Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged primarily out of enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolution, as a positivist science

of society. Its genesis owed to various

key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge. Social analysis in a broader sense, however, has origins in the common stock of philosophy and
necessarily pre-dates the field. Modern academic sociology arose as a reaction to modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism.
Late 19th century sociology demonstrated a particularly strong interest in the emergence of the modern nation state; its constituent institutions, its units of socialization, and its
means of surveillance. An emphasis on the concept of modernity, rather than the Enlightenment, often distinguishes sociological discourse from that of classical political
philosophy.[1]
Various quantitative social research techniques have become common tools for governments, businesses and organizations, and have also found use in the other social sciences.
Divorced from theoretical explanations of social dynamics, this has given social research a degree of autonomy from the discipline of sociology. Similarly, "social science" has come
to be appropriated as an umbrella term to refer to various disciplines which study humans, interaction, society or culture.[2]
Ancient times
Sociological reasoning may be traced back at least as far as the ancient Greeks (cf. Xenophanes remark: "If horses would adore gods, these gods would resemble horses"). Protosociological observations are to be found in the founding texts of Western philosophy (Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Polybius and so on), as well as in the non-European thought of
figures such as Confucius.[3] The characteristic trends in the sociological thinking of the ancient Greeks can be traced back to their social environment. Because there was rarely
any extensive or highly centralized political organization within states this allowed the tribal spirit of localism and provincialism to have free play. This tribal spirit of localism and
provincialism pervaded most of the Greek thinking upon social phenomena.[4]
The origin of the survey can be traced back to the Domesday Book ordered by king William I in 1086.[5][6]
In the 13th century, Ma Tuan-Lin, a Chinese historian, first recognized patterns of social dynamics as an underlying component of historical development in his seminal
encyclopedia, Wenxian Tongkao or "Comprehensive Examination of Literature".[7]
Ibn Khaldun (14th century)
There is evidence of early Muslim sociology from the 14th century. Some consider Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Tunisian, Arab, Islamic scholar from North Africa, to have been the
first sociologist and father of sociology;[8] his Muqaddimah was perhaps the first work to advance social-scientific reasoning on social cohesion and social conflict. Ibn Khaldun
(13321406), in his 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. He is thus considered by some to be the forerunner of sociology.
Concerning the discipline of sociology, he conceived a dynamic theory of history that involved conceptualizations of social conflict and social change. He developed the dichotomy
of sedentary life versus nomadic life as well as the concept of a "generation", and the inevitable loss of power that occurs when desert warriors conquer a city. Following a
contemporary Arab scholar, Sati' al-Husri, the Muqaddimah may be read as a sociological work: six books of general sociology. Topics dealt with in this work include politics, urban
life, economics, and knowledge. The work is based around Ibn Khaldun's central concept of 'asabiyyah, which has been translated as "social cohesion", "group solidarity", or
"tribalism". This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks
at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds psychological, sociological, economic, political of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new
group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion
The term ("sociologie") was first coined by the French essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieys (17481836),[17] from the Latin: socius, "companion"; and the suffix -ology, "the study of",

from Greek , lgos, "knowledge".[18][19] In 1838, the French-thinker Auguste Comte (17981857) ultimately gave sociology the definition that it holds today.[18] Comte had
earlier expressed his work as "social physics", but that term had been appropriated by others, most notably a Belgian statistician, Adolphe Quetelet (17961874).