A literary person, not a statistician , invented sociology.
The usual way to deal with the history of disciplines is to identify its originating figure. Copernicus started modern astronomy; Aristotle invented poetics and metaphysics; Adam Smith invented economics and Darwin, backed up by combining geology with Malthus, invented evolution. But that isn’t quite right. Evolution was independently developed at the same time by Wallace, which suggests that the idea was gurgling along and would have been invented a number of times at about the same date, and Smith was predated by those who influenced Hamilton even after “The Wealth of Nations”. And who is first at biology? The circulation of the blood or the cell theory or as far back as Vesalius who operated on wounded soldiers? There are incremental changes that take place before there is a striking moment when a field becomes recognized as itself. Rather than looking at pivotal figures, look at the distinguishing characteristic when the discipline emerges. Plato engaged in distinguishing reality from appearances before Aristotle proposed treatises on the essential categories of cause and animation.
The same is true of sociology which is credited as a discipline by Comte, the Frenchman who, after all, had coined the term around 1830 even though he is not to be identified either with statistics or a mechanism for society but is rather a popularizer of the metaphor that society is subject to a scientific endeavor borrowed from physical science. Forebearers would include the political dynamics of Madison in the Federalist Papers and Hume on the social dynamics of revolution, the political sphere of social life examined before its social life, but then again More’s utopia shows how agriculture and commerce constrain one another and isn’t that sociology? I want to present as a forbearer of sociology nolt only Samuel Johnson’s description of the sociological state of the Scottish economy and society, which was a travel book and bereft of statistics (Hume already having introduced statistic about social life with his description of the demographics of the ancient world populations) and even though he was writing essays rather than treatises or monographs. What he did in his short essay “The Benefits of Human Society”, (“The Adventurer”, No. 67) was to find the characteristic thing of sociology, its essential method, which was to think of an attribute as a characteristic of a social group rather than as a generalization of the attribute of individuals and applied that to the modern world while Tacitus invented anthropology because he had attributed the customs of the Germanic tribes to their collective cultures.
Johnson observes that people familiar within their social circumstances may become insensitive to what is going about them, and that is an explanation enough for why people immersed in society may not appreciate the significance of what they are doing even if they are acting in perfectly reasonable ways. It takes the trained eye, such as Johnson's, to notice the obvious, and that can be said of sociology itself, whereas anthropologists observe the exotic so as to identify the fundamental. Johnson notes that in cities people create goods to sell that people did not know they needed until these objects were invented and offered for sale, his example the clay pipes whereby people can indulge in what he regards as the filthy habit of smoking, further refined as snuff so as to gain a pleasure never before acquired. There are any number of these products and with little trouble anyone can become a producer and a seller of some product or other and cumulatively provide a cornucopia of plenty never heard of before. I can add that the socialist ideal of an efficient and therefore less expensive service, such as universal health care, might save money through eliminating duplication and waste and profiteering, but that competition however its costs, can also lead to lower costs and better products so long as real competition is maintained through government t regulation, but these issues appear much further on from Johnson on the stages of economic development. The point is that abundance, such as cities produce, is natural only for cities and is not there in a state of nature where goods are scarce and rudimentary. What now seems inevitable in London is a wonderful invention of the cities.
The primitive man can be praised for being self sufficient in that with his own tools he can build a canoe or work a farm, but this individual life is meagre in its pleasures and in its abundantly painmms and that life is “short and mean”, tome invoking the use Hobbes’ phrase to describe the social life when there is no commercial life rather than because there is no political life. The baseline is that the primitive life cannot imagine the prodigality of the commercial life which allows people to ease themselves on the couch and think of the luxury of deep thoughts rather than just living day to day. London is a miracle taken for granted.
People have noticed the difference between cosmopolitan cities and rural areas for a long time. Aristotle treated “coincidence’ as what happens when people meet one another in the port city of Piraeus. Presumably, people who otherwise meet one another on the street are people you come across one another a lot of the time as part of their daily routines and so are not coincidences. But really big cities that emerged in the modern era seem to have a life of their own. London grew by a quarter from 575,000 to 740,00 from 1700 to 1760, which meant just about within Johnson’s lifetime, which was between 1709 and 1784. So it made sense to think of the growth of the city as an attribute of the city rather than just the intermingling of individual actors, and so we are at sociology rather than group psychology.
