What sociology is: how it began, what it studies and what it is for

What this chapter is for

This chapter answers the first question of the subject, which is what sociology is. It tells how the subject began, first in the work of Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century and then in Europe after two great revolutions. It sets out what sociology studies, how it differs from the subjects next to it, the three ways sociologists look at society, and what sociology is used for in a village, a clinic and a factory. Every later chapter stands on this one, so read it first.

The chapter runs long, so here is its shape. It begins with what sociology is and how it was born. It then shows how a sociologist looks at a problem, and how sociology differs from social philosophy and from its neighbours. It ends with the three perspectives tested on one Pakistani event, the subject at work, its history in Pakistan, and its critics.

The papers ask about this ground directly. CE-2026 asked how the Industrial and French Revolutions shaped the birth of sociology, CE-2018 asked whether Ibn Khaldun rather than Comte founded it, and CE-2016 asked for its uses in agriculture, health and industry.¹

Before you start

The words

Society. A large group of people who live in one territory, deal with each other over time and share a culture. Pakistan is a society; so, in a smaller way, is a village.

Social interaction. The way people act towards each other and respond to each other, from a greeting to a business deal.

Group. Two or more people who interact and feel they belong together, such as a family, a class of students or a cricket team.

Institution. A lasting pattern of rules and roles that meets a basic need of society. The family, religion, education, the economy and the state are the five main institutions.

Social structure. The pattern of relationships, groups and institutions that holds a society together, and which outlasts the people in it.

Empirical. Based on evidence that can be seen, counted or checked, rather than on belief or reasoning alone.

Perspective. A way of looking at society as a whole, which decides what questions a sociologist asks. Sociology has three main ones: functionalism, conflict and symbolic interactionism.

Positivism. Comte’s name for the belief that society can be studied by the methods of natural science, by observing facts and finding the laws that connect them.

Micro and macro. Micro sociology studies small-scale interaction between people. Macro sociology studies large structures such as classes, institutions and whole societies.

The places

Tunis, Cairo and the Maghreb. North Africa, where Ibn Khaldun was born (Tunis, 1332), wrote his Muqaddimah (1377) and died (Cairo, 1406). The Maghreb is the old Arabic name for the lands west of Egypt.

Britain. Where the Industrial Revolution began in the late eighteenth century, moving work from homes and farms into factories.

France. Where the Revolution of 1789 overthrew the king and the old order, and where Comte and Durkheim wrote.

Baldia Town, Karachi. The industrial area where the Ali Enterprises garment factory burned on 11 September 2012. This chapter uses it to show the three perspectives at work.

The story in plain words

1. People have always lived in groups, and wise people have always asked why.
2. In 1377 Ibn Khaldun wrote that human society could be studied as a science of its own.
3. Around 1800, two revolutions shook Europe. Factories pulled millions into cities, and the French Revolution ended the rule of kings and priests.
4. Old ways of life broke, and thinkers asked what now held society together.
5. In 1838 Auguste Comte named the new science of society “sociology”.
6. Marx, Durkheim and Weber built it into a subject with its own methods.
7. Sociology studies how people live together, using evidence, not wishes.
8. It looks at society in three main ways, as a working system, as a contest for power, and as meanings made in everyday life.
9. Its findings are used to plan farming, health care, industry and social policy, in Pakistan as elsewhere.

1. Sociology is the study of people living together

Begin with something you have seen. In a Pakistani village, a girl is married at seventeen to a cousin her father chose. In a Lahore housing society, her cousin of the same age is at university and will choose her own husband at twenty-six. A psychologist might ask what each girl felt. A sociologist asks a different question. Why do girls in one setting marry earlier, and to relatives, while girls in another marry later? The answer lies not in either girl’s mind but in the families, incomes, schools and customs around her. That is the ground sociology works on.

Sociology is the scientific study of society, of the groups people form and of how they interact. A standard textbook puts it as “the scientific and systematic study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions, from small and personal groups to very large groups”.³ Three words in that definition matter. “Scientific” means sociology rests on evidence that others can check. “Groups” means its unit is never the lone individual but people in relation to each other. “Interactions” means it studies what people do to and with each other, not only the structures they build.

