Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (Part 3)

I was a sociology major. And it had nothing to do necessarily with law, which is ultimately - I went to law school. But what I tried to do was choose something that I was passionate about or something that I cared about.

Michelle Obama

Sociology: An Introduction

(Part C)

by

 Charles Lamson

 From Social Thought to Social Science

Like all sciences, sociology developed out of pre-scientific longings to understand and predict. Essential questions of sociology have been pondered by the world's great thinkers since the earliest periods of recorded history. The ancient Greek philosophers believed that human societies inevitably arose, flourished, and declined. They tended to perceive the past as better than the present looking back to a "golden age" in which social conditions were presumed to have been better than those of the degraded present. Before the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the theologians and philosophers of medieval Europe and the Islamic world also believed that human misery and strife were inevitable. As the Bible put it, "The poor always ye have with you." Mere mortals could do little to correct social conditions, which were viewed as the work of divine Providence.

The Age of Enlightenment

The roots of modern sociology can be found in the work of the philosophers and scientists of the Great Enlightenment, which had its origins in the scientific discoveries of the 17th century. That pivotal century began with Galileo's heretical proof that the Earth was not the center of the universe; it ended with the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. Newton is often credited with the founding of modern science. He not only discovered the laws of gravity and motion but, in developing the calculus, also provided later generations with the mathematical tools whereby further discoveries in all the sciences could be made. 

Hard on the heels a both of this unprecedented progress in science and mathematics came a theory of human progress that paved the way for a science of humanity. Francis Bacon in England, Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal in France, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany were among the philosophers who recognized the social importance of scientific discoveries. Their writings emphasized the idea of progress guided by human reason and opposed the dominant action notion that the human condition was ordained by God and could not be improved through human actions.

Today we are used to inventions crowding one upon another. Between the childhood of our grandparents and our own adulthood, society has undergone some major transformations: from agrarian to industrial production; from rural settlements and small towns to large cities and expanding metropolitan regions; from reliance on wood and coal as energy sources to dependence on electricity and nuclear power; from typewriters to computers. But in the 17th century people were used to far more stability. Ways of life that had existed since the Middle Ages were not expected to change in a generation.

The rise of science transformed the social order. New methods of navigation made it possible to explore and chart the world's oceans and continents. Applied to warfare, scientific knowledge enabled Europeans to conquer the people of Africa, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. In Europe, those conquests opened up new markets and stimulated new patterns of trade that hastened the growth of some regions and cities and the decline of others. The entire human world had entered a period of rapid social change that continues today and shows no signs of ending.

The Age of Revolution

The vehicle of social change was not science itself since relatively few people at any level of society were practicing scientists. Rather, the modern era of rapid social change is a product of the many new ideas that captured people's imagination during the 18th century. The series of revolutions that took place in the American colonies, and France, and in England all resulted in part from social movements unleashed by the Triumph of science and reason. The idea of human rights (that is, the rights of all humans, not just the elite), of democracy versus rule by an absolute monarch, of self-government for colonial peoples, and of applying reason and science to human affairs in general---all are currents of thought that arose during this period. 

The revolutions of the 18th century loosed a torrent of questions that could not even have been imagined before. The old order of society was breaking down as secular knowledge replaced sacred traditions. The study of laws and lawmaking and debates about justice and society began to replace the idea that kings and other leaders had a divine right to rule. Communities were breaking apart; courts and palaces and great estates were crumbling as people struggled to be free. What would replace them? Would the rule of the mob replaced the rule of the monarch? Would greed and envy replace piety and faith? Would there be enough opportunities in the New World for all the people who were being driven off the land in the old world? Would the factory system become the new order of society, and if so, what did that imply for the future of society?

