Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies, sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world.
behavior of individuals and the society that shapes that behavior figuration. He
described it through a metaphor of dancing. There can be no dance without the
dancers, but there can be no dancers without the dance. Without the dancers, a dance
is just an idea about motions in a choreographer’s head. Without a dance, there is
just a group of people moving around a floor. Similarly, there is no society without
the individuals that make it up, and there are also no individuals who are not affected
by the society in which they live (Elias 1978).
1.2. The History of Sociology
People have been thinking like sociologists long before sociology became a separate
academic discipline:
(a) Plato and Aristotle,
(b) Confucius,
(c) Khaldun, and
(d) Voltaire all set the stage for modern sociology.
Since ancient times, people have been fascinated by the relationship between
individuals and the societies to which they belong. The ancient Greeks might be
said to have provided the foundations of sociology through the distinction they drew
between physis (nature) and nomos (law or custom). Whereas nature or physis for
the Greeks was “what emerges from itself” without human intervention, nomos in
the form of laws or customs, were human conventions designed to constrain human
behavior. Histories by Herodotus (484–425 BCE) was a proto-anthropological
work that described the great variations in the nomos of different ancient societies
around the Mediterranean, indicating that human social life was not a product of
nature but a product of human creation. If human social life was the product of an
invariable human or biological nature, all cultures would be the same. The concerns
of the later Greek philosophers Socrates (469–399 BCE), Plato (428–347 BCE),
and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) with the ideal form of human community (the polis
or city-state) can be derived from the ethical dilemmas of this difference between
human nature and human norms. The modern sociological term “norm” (i.e., a
social rule that regulates human behavior) comes from the Greek term nomos.
In the 13th century, Ma Tuan-Lin, a Chinese historian, first recognized social
dynamics as an underlying component of historical development in his seminal
encyclopedia, General Study of Literary Remains. The study charted the historical
development of Chinese state administration from antiquity in a manner akin to
contemporary institutional analyses. The next century saw the emergence of the
historian some consider to be the world’s first sociologist, the Berber scholar Ibn
Khaldun (1332–1406) of Tunisia. His Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History is
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