Sociologists study society at two levels. Micro sociology looks at small groups and face-to-face meetings, such as how a family decides on a marriage, how students behave in a classroom, how a patient and a doctor talk. Macro sociology looks at large patterns, such as how industry changed the family, why some classes stay poor, how a country’s population grows. The two levels meet, because every large pattern is made of countless small meetings, and every small meeting is shaped by the large patterns around it.

The founders gave their own definitions, and each shows what they thought mattered most. For Ibn Khaldun, the new science had “its own peculiar object-that is, human civilization and social organization”.⁶ For Durkheim, sociology studied social facts, the ways of acting and thinking that exist outside any one person and press upon each of us, such as laws, customs and language. For Weber, it sought to understand the meaning people give to their actions and so explain what they do. A candidate who can set two or three of these definitions side by side, with their authors, begins an answer the way the examiner hopes.

2. How sociology was born: two revolutions

Sociology is a young subject, and it was born out of disorder. Between about 1780 and 1850, two revolutions changed European life more than anything in the thousand years before. Figure 1 sets them beside the questions they raised and the thinkers who answered.

The first was the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the late eighteenth century. Machines driven by water and then steam moved work from the home and the field into the factory. Millions of people left villages for crowded cities, where they lived among strangers, worked long hours for wages, and lost the help of kin and neighbours. A new class of factory owners grew rich while a new class of workers lived in slums. Old ties of family, village and church weakened, and nobody yet understood what would replace them.⁴

The second was the French Revolution of 1789. It overthrew the king and the privileges of the nobles and the Church, and declared that power came from the people and that all men had rights. For the first time, the order of society looked like something human beings had made, and could remake, rather than something fixed by God and tradition. That idea opened the way to a science of society. If people made society, then society could be studied, explained and perhaps improved.

The two revolutions left three questions, and each founder of sociology answered one of them. What holds a society together when the old bonds of village and church break? Durkheim answered with his idea of social solidarity. Why does the new wealth leave so many poor? Marx answered with his theory of class conflict. How did the modern, rational, bureaucratic world arise, and what does it mean to the people inside it? Weber answered with his studies of religion, authority and bureaucracy. CE-2026 asked exactly this, how the two revolutions shaped “the scientific study of society and the formation of key sociological perspectives”.¹

The age also gave sociology its method. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had taught Europe to trust observation and reason over tradition, and the natural sciences had shown what that trust could achieve in physics and chemistry. The founders asked why the same method should not work for society. Comte called the hope positivism, and it is the root of every survey, census and statistic in this subject.⁴

3. Ibn Khaldun and the science of human civilization

Long before Europe’s revolutions, a Muslim scholar had set out the idea of a science of society. Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in 1332 and died in Cairo in 1406. He served several rulers of North Africa and Spain as a minister and judge, and saw dynasties rise and fall around him. In 1377 he completed the Muqaddimah, the “Introduction” to his history of the world, and in it he proposed a new science he called ilm al-umran, the science of human civilization.⁴⁶

His reason began with history. Historians of his day repeated reports that could not have happened, because they did not know what was possible in society. Ibn Khaldun argued that to judge a report, a historian must first know the nature of human social organization, meaning what always goes with it, what happens to it by accident, and what can never happen to it. That knowledge, he said, deserved a science of its own. “(The subject) is in a way an independent science. (This science) has its own peculiar object-that is, human civilization and social organization.”⁶

He knew he was doing something new. He separated his science from rhetoric, which persuades, and from politics, which tells rulers how a city ought to be run, and wrote that “In a way, it is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines by anyone.”⁶ His science described how society is, not how it ought to be, and that is the line that still divides sociology from social philosophy.

The Muqaddimah then does what a sociologist does. It begins with the claim that society is necessary, because no one person can grow, grind and bake their own bread or defend themselves alone. In his words, a man “cannot do without a combination of many powers from among his fellow beings”.⁷ It compares the hard, close-knit life of desert tribes with the soft, wealthy life of cities. It explains the rise and fall of dynasties through asabiyyah, the group feeling that binds a tribe and lets it seize power, and which weakens over three or four generations of luxury. The chapter on Ibn Khaldun in head II teaches these ideas in full.

This is why CE-2018 asked whether Ibn Khaldun, “but not August Comte”, is the founder of sociology.¹ The honest answer has two halves. Ibn Khaldun set out the idea of the science, its object and its method four and a half centuries before Comte, and much of what he said still holds. Comte gave the science its name and launched it as a continuing subject in Europe, where Ibn Khaldun’s work had no successors for centuries and was barely known. So Ibn Khaldun is the first sociologist, and Comte the founder of sociology as an organized discipline. The answer plan at the end of this chapter works this question through.

