<Tr> <Td> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> </Td> </Tr> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> <P> Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged primarily out of the Enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolution, as a positivist science of society . Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge . Social analysis in a broader sense, however, has origins in the common stock of philosophy and necessarily pre-dates the field . Modern academic sociology arose as a reaction to modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism . Late 19th century sociology demonstrated a particularly strong interest in the emergence of the modern nation state; its constituent institutions, its units of socialization, and its means of surveillance . An emphasis on the concept of modernity, rather than the Enlightenment, often distinguishes sociological discourse from that of classical political philosophy . </P> <P> Various quantitative social research techniques have become common tools for governments, businesses, and organizations, and have also found use in the other social sciences . Divorced from theoretical explanations of social dynamics, this has given social research a degree of autonomy from the discipline of sociology . Similarly, "social science" has come to be appropriated as an umbrella term to refer to various disciplines which study humans, interaction, society or culture . </P>

When did sociologists (as opposed to social thinkers) first appear