Achievement in the Analytical Tradition in Sociology

Abstract

When sociology was founded as an academic discipline, the spirit of the time was predominantly positivist. Studying society in those days meant searching for scientific laws that would enable man to predict future events in a reliable and precise way, thereby enhancing human capacity to intervene in social reality at will. The guiding image of this tradition has been aptly formulated by Comte as ‘savoir pour prévoir, prévoir afin de pouvoir’. This guiding image implicitly contains criteria for identifying achievement in the early years of the tradition: causal understanding of the phenomena to be manipulated, prediction based upon causal laws, intervention based upon causal understanding and prediction. We are talking about sociologists who wanted knowledge primarily in order to be able to apply it to the solution of practical problems. We are also talking about the mainstream tradition in sociology.¹