4. Comte names the science, and the founders build it

Auguste Comte, a French philosopher born in 1798, gave the new science its name. He first called it “social physics”, then, in 1838, coined the word “sociology”, joining the Latin socius (companion) and the Greek logos (study).⁴⁸ His six-volume Course of Positive Philosophy, published between 1830 and 1842, ranked the sciences from mathematics and astronomy up to physics, chemistry and biology, and put sociology at the top as the most complex of all.⁸

Comte’s central claim was his law of three stages. “Each of our leading conceptions — each branch of our knowledge — passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.”⁹ In the first stage people explain events by gods and spirits, in the second by abstract forces, and in the third by laws found through observation. Sociology, for Comte, was the positive stage reached in the study of society itself. The chapter on Comte in head II teaches the law and its critics.

Others built on Comte’s name. Herbert Spencer in England compared society to a living body whose organs depend on each other, and wrote The Study of Sociology in 1873. Karl Marx in Germany and England explained history as a struggle between classes over the means of production, set out in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 with Friedrich Engels.⁴ Émile Durkheim in France made sociology a university subject and set out its method in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), after The Division of Labour in Society (1893) and before Suicide (1897). Max Weber in Germany studied how religion shaped economic life in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published as essays in 1904 and 1905.⁴

These are the seven thinkers the syllabus names, with Talcott Parsons, the American who drew Durkheim and Weber together into one theory of the social system in the 1930s to 1950s. The timeline in Figure 2 shows their order, and head II gives each a chapter.

5. What sociology studies

Sociology’s field is wide, because almost everything people do, they do in groups. Its main topics are the ones this syllabus lists. Culture and socialization are the shared ways of life and how they are learnt. Society and its types run from hunting bands to industrial nations. Stratification is the ranking of people by class, caste and status. Social control and deviance are how a society makes people keep its rules and why some break them. Social change covers how and why societies change. Community is life in villages and cities. Institutions are the family, religion, education, the economy and politics. Social problems include poverty, crime and violence. Population and migration close the list.

Early sociologists argued over how wide the field should be, and the argument still shows up in textbooks as the question of sociology’s scope. One school, the formal or specialistic school, led by the German Georg Simmel, held that sociology should study only the forms of social relations, such as competition, conflict, cooperation and authority, which appear the same whether the setting is a family, a firm or a state. In Simmel’s own words, sociology “should treat of the specifically social, the process and forms of socialization, as such”.¹¹ That would give sociology a field of its own that no other science claimed. The other school, the synthetic school, led by Durkheim and later Pitirim Sorokin, held that sociology should study society as a whole, drawing together what the other social sciences find, because the parts of social life affect each other.

The second view won, and modern sociology is broad. It has kept one thing from the first, an eye for the forms that recur across settings. A sociologist sees the same pattern of patronage in a biradari, a political party and a government office, and that is the formal school’s insight at work. In an answer on the scope of sociology, give both schools with their leaders, then say that the subject today combines them.

6. How a sociologist looks at a problem

The heart of sociology is a way of seeing. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills called it the sociological imagination, in a book of that name in 1959. It is the habit of connecting a person’s own life to the history and the social structure around it.¹⁰³ Mills’s best-known example is unemployment. If one person in a large city has no job, that is a personal trouble, and we look to that person’s skills and character for the cause. When millions are out of work at once, it is a public issue. The cause then lies in the economy and the structure of opportunities, and no amount of personal effort by each jobless person will solve it.¹⁰

Take a Pakistani case. A young graduate in Multan who cannot find work may blame herself or her luck. The sociologist asks how many graduates of her age are in the same position, in which provinces, with what degrees, and why. The Labour Force Survey gives the answer in numbers, and those numbers turn her private trouble into a public issue of the kind the state can address. The chapter on unemployment gives the figures from the survey of 2024-25.

Seeing this way takes four habits, and each recurs throughout this subject. The first is to look for patterns, not single cases. One divorce is a private matter, but a rising divorce rate is a social fact. The second is to look behind the obvious, since the stated purpose of a custom is often not its real effect. Merton called these manifest and latent functions, and the chapter on structural functionalism teaches them. The third is to compare across places and times, because what seems natural at home is often only local. The fourth is to test claims against evidence, so that common sense is checked rather than trusted.

