Sociology

I

Introduction

Sociology, the scientific study of the development, structure, and function of human society. Other disciplines within the social sciences—including economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology—are also concerned with topics that fall within the scope of sociology. Sociologists examine the ways in which social structures and institutions—such as class, family, community, and power—and social problems—such as crime—influence society.

Sociological thinking rests on the notion that human beings act according to cultural and historical influences, not their own freely made decisions. They also act and behave according to the wishes and expectations of others. Therefore, social interaction, or the responses of individuals to each other, is perhaps the basic sociological concept, because such interaction is the elementary component of all relationships and groups that make up human society. Sociologists who concentrate on the details of particular interactions as they occur in everyday life are sometimes called microsociologists; those concerned with the larger patterns of relations among major social sectors, such as the State and the economy, and even with international relations, are called macrosociologists.

II

History of the Discipline

As a discipline, or body of systematized knowledge, sociology is of relatively recent origin. The concept of civil society as a realm distinct from the State was expressed in the writings of the 17th-century English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and of the later thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment (in France and Scotland). Their works anticipated the subsequent focus of sociology, as did the later philosophies of history of the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico and the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel with regard to the study of social change.

A

Origins

The first definition of sociology was advanced by the French philosopher Auguste Comte. In 1838 Comte coined the term sociology to describe his vision of a new science that would discover laws of human society resembling the laws of nature by applying the methods of factual investigation that had proved so successful in the physical sciences. The British philosopher Herbert Spencer adopted both Comte's term and his mission.

Several 19th-century social philosophers who never called themselves sociologists, are today also counted among the founders of the discipline. The most widely influential among them is Karl Marx, but their number also includes the French aristocrat Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, the writer and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville and, the British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. These people were largely speculative thinkers, as were Comte and Spencer and their predecessors in the 17th and 18th centuries. A quite different tradition of empirical reporting of statistics also developed in the 19th century, and later became incorporated into academic sociology.

B

Developments

Not until the 1880s and 1890s did sociology begin to be recognized as an academic discipline. In France, Émile Durkheim, the intellectual heir of Saint-Simon and Comte, began teaching sociology at the universities of Bordeaux and Paris. Durkheim founded the first true school of sociological thought. He emphasized the independent reality of social facts (as distinct from the psychological attributes of individuals) and sought to discover interconnections among these facts. Durkheim and his followers made extensive studies of non-industrial societies similar to those that were later carried out by social anthropologists.

In Germany, sociology was formally recognized as an academic discipline in the first decade of the 20th century, largely because of the efforts of the German economist and historian Max Weber. In contrast with the attempts to model the field after the physical sciences, which were dominant in France and in English-speaking countries, German sociology was largely the outgrowth of far-ranging historical scholarship, combined with the influence of Marxism, both of which were central to Weber's work. The influential efforts of the German philosopher Georg Simmel to define sociology as a distinctive discipline emphasized the human-centred focus of German philosophical idealism.

In Great Britain, sociology was relatively slow to develop; until the 1960s the field was mostly centred on a single academic institution, the London School of Economics, part of the University of London. British sociology combined an interest in large-scale evolutionary social change with a practical concern for problems relevant to the administration of the welfare state.

In the second half of the 20th century, after the early interest in the broad evolutionist theories of Comte and Spencer had declined, sociology emphasized the study of particular social phenomena such as crime, marital discord, and the acculturation of immigrants.

The most notable centre of sociological study before World War II (1939-1945) was the University of Chicago, in the United States. There, the American philosopher George Herbert Mead, who had studied in Germany, stressed in his writings the origins of the mind, the self, and society in the actions and interactions of people. This approach, later known as symbolic interactionism, was largely microsociological and social psychological in emphasis. In 1937, the American sociologist Talcott Parsons introduced the ideas of Durkheim, Weber, and the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto in his major work The Structure of Social Action, which eventually overcame the narrow, limited outlook of American sociology. Leadership in the field passed to Columbia University, where the American social scientist Robert Merton attempted to unite theory with rigorous empirical (data-gathering) research.

To a growing extent in both the United States and Western Europe, the three dominating figures of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber were recognized as the pre-eminent classical thinkers of the sociological tradition; and their work continues to influence contemporary sociologists.