ABSTRACT
Since its inauguration as an academic discipline after the July Revolution, in the 1830s, sociology has had a lasting ambivalent relationship to the humanities. On the one hand, Auguste Comte, who in 1838 had coined the word ‘sociology’ in a footnote to the 47th lesson of his Course in Positive Philosophy (1830-1842), introduced the new science as a type of physics, ‘social physics’, patterned on the model of Newtonian physics. For Comte’s contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, on the other hand, the ‘new science’ belonged to the humanities, in particular to political philosophy, theology, classical studies, rhetoric and history, inspired by sociological forerunners like Hobbes, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Conflicting views of the relationship between sociology and the humanities and the natural sciences have shaped sociology’s development. 1 The key issue in the making of sociology, I argue, is the question of how to position sociology in the modern period, that is, in the context of modern civilization. Comte defined this civilization as industrial civilization. Sociology, accordingly, was the science of industrial civilization that theorized and shaped industrial progress. For Tocqueville, civilization was democratic civilization. Sociology was that peculiar branch of the humanities which theorized and shaped democratic progress. Historians of sociology have amply documented the conceptual, methodical and analytical differences that characterize the making of sociology. What has not been narrated yet is the role of mythical imageries in the two sociologies, how myth continues now in the making of the Comtean and Tocquevillian sociologies in the modern period.
