B.A. LL.B. (Five Years) Sem 1 Sociology I 2013 Jun Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: who Howard was and where the saying comes from (Freeman's "History is past politics"); what the two halves mean; what history is and what sociology is; how history helps sociology; how sociology helps history; the differences between them, with a table; how far the saying is true and where it goes too far; historical sociology and social history as meeting points; Indian examples; a conclusion.

The saying and its author

George Elliott Howard (1849 to 1928) was an American historian and sociologist. His epigram, "History is past sociology and sociology is present history", plays on an older saying. The English historian Edward Augustus Freeman often said, "History is past politics and politics present history." Howard widened Freeman's idea from politics to the whole of social life.

What the saying means

The epigram has two halves.

2. It shows origins. To understand caste, the joint family or the state today, one must know how they developed. History supplies that background.
3. It permits comparison. Comparing societies across centuries tests whether a pattern is general or limited to one period.
4. It guards against narrowness. History reminds sociology that present arrangements are not permanent. What looks natural today was once new.

How sociology helps history

1. It supplies concepts. Terms such as status, class, stratification, social mobility and social change help historians analyse the past.
2. It explains social causes. A sociologist asks why events happened as they did, looking at groups and institutions rather than only at kings and battles.
3. It widens the field. Under sociology's influence, historians began writing the history of ordinary people, families, women, workers and peasants. This is called social history.
4. It offers methods. Statistical analysis, sampling and the study of records in bulk came to history partly from the social sciences.

1. Sociology is not only about the present. Many sociologists study the past directly. Max Weber studied religions and economies across centuries, and Karl Marx built a theory of history itself.
2. History is not only past sociology. History also records unique events and the acts of individuals, which sociology does not try to explain.
3. The two use different methods. History works from surviving documents. Sociology can also create fresh data through surveys and fieldwork.

The epigram is therefore best read as a lively statement of closeness, not as a claim that the two subjects are identical.

Meeting points

The two subjects meet in historical sociology, which studies large changes over long periods, such as the rise of capitalism or the modern state. They also meet in social history, which studies the everyday life of ordinary people in the past. Both fields would be impossible without the other subject.

A worked example: the joint family

Take the Indian joint family. A historian can trace how it was described in the Dharmashastras, how British courts recorded its rules, and how land and inheritance laws changed it. That is history, the joint family's past. A sociologist can survey households in a Karnataka town today. The survey shows how many live jointly, how property and earnings are shared, and how the old are cared for. That is sociology, the joint family's present. Put the two together and one can say why it has changed, which neither subject could say alone. This is exactly the partnership Howard's epigram describes.

Conclusion. Howard's epigram captures the close kinship of history and sociology: history studies society in the past, and sociology studies it in the present. Each supplies the other with data, concepts and methods. The saying overstates the case, because sociology also studies the past and history also records unique events. Read as a statement of interdependence rather than identity, it is sound.