The last habit is what makes sociology a science and not an opinion. Common sense says many things that turn out false, and some that contradict each other. “Birds of a feather flock together” and “opposites attract” cannot both be the rule. Sociology settles such questions by gathering evidence with a stated method, so that another researcher can check the result. The three chapters of head III teach how that is done.

7. Sociology and social philosophy

Sociology grew out of social philosophy, and the line between them is the line between what is and what ought to be. Social philosophy asks what a good society is and how people ought to live. Sociology asks how societies actually work and why. A social philosopher asks what justice requires. A sociologist asks how people in a given society understand justice, and what happens when their courts deliver it or fail to. CE-2026 set this as a question in Part-I. Sociology differs from social philosophy “primarily because it” employs “systematic and empirical methods to study social reality”.²

Plato’s Republic, written in Athens in the fourth century before Christ, is the classic work of social philosophy, and CE-2023 asked about three of its ideas.¹ Plato’s theory of justice describes an ideal city with three classes, the rulers who think, the guardians who defend, and the producers who work. Justice is each class doing its own work, or in Plato’s words, “justice was doing one’s own business, and not being a busybody”.¹² His theory of forms holds that behind every changing thing we see lies an unchanging, perfect idea, its form, which only reason can grasp. His allegory of the cave, in Book VII, pictures prisoners chained in an underground den who see only shadows on a wall and take them for reality, until one is freed and climbs out into the sun.¹²

Notice what kind of claims these are. Plato does not count the classes of Athens or ask how many people in fact do their own work. He reasons about what a just city should be. That is philosophy’s method, and it is valuable, because every society needs to argue about its ideals. Sociology’s method is the other half. It goes out and looks, as Ibn Khaldun did when he compared nomads and townsmen. A candidate asked about Plato in a Sociology paper does best to explain the ideas briefly and then show this contrast, which is what the paper is testing.

8. Sociology and its neighbours

Sociology shares its ground with the other social sciences, and each looks at the same society from its own side. Figure 3 places them around sociology with what each shares with it.

Psychology studies the individual mind, its perception, memory, emotion and personality. Sociology studies the group. The two meet in social psychology, which asks how groups shape individuals, and in the study of socialization. A psychologist asks why one person is aggressive. A sociologist asks why violence is more common in some settings than others.

Anthropology studies whole ways of life, and began with small societies far from Europe. Its method is long fieldwork inside a community. Sociology began with modern industrial societies and used surveys and statistics. Today the two have grown close, and the line between social anthropology and sociology is mostly one of tradition. Akbar S. Ahmed’s work on the Pukhtun tribes, which FPSC lists among its readings, is anthropology that a sociologist reads with profit.

Economics studies how goods are produced, exchanged and consumed, and assumes people act rationally to gain the most. Sociology studies the social setting of economic life. It asks why people trust some traders and not others, how caste shapes occupation, why remittances change family life. Political science studies power, the state and government. Sociology studies power in all its settings, in the family and the village as well as the state, and studies the state as one institution among others.

History studies particular past events in their order. Sociology looks for patterns that recur across events and periods. The historian asks what happened at Plassey in 1757. The sociologist asks why conquest so often follows division among local rulers. Each needs the other. Ibn Khaldun wrote his science of society as the introduction to a history, so that history could be judged by what is socially possible.

9. Three ways of seeing society

Sociologists do not all look at society the same way. Three broad perspectives, or paradigms, have come to dominate the subject, and every chapter of this book uses them.⁵ Each starts from a different picture of what a society is, and so asks different questions of the same facts.

Structural functionalism sees society as a system of parts that work together to keep the whole stable, like the organs of a body. Each part, such as the family, the school or religion, has a function that helps the whole survive. The theory grew from Spencer’s comparison of society with an organism, and was developed by Durkheim, Parsons and Merton.⁵ It asks what each part does for society. Its weakness is that it explains stability better than change, and can make whatever exists seem necessary.

The conflict perspective sees society as an arena in which groups compete for the scarce goods of wealth, power and prestige. The groups that win shape institutions to keep their advantage. The theory comes from Marx, and was widened by Weber, who added status and power to class, and by later writers on gender and race.⁵ It asks who benefits and who loses. Its weakness is that it can overlook the real cooperation and shared values that hold most societies together.

