before or since. However, this distinctive element has been all but lost and forgotten today. (2003: 2)
[Republished with permission of State University of New York Press from Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece, G. E. McCarthy, 2003]
This forgetting was a consequence not only of the Parsonian influence in the development of sociological thought, transforming it into a utilitarian, positivistic form of thought based on explanation and prediction, but also of foregrounding only Enlightenment forms of rationality. As a result an Aristotelian conception which highlights civic virtue and practical wisdom (phronesis) at the expense of a singular emphasis on the technical and utilitarian science (techne) of explanation and formal causality, disappeared.
Plato’s and Aristotle’s influences have not been restricted to just the classical sociologists; as we shall see they are also present in the work of modern social theorists including Foucault, Habermas and Bourdieu. For example, in the latter we see the concepts of doxa, phronesis, habitus and hexis. Their thought then is a central foil against which sociological theory develops. More recently social scientists such as Flyvbjerg (2001) have attempted to develop a contemporary interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of phronesis by using it as a way to understand social practice and bypass readings of social science and theory, which reduce it to either episteme or techne. The social sciences deal with reflexive actors, values and interests rather than predictive theory.
Conclusion
Although ordinarily seen as philosophers, both thinkers developed what we may refer to as proto-sociological concerns in their work, especially Aristotle, who was more empirically minded. Their thought and thinking as well as the images and metaphors used have continued to influence classical and modern sociological thinking in a variety of ways. However, in order to understand their arguments and assess their explanatory power they need to be contextualised within ancient Greek society.
Note
1 In his books Socrates often expresses Plato’s views in dialogue with others.
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II Confucius and Ibn Khaldun
Introduction
There is no doubt that as an academic discipline sociology is a child of the Enlightenment and as such it develops and proliferates only in modernity. However, this does not mean that sociological thought emerges suddenly and out of nowhere. On the contrary, and as argued in the Introduction and Chapter 1 to this book, sociological thinking has deep roots in the ancient world. In many respects the latter-day intellectual movements such as the Renaissance, Rationalism and the Enlightenment, owe a great deal to the ancient social philosophers and scholars who provided elaborate conceptual frameworks aiming to understand and change the social world. While the traditional accounts have emphasised the role ancient Greek and Roman thinkers had in the development of social and political thought, less weight has been given to the non-European scholars. This chapter focuses on the two leading social thinkers that have made profound impacts on the development of social thought in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and further afield. Although they lived in different time periods and in very different parts of the world, both Confucius and Ibn Khaldun have made significant marks on the rise of social thought worldwide. This chapter highlights their main contributions and historically traces the broader social contexts that shaped their intellectual development.
Life and Intellectual Context
Confucius
