Beginnings of Sociology

 True modern sociology probably began as the result of the French revolution and the need to reorganize society after the social unrest. Sociology could have just as well had its origins centuries earlier when Socrates would discuss philosophical issues with his peers. One wonders about the code of conduct among those philosophers and how they could have expressed the need for social involvement and the importance of knowing the interaction between the individual and the world in which he lived.

If the citizens of ancient Greece were assembled to attend forums and partake in discussions that might be an origin of sociology. Centuries past before there were revolutionary changes in the way scientific phenomena were observed and studied. That lay the groundwork for the way of analysis for all the sciences; there had to be a means of investigation and one could not just assume that an event would cause another unless there was data to back that up.

Once the era of the scientific revolution fell in Europe the phenomena of how man might accumulate knowledge was looked at differently. He began to view or classify his fields of interests separately such that thee could of been the beginnings of sociology then and there. If man became interested in the life of the group and began to steer away from the view of seeing  discoveries, as only the outcome of any single person, then that could have been the origin of social thought. It could contributed to how men would redefine themselves into being socially interdependent.

Scientifically, Darwinism questioned the six day creationist principle and that occurred alongside the creation of Comte’s secular religion where he had an interest in understanding how society lived and how people would interact with it. People were also looking for a modern approach to explain Earth’s role in the universe. Then of course a shift to the heliocentric view to the nature of the solar system, the enlightenment and the period where scientific discoveries redefined the rules of the world for man, might have had some effect on the need to understand man’s place on the Earth and by extension man’s social role. Changes in knowledge of physics and astronomy and biology, might have gave man the desire to see into the human side of what was happening on the Earth.