Journey · 12 stops
How Sociology Emerged from Philosophy
How questions of moral philosophy, natural law, the philosophy of history and political economy became a science of society – from Ibn Khaldun to Durkheim, who in 1895 declared it independent of philosophy.
Stops
Stop 1 of 12: Ibn Khaldun
Before sociology had a name, its questions belonged to moral and political philosophy: how should people live together? In the Muqaddimah (1377) Ibn Khaldun claimed an independent science of human civilisation, distinct from the philosophers’ “civil politics”, which asks how a household or city should be governed according to ethics and philosophy; his subject was how social life actually works. Ottoman historians read him from the 17th century, but most European thinkers on this journey never did: a complete French translation appeared only in the 1860s.
Stop 2 of 12: Giambattista Vico
Three and a half centuries later, apparently unaware of Ibn Khaldun, Giambattista Vico in Naples also announced a new science. The New Science (1725; final version 1744) argues that the civil world was made by humans, so its principles are “to be found within the modifications of our own human mind”, and that philosophy must join philology, the study of languages, customs and laws. Against Grotius and Pufendorf, Vico held that natural law was no timeless code but grew with the customs of nations. Long marginal, he was rediscovered in the 19th century.
Stop 3 of 12: Montesquieu
Vico sought the course common to all nations; Montesquieu asked why their laws differ so widely. The Spirit of the Laws (1748) defines laws as “the necessary relations arising from the nature of things” – a definition that covers the physical world and human societies alike – and sets beside the natural-law question of what laws ought to be a comparative one: why they are as they are. Climate, religion, commerce, mores and the form of government together shape what he called a nation’s “general spirit”.
Stop 4 of 12: Adam Ferguson
In Scotland, where the chairs of moral philosophy and law taught the history of society, Montesquieu was read closely. Adam Ferguson, professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh from 1764, admitted in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) that after what Montesquieu had written he hardly knew why he should treat of human affairs at all. Against the state of nature of natural-law theorists from Hobbes to Rousseau, he held that humans have always lived in groups: the state of nature “is here”.
Stop 5 of 12: John Millar
Ferguson wrote the history of civil society as a story of virtue and corruption; John Millar in Glasgow tied it to the way people make their living. The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771; revised 1779) traces how authority over women, children and servants changes from hunting and herding to farming and commerce, and criticises American colonists who spoke of liberty while holding slaves. Ronald Meek (1976) showed how heavily the scheme drew on reports about the Indigenous peoples of America; in his reading, it placed them at the earliest stage, in Europe’s past rather than among its contemporaries.
Stop 6 of 12: Adam Smith
Millar, by his own account, owed his approach to Adam Smith’s lectures, which he had heard as a student. A student’s notes of Smith’s Glasgow lectures on jurisprudence of 1762–63, found only in 1958, set out four “distinct states” of mankind: hunters, shepherds, agriculture and commerce. As Millar described it for Dugald Stewart, Smith’s moral philosophy course ran from natural theology and ethics to justice and “expediency” – the part that became The Wealth of Nations (1776). Millar called Montesquieu the Bacon of this branch of philosophy, Smith its Newton. Turgot sketched a similar sequence of stages in Paris in 1750–51; who came first is disputed (Meek 1976).
Stop 7 of 12: Henri de Saint-Simon
After the Revolution, Smith’s commercial society reappeared in France as “industrial” society. Henri de Saint-Simon drew on Jean-Baptiste Say, who had made Smith’s economics known in France, and drew a political conclusion: those who produce, together with the scientists, should direct society, not nobles and soldiers. In his Memoir on the Science of Man (1813) he called for a science of human beings and society that would rest, like physiology, on observation. From 1817 the young Auguste Comte worked for him as his secretary.
Stop 8 of 12: Auguste Comte
The two parted in 1824 in a dispute over the reissue of Comte’s Plan of the Scientific Work Necessary for Reorganising Society (1822). Politics, the young Comte argued there, had to be raised to the rank of the sciences of observation. The watchwords of 1789 he called “critical” doctrines, able to dissolve the old order but not to found a new one. Where natural law had argued about rights, the new science was to look for the laws of social life.
Stop 9 of 12: Harriet Martineau
Comte’s Course reached the English-speaking world through Harriet Martineau, who had come to the study of society through political economy: her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) turned the ideas of Smith, Malthus and Ricardo into widely read monthly stories. Her book How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) is one of the first treatises on the method of social research. Her condensation of Comte’s six volumes into two (1853) was clear enough that Comte recommended it to his followers, and it was later translated back into French.
Stop 10 of 12: Alexis de Tocqueville
Martineau toured the United States in 1834–36; Alexis de Tocqueville had travelled there in 1831–32 and asked what a society of equals does to its members. Democracy in America (1835/1840) treats “equality of conditions” as the generative fact from which laws, opinions and mores follow, and declares that “a new political science is needed for a world altogether new”. Tocqueville named Pascal, Montesquieu and Rousseau as the three men he lived with “a little every day”; his comparison of mores and institutions carried Montesquieu’s method into the democratic age.
Stop 11 of 12: Karl Marx
In 1848 Tocqueville witnessed the revolution in Paris as a deputy; Karl Marx analysed it from London as class struggle (The Class Struggles in France, 1850). He turned the Scots’ legacy into a critique: Smith and Ricardo, he wrote in 1857, began with “the individual and isolated hunter and fisherman”, projecting the individual of their own century into the past as natural. Capital (1867) quotes Ferguson on the division of labour and Vico on history as made by humans; Ronald Meek saw the four stages as a forerunner of Marx’s modes of production.
Stop 12 of 12: Émile Durkheim
Where Marx saw alienation and class rule in the division of labour, Émile Durkheim asked what holds a society together when everyone does different work. The Division of Labour in Society (1893) begins with Adam Smith and answers with an “organic” solidarity of mutual dependence; his Latin thesis credited Montesquieu with laying the foundations of social science. The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) declared the new science free of any dependence on philosophy; in 1896 Bordeaux gave him France’s first chair of social science. How the discipline went on is told in the journey “How Society Became Thinkable”.
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