ABSTRACT
The preliminary history of sociology covers to quite a considerable extent the days of the French and English Enlightenment. The achievements and the exigencies of bourgeois society were criteria to which everything else necessarily had reference. All that opposed, or ran counter to, what was looked upon as the normal development of this society was regarded as unnatural. This exclusively political social philosophy regarded society as one whole; and it stressed this whole, despite the great variety of its manifestations, and underlined the connections which made it a whole. The social sciences, which were just beginning to deal individually with the great variety of manifestations, were enlightened enough to subordinate their efforts to the understanding of this whole according to natural necessity. However, it was the process of a Nature which already bore traces of civilization. Sociology, on the other hand, is the product of the Restoration atleast, it is in its first systematic presentation, which is that of Comte.
