So, Auguste Comte was the man who gave us the word sociology. As I already explained, he believes that another author had stolen his expression, la physique sociale, social physics. And that, that was the reason why he created a new word that nobody could use without paying homage to the man who had personally invented it, lax sociology. The word sociology is in a way the outcome of a conflict about a priority claim. Intellectual ownership, copyright until this very day it's a battlefield. Outside the world of science, of course, but also inside the world of science. But there is a bit more to it. By using from 1838 on, in his books the word sociology culminate something else very clear. The new science of human societies was not just a new branch of physics, it was something different entirely. The approach of the science of physics that studies discrete and unorganized particles, according to Comte could not and should not be applied to the study of human societies. In the science of sociology, the science that searches for the logical of the social world, we do our job in a very different way. We use another methodology. We approach our subject matter in a way that is different from what has been so successful in the natural sciences. Comte was not just a man who gave sociology it's new name, he also was the philosopher of science who had a keen eye for what makes sociology very different. A science with its own field of study of course, but also with its own approach to that field, even its own methods for collecting the data. Like the practitioners of the hard sciences, such as physics and chemistry, sociologists should, of course, use observation and experimentation as their methods. But that is sometimes very difficult, and even impossible at times, when you study human beings. And therefore, the method par excellence in sociology is the comparative approach where we compare different societies that we find at one point in time. Or, we compare societies in the past with societies in the present. You can, for example, compare the structure of a certain society at different points in time in its history. Such an historical overview may enrich our understanding of human societies. This reliance on the comparative historical method is typical of the way sociology approaches its field of study. And it is one of the reasons why this science is so different from the other sciences and should not be seen as a sub genre within one of the existing sciences. Now here we see how Comte was one of the very first theorists who made a claim for the relative autonomy of the discipline, the science, of sociology. To borrow an expression from Norbert Elias, relative autonomy. Maybe Comte was really the very first thinker who saw that we today are in need of a new type of science in order to study society. A science that is not patterned after the natural sciences, but that has its own way of collecting the data, its own methodology, its own explanatory principles, yes, even its own kind of theory. And again, Comte's innovative suspicion was only later elaborated for example in the works of 20th century sociologists like Émile Durkheim in his book on the rules of sociological method or by Norbert Elias in his little book with the title, What is Sociology? Comte's insistence that we should never forget the importance of the historical approach led to one sentence that is often referred to as one of his most famous maxims. In the [FOREIGN], Comte wrote those words. [FOREIGN] And every sociologist, teaching the history of sociological thought loves to quote that phrase, and yes, so do I. You cannot completely understand the science if you don't know its history.
