Introduction

Abstract

One of the major contributions classical sociology has made to the social sciences is its successful establishment of that discipline’s autonomy from both philosophy and such neighbouring fields of knowledge as biology and psychology. So Marx, for instance, left the philosophical anthropology of his early writings for historical materialism in his attempt to translate his ontological views on matter and consciousness into a concrete historical analysis. For him, historical materialism was the better vehicle for showing the construction, reproduction and transformation of social formations, and for demonstrating the primary role played in that process by social classes situated in specific technological and economic contexts. Durkheim, on the other hand, by insisting that social facts must primarily be explained by other social facts, attempted to establish the relative autonomy of sociology as a discipline and the impossibility of reducing social phenomena to psychological or biological ones. Weber, finally, despite his methodological individualism, engaged in comparative analysis of social structures, and of corresponding modes of cognition and affect, in a way which was remarkably free of both moralising and psychologistically reductive explanations.