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The aim of this paper is to unfold the historical configuration that made possible, at the end of the 18th century, the emergence of « society » as the new ontological frame of collective existence as well as an « object » whose functioning sui generis is to understand and possibly to modify. This configuration did not only allow the invention of the object of sociology, that is, « society » ; it also led to the invention of the very word of « sociology », which appeared for the first time in the manuscripts of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, one of the greatest legislators of the French Revolution. With the co-emergence of the « word » and the « object » of sociology, the potential antagonisms between individual and society, nature and art, social plurality and political unity, became a political and a scientific issue. This is the political significance of these antagonisms we inherited that this return to the roots of sociology aims to highlight.