Practice question · Select all that apply
Which claims about sociology’s origins are defensible on the evidence?
Hints
- Three of these are widely accepted; one is the Eurocentric story in its strongest form.
- Ask whether a fourteenth-century account of dynastic cycles counts as social analysis.
Show the answer
- A. The discipline’s founding question was posed by critics of the French Revolution as much as by its supporters
- B. Economic historians dispute how sudden British industrialisation actually was
- D. Systematic social analysis existed long before the word sociology, for instance in Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah of 1377
Why
The first three are standard. The fourth is the story the discipline used to tell about itself, and it survives because it flatters: it makes 1838 a beginning rather than a naming. What changed around 1800 was institutional — chairs, journals, methods — not the sheer fact of thinking about society.
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
- Arrange these steps towards a science of society, earliest first.
- 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.
- 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…