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Analytical framework, or paradigm, that is used to study and interpret social phenomena

Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies (e. g. positivism and antipositivism), the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary", or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non academic or journalistic forms of writing. Social theory, as it is recognized today, emerged in the 20th century as a distinct discipline, and was largely equated with an attitude of critical thinking and the desire for knowledge through a posteriori methods of discovery, rather than a priori methods of tradition. Social thought provides general theories to explain actions and behavior of society as a whole, encompassing sociological, political, and philosophical ideas. Classical social theory has generally been presented from a perspective of Western philosophy, and often regarded as Eurocentric. Theory construction, according to The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, is instrumental:
"Their goal is to promote accurate communication, rigorous testing, high accuracy, and broad applicability. They include the following: absence of contradictions, absence of ambivalence, abstractness, generality, precision, parsimony, and conditionality." Therefore, a social theory consists of well defined terms, statements, arguments and scope conditions.

Confucius (551–479 BCE) envisaged a just society that went beyond his contemporary society of the Warring States. Later on, also in China, Mozi (circa 470 – circa 390 BCE) recommended a more pragmatic sociology, but ethical at base. In the West, Saint Augustine (354–430) was concerned exclusively with the idea of the just society. St. Augustine describes late Ancient Roman society through a lens of hatred and contempt for what he saw as false Gods, and in reaction theorized City of God. Ancient Greek philosophers, including Aristotle (384–322 BC) and Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC), did not see a distinction between politics and society. The concept of society did not come until the Enlightenment period. The term, société, was probably first used as key concept by Rousseau in discussion of social relations. Prior to the enlightenment, social theory took largely narrative and normative form. It was expressed as stories and fables, and it may be assumed the pre Socratic philosophers and religious teachers were the precursors to social theory proper.

There is evidence of early Muslim sociology from the 14th century: in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah (later translated as Prolegomena in Latin), the introduction to a seven volume analysis of universal history, was the first to advance social philosophy and social science in formulating theories of social cohesion and social conflict. Ibn Khaldun is thus considered by many to be the forerunner of sociology. Khaldun's treatise described in Muqaddimah (Introduction to History), published in 1377, two types of societies: (1) the city or town dweller and (2) the mobile, nomadic societies.

Modernity arose during the Enlightenment period, with the emergence of the world economy and exchange among diverse societies, bringing sweeping changes and new challenges for society. Many French and Scottish intellectuals and philosophers embraced the idea of progress and ideas of modernity. The Enlightenment period was marked by the idea that with new discoveries challenging the traditional way of thinking, scientists were required to find new normativity. This process allowed scientific knowledge and society to progress. French thought during this period focused on moral critique and criticisms of the monarchy. In the 18th century, the pre classical period of social theories developed a new form that provides the basic ideas for social theory, such as evolution, philosophy of history, social life and social contract, public and general will, competition in social space, organismic pattern for social description. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of Laws, which established that social elements influence human nature, was possibly the first to suggest a universal explanation for history. Montesquieu included changes in mores and manners as part of his explanation of political and historic events. The first "modern" social theories (known as classical theories) that begin to resemble the analytic social theory of today developed simultaneously with the birth of the science of sociology. Auguste Comte (1798–1857), known as the "father of sociology" and regarded by some as the first philosopher of science, laid the groundwork for positivism – as well as structural functionalism and social evolutionism. Karl Marx rejected Comtean positivism but nevertheless aimed to establish a science of society based on historical materialism, becoming recognised as a founding figure of sociology posthumously. At the turn of the 20th century, the first of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, developed sociological antipositivism. The field may be broadly recognized as an amalgam of three modes of social scientific thought in particular; Durkheimian sociological positivism and structural functionalism, Marxist historical materialism and conflict theory, and Weberian antipositivism and verstehen critique. Another early modern theorist, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), coined the term "survival of the fittest". Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and Pitirim A. Sorokin argued that "history goes in cycles," and presented the social cycle theory to illustrate their point. Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) made community and society (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, 1887) the special topics of the new science of "sociology", both of them based on different modes of will of social actors. The 19th century pioneers of social theory and sociology, like Saint Simon, Comte, Marx, John Stuart Mill or Spencer, never held university posts and they were broadly regarded as philosophers. Emile Durkheim endeavoured to formally established academic sociology, and did so at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, he published Rules of the Sociological Method. In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.

