Breaking down the question
The statement is an aphorism about the relationship between two disciplines, and the command word elaborate asks you to unfold its meaning, defend it, and illustrate it — not merely to agree. The sentence has two symmetrical halves, and a complete answer must honour both.
The first half — sociology without history is rootless — claims that sociological analysis cut off from the past loses its foundations. Social structures, institutions and values are not given ready-made; they are the sediment of historical processes. A sociology that studies only the present moment, frozen and ahistorical, mistakes a passing arrangement for a permanent order and cannot explain how it came to be or where it is tending.
The second half — history without sociology is fruitless — claims that a history that is only a chronicle of unique events, dates and personalities yields little understanding. Without sociological concepts — class, authority, bureaucracy, kinship — the historian has facts but no analysis, a narrative without explanatory yield.
The task, then, is to establish the interdependence of the two disciplines, to identify what each contributes to the other, and to acknowledge — briefly — the tension between them, since they are not identical. The best answers treat the aphorism as broadly true but examine why it is true and where the two disciplines part company.
How to approach it
Open by locating both disciplines: sociology as the systematic, generalising study of society, history as the study of the human past in its particularity. Then interpret each clause in turn rather than merging them, so that the symmetry of the quotation is preserved.
Develop the first clause through the idea that all social facts are historically produced. Draw on the emergence of sociology itself as a response to historical rupture — the transformations of modernity and the emergence of sociology — to show that the discipline was born historical.
Develop the second clause by showing what sociological concepts give to historical narrative: causal explanation, comparison, structure. Marshal the great practitioners of the fusion — Marx, Weber, and the tradition of historical sociology — to demonstrate that the finest work in either discipline has drawn on the other.
Then introduce the necessary qualification: the two disciplines differ in method and emphasis — the nomothetic versus the idiographic, the general versus the particular — so the relationship is one of fruitful tension, not identity. Close with C. Wright Mills's insistence that the sociological imagination is inescapably historical.
Model answer
Sociology and history study the same object — human social life — from complementary angles, and the aphorism captures the truth that neither can flourish in isolation from the other. To elaborate it is to show why the study of society must be rooted in time, and why the study of the past must be armed with sociological concepts.
Why sociology without history is rootless. Every institution, value and structure that sociology examines is a product of historical development. The modern family, the market economy, bureaucratic authority, the caste order — none is natural or eternal; each has a genesis, a trajectory and a set of conditions that brought it into being. A sociology that studies only the present, treating current arrangements as if they had always existed, commits what has been called the "illusion of the timeless present". It can describe a society but cannot explain it, for explanation requires knowing how a structure arose and what strains are working within it.
This is not an external constraint on sociology but part of its origin. The discipline itself emerged as an attempt to comprehend a specific historical upheaval — the double revolution, industrial and political, that dissolved the old European order and produced the phenomena of class, urbanisation, secularisation and the modern state. The founders were therefore historical thinkers by necessity. To understand society, they had first to understand a transformation. A sociology that forgets this and abstracts its categories from any temporal ground floats free of the reality it claims to analyse — it becomes, precisely, rootless.
Why history without sociology is fruitless. The converse holds with equal force. A history that confines itself to narrating unique events — this battle, this treaty, this monarch — accumulates facts without yielding understanding. To make the past intelligible, the historian must reach for concepts that are, in origin, sociological: feudalism, class, bureaucracy, charisma, revolution. The moment a historian asks not merely what happened but why it happened and what kind of event it was, comparing it with others, she is thinking sociologically. Without such concepts, history remains a chronicle; with them, it becomes explanation. This is what the aphorism means by fruitless — rich in detail but poor in yield, a harvest of facts that never ripens into knowledge.
The great practitioners of the fusion. The most powerful work in the human sciences has been produced precisely where the two disciplines meet. Karl Marx's account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is at once a historical narrative and a sociological theory of how modes of production give way to one another through class struggle. Max Weber's comparative studies of the world religions, and his tracing of the affinity between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, are exemplary historical sociology: he uses the particular to build the general and the general to illuminate the particular. Later, the tradition of historical sociology — from Barrington Moore's inquiry into the social origins of dictatorship and democracy to the longue durée of Fernand Braudel and the Annales school — has made the marriage of the two disciplines a settled research programme. Each of these figures demonstrates the aphorism in practice: their sociology is rooted, their history fruitful.
The tension that keeps the marriage honest. Yet the two disciplines are not identical, and it would falsify the relationship to pretend they are. History is characteristically idiographic: it seeks to grasp the individual event in its uniqueness and particularity. Sociology is characteristically nomothetic: it seeks generalisations, patterns and, at its most ambitious, law-like regularities. History emphasises the diachronic — change through time; sociology has often emphasised the synchronic — the structure of a society at a moment. These differences of emphasis are real, and they generate a productive tension rather than dissolving one discipline into the other. Sociology reminds history that particular events instantiate general processes; history reminds sociology that its generalisations must answer to the stubborn particularity of the record. The relationship is a division of labour, not a merger.
Conclusion. The aphorism is, in the end, sound. C. Wright Mills gave it its sharpest modern statement when he argued that the sociological imagination is inescapably historical: to grasp a personal trouble as a public issue, one must locate the individual within both social structure and historical period. Every social structure is a moment in a process; every historical process works itself out through social structures. A sociology alert to time is rooted in the soil from which its subject grew; a history armed with concepts bears the fruit of explanation. The two disciplines are best understood not as rivals but as two hands of a single enterprise — the effort to understand human beings as makers, and creatures, of their own history.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners reward candidates who treat the quotation as a two-part proposition and answer both parts with equal care. A common failing is to write a general essay on "sociology and history" that never returns to the specific claims about rootlessness and fruitlessness; the strongest scripts keep the aphorism's own vocabulary in view throughout.
The second thing that lifts an answer is concrete illustration. Naming Marx on the feudalism-to-capitalism transition, Weber on the Protestant ethic, and the historical-sociology tradition of Moore or Braudel converts an abstract claim into a demonstrated one. Vague assertions that the disciplines "help each other" earn little; worked examples earn the higher band.
Finally, examiners look for the qualification. A candidate who notes the idiographic-nomothetic distinction, and frames the relationship as fruitful tension rather than identity, shows that she understands why the two disciplines remain distinct even as they depend on one another — and it is that discrimination, closed with the Millsian point about the historical character of the sociological imagination, that marks out a first-class answer.