Abstract
What kind of review of preexisting studies is productive both for sociology as a science and for history of sociology? It is the review of questions (especially “whys”) on social phenomena and the hypotheses to these questions. I will not only emphasize the necessity of discriminating between sociology as a science and history of sociology but also clarify the discriminative features of each of the two disciplines. I will also clearly state the aims and the methods of sociology as a scientific exploration. Raymond Boudon’s study of relative deprivation is a good example of such kind of exploration. In his study, he related his own why question and mathematical model to the whys posed by classical sociologists as well as his contemporaries. We should follow his research strategy, because the review of whys on social phenomena and the hypotheses to these questions is more suggestive than the reviews of scholars’ lives, sociological statements or concepts, and meta-theories and it also contributes to describe the history of sociological practices in an attractive manner.
