Blackwell Reference Online

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Following Parsons (1968) , Habermas (1984) is correct in noting that sociology is the science primarily concerned with explaining human cooperation. Explanations of the forms of human cooperation have preoccupied philosophy, the humanities, and science since the time of the ancient Greeks. It was not until philosophy was able to separate itself from religious doctrine, beginning with Hobbes (the state) and Locke and Rousseau (the social contract), that a search was launched for the mechanisms that hold persons together or drive them apart ( Eder 2007 ). Building upon the thought of Vico, Mill, and Comte, by the late 1800s sociology was finally positioned to conceptualize and research human sociality, bringing to bear the latest statistical and methodological techniques. Comte's doctrine of positivism suggested that as the queen of the sciences, sociology was an empirical science that builds upon the basic physical sciences such as mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, and zoology. Drawing upon his training in the natural sciences and influenced by the positivism of Comte and the evolutionism of Spencer, early American sociologist Lester F. Ward argued that matter exists in three degrees of aggregation. In primary aggregation , inorganic matter is held together by molecules, and here there is a direct application to chemistry and the notion of chemical bonds. With the rise ... log in or subscribe to read full text