Ancient Confucius (551–479 BCE) envisaged a just society that went beyond his contemporary society of the
Warring States. Later on, also in China,
Mozi (
circa 470 –
circa 390 BCE) recommended a more pragmatic sociology, but ethical at base. In the West,
Saint Augustine (354–430) was concerned exclusively with the idea of the
just society. St. Augustine describes late
Ancient Roman society through a lens of hatred and contempt for what he saw as false
Gods, and in reaction theorized
City of God.
Ancient Greek philosophers, including
Aristotle (384–322 BC) and
Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC), did not see a distinction between politics and society. The concept of society did not come until the
Enlightenment period. The term,
société, was probably first used as key concept by
Rousseau in discussion of social relations. Prior to the enlightenment, social theory took largely
narrative and
normative form. It was expressed as stories and fables, and it may be assumed the
pre-Socratic philosophers and religious teachers were the precursors to social theory proper.
Medieval There is evidence of
early Muslim sociology from the 14th century: in
Ibn Khaldun's
Muqaddimah (later translated as
Prolegomena in
Latin), the introduction to a seven volume analysis of
universal history, was the first to advance
social philosophy and
social science in formulating theories of
social cohesion and
social conflict.
Ibn Khaldun is thus considered by many to be the forerunner of sociology.
Khaldun's treatise described in
Muqaddimah (Introduction to History), published in 1377, two types of societies: (1) the city or
town-dweller and (2) the mobile,
nomadic societies.
European social thought Modernity arose during the Enlightenment period, with the emergence of the
world economy and exchange among diverse societies, bringing sweeping changes and new challenges for society. Many
French and
Scottish intellectuals and
philosophers embraced the idea of progress and ideas of modernity. The Enlightenment period was marked by the idea that with new
discoveries challenging the traditional way of thinking, scientists were required to find new normativity. This process allowed
scientific knowledge and society to
progress. French thought during this period focused on
moral critique and criticisms of the
monarchy. The classical approach has been criticized by many modern sociologists and theorists; among them
Karl Popper,
Robert Nisbet,
Charles Tilly and
Immanuel Wallerstein. The 19th century brought questions involving
social order. The
French Revolution freed French society of control by the monarchy, with no effective means of maintaining social order until
Napoleon came to power. Three great classical theories of social and historical change emerged: the
social evolutionism theory (of which
Social Darwinism forms a part), the
social cycle theory, and the
Marxist historical materialism theory. 19th-century classical social theory has been expanded upon to create newer, contemporary social theories such as
multilineal theories of evolution (
neoevolutionism,
sociobiology,
theory of modernization,
theory of post-industrial society) and various strains of
Neo-Marxism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, social theory became closely related to academic
sociology, and other related studies such as
anthropology,
philosophy, and
social work branched out into their own disciplines. Subjects like "
philosophy of history" and other multi-disciplinary subject matter became part of social theory as taught under sociology. A revival of discussion free of disciplines began in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research is a historical example. The
Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago followed in the 1940s. In the 1970s, programs in Social and Political Thought were established at
Sussex and
York. Others followed, with emphases and structures, such as Social Theory and History (
University of California, Davis).
Cultural Studies programs extended the concerns of social theory into the domain of
culture and thus
anthropology. A chair and undergraduate program in social theory was established at the
University of Melbourne. Social theory at present seems to be gaining acceptance as a classical academic discipline.
Classical social theory Adam Ferguson,
Montesquieu, and
John Millar, among others, were the first to study society as distinct from political institutions and processes. In the nineteenth century, the
scientific method was introduced into study of society, which was a significant advance leading to development of
sociology as a
discipline. In the 18th century, the pre-classical period of social theories developed a new form that provides the basic ideas for social theory, such as
evolution,
philosophy of history, social life and
social contract, public and
general will, competition in social space, organismic pattern for social description.
Montesquieu, in
The Spirit of Laws, which established that social elements influence human nature, was possibly the first to suggest a universal explanation for
history. Montesquieu included changes in
mores and manners as part of his explanation of political and historic events. The first "modern" social theories (known as classical theories) that begin to resemble the analytic social theory of today developed simultaneously with the birth of the science of sociology.
