The Birth and the rise of sociology

We cannot study society without considering the rise of sociology as an academic discipline. Sociology is one of the most recent social sciences. People have always attempted to comprehend or understand society. Several Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, pondered the nature of society and government, Confucius taught people how to behave in a well-regulated society. Iben Caldoun, an Arab scholar living in Morocco in the thirteenth century, pondered the nature of conflict in societies. However, the distinctive intellectual tradition we now call sociology began in Western Europe in the nineteenth century. Its rise was associated with several great changes that occurred in Europe, including the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and the rapid urbanization that occurred in every European society. Most of the important founders of modern, Western sociology observed these changes and provided the beginnings of what became the empirical, scientific study of society – sociology.

Sociology’s early founders had at least two things in common: They were interested in 1) understanding society as a whole, and they were trying to comprehend; 2) the nature of social change and stability. Society is the general concept, which encompasses the permanent structures, or social arrangements, which impinge on the lives of ordinary people. Structures include institutions such as family, religion, and education, which often endure for generations and give stability and continuity to a society. Early founders of sociology were interested in the decay of an old society and the emergence of new social forms. They were interested in how changes affected individuals – how people respond when the old rules no longer govern.

Many academic disciplines developed to explain segments of the social world. Psychology studies the individual; political science studies systems of government; anthropology studies features of diverse cultures; economics studies micro and macro levels of economic exchange; sociology alone focuses on group behavior in society as a whole. However, no single academic discipline had sufficient scope to explain the complexities of societal transformation as Europe moved from a feudal to industrial economy.

For many reasons, including the popularity and importance of the physical sciences and ideas emerging from the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic Movement, many people in eighteenth-century Europe rejected traditional theological explanations. To many people, the will of God was not an adequate explanation for the dramatic social changes many experienced in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution.

If traditional and theological explanations were inadequate, what might take their place? Some were attracted to philosophical explanations. However, others sought explanations rooted in the observation of human social arrangements. If the physical sciences could help us understand the world of nature, might we not create a social science? To be scientific, the new discipline would have to be based on the empirical observation of social life. Observations or facts do not speak for themselves. Not only do humans create them, but once we have gathered and organized our observations, we also have to create concepts and theories to provide general explanations for the facts and relationships we observe. The first sociologists created large-scale social theories to explain those aspects of society of greatest interest: how societies change and how they stay the same.

One way to view social theories is to examine their origins – what were the dominant social conditions that were influencing the awareness of the theorist? This is studied as the sociology of knowledge itself. An individual may extend ideas or improve available concepts, but such work is always done in the context of existing knowledge. You may develop a new theory, but your insights will almost certainly emerge from ideas you have previously learned. Karl Mannheim, a German sociologist who died in 1947, was one of the important contributors to the study of the social origin of knowledge.

The way I view the world, just as the way you do, is greatly influenced by my previous experiences and the way I understand these experiences. We will look at some of the early influences on sociology in terms of the broad social conditions that influence the development of different social theories.