ABSTRACT
Sociology set out to help human beings to observe, understand, foresee and solve problems of their societies. The emphatic belief in science and scholarship characteristic of Europe after the French Revolution is hard for many of to understand, not to mention to share, but it was the origin of Western sociology. The success of the natural sciences during the nineteenth century led to the assumption that historical and socio-economies developments are governed by a system of laws. Auguste Comte's enormous ambition to make sociology the paramount science surely must be abandoned at the end of the twentieth century. Sociology is the intellectual enterprise by which one can learn about human beings and about society without direct practical and professional application outside the reproduction of academic sociology itself. Sociology attracts people in search of the knowledge and instruments with which to understand society, and to gain the intellectual power that stems from knowledge and then use it actively to change society.
