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This paper raises doubts about the traditional justification of the autonomy of the sociological object in terms of the "discovery" of "society" as demarcated from the state. Against the tendency to homogenize social theory from an overly "Anglosaxon" or liberal image of its early history, it offers a triadic, "knowledge-geographical" tableau of interpretations of the social object-and-project, which aligns it more closely with political ideology, resisting any clear-cut delineations in state vs. society terms. In the threepartite space of emerging social science, the French and German-Italian branches stuck significantly closer to the political and staatswissenschaftliche tradition than the Anglosaxon branch, and exemplified not so much a rupture with as an innovatory continuation of "Aristotelian" political philosophy, extending and generalizing its scope of analysis from state sovereignty towards a more inclusive theory of the generation and distribution of social power. This approach introduces a new specification of the unity and diversity of the sociological object-and-project, which may be re-described as that of knowledgeable organization: an appelation which at once defines the classical promise and the classical hubris of the sociological tradition in its three intellectual-geographical zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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