ABSTRACT
Sociology was founded as an explicit discipline using combination of the organismic analogy and somewhat raw ideas from 19th Century physics. Thus sociology from its beginnings has always been concerned with evolution, particularly the movement of societies from simple to ever-more complex forms. At the same time, functionalism was sociology’s first explicit theoretical approach, and this approach was, not surprisingly, built around the analysis of superorganisms, or the organization of organisms. At the same time, ecological analysis, revealing a distinctly Darwinian flavor, was introduced in the early history of sociology. And like so much philosophy, early sociology was interested the human nature or the biological drives that guided human behavior and social organization. This chapter briefly reviews these key ideas that were part of sociology as an explicit discipline at its early beginnings in the first decades of the 19th Century.
