Sociology is the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior. Sociologists investigate the structure of groups, organizations, and societies, and how people interact within these contexts.

This paper attempts to identify some relevant aspects of the history and sociology of scientific disciplines. The assumption is that disciplines are not a merely trivial

structural aspect of modern science, useful only for librarians' classifications. Instead, disciplines are considered to be the primary unit of internal differentiation of the modern system of science and, as such, vital to any analysis — historical or systematic

— of scientific developments.

Scientific disciplines are an "invention" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like most inventions, they are not the result of a lucky moment, a singular event, a founding impulse, or an institutional innovation. They represent the cumulative and unforeseeable result of a large number of innovations and changes. It is therefore necessary to survey a relatively long period — from the beginning of the

eighteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century — when attempting to understand the genesis of scientific disciplines.

To begin with, it seems necessary to mention that what we are concerned with here is not preconditions for the establishment of a scientific discipline in the context of other, previously established disciplines. Studies on the development of disciplines are usually concerned with exactly this question. They assume an environment of differentiated disciplines and attempt to explain how and why a new discipline — biochemistry, for example — emerges (see Kohler 1982). In this paper interest is focused on the preconditions for the establishment of scientific disciplines per se, at a moment in history when it is unknown that a representative universal social form (the scientific discipline) — within which all processes of scientific communication will take place in the future — is coming into being. 

The following example may serve to illustrate the uncertainty resulting from these conditions. In 1771, in the opening section of one of the early physiocratic treatises, Nicolas Baudeaux attempted to define the status of the "Economistes," whom he perceived as representing a very distinct intellectual perspective. The only term he could come up with was "philosophical school," and for comparison he cited the philosophical schools of Zenon, Pythagoras, and Confucius (Baudeaux 1771, pp. 4-5 of the separately paginated "Avis au lecteur").