Symbolic interactionism looks at the small scale. It sees society as made and remade in everyday meetings, where people act on the meanings things have for them, and learn those meanings from each other. It comes from George Herbert Mead and was named by Herbert Blumer.⁵ It asks what a thing means to the people involved, and how they define the situation. Its weakness is that it can miss the large structures of class and power that shape those meetings.

The three are not rival truths. Each is a lens that brings some things into focus and blurs others, and a good answer uses more than one. Figure 4 shows them in one table, and the next section tests all three on one Pakistani event.

10. One event, three readings: the Baldia factory fire

On 11 September 2012, fire swept through the Ali Enterprises garment factory in Baldia Town, Karachi. Some 264 workers, men and women, died, unable to get out of the burning building. In September 2020 an anti-terrorism court ruled that the fire was arson, set after the factory’s owners failed to pay extortion money, and sentenced two men to death.¹³ The disaster is a hard case, and it shows how each perspective sees a different part of the truth.

A functionalist asks which parts of the system failed in their function. Factories need fire exits, inspectors to check them, police to stop extortion, and courts to punish it. At Baldia each of these parts failed at once. The inspection that should have found the danger did not, and the protection that should have kept extortion away from the factory did not either. The functionalist sees a dysfunction, a breakdown in the parts that keep industrial life safe. Its remedy is to repair them, with stronger inspection, real fire codes and protection for business from criminal gangs.

A conflict theorist asks who had power and who did not. The people on the factory floor had the least say over how the building was run and what risks were taken, and they paid with their lives. Pakistan’s garment factories sell into a global market in which cheap labour is the main advantage the country has to offer, so the pressure on costs falls hardest on the workers. Those who gained from the system were far from the fire. The remedy this lens points to is more power for workers, through unions, enforced labour law, and responsibility placed on buyers as well as owners.

A symbolic interactionist asks how people understood their situation. It looks at how unsafe work comes to seem normal, part of the job, so that nobody protests until it is too late. After the fire, people fought over what the event meant. Was it an accident, negligence or murder? The answer decided who was blamed and who paid. The court’s finding of arson in 2020 changed the public meaning of the event eight years after it happened.¹³ The remedy here is to change how people define what is normal and acceptable at work.

None of the three tells the whole story, and together they tell much more of it. That is how to use the perspectives in an answer. Name each, apply it to the case, and show what each adds, as Figure 5 does.

11. The branches of sociology

As the subject grew, it divided into branches, each applying the sociological method to one part of life. The syllabus touches most of them, and knowing their names helps you place a question.

Rural sociology studies village life, farming communities and the spread of new farming methods. Urban sociology studies cities, their neighbourhoods and their problems. Industrial sociology, sometimes called the sociology of work, studies factories, offices, workers and managers. Medical sociology, or the sociology of health, studies illness, healing and health care as social matters. The sociology of religion, of education, of the family and political sociology each take one institution. Criminology and the sociology of deviance study rule-breaking and how society responds. Demography, the study of population, counts births, deaths and migration and asks what they mean.

Two further branches matter for this paper. Social research methods, head III of the syllabus, teaches how sociologists gather and test evidence. Applied sociology puts findings to use in policy, planning and social work. The next section shows applied sociology at work in three fields, the ones CE-2016 asked about.¹

12. Sociology at work in the field, the clinic and the factory

The best way to see what sociology is for is to watch it solve a problem. Three classic cases come from the three fields the CE-2016 paper named, agriculture, health and industry.¹

The first is in agriculture, and it began with corn in the American state of Iowa. Hybrid seed corn came out of the experimental stage about 1927, and within little more than ten years practically every farmer in the state used it. Yet some farmers took it up ten years or more before others. Two rural sociologists, Bryce Ryan and Neal C. Gross, asked why, and found that farmers first heard of the seed from salesmen but were persuaded to plant it by their neighbours.¹⁴ Their study founded the sociology of the diffusion of innovations, which every agricultural extension service now uses. In Pakistan it explains why a new wheat variety or a water-saving method spreads fastest when a respected local farmer adopts it first and others see the result in that farmer’s field.

