Conditions for the Emergence of Sociology

As Michel Foucault makes clear, diverse forms of empirical science, including sociology, arose in the space of knowledge in the last decades of the eighteenth century. I apply some of Foucault's insights to early 'sociological' writers and explore in detail what was visible and articulable in the France of the late eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries. Pierre Bourdieu is also used as a theoretical resource because he treats science and scientists as part and product of their particular social world or 'field'.