In this book Bruce Mazlish examines the historical origins of sociology, especially in terms of its relationship to the humanities and to economics. He is particularly concerned with how omnipresent substitution of money for personal relations changed the nature of human relations in the nineteenth century. He examines the works of Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle, and particularly novelists such as Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, and Benjamin Disraeli. Mazlish explores the influence of Darwin and his theories and presents Engels and Marx as precursors of the science of sociology. He then discusses the major founding figures of sociology: August Comte, Ferdinand Tonnies, Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber.