Roots and Routes: The Scottish Origins of Sociology

It is a puzzle for many of us sociologists that we have forgotten who we came from.We used to have it dinned into us that Marx, Weber and Durkheim were the 'founding fathers' of the discipline, the creators of classical social theory which underpinned sociology.Other theorists crowded in, usually dead white men, and one suspects that many gave it up as a bad job, allowing students to make it up as they went along without worrying overmuch about who started the whole business.So, cafeteria sociology became the norm, that students could pick and choose from what was on offer according to taste.Why worry about dead social theorists, still less about those bundled up as the Scottish Enlightenment?Alex Law has written a fine book which critically assesses the extent to which the Scottish Enlightenment developed a model of the civilising process as Norbert Elias called it.In doing so, the likes of Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, Henry Home (Lord Kames) and James Steuart and many more are credited as the forerunners of sociology, or more precisely, proto-sociology.Usually, Auguste Comte is credited with coining the term 'sociology' in 1830, but its antecedents were older than that, and lay in that bundle of ideas and theories latterly called the Scottish Enlightenment.Critics demurred; and argued that the Enlightenment was a brief episode in a long-term failure whereby sociology failed to cohere as a science of society rather than a subset of philosophy, and in the case of Adam Smith, political economy.Law argues that sociology sprang, not from counter-critiques by radicals who demanded social justice for their ilk, but from the struggles of intellectual elites to understand and characterise how social processes and consequences transcend the wishes and actions of individual social agents.For Law, the study of the intellectual origins of sociology helps to counter 'the restricted horizon of present-centred sociology which propels a spiral regression of disciplinary subspecialisation which erases its origins' (p19).The key question was, and remains -how is society possible?-attributed usually to Georg Simmel in the early years of the 20 th century.Furthermore, it was the driving puzzle for the Scottish