There are excellent reasons for saying that the Greek philosopher, Plato, should be considered the founding Father of Sociology. He developed, for example, utopian models about the perfect society, ideal types that he could then use as a measuring rod in order to analyze and to criticize his own society. So, we could say that at least some aspects of sociological thought can already be found in the year 400 before the common era. That is one way of looking at it. Completely opposed to that position is the idea that serious academic theories about human society anchored in methodologically sound research, are not to be found before the second world war. The idea that sociology as an empirical science came of age in the United States, in the 40s and the 50s of the 20th century with sociology professors such as, Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton as the first rigorously scientific theorists. When you would have a look at the large collection of handbooks or readers devoted to sociological theory, you might discover that the extreme positions that I just mentioned are not shared by contemporary authors. It's much more common to begin the story of sociological theory somewhere in the 18th century, for example with the Scottish moral philosophers. Sociologists disagree about many things but there is a rather broad consensus about where the story of sociological theory really starts. That is, in the 18th, maybe in the 19th century. Let me begin with a somewhat trivial observation. Wouldn't it be nice if we knew who the person was who coined the word sociology and if we knew in what year he or she used that word for the very first time? Well, it may come as a surprise but we do know this name and we do have this date. The wordsmith in question was the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who single-handedly welded together the Latin word socius, companion, and the Greek suffix logos, which means the knowledge of something. Comte published a book in the year 1838, in which the words can be found in print for the very first time. He actually had used another term before to denote the same thing, the science of society referring then to la physique sociale, social physics. But when he discovered that another author had stolen his word, or at least he believed that his intellectual ownership had been injured, he invented the terms of sociology stressing over and over again that this was the word that he personally had given to the world. Many new words were invented in that same period for new phenomena that had to be given a name, such as industrialism or socialism or even the word altruism. Another term coined by Comte, who needed something denoting the opposite of egoism. As an institutionalized academic enterprise, science taught by university professors appointed to teach this brand new science. Sociology had to wait till the end of the 19th century, when Albion Small became a professor of sociology at the new University of Chicago. But as a way of studying the social implications of the great transformation towards modernity, sociology is older than Comte. His term was not the start of the discipline. It is in a way the outcome of an intellectual movement that culminated with the growing acceptance of his word. If we follow the idea that substantially Sociology is the science that takes as its subject matter, the rise of industrialized societies in the West, then it makes sense to say that it was born in the course of the 18th Century. Anybody interested in following the intellectual river further upstream, may come up with interesting precursors, like the North African scholar, Evan Holdom, or Machiavelli, or or the great Dutch humanist, Erasmus. But in this course, we begin our overview of classical authors with Adam Smith, who witnessed a new type of division of labor, who wrote about relatively modern manufacturers, who was amazed by the increase of the output of the workers, and who studied the social implications of those huge changes. That is where our story begins.
