Sociology: The Discipline

Introduction

Sociology does not claim to be a potentially all-inclusive and all-sufficing science of society which might absorb the more specialized social sciences.
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T

The late origin of sociology does not mean that its standing as compared with other social sciences is very weak. Its scope has been clearly demarcated right from the early days. Its concepts, terms, typologies and generalizations leading to theories, emerged from the very beginning.

Moreover, there are striking similarities between sociology and other social sciences: man as a principal ingredient of their subject matters, applications of some methodological tools like observation, comparative method, casual explanations, testing and modification of hypothesis etc. When so much is common to sociology on the one hand and the other social sciences it is understandable that there is some amount of commonness in the studies as well as mutual borrowings in the form of data, methods, approaches, concepts and even vocabulary.

In brief, sociology is a distinct social science, but it is not an isolated social science as the current trends indicate that every social science is depending more and more on inter-disciplinary approach, that is, historians and sociologists, for example, might even work together in curricular and search projects which would have been scarcely conceivable prior to about 1945, when each social science tendered to follow the course that emerged in the 19th century; to be confined to a single, distinguishable, though artificial, area of social reality.

Sociology and History

Both sociology and modern historiography had their origin in 19th century. The latter established the concept of historical periods and thus bequeathed to historiography theoretical ideas and concerns which were entirely absent from the work of earlier narrative historians and chroniclers. It bequeathed to modern sociology the notion of historical types of society and thus enabled the socialists to build classification of societies.