Practice question · Multiple choice
Sociology emerged not from passive curiosity about human behaviour, but as an attempt to explain a structural rupture. What made nineteenth-century social observation fundamentally different from earlier philosophical reflection?
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- Did early sociologists merely describe events, or seek underlying principles?
- How did the conceptualisation of society change when old traditions collapsed?
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B. It treated society as an autonomous system governed by discoverable laws
Why
Pre-nineteenth-century thinkers reflected on ideal polities or human nature, whereas emerging sociologists conceptualised society as an objective entity operating under its own regularities, laying groundwork for systematic empirical analysis.
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