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The article discusses on historical sociology. Sociologist Emile Durkheim himself was interested in history though also concerned to legitimate his own sociological enterprise by distinguishing its approach from that of history on one side, and philosophy, on the other. On the one hand, his lectures on the history of French education. The introduction to Fernand Paul Braudel's Mediterranean, in which he suggests that time moves at different speeds, is one of the classic discussions of what sociologists call social time. Elaborating the common-sense contrast between the long and the short term, he distinguishes the high-profile time of events from the time of institutions and from the still slower and almost imperceptible time of environmental change. In the case of capitalism, one of his life-long preoccupations, Braudel was studying a subject which had interested sociologists since the origins of their discipline, which they had studied in a comparative manner, and which they had linked to the rise of modernity and the West.