Origins of Sociology: The Case of the Scottish Enlightenment

Abstract

Historians of sociology frequently locate its origins in the early years of the nineteenth century and especially in the work of Comte, Mill and Le Play.' They argue that with the growth of a rigorous method in social research and an increasing knowledge of both industrial and non-industrial societies, sociology gradually emerged as an autonomous and disciplined science. In this 'drive towards objectivity'2 sociology sheds its ideological character and polemical intent, and, working in many directions strives for an objective, unbiased and scientific understanding of the social world. Thus British sociology, originating in early nineteenth-century statistics and surveys and strongly motivated by a desire to improve industrial society, especially its working-class segments tended to lose its direction after Spencer and become fragmented into social administration and the study of eugenics. Abrams has recently argued that it was not until the 1930s that British sociology recovered its scientific elan through a direct and negative confrontation with the eugenicist argument thus providing it with its contemporary character: a dominant concern with demography, educational opportunity, mobility and the sociology of poverty.3 So much for the myth. It seems most improbable that an automatic conversion to unsullied objectivity about human society occurs simply because of increasing specialization and sophisticated techniques of data gathering, for as soon as sociology attempts reintegration of its limited empirical findings with a conception of society as a whole and as a process then the work becomes problematic. For the sociologist comes to any study with a perspective and a core of values and as the sociology of knowledge has convincingly shown, perspectives and values have a social referent which lends them the character of an ideology. It is precisely perspective and values which are likely to penetrate the problem of social significance which underpins all empirical research. If this is so, then the history of social theory itself becomes problematic and that instead of some kind of evolutionary march to objectivity one should pose the concept of the broken line: that at different historical moments certain doctrines and theories which will attempt to ascribe