (cf. Xenophanes remark: "If horses would adore gods, these gods would resemble hors es"). Proto- sociological observations are to be found in the founding texts of Western philosophy (Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Polybius and so on), as well a s in the non-European thought of figures such as Confucius. The characteristic t rends in the sociological thinking of the ancient Greeks can be traced back to t he social environment. Because there was rarely any extensive or highly centrali zed political organization within states this allowed the tribal spirit of local ism and provincialism to have free play. This tribal spirit of localism and prov incialism pervaded most of the Greek thinking upon social phenomena. The origin of the survey can be traced back to the Doomesday Book ordered by king William I in 1086. There is evidence of early Muslim sociology from the 14th century. Ibn Khaldun (1332 1406), in his Muqaddimah (later translated as Prolegomena in Latin), the introduction to a seven volume analysis of universal history, was the first to advance social philosophy and social science in formulating theories of socia l cohesion and social conflict. He is thus considered by some to be the forerunn er of sociology. Origins Comte, Spencer and Marx The term ("sociologie") was first coined by the French essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (1748 1836). (from the Latin: socius, "companion"; and the suffix -ology, "th e study of", from Greek lgos, "knowledge"). The term was independently re-invented, and introduced as a neologism, by the Fr ench thinker Auguste Comte (1798 1857) in 1838. Comte had earlier expressed his work as "social physics", but that term had been appropriated by others, most notabl y a Belgian statistician, Adolphe Quetelet (1796 1874). Writing after the original e nlightenment political philosophers of social contract, Comte hoped to unify all studies of humankind through the scientific understanding of the social realm. His own sociological scheme was typical of the 19th century humanists; he believ ed all human life passed through distinct historical stages and that, if one cou ld grasp this progress, one could prescribe the remedies for social ills. Sociol ogy was to be the "queen science" in Comte's schema; all basic physical sciences

had to arrive first, leading to the most fundamentally difficult science of hum an society itself. Comte has thus come to be viewed as the "Father of Sociology" . Comte delineated his broader philosophy of science in The Course in Positive P hilosophy [1830-1842], whereas his A General View of Positivism (1865) emphasize d the particular goals of sociology. In later life, Comte developed a 'religion of humanity' for positivist societies in order to fulfil the cohesive function once held by traditional worship. In 1 849, he proposed a calendar reform called the 'positivist calendar'. For close a ssociate John Stuart Mill, it was possible to distinguish between a "good Comte" (the author of the Course in Positive Philosophy) and a "bad Comte" (the author of the secular-religious system). The system was unsuccessful but met with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species to influence the proliferation of various Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century, especially throug h the work of secularists such as George Holyoake and Richard Congreve. Although Comte's English followers, including George Eliot and Harriet Martineau, for th e most part rejected the full gloomy panoply of his system, they liked the idea of a religion of humanity and his injunction to "vivre pour altrui" ("live for o thers", from which comes the word "altruism") Comte's account of social evolution bears similarity to Karl Marx's (1818 1883) view that human society would progress toward a communist peak. This is perhaps unsu rprising as both were profoundly influenced by the early Utopian socialist, Henr i de Saint-Simon (1760 1825), who was at one time Comte's mentor. Both thinkers inte nded to develop a new scientific ideology in the wake of European secularisation . Marx, in the tradition of Hegelianism, rejected the positivist method, but in attempting to develop a science of society nevertheless became recognized as a f ounder of sociology later as the word gained wider meaning. Isaiah Berlin descri bed Marx as the "true father" of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone can clai m the title.