ABSTRACT
Sociology is a science. It arises from the recognition of order in society. The discipline describes this order and its antecedents, and from these predicts the future course of human behaviour. A definition as austere as this is not readily acceptable to the layman or even to many social scientists because, first, it asserts that human behaviour is predictable and thus conflicts with ideas of free-will, and, second, it implies that all social processes are of interest to the sociologist and that he does not necessarily accept the popular valuations of different social processes that divide them into good, to be encouraged, and bad, to be discouraged.
