ABSTRACT
Sociology, the science of modern society, thus has as a central category the social, as distinguished from the traditional concepts of the political and the economic. In depth, the Weberian definition of sociology, arising out of German idealist philosophy and the economic and juridical theory of action, can be reconciled with a definition in terms of the social, as distinguished from the political and the economic, following the double revolution, French and industrial. The birth of socialism and sociology in the same historical circumstances—the fall of the Ancien Regime and untamed industrialism—has fostered the accusation that sociologists have a professional fondness for socialism. The rejection of any hierarchy of cultures is perhaps tantamount, for the ethnologist or the sociologist, to a methodological postulate. All sociology, in any case all macrosociology, preserves elements of social criticism and philosophic interpretation.