The second is in health, and Pakistan has one of the best cases in the world. In 1994 the Ministry of Health launched the Lady Health Worker Programme, “to reduce poverty and improve health by bringing health services to the doorsteps of underserved communities”.¹⁵ Its design was sociological. Many rural women could not travel to a clinic or speak freely with a male doctor, so the programme recruited women from the community itself, trained them, and sent them into homes their neighbours trusted. By 2019 almost 90,000 Lady Health Workers served about 115 million people with family planning, immunization and care for mothers and children.¹⁵ The lesson is that a health service succeeds when it fits the social rules of the people it serves.

The third is in industry. Between 1924 and 1932, researchers at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company near Chicago studied what made factory workers more productive. They began with lighting, in tests from 1924 to 1927, and moved to a small room of women assembling telephone relays from 1927 to 1932.¹⁶ Output rose under almost every change, and the researchers, led by Elton Mayo of Harvard, concluded that the workers’ sense of being noticed and of belonging to a group mattered more than the lighting or the pay. From 1928 to 1930 they carried out more than 21,000 interviews with workers.¹⁶ The Hawthorne studies founded industrial sociology and the human relations school of management, and they are why a good manager in Faisalabad or Sialkot pays attention to the work group, not only to wages.

13. Sociology in Pakistan, and where the subject stands now

Sociology came to Pakistan’s universities soon after independence. The Department of Sociology at the University of the Punjab was set up in 1954, with the help of Dr John B. Edlefsen of Washington State University under an exchange programme, and its first MA class began in September 1955 with 35 students, 26 men and nine women.¹⁷ The University of Sindh followed in 1964 and Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad in 1972, and today most large universities teach the subject.¹⁸

The subject’s tools are now built into the Pakistani state. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics runs the census, the Labour Force Survey and the Household Integrated Economic Survey, which are the raw material of Pakistani sociology. Every chapter of head I in this book draws on their latest releases. The questions asked in those surveys, about who lives in a household, who works, who is in school and who has migrated, are sociological questions turned into numbers that policy can use.

Sociology in Pakistan has also had to ask whether theories built in Europe fit a Muslim, largely rural society. Scholars in the Muslim world have argued that the social sciences in post-colonial countries too often copy Western ideas without testing them on local facts. The Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas called this “the captive mind” in an article of 1972.¹⁹ The answer is not to reject the classic theories but to test them on Pakistani evidence, and to draw on thinkers such as Ibn Khaldun whose ideas grew from Muslim societies. That is the approach of this book.

Where does the subject stand now? Sociology today is broad and confident. It uses large surveys and statistical analysis, and also long interviews and observation. It has added new perspectives to the three, among them feminist sociology, which asks how gender shapes social life, and postmodern sociology, which doubts that any one theory can explain everything; the chapter on the perspectives after the three teaches them. It studies new subjects, such as the internet and social media, which have reached 70 per cent of Pakistani households.²⁰ Its questions are the ones every government now asks.

14. The critics of sociology

Sociology has had critics from its first day, and a good answer knows their case. There are four main criticisms.

The first is that sociology is not really a science. People, unlike atoms, think, choose, and change their behaviour when they know they are being studied. Laws as firm as those of physics have not been found in society, and predictions often fail. Sociologists answer that their science is one of probabilities, not certainties. It can say that poverty makes crime more likely without saying that every poor person is a criminal. Weber went further and held that sociology must understand meaning as well as count behaviour, so its method should differ from physics.⁴

The second is that sociology only states common sense in long words. The answer is that common sense is often wrong, and only evidence shows which part of it is right. Durkheim’s study of suicide found that suicide rates followed social patterns, such as religion and family ties, in ways that common sense, which saw suicide as a purely personal act, had not expected.⁵

The third is that sociology is biased. Some critics say it leans to the left and dwells on conflict and inequality. Others say functionalism made it a defender of whatever exists. Weber’s answer was that a sociologist should keep personal values out of the analysis, once the topic is chosen, and let the evidence speak.

The fourth is the criticism from the Muslim world and the global South already met, that sociology carries Western assumptions into societies they do not fit.¹⁹ The best answer to all four is the same. Sociology earns trust by stating its method, testing its claims on evidence, and correcting itself when the evidence goes against it.

15. What students confuse about sociology

Sociology and socialism. The two words look alike but mean different things. Sociology is the study of society. Socialism is a political and economic system in which the means of production are owned in common. A sociologist may study socialism, but the subject itself takes no side.

