ABSTRACT
From its beginnings sociology was closely connected with the philosophy of history and with interpretations of the rapid and violent changes in European societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Scottish historians and philosophers (in particular, Ferguson, Millar, and Robertson), the French philosophes (Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet), the German historians and philosophers (Herder, Hegel), were all concerned to explain or interpret the social and political revolutions of their age, within the framework of a general theory of history. Their influence was profound and can be plainly seen in later writers such as SaintSimon and Buckle, and in the work of the first sociologists, Comte, Marx and Spencer. Even later in the nineteenth century, a historical and evolutionary approach was dominant in sociology and anthropology. Max Weber presented no theory of universal history but it is evident that all his sociological work was inspired by a historical concern with the origins and significance of modern Western capitalism, and more widely by his preoccupation with the increasing rationalization of social life and its implications for human freedom. Durkheim rejected Comte’s evolutionary sociology, but his own outline of a classification of societies is conceived in terms of an evolutionary scheme, and his Division of Labour in Society is concerned with a process of development from primitive to modern societies. Hobhouse was more immediately indebted to Comte and Spencer, and the whole of his sociological work is clearly directed by a philosophical conception of social progress.