The term "postmodernism" was brought into social theory in 1971 by the Arab American Theorist Ihab Hassan in his book: The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. In 1979 Jean François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes were influential in the 1970s in developing postmodern theory. Scholars most commonly hold postmodernism to be a movement of ideas arising from, but also critical of elements of modernism. The wide range of uses of this term resulted in different elements of modernity are chosen as being continuous. Each of the different uses is rooted in some argument about the nature of knowledge, known in philosophy as epistemology. Individuals who use the term are arguing that either there is something fundamentally different about the transmission of meaning, or that modernism has fundamental flaws in its system of knowledge. The argument for the necessity of the term states that economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media dominated society. These ideas are simulacra, and only inter referential representations and copies of each other, with no real original, stable or objective source for communication and meaning. Globalization, brought on by innovations in communication, manufacturing and transportation, is cited as one force which has decentralized modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected global society, lacking any single dominant center of political power, communication, or intellectual production. The postmodern view is that inter subjective knowledge, and not objective knowledge, is the dominant form of discourse. The ubiquity of copies and dissemination alters the relationship between reader and what is read, between observer and the observed, between those who consume and those who produce. Not all people who use the term postmodern or postmodernism see these developments as positive. Users of the term argue that their ideals have arisen as the result of particular economic and social conditions, including "late capitalism", the growth of broadcast media, and that such conditions have pushed society into a new historical period.

In the past few decades, in response to postmodern critiques, social theory has begun to stress free will, individual choice, subjective reasoning, and the importance of unpredictable events in place of deterministic necessity. Rational choice theory, symbolic interactionism, false necessity are examples of more recent developments. A view among contemporary sociologists is that there are no great unifying 'laws of history', but rather smaller, more specific, and more complex laws that govern society. Philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger recently attempted to revise classical social theory by exploring how things fit together, rather than to provide an all encompassing single explanation of a universal reality. He begins by recognizing the key insight of classical social theory of society as an artifact, and then by discarding the law like characteristics forcibly attached to it. Unger argues that classical social theory was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, and not the expression of an underlying natural order, but at the same time its capacity was checked by the equally prevalent ambition to create law like explanations of history and social development. The human sciences that developed claimed to identify a small number of possible types of social organization that coexisted or succeeded one another through inescapable developmental tendencies or deep seated economic organization or psychological constraints. Marxism is the star example. Unger, calling his efforts "super theory", has thus sought to develop a comprehensive view of history and society. Unger does so without subsuming deep structure analysis under an indivisible and repeatable type of social organization or with recourse to law like constraints and tendencies.

The Chicago school developed in the 1920s, through the work of Albion Woodbury Small, W. I. Thomas, Ernest W. Burgess, Robert E. Park, Ellsworth Faris, George Herbert Mead, and other sociologists at the University of Chicago. The Chicago school focused on patterns and arrangement of social phenomenon across time and place, and within context of other social variables.

Critical theorists focus on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures and their relations and influences on social groups.

Karl Marx wrote and theorized about the importance of political economy on society, and focused on the "material conditions" of life.

Postmodernism was defined by Jean François Lyotard as "incredulity towards metanarratives" and contrasted that with modern which he described as "any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth."

Some known French social thinkers are Claude Henri Saint Simon, Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, and Michel Foucault.

British social thought, with thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, addressed questions and ideas relating to political economy and social evolution. The political ideals of John Ruskin were a precursor of social economy (Unto This Last had a very important impact on Gandhi's philosophy).

Important German philosophers and social thinkers included Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Niklas Luhmann.

Important Chinese philosophers and social thinkers included Shang Yang, Lao Zi, Confucius, Mencius, Wang Chong, Wang Yangming, Li Zhi, Zhu Xi, Gu Yanwu, Gong Zizhen, Wei Yuan, Kang Youwei, Lu Xun, Mao Zedong, Zhu Ming.

Important Italian social scientists include Antonio Gramsci, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Franco Ferrarotti.

Social theory seeks to question why humans inhabit the world the way they do, and how that came to be by looking at power relations, social structures, and social norms, while also examining how humans relate to each other and the society they find themselves in, how this has changed over time and in different cultures, and the tools used to measure those things. Social theory looks to interdisciplinarity, combining knowledge from multiple academic disciplines in order to enlighten these complex issues, and can draw on ideas from fields as diverse as anthropology and media studies. Social theory guides scientific inquiry by promoting scientists to think about which topics are suitable for investigation and how they should measure them. Selecting or creating appropriate theory for use in examining an issue is an important skill for any researcher. Important distinctions: a theoretical orientation (or paradigm) is a worldview, the lens through which one organizes experience (i. e. thinking of human interaction in terms of power or exchange). A theory is an attempt to explain and predict behavior in particular contexts. A theoretical orientation cannot be proven or disproven; a theory can. Having a theoretical orientation that sees the world in terms of power and control, one could create a theory about violent human behavior which includes specific causal statements (e. g. being the victim of physical abuse leads to psychological problems). This could lead to a hypothesis (prediction) about what one expects to see in a particular sample, e. g. "a battered child will grow up to be shy or violent". One can then test the hypothesis by looking to see if it is consistent with data. One might, for instance, review hospital records to find children who were abused, then track them down and administer a personality test to see if they show signs of being violent or shy. The selection of an appropriate (i. e. useful) theoretical orientation within which to develop a potentially helpful theory is the bedrock of social science.