CHAPTER 1: SOCIOLOGY AS A SCIENCE

DEFINITIONS

 The systematic study of human society, of the organization of human groups, based on
experience and observation (science).

 What sociologist want to do is science through a systematic study of society. They use
science as the process of research, the scientific method which studies what has been
done and go forward.
1st Research
2nd Study
3rd Prove
4th Publish

 FOUNDER

o Auguste Comte: He is recognised as the founder of the term sociology in 1838

to describe a new way of looking at society. Before him sociology was
scientific philosophy.
e defined and understand new a days
“ORDER AND PROGRESS”

 Watson: “The academic study of the relationships which develop between human
beings as they organise themselves and are organised by others in societies”.
It is “something that looks at how human beings organize both themselves and each
other. In looking at how people think and behave, it looks for cultural patterns and
‘structures’ in social life”.

 Cohen: “Sociology involves the systematic study of patterns of human interaction”.

 Berger: “Then, the sociologist is the person who is interested in understanding the
society but in a disciplined way”.

 Giddens: “Sociology can be identified as the systematic study of human societies giving
special emphasis to modern, industrialized systems”.

 They all have some ideas in common:

o It is a discipline, systematic (Latin academia – university - systematic) and

academic.
THE GREAT THINKERS

 Comte was not the first or the only person to think about society, organizing people in
groups. Such questions had already fascinated brilliant thinkers of ancient civilizations:
o K’un Fu-Tzu (Confucius 551-479 BC) The Analects
o Plato (427-327 BC) The Republic (Cave – shadow like a fecade)
o Aristotle (384-322 BC) The Politics (Organization by dialogs)
o Saint Agustine of Hippo (1225-1274) De Civitate Dei
o Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) Summa Theologiae
 o William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Julius Caesar

 They wrote about the workings of society but not with a systematic study.
The main difference was that they were more interested in imagining the ideal society
than studying society as it really was.
THE KEY THINKERS, the predecessors

 J.J. Rousseau (1762) Social contract (French revolution 1789 - bastille)

 Adam Smith (1776) Inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (self-
interest) Wealth of nations, the society from an economic point of view.

 Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1840) What is property? (Law, justice, heredity, inequality, the
structure of society we stablish hope, fear)

 Henry de Saint-Simon (1823) The industry, and the new Christianity (1825) (leaders =
producers: businessmen, and workers not nobility). Was the teacher from Auguste
Comte, he spokes about Christianity but not related much to religion.

 Alexis de Tocqueville (1835-40) The democracy in America (political thought:

equality, democracy, mobility of individuals ≠ aristocracy). He classified the old world
(Europe) and the new world (America) and compare them.
THE CLASSICS

 Auguste Comte (birth:1798) The course in positivist philosophy (1830-42), and

Positivist catechism (1851- 54), (scientifically verified).

 Émile Durkheim (1858) Division of labour in society (1893), Suicide (1897), was a
basic work on how to make sociology because people think suicide is a private act and
don’t have to do with society, but it truly does, and Moral education (1925).

 Karl Marx (1818) The capital (1867), and Wage labour and capital (1847).

 Max Weber (1864) The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (1904), and
Economy and society (1922).

WHY SOCIOLOGY AND WHY AT THAT TIME?

 Why did it happen? Why did Comte come to the idea of studying the society in a new
way? Because something happen that couldn’t be understand by humans.

1. The rise of a factory-based industrial economy, the old live change.

2. The explosive growth of cities.
 3. New ideas about democracy and political rights. Linked to revolutions like the
French rev. that lasted 10 years or the American rev. there were new ways of
thinking, new revolutionary ideas like democracy.
NEW INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY

 During the Middle Ages in Europe: People worked fields near their homes or in small
scale manufacturing = “made by hand”. The past live was relatively slow, the evolution
from the stone age to the time took 10 thousand years and the industrial revolution
supposed a quick and extreme change on people lives.

 By the end of the eighteenth century, inventors used new sources of energy (steam) to
operate large machines in mills and factories.

 The workers became part of a large and anonymous labour force instead of labouring at
home, and they were under the control of strangers who owned the factories. This
changed the traditions and community life they had been guided by for centuries.

People now need to move from the rural areas to the cities, they didn’t live in the same
place where their work is. They moved from fields to factories and work with the chain
production in which everyone does a part of the process.
THE EXPLOSIVE GROWTH OF CITIES

 Across Europe

o Landowners took part in the enclosure

movement: they fenced in more and
more farmland to create grazing areas
for sheep, the source of wool, for the
thriving textile mills.

o Without land, countless tenant farmers

had little choice but to head to cities in
search of work in the new factories.

o As cities grew larger, these urban

migrants faced many social problems:
pollution, crime, and homelessness.

o Moving through streets crowded with strangers, they faced a new, impersonal
social world.

POLITICAL CHANGE

 People in the Middle Ages:

1. Society as an expression of God’s will.
2. From the royalty to the serfs, each person up and down the social ladder played a
part in the holy plan.
 3. This theological view of society can be read in a lot of hymns: -” The rich man in
his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, and ordered
their estate”.
William from Ockham was one of the first who started to say people should also
decide (1365).
 Evolution to the Modern Age:
1. But the cities grew, and tradition came under spirited attack.
2. Th. Hobbes (1588-1679), J. Locke (1632-1704), and Adam Smith (1723-1790). We
see in their writings a shift in focus from a moral obligation to God and king to the
pursuit of self-interest. OUR OWN DECISIONS.
3. Philosophers spoke of individual liberty and individual rights.
1. French Revolution (1789): was an even greater break with political and social
tradition. It was an ideological change.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) thought the changes in society brought
about by the French Revolution were so great that they amounted to “nothing
short of regeneration of the whole human race”.

 Highlights

o 4 Highlights from the Middle Age to the Capitalist Society:

 The Reformation: (1517) from the corporate to the individual, and from
traditional to rational. Catholic revolution, protestants.
 The Enlightenment: (End 17th) rational and critical scrutiny of
institutions – religion, inequality, kinship, property, etc. helped to see
the world on a different way.
 The Industrial Revolution: (End 18th) structural implications – the
working class, processes of urbanisation.
 The French Revolution: (1789-99) The Monarchy had been toppled;
notions of democracy without appropriate institutions.

o All of this helped for the revolution and new ideas to be created.

FIRST CONCLUSIONS

 It was a total breakdown of society at this time. The beginning of sociologist started
because people weren’t able to understand.

 They needed a total reconstruction of the social order: theoretical reconsolidation of the
elements on which social order had once rested: kinship, land, social class, religion,
local community, and monarchy.
 And here is the work of the founders of sociology: they tried to understand the huge
changes on our world.

o Giddens says, the overwhelming interest of Marx, Durkheim and Weber was in
the “delineation of the characteristic structure of modern capitalism as
contrasted with prior forms of society”. Contemporary sociology has inherited
this role and has “as its main focus the institutions of ‘advanced’ or
‘industrialised’ societies, and of the conditions of transformation of those
institutions”.

o Sociology was – and continues to be – both a reaction to and a part of the social
and cultural changes in which it was / is involved. It analyses nowadays society,
not discovers the future.