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Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged, primarily out of Enlightenment thought, as a positivist science of society shortly after the French Revolution.Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge, arising in reaction to such issues as modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism.
As time has passed, history and sociology have developed into two different specific academic disciplines. Historical data was used and is used today in mainly these three ways: examining a theory through a parallel investigation, applying and contrasting events or policies (such as Verstehen), and considering the causalities from a macro point of view.
The contemporary discipline of sociology is theoretically multi-paradigmatic [74] in line with the contentions of classical social theory. Randall Collins ' well-cited survey of sociological theory [ 75 ] retroactively labels various theorists as belonging to four theoretical traditions: Functionalism, Conflict, Symbolic Interactionism, and ...
Sociology was established by Comte in 1838. [10] He had earlier used the term "social physics", but that had subsequently been appropriated by others, most notably the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet. Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the scientific understanding of the social realm.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the discipline of sociology: . Sociology – the study of society [1] using various methods of empirical investigation [2] and critical analysis [3] to understand human social activity, from the micro level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and social structure.
David Émile Durkheim (/ ˈ d ɜːr k h aɪ m /; [1] French: [emil dyʁkɛm] or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist.Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.
Antipositivism (or Interpretive sociology) is a theoretical perspective based on the work of Max Weber, proposes that social, economic and historical research can never be fully empirical or descriptive as one must always approach it with a conceptual apparatus.
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. [1] A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies (e.g. positivism and antipositivism), the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity.