ABSTRACT
The origin of German sociology goes back to the eighteenth century. Important observations concerning a systematic science of sociology could be gathered, from the sphere of moral philosophy; from the philosophy of history; from geography and ethnography; from statistics-in the sense of political arithmetic and history. Compared with the French and English Enlightenment, whose literature was studied either in the original or in translation and became the common property of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the movement in Germany made a rather provincial impression, and only Johann Gottlieb Herder, who developed the 'concrete totality' of the peoples as a real subject of history, rose to any greater importance. From the earliest times down to the present, history is intrinsically connected; it may be divided into various cultural phases which all reveal in themselves a uniform structure, and all, despite the confusion which prevails in them, promote the 'formation of humanity' to the status of a reasonable order of human society.
