What Sociology is About

‘Sociology’, says Professor Ginsberg, 1 ‘may be defined as the study of society, that is, of the web or tissue of human interactions and interrelations’. The subject-matter is indeed so vast that it is not surprising to find that sociologists differ in their attempt to analyse and group the topics which it includes into neat compartments. Durkheim maps out the field under three headings: (1) ‘Social Morphology’, which covers the geographical setting, the density of population and suchlike preliminary data; (2) ‘Social Physiology’, which is concerned with such dynamic processes as religion, morals, law, economic life, etc., each of which may be the subject matter of a special discipline; (3) ‘General Sociology’, which is the attempt to discover the general social laws manifest in the more specialised social processes.