Sociology and social work. Social work helps individuals and families with their problems, using what sociology and psychology have found. Sociology studies society. A social worker applies; a sociologist explains.

Who coined the word. Comte coined “sociology” in 1838. Ibn Khaldun called his science ilm al-umran, not sociology, and wrote in Arabic in 1377. A candidate who writes that Ibn Khaldun “coined sociology” has the right man for the idea but the wrong one for the word.

Society and community. A society is large, impersonal and held together by institutions. A community is smaller and closer, held together by personal ties and a shared place. The chapter on society and community teaches the difference in full.

A perspective and a theory. A perspective is a broad way of seeing all of society, such as functionalism. A theory is a specific explanation of one thing, such as Durkheim’s theory of suicide. Theories are built within perspectives.

Sociology and social philosophy. Social philosophy asks what ought to be; sociology asks what is and why. Plato reasoned about the just city; Ibn Khaldun compared real nomads and townsmen.

16. What the examiners have asked

Five questions in the archive fall in this chapter’s territory.¹

• CE-2016, Q.2: “Discuss the application of Sociology in agriculture, health and industries with examples.”
• CE-2018, Q.7: “Ibn-e-Khaldun but not August Comte is the founder of Sociology? Make your argument in favour or against this thought with logic and examples from the historical development of sociology.”
• CE-2023, Q.6: “Discuss in detail the theory of justice and Plato’s theory of forms and allegory of the cave.”
• CE-2026, Q.2: “Critically analyze the emergence and development of Sociology emphasizing the transformative role of the Industrial and French Revolutions. Evaluate how these historical contexts influenced the scientific study of society and the formation of key sociological perspectives.”
• CE-2026, Part-I: “Sociology differs from social philosophy primarily because it” employs systematic and empirical methods.²

Part-I also tests the founders’ firsts and coinages. Expect to be asked who coined the word sociology, who wrote the Muqaddimah, and which perspective works at the micro level.

17. Facts to take into the examination hall

• Definition. Sociology is the scientific and systematic study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions.³
• Ibn Khaldun. Born Tunis 1332, died Cairo 1406. Muqaddimah completed 1377. Named his science ilm al-umran, the science of human civilization, “an independent science” with “its own peculiar object”.⁶
• Comte. Born 1798. Coined “sociology” in 1838. Course of Positive Philosophy, 1830 to 1842. Law of three stages: theological, metaphysical, positive.⁴⁹
• The founders’ works. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848. Spencer, The Study of Sociology, 1873. Durkheim, Division of Labour, 1893; Rules of Sociological Method, 1895; Suicide, 1897. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 1904 to 1905.⁴
• Two revolutions. The Industrial Revolution, Britain, late eighteenth century onward; the French Revolution, 1789.
• The sociological imagination. C. Wright Mills, 1959: personal troubles against public issues.¹⁰
• Three perspectives. Structural functionalism (Spencer, Durkheim, Parsons, Merton; macro); conflict (Marx, Weber; macro); symbolic interactionism (Mead, Blumer; micro).⁵
• Scope. Formal or specialistic school (Simmel); synthetic school (Durkheim, Sorokin).
• Applied cases. Hybrid corn in Iowa, Ryan and Gross; the Lady Health Worker Programme, 1994, almost 90,000 workers by 2019; Hawthorne studies, 1924 to 1932, more than 21,000 interviews.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶
• Sociology in Pakistan. University of the Punjab department, 1954, first MA class September 1955; University of Sindh 1964; Quaid-i-Azam University 1972.¹⁷¹⁸
• Baldia factory fire. 11 September 2012, Karachi; 264 workers killed; ruled arson by an anti-terrorism court in September 2020.¹³

18. What loses marks on this subject

• Writing a history with no argument. A question on the founders wants to know why sociology arose, not only who wrote what. Tie each founder to the question his age raised.
• Treating Ibn Khaldun as either the whole story or no part of it. The strong answer gives him the idea and Comte the name and the discipline, with evidence for each.
• Defining sociology with no author. Give a definition and name its source.
• Describing the three perspectives without applying them. Show each on one case.
• Forgetting the examples a question asks for. CE-2016 asked for applications “with examples”. A Pakistani example for each field is worth more than three foreign ones.
• Confusing sociology with social work or socialism. Define the subject before you discuss it.

