Sociology participates in a rather long tradition of systematic social thinking .
Its origin dates back some twenty four hundred years to Plato and Aristotle. This relatively one sided dependence, discovered so long ago, may still be considered the basic assumption of sociology. However insightful, this early thinking was to a large extent speculative and tied to a very traditional image of human nature. The roots of modern sociology , as an empirical discipline , extend back only to the mid nineteenth century, when using the physical and biological sciences as models, sociologists sought to account for the regularities in the diversity of human activity by systematic observation. Since its beginning, the discipline has moved briskly to develop the complex methods and techniques necessary to gather and analyze quantities of data, while the theoretical components of sociology have been greatly elaborated .