State the similarities and differences between sociology and history.

Similarities between Sociology and History :

(i) Society is common between sociology and history.

(ii) Both are social science disciplines.

(iii) Sociology and history both are concerned with human activities and events.

(iv) History is concerned primarily with the record of the past. The historians want to describe, as accurately as possible, what actually happened to man during a given time. The socialogists use, to all intents and purposes the same record to the past.

(v) Apart from philosophy today the historian is considerbly depending upon sociological concepts and narrations. We conway that modern historiography and modern sociology have been influenced by each other.

Differences between Sociology and History :

(i) Sociology is concerned with the present and in some extent with future, History studies the past.

(ii) Sociologist borrow from historical sources and sociological analysis and vice-versa. The Sociologists use, to all intants and purposes, the same record of the past.

(iii) Generally, we may say that history occupies it self with the differences in similar events and sociology deals with teh similarities in different events.

(iv) Historians generally restrict themselves to the study of the past, from the more recent to the remotest one. Sociologist shows interest in the contemporary scence or the recent past.

(v) In short we may say that, sociology and history may be distinguished. The former generalized about society, the latter is a particularizing or individualzing discipline. Sociology in an analytical discipline whereas history is a descriptive discipline.

(vi) Sociology emphasizers on the regular and the recurrent whereas history investigates the unique and the individual.

(vii) An event that has occurred only once in the human past is of no sociological importance unless it can be related to a pattern of events that repeats itself generation after generation, historical period after historical period and human group after human group. If the past is concerned of as a continuous cloth unrolling through the centuries, history is interested in the individual threads and strands that made it up : sociology analysis the patterns that human society exhibits.