Sociology got its name in an unpublished manuscript and its first department in Chicago
The French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès first wrote the word sociology in 1780, in a manuscript he never published. Auguste Comte arrived at it independently in 1838, partly because his earlier label, social physics, had been taken over by the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet. The name joins the Latin socius, companion, to the Greek logos.
Sociology is the scientific study of society: social behaviour, relationships, interaction and everyday culture. Its classic subjects include class, social mobility, religion, law, gender, race, norms and deviance, and newer work examines the digital divide. Its methods have swung from the interpretive, following mid-twentieth-century linguistic and cultural turns, to computational techniques like agent-based modelling at the turn of the twenty-first.
Social analysis is far older than the field. Ancient comic poetry mocked politics and society, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle theorised about it, and Confucius wrote on social roles. Some call Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century scholar from Tunisia, the father of sociology for the Muqaddimah's reasoning about cohesion and conflict, though European founders of the modern discipline never cited him.
Comte, writing after the turmoil of the French Revolution, hoped a positivist science could cure social ills, and saw it as humanity's final stage after theological and metaphysical thinking. Marx rejected positivism yet also sought a science of society and came to be counted among the founders. Herbert Spencer, who coined survival of the fittest, reportedly sold a million books during his lifetime, far outselling other sociologists, and Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society is largely an argument with him. A critic of socialism who favoured laissez-faire government, Spencer found keen readers in conservative circles in Britain and America.
The academic field took shape quickly. Albion Small opened the world's first formal sociology department at the University of Chicago in 1892, at William Rainey Harper's invitation, and founded the American Journal of Sociology in 1895. A year later W. E. B. Du Bois established the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory at Atlanta University, the first scientific school of sociology. Durkheim, Marx and Max Weber are usually named the discipline's three principal architects, and Du Bois the father of urban and American sociology.
Source: Sociology
