Practice question · Put in order
Arrange these steps towards a science of society, earliest first.
- Comte puts the word sociologie into print
- A census records an urban majority in England and Wales
- The French Revolution begins
- Montesquieu publishes De l’esprit des lois
- Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations
- Rousseau publishes the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Hints
- Three of these are books of the Enlightenment and they come first.
- Montesquieu 1748, Rousseau 1755, Smith 1776, the Revolution 1789, the word 1838, the census 1851.
Show the answer
- Montesquieu publishes De l’esprit des lois
- Rousseau publishes the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
- Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations
- The French Revolution begins
- Comte puts the word sociologie into print
- A census records an urban majority in England and Wales
Why
The order matters more than the dates: the intellectual claim that society is lawful comes first, the political rupture that made the claim urgent comes second, and the name for the new discipline arrives half a century after the rupture. Sociology is named long after the problem it exists to solve had been posed.
Practise The Birth of a Discipline
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Sociology I is free to start.
More questions on The Birth of a Discipline
- Conservative critics of the French Revolution such as Bonald and Maistre wanted to restore the authority the…
- Sociology emerged not from passive curiosity about human behaviour, but as an attempt to explain a structural…
- Comte first called his new science "social physics" and changed the name after Quetelet used the same phrase…
- Sort each development by which of the three revolutions behind sociology it belongs to.
- Match each writer to the claim that entered sociology from their work.
- Which claims about sociology’s origins are defensible on the evidence?
- In which year did Auguste Comte first put the word "sociologie" into print, in his Cours de philosophie…
- Arrange the stages by which industrialisation reorganised where and how people lived.
- Most nineteenth-century urban growth in Britain came from births in the towns themselves rather than from…
- Estimate how many years separate the publication of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the census that first…