Sociology named itself after revolution shook Europe
Sociology crystallized after the French Revolution as an Enlightenment-born, positivist science of society. The word and concept are tied to Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and later nineteenth-century system-builders who wanted laws of the social as firm as laws of nature.
Thinking about society is far older than the discipline. Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Polybius all recorded social observations, and the systematic survey arguably begins with the Domesday Book that William the Conqueror ordered in 1086. Beyond Europe, Confucius offered social perspectives, and in the 13th century the Chinese historian Ma Duanlin treated patterns of social dynamics as a driver of history in his encyclopedia, the Wénxiàn Tōngkǎo. Historians warn against reading today's categories backwards and suggest calling such early work proto-sociology.
Some scholars name Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Arab from Tunisia, as the first sociologist. His Muqaddimah, the introduction to a seven-volume universal history, built a dynamic theory of social conflict and change around asabiyyah, meaning group solidarity. Cohesion born in small kin groups, amplified by religion, carries a people to power, yet it also holds the seeds of their fall, when a younger and more tightly bound group replaces them. He contrasted nomadic with settled life and wrote on cities, economics and knowledge.
The modern field took shape in France. The priest and essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès coined sociologie from the Latin socius, companion, and Louis de Bonald laid theoretical groundwork. Henri de Saint-Simon published Physiologie sociale in 1813, urging an international assembly of scientists to steer society toward progress, and adopted the slogan that all men must work. In 1838 Auguste Comte gave the discipline its lasting definition, having abandoned his earlier label, social physics, after the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet took it up.
Late 19th-century sociologists concentrated on the rising nation-state, its institutions and its surveillance, and on modernity, capitalism, urbanization and secularization. Their quantitative methods later spread to governments, businesses and neighbouring disciplines, giving social research a life partly independent of sociological theory.
Source: History of sociology
