The founders of social theory were mostly outsiders with no university jobs
Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer shaped how we think about society, yet none of them ever held a university post. In their day they counted as philosophers. The field they helped build has roots stretching back through a fourteenth-century North African historian to ancient China.
Social theories are frameworks for interpreting social life, tangled up in old arguments over positivism, structure versus agency, and chance versus necessity. Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 BCE, imagined a just society beyond the Warring States of his time, and Mozi later proposed a more practical yet ethical vision. Saint Augustine answered what he saw as Rome's false gods with his City of God. Plato and Aristotle drew no line between politics and society; a separate concept of society arrived with the Enlightenment.
Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah of 1377, the introduction to a seven-volume universal history, set out theories of social cohesion and conflict, and many regard him as sociology's forerunner. In the eighteenth century Adam Ferguson, Montesquieu and John Millar were among the first to study society apart from political institutions. Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws argued social conditions shape human nature, perhaps the earliest bid for a universal explanation of history. Rousseau traced the origin of inequality and analysed the social contract, while Adam Smith argued that the wealthy, by employing many people to serve them, spread wealth around.
Nineteenth-century upheaval, including the disorder after the French Revolution until Napoleon took power, produced three big theories of historical change: social evolutionism, cycle theory and Marx's historical materialism. Auguste Comte, called the father of sociology, laid foundations for positivism, and Spencer coined survival of the fittest. Vilfredo Pareto and Pitirim Sorokin insisted history moves in cycles, and Ferdinand Tönnies built the new discipline around Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, community and society, in 1887.
Later, thinkers pushed back against narrow disciplines. The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research emerged around the late 1920s and early 1930s, Chicago's Committee on Social Thought followed in the 1940s, and Sussex and York launched programmes in social and political thought during the 1970s.
Source: Social theory
