Daniel Little — History of sociology

Sociology is a discipline with a short history and a very dense and complex tree of topics and methods. So writing its history — even limited to the past century and a half — is extremely challenging. And the idea that the discipline has worked itself out as the methodical development of ideas advanced by the "founders" -- e.g. Marx, Durkheim, Tarde, Weber, and Simmel -- is really a non-starter. Each of these thinkers brought important ideas into the mix; but sociology is more than simply an elaboration of their nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ideas. Rather, sociologists have taken a meandering path as they have reacted to new social problems, innovations in theory and method, and shifting priorities in universities and funding sources.…

Economics is an aspect of sociology, and a branch of sociology, economic sociology, is dedicated to it. Unfortunately, there is no sociological economics is conventional economics. Marxist, Marxian and Institutional economics can be viewed as sociological economics. Conventional economics rejects sociological approaches in favor of formal methods.

Understanding Society
History of sociology
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor