Sociology and History

Sociology and History

Sociology and history share a deep, natural kinship — both are concerned with human society, but they approach it from different angles of time. The historian, almost as a rule, studies the past; the sociologist is far more interested in the contemporary world or the recent past. This difference in time-orientation is the first and most obvious point of distinction between the two disciplines.

The older style of history was content to delineate actual events — to establish, with precision, how things actually happened. The historian's task was to reconstruct a sequence of occurrences, to narrate what took place. Sociology, from its side, sought something different: it aimed to establish causal relationships. Where the historian asked "what happened?", the sociologist asked "why did it happen, and what patterns connect one event to another?"

There is also a difference in the level of abstraction. History studies concrete details — the specific battle, the particular treaty, the individual ruler. The sociologist, by contrast, is more likely to abstract from concrete reality, to categorise and to generalise. From many particular instances, the sociologist draws out types, patterns and regularities. This does not mean one is superior to the other; they simply work at different levels of specificity.

The relationship, however, is not one of permanent separation. Historians today are equally involved in using sociological methods and concepts in their analysis. The boundary has blurred considerably, and the two disciplines now borrow freely from each other.

A major shift has occurred in what counts as worthy of historical study. Conventional history was largely the history of kings and war — the deeds of rulers, the outcomes of battles, the rise and fall of dynasties. The less glamorous or exciting events — changes in land relations, or shifts in gender relations within the family — were traditionally neglected by historians. Yet these very topics formed the core area of the sociologist's interest. For the sociologist, the everyday, the structural and the relational were always central, even when they seemed unremarkable. …