1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Analytical sociology is a strategy for understanding the social world.
It is concerned with explaining important macro-level facts such as the diffusion of various social practices, patterns of segregation, network structures, typical beliefs, and common ways of acting.
[1] The analytical approach is founded on the premise that proper explanations detail the "cogs and wheels" through which social outcomes are brought about, and it is driven by a commitment to realism.
Empirically false assumptions about human motivation, cognitive processes, access to information, or social relations cannot bear the explanatory burden in a mechanistic explanation no matter how well they predict the outcome to be explained.
The work of James Coleman, Jon Elster, Robert Merton, Thomas Schelling and Raymond Boudon was of pivotal importance for the development of the analytical approach.