Auguste Comte (1798–1857), known as the "father of sociology" and regarded by some as the first philosopher of science, laid the groundwork for
positivism – as well as
structural functionalism and
social evolutionism.
Karl Marx rejected Comtean positivism but nevertheless aimed to establish a
science of society based on
historical materialism, becoming recognised as a founding figure of sociology posthumously. At the turn of the 20th century, the first of German sociologists, including
Max Weber and
Georg Simmel, developed sociological
antipositivism. The field may be broadly recognized as an amalgam of three modes of social scientific thought in particular; Durkheimian
sociological positivism and
structural functionalism, Marxist historical materialism and
conflict theory, and Weberian
antipositivism and
verstehen critique. Another early modern theorist,
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), coined the term "
survival of the fittest".
Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and
Pitirim A. Sorokin argued that "history goes in cycles," and presented the
social cycle theory to illustrate their point.
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) made
community and
society (
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, 1887) the special topics of the new science of "sociology", both of them based on different modes of
will of
social actors. The 19th century pioneers of social theory and sociology, like Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx,
John Stuart Mill or Spencer, never held university posts and they were broadly regarded as philosophers.
Emile Durkheim endeavoured to formally established academic sociology, and did so at the
University of Bordeaux in 1895, he published
Rules of the Sociological Method. In 1896, he established the journal ''
L'Année Sociologique''. Durkheim's seminal monograph,
Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongst
Catholic and
Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from
psychology or
philosophy.
Post-modern social theory The term "postmodernism" was brought into social theory in 1971 by the Arab American Theorist
Ihab Hassan in his book:
The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. In 1979
Jean-François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work
The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge.
Jean Baudrillard,
Michel Foucault, and
Roland Barthes were influential in the 1970s in developing postmodern theory. Scholars most commonly hold
postmodernism to be a movement of ideas arising from, but also critical of elements of
modernism. The wide range of uses of this term resulted in different elements of modernity are chosen as being continuous. Each of the different uses is rooted in some argument about the nature of knowledge, known in philosophy as
epistemology. Individuals who use the term are arguing that either there is something fundamentally different about the transmission of meaning, or that modernism has fundamental flaws in its system of knowledge. The argument for the necessity of the term states that economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media-dominated society. These ideas are
simulacra, and only inter-referential representations and copies of each other, with no real original, stable or objective source for
communication and meaning.
Globalization, brought on by innovations in communication,
manufacturing and
transportation, is cited as one force which has decentralized modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected global society, lacking any single dominant center of political power, communication, or intellectual production. The postmodern view is that inter-subjective knowledge, and not objective knowledge, is the dominant form of
discourse. The ubiquity of copies and dissemination alters the relationship between reader and what is read, between observer and the observed, between those who consume and those who produce. Not all people who use the term postmodern or postmodernism see these developments as positive. Users of the term argue that their ideals have arisen as the result of particular economic and social conditions, including "
late capitalism", the growth of
broadcast media, and that such conditions have pushed society into a new
historical period.
Today In the past few decades, in response to postmodern critiques, social theory has begun to stress free will, individual choice, subjective reasoning, and the importance of unpredictable events in place of
deterministic necessity.
Rational choice theory,
symbolic interactionism,
false necessity are examples of more recent developments. A view among contemporary sociologists is that there are no great unifying 'laws of history', but rather smaller, more specific, and more complex laws that govern society. Philosopher and politician
Roberto Mangabeira Unger recently attempted to revise classical social theory by exploring how things fit together, rather than to provide an all encompassing single explanation of a universal reality. He begins by recognizing the key insight of classical social theory of society as an artifact, and then by discarding the law-like characteristics forcibly attached to it. Unger argues that classical social theory was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, and not the expression of an underlying natural order, but at the same time its capacity was checked by the equally prevalent ambition to create law-like explanations of history and social development. The
human sciences that developed claimed to identify a small number of possible types of social organization that coexisted or succeeded one another through inescapable developmental tendencies or deep-seated economic organization or psychological constraints.
Marxism is the star example. Unger, calling his efforts "super-theory", has thus sought to develop a comprehensive view of history and society. Unger does so without subsuming deep structure analysis under an indivisible and repeatable type of social organization or with recourse to law-like constraints and tendencies. ==Schools of thought==