HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY

History of Sociology

History of Sociology

The scientific study of society began only in the late 1800s. Before that time, many philosophers felt concern over the state of society—family life, crime, poverty, and other realities of everyday life—and had written on ethics and morality. These so-called social philosophers were not sociologists in the modern sense, however, because they did not test their doctrines. Nevertheless, social philosophers such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, and Immanuel Kant were important to the later development of sociology, raising pertinent questions that sociologists have only begun to answer.

The French philosopher Auguste Comte, who invented the term ...