ABSTRACT
History and sociology maintain a complex relationship made up of differences and similarities. In many cases it is difficult to make a rigorous distinction between studies from one discipline or the other. We should be suspicious of hard and fast distinctions. The proposition put forward here is that it is an exaggeration to assume that sociology is essentially a nomothetic science, seeking to uncover general laws, while history would be an essentially descriptive discipline. It is simplistic to see history as a science of the singular and sociology as a science of the general. Such broad distinctions may perhaps have didactic virtue. But they are too crude to describe the similarities and differences between sociology as it is and history as it is. Such crude distinctions do, however, have a practical and
somewhat polemical function: they enable the sociologist to mark out a territory within frontiers which are all too often uncertain and contested. But if it is difficult to separate the two disciplines by clear differences, it is equally true that, from an ideal-typical perspective, they tend (contradicting the opinion of certain historians such as Braudel, who would deny any specificity to sociology) to be distinguished, from the viewpoint of methods and objectives, by a certain number of traits.
