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 sociologists use, to all intents and purposes the same record to the past.
(v) Apart from philosophy today the historian is considerably depending upon sociological concepts and narrations. We convey 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 to some extent with the future, History studies the past.
(ii) Sociologists borrow from historical sources and sociological analysis and vice-versa. Sociologists use, to all intents and purposes, the same record of the past.
(iii) Generally, we may say that history occupies itself with the differences in similar events and sociology deals with the similarities in different events.
(iv) Historians generally restrict themselves to the study of the past, from the more recent to the remotest one. Sociologists show interest in the contemporary scene or the recent past.
(v) In short we may say that sociology and history may be distinguished. The former generalised about society, the latter is a particularising or individualising discipline. Sociology is an analytical discipline whereas history is a descriptive discipline.
(vi) Sociology emphasises 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 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.
