Abstract
SOCIOLOGY is a discipline that employs abstract concepts to express general propositions about social behaviour, relationships and processes. From its beginnings, sociology was as much concerned to interpret the past as to explain the present. The early sociologists were historicists and evolutionists who explained the past by imposing a pattern of order upon it, and who readily took the less developed contemporary societies of their own time as images of the remote past of their own societies. It is to those thinkers, Comte, Spencer and Marx, if not precisely to the issues that occupied them, that sociologists still turn in tracing their intellectual descent—not to the early social surveyors, Charles Booth or Frederic Le Play.
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