Excerpt from Twentieth Century SociologyNineteenth Century Sociology was characterized by a limited number of problems more or less dogmatically ac cepted and differently resolved in conflicting schools. The initial tendency to link if not to identify sociology with philosophy of history or theory of evolution (as exemplified by Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and even Karl Marx) was overcome only slowly and step by step. The field was marked by eternal discussions between the partisans of order or the admirers of progress, between the defenders of the individual or of Society, contrasted with each other as isolated entities, between the promoters of psychology as against sociology, and vice versa, and among the proponents of a predominating factor in so cial life, such as the geographical, biological, anthropo racial, demographic, technological, and so on (not one of which as a matter of.fact when taken separately belongs to the social reality). These conflicts threatened to com promise the scientific character of early sociological re search. The practice of seeking and formulating socio logical laws on which different sociologists could never agree completed the rather dismal picture of sociology in the first century of its birth.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.