19. A worked answer plan

The question

Ibn-e-Khaldun but not August Comte is the founder of Sociology? Make your argument in favour or against this thought with logic and examples from the historical development of sociology. (CE-2018, Q.7)

The tasks

There are two. Take a position on whether Ibn Khaldun or Comte founded sociology, and support it with logic and with examples from the subject’s history. The phrase “in favour or against” asks you to choose, so the answer must end with a clear judgment.

The headings

1. Introduction: what “founder” can mean, and the thesis.
2. The case for Ibn Khaldun: his science, its object and method, his findings.
3. The case for Comte: the name, positivism, and a continuing discipline.
4. Why Ibn Khaldun’s work had no successors for four centuries.
5. A comparison table of the two.
6. Judgment and conclusion.

A sketch

A two-column table: Ibn Khaldun against Comte, with rows for date, name of the science, object, method, key idea, and influence on later sociology.

A model introduction

To ask who founded sociology is to ask what founding a science means: conceiving it, or establishing it as a continuing discipline. Ibn Khaldun, in the Muqaddimah of 1377, conceived a science whose “peculiar object” was “human civilization and social organization”, and practised it with a method of comparison and causal explanation that anticipated modern sociology by four and a half centuries. Auguste Comte, writing between 1830 and 1842, named the science “sociology” in 1838, gave it the positivist method, and launched the tradition through which Durkheim, Weber and their successors made it an academic discipline. This answer argues that Ibn Khaldun is the first sociologist and the true originator of its central idea, while Comte is the founder of sociology as an organized discipline; both claims are needed for a just verdict.

The support, under each heading

Under the case for Ibn Khaldun, quote his claim that his science was “an independent science” with “its own peculiar object”, and his separation of it from rhetoric and politics. Give his finding that society is necessary because no one person can meet their own needs, his comparison of nomadic and settled life, and asabiyyah with the rise and fall of dynasties. Under the case for Comte, give the coinage of 1838, the law of three stages with his own words, and the hierarchy of the sciences. Under the gap of four centuries, explain that Ibn Khaldun’s work was little read in Europe until the nineteenth century and founded no school, while Comte’s was taken up at once by Mill, Spencer and Durkheim.

A model conclusion

The claim that Ibn Khaldun, and not Comte, founded sociology is half true. Ibn Khaldun conceived the science, defined its object and practised its method long before Europe did, and Muslim scholarship rightly honours him as its first master. Comte named it, gave it a programme, and began the continuous tradition that produced the discipline taught today. The fairest verdict is that Ibn Khaldun is the father of the idea of sociology and Comte the father of its name and its institution.

What to remember from this chapter

• Sociology is the scientific study of society, groups and social interaction, at the micro and the macro level.
• Ibn Khaldun conceived a science of human civilization, ilm al-umran, in the Muqaddimah of 1377, and called it an independent science with its own object.
• Comte coined the word “sociology” in 1838 and gave it the positivist method.
• The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution of 1789 broke the old order and left the questions sociology was born to answer.
• Mills’s sociological imagination links personal troubles to public issues.
• Sociology asks what is; social philosophy, as in Plato’s Republic, asks what ought to be.
• The three perspectives are functionalism, conflict and symbolic interactionism; a good answer applies more than one to a case.
• Sociology is applied in farming (Ryan and Gross), health (the Lady Health Workers) and industry (Hawthorne).
• The University of the Punjab set up Pakistan’s first sociology department in 1954.

Check yourself

Try each question from memory, in your own words, before you open the answer.

1. Define sociology, and explain the difference between micro and macro sociology with a Pakistani example of each. (The section on sociology as the study of people living together)

2. How did the Industrial and French Revolutions give rise to sociology? (The section on how sociology was born)

3. What did Ibn Khaldun claim for his new science, and why does that support calling him the first sociologist? (The section on Ibn Khaldun)

4. Explain Mills’s distinction between a personal trouble and a public issue, with a Pakistani example. (The section on how a sociologist looks at a problem)

5. How does sociology differ from social philosophy? Use Plato and Ibn Khaldun to show it. (The section on sociology and social philosophy)

6. Name the three perspectives, and apply each to the Baldia factory fire in one sentence. (The section on one event, three readings)

7. Give one example of sociology applied in agriculture, one in health and one in industry. (The section on sociology at work)