The study which based on principles of social life and behavior of humans inside their social groups emerged comparatively recently. Before the nineteenth century, such a science as sociology did not exist. Society just did not need to discover people among which they lived better before some crucial economic and political events changed the world in the early nineteenth century.
The first precondition of creating a new science was the Industrial revolution. The agricultural occupations were succeeded with job-places created at newly-built factories. People moved to urban industrial areas to improve their well-being but faced only filth and poverty. Working in terrible conditions, people were forced to make their children do the same to make both ends meet. Trying to combat their misery, society developed ideas concerning democracy and political rights. The necessity to change their life became vital, and activists needed a tool to promote their views among the others.
Alongside with the urbanization, imperialism accelerated the rise of sociology. As European countries conquered more new lands, they faced the entirely different peoples with their genuine cultures, religions, and social norms. When people started to discover social specifics of their own country and foreign lands, they found newly developed methods of observation natural sciences quite useful when applied to people.
Sociology developed quickly due to the contribution of its founder. French Auguste Comte first proposed the method of positivism to study the social world and he named this new science as sociology in 1838. Herbert Spenser and Karl Marx followed Comte in his research and introduced the phenomena they called Social Darwinism and Class Conflict.