History of Sociology

Sociology emerged from enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolution, as a positivist science of society. Social analysis, however, has origins in the common stock of Western knowledge and necessarily pre-dates the field. Modern academic sociology arose as a reaction to modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, and secularization, bearing a particularly strong interest in the emergence of the modern nation state; its constituent institutions, its units of socialization, and its means of surveillance. Within a relatively brief period of time the discipline greatly expanded and diverged, both topically and methodologically, particularly as a result of myriad reactions against empiricism. Historical debates are broadly marked by theoretical disputes over the primacy of either structure or agency. Contemporary social theory has tended toward the attempt to reconcile these dilemmas. Whilst postmodernist trends in recent years have seen a rise in highly abstracted theory, new quantitative data collection methods have also emerged, and remain common tools for governments, businesses and organizations.