ABSTRACT
Social thought, concerned with the workings of community, society and the body politic, is, arguably, as old as philosophy. Sociology, on the other hand, is much younger: Traditionally regarded as an offspring of modernity, in its first formulations it was designed to produce scientific knowledge about social reality in general, and the great social transformations of its time in particular, essentially by applying the same methods as the natural sciences. Scientific sociology, as conceived by founding fathers such as Comte or Durkheim, was not expected to speculate about social reality, it was supposed to ascertain how it worked: Empirical research, guided by theory, would unveil the hidden laws of society just as Newton had discovered the laws of physics.
