Wikipedia defines sociology as "a social science [whose subject matter concerns] the study of the social lives of people, groups and societies, sometimes defined as the study of social interactions" (en.wikipedia.org/Wiki/Sociology). The word "sociology" was coined by Auguste Compte in 1838. He conceived it as the "queen of sciences", one that would discover the laws of human behavior. In his view, it should include the disciplines of history, psychology, and economics.
Compte's theoretical approach to sociology, known as positivism, was to treat it like the physical sciences, using the same methods on social phenomena. He hoped to establish its findings on the same rigorously empirical basis as the pre-existing natural sciences, to distinguish it from less precise fields of study such as philosophy.
The seminal figures in sociology's first century รป Karl Marx, Ferdinand Toennies, Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, and Max Weber - worked in a variety of subjects, such as religion, economics, education, psychology, philosophy, and theology. Weber, and later Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Reikert, were part of a basic schism in the field, a rejection of the positivistic search for precise and unchanging laws governing human behavior in favor of a concentration on the unique aspects of human culture such as language, values, norms, symbols, and meaning, which, needless to say, are maddeningly difficult to objectify or quantify.
All the social sciences suffer from similar limitations. When human beings study human beings, their theoretical predilections cloud their objectivity. It is harder to experiment with people than it is with other organisms, and what you learn under laboratory conditions may not elucidate much about real social life. Human culture, and each individual in it, is infinitely complex. No laws of human behavior have been discovered by any of the social sciences that even remotely have the predictive value and ...