gave rise to ideas about the nature of the natural and social worlds (and how it
was possible to study them through systematic observation and the
development of causal explanations).The Origins of Sociology
As we have
seen, The Enlightenment, (in the shape of philosophers such as Bacon
and Locke and physicists such as Newton)
gave rise to ideas about the nature of the natural and social worlds (and how it
was possible to study them through systematic observation and the
development of causal explanations).
As part of this
general social and intellectual development, the term "Sociology",
derives from the work
of Auguste Comte; and from Comte we also get one of the earliest
conceptions of the nature of the sociological enterprise - Sociology as the
"Science of Society".
Comte's main writings date from the early part of the 19th century and reflect a general preoccupation, at this time, with the methodology of scientific thought.
Just as natural scientists (whose field of study is the natural [inanimate] world) had started to theorise and discover the nature of the Laws that determined the behaviour of matter in the physical world, Comte argued that it was theoretically possible to discover the Laws governing the behaviour of people in the social world.
The way in which this could be made possible, he argued, (in "The Positive Philosophy", 1853), was through the development of a "positive" (or scientific) philosophy of human social development (hence the term "positivism" to describe this methodology)
In essence, Comte was arguing that the methodology and insights developed in the natural sciences could be used, by social scientists, as the model for the development of what he termed "Social Physics" or, eventually, "Sociology".