Johnson can therefore be thought of as an originator of sociology because of his noticing attributes of groups rather than people even though his writings are literary rather than scientific, Comte later to claim that sociology was the application of scientific method to social life. Moreover, Johnson noticed social qualities without reducing it to formulas, which happen a generation later when Malthus came to understand that population increase was exponentially while food increase was linear, which turned out to be untrue, while Johnson’s “prediction” or just suspicion that Scotland needed to invest in herds of sheep was correct if it were to become prosperous. Nor did statistics become more than incidental rather than essential to sociology. What Lazarsfeld found about voting behavior was the application of the Marxist idea that attributes rather than motivations could be considered the “cause” of voting behavior. What made Johnson seem less than sociological was that his right resulted from personal acumen rather than the application of replicable and methodical study, a goal rarely attained in sociology because if an election doesn’t turn out as was expected, it just means voters changed at the last minute and, anyway, that is just one election never to be repeated again and so not testable.
Sociology has long distinguished itself as the study of advanced industrial societies as opposed to anthropology which centers on primitive peoples and how present societies still have the dynamics found in primitive societies. Johnson engaged in such a venture in his Tour of the Hebrides where he contrasted the ancient castles and spooky moonlight shadows of Scotland with the more advanced, prosperous, commercial society of Great Britain. Another theme of sociology has been urbanization, the culture and structure of cities. Explored by the Chicago School in the early part of the twentieth century, the process of suburbanization in the Fifties and Sixties, and the decline of the older inner cities in youtube following twenty years. This preoccupation with the cities is explored by the purist of sociologists, Georg Simmel, the German sociologist in the first quarter of the twentieth century, because he thought most of social life could be understood as tube direct consequences of sociation itself, which are the qualities like conflict and affiliation that are inherent in dealing with people and so not matters of personal inclination, that A way to treat human behavior as attributed to interaction or group rather than individual behavior.
Simmel, like Johnson, dealt with cities and came to similar conclusions. The prolixity of products and services available in cities made them prosperous and in some sense free because they could get anything they wanted or things that they did not realize they wanted until it became available. But the reason for that is not as Johnson thought, commerce but the fecundity of people to invent things out of their minds because of their various interests and capacities. Simmel mentions that in a city there can be found a broken plate society, something I have never heard of elsewhere, but that makes sense. A plate is broken into pieces and every piece is given to each of its members, the piece given to another member when a person dies. When the last but one piece or person is left, the last piece goes to the last survivor and the pieces are reassembled. That can be thought of as a symbolic expression of the fidelity of the group or simply a commemoration that there was such a group. This procedure exists because people in cities are various enough to do inventive or strange things. So it is necessary to distinguish cosmopolitan from simply large cities. Cosmopolitan cities, such as those in European seaports, which bring all sorts of people there, will originate such fanciful o profitable enterprises while cities that are merely lare, so that a great many people congregate in a place but are very similar to one another, which I am told is true in many current Chinese cities, will not generate such ingenuity. That situation and practice of cosmopolitanism is a measure and tribute by Simmel to individualism.
Here is a thought inspired by Johnson which is not met by even Simmel’s sagacity. The result of all of this production and commerce in tube city is not just that it is prosperous but leads as well to a kind of equality of the only sort there may be. Whether low or high, honorable or dissolute, people will find this to produce and sell. Moreover, the city will provide all of these plenties to buy and so every person is not just to beware of what is sold but sense the profligacy of what is available, the abundance of riches between people can make choices about what to buy and what not to buy, The consumer is the king, gaining his pleasures as he sees fit and so to have an active and real meaning to the abstract notion of choice and therefore, I would suggest, the gist of the idea of electoral choice, every voter assessing the merits of the candidates offered and deciding which ones are worthy of selection and subsequent election. There is a tie between democracy and commerce that is emerging at that time in England, Adam Smith a decade later than this essay offering “The Wealth of Nations” Democracy is the hustle bustle of commerce and this connection was appreciated as far back as Spinoza who observed that a politician was someone who had to gain the supporters of his constituents whether he was a nobleman or a blackguard or both who was offering himself for commendation. The energy of campaigning is like the energy of engaging in financial transactions. There is a drama about whether a deal to exchange a good for money will be consummated just as there is the drama of whether a candidate, whether for charm or sobriety or meanness will be turned to the favor of voters.