No longer could the scriptures or the classics of ancient Greece and Rome be consulted for easy answers to such questions. Rather, it was becoming evident that new answers could be discovered through the scientific method: repeated observation, careful description, the formulation of theories based on possible explanations, and the gathering of additional data about questions arising from those theories. Why not use the same methods to create a science of human society? This ambitious idea led to the birth of sociology. It is little wonder that the French philosopher Auguste Comte thought of sociology, even in its infancy, as the "queen of sciences," one that would soon take its rightful place beside the reigning science of physics. It was he who coined the term sociology to designate the scientific study of society. Comte believed that the study of social stability and social change was the most important subject for sociology to tackle. He made some of the earliest attempts to apply scientific methods to the study of social life. 

The Founders of Sociology

In the 19th century an increasing number of philosophers and historians began to see themselves as specializing in the study of social conditions and social change. They attempted to develop global theories of social change based on the essential qualities of societies at different stages of human history, and they devoted much of their attention to comparing existing societies and civilizations, both past and present.

The early sociologists tend to think in macro sociological terms. Their writing dealt with whole societies and how their special characteristics influence human behavior and social change. Most sociologists would agree that the 19th century social theorists who had the greatest and most lasting influence on the field were Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. All three applied the new concepts of sociology to gain an understanding of the immense changes occurring around them.

German-born Karl Marx (1818-1883) became a radical philosopher as a young man and was embroiled in numerous insurrections and attempts at Revolution in Germany and France. Forced to flee Germany after the abortive European revolution of 1848, he lived work and worked in England for the rest of his life. Often penniless, Marx worked for hours on end in the library of the British museum, there he developed the social and economic theories that would have a major influence on sociological thought. His famous treatise Capital is a detailed study of the rise of capitalism as the dominant system of production. In this work and elsewhere, Marx set forth an extremely powerful theory to explain the transformations taking place as societies became more industrialized and urbanized. He argued that those transformations would inevitably end in a revolution in which the workers would overthrow capitalism, but he also believed that revolution could be hastened through political action.

Karl Marx.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was the founder of scientific sociology in France. His books, among which the best known are The Division of Labor in Society, Rules of the Sociological Method, and Suicide were pioneering examples of the use of comparative data to assess the directions and consequences of social change. The first university professor with a chair in the social sciences, Durkheim was soon surrounded by a brilliant group of academic disciples who were deeply interested in understanding the vast changes that occurred in societies as they became more populous, more urbanized, and more technologically complex. in 1898 Durkheim and his colleagues established the first scientific journal in sociology, The Sociological Year. This journal and much of Durkheim's own writing were among the first examples of the application of statistics to social issues.

Emile Durkheim.

Max Weber (1864-1920) was a German historian, economist, and sociologist. Weber's life, like Durkheim's spanned much of the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the twentieth. Like the other early sociologists, therefore, Weber witnessed the tumultuous changes that were bringing down the old order. He saw a monarchies tottering in the face of demands for democratic rule. He observed new industries and markets spanning the globe and linking formerly isolated peoples. He saw and described the rise of modern science and jurisprudence and modern ways of doing business. The growing tendency to apply rational decision-making procedures, rather than merely relying on traditions, was for Weber a dramatic departure from the older ways of feudal societies and mercantile aristocracies. Weber compared many different societies to show a How new forms of government and administration were evolving.

Max Weber.

All three of these pioneers in sociology were scholars of great genius. They were also political activists. Marx, of course, was the most revolutionary of the time and devoted much of his energy to the international socialist movement. Durkheim was a lifelong socialist but was more moderate than Marx. Although he took stands on more political issues, he did not devote himself to political activities. As a young man, Weber had been involved in the movement to create a unified German nation, but as a mature scholar he developed a belief in "value-free" social science. A social scientist might draw research questions from personal political beliefs, but the research itself must apply scientific methods. This view, which Durkheim also shared, did much to advance sociology to the level of a social science rather than just a branch of philosophy.

To become a science, sociology had to build on the research of its founders. The 20th century brought changes of such magnitude at every level of society that sociologists where in increasing demand. That mission was to gain new information about the scope and meaning of social change. 

*SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., 2003, WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 7-10*

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