Auguste Comte

One universal law that Comte saw at work in all sciences he called the 'law of three phases'. It is by his statement of this law that he is best known in the English-speaking world; namely, that society has gone through three phases: Theological, Metaphysical, and Scientific. To the last of these he also gave the name "Positive," because of the polysemous connotations of that word. The Theological phase was seen from the perspective of 19th century France as preceding the Enlightenment, in which man's place in society and society's restrictions upon man were referenced to God. By the "Metaphysical" phase, he was not referring to the Metaphysics of Aristotle or any other ancient Greek philosopher, but for Comte was rooted in the problems of French society subsequent to the revolution of 1789. This Metaphysical phase involved the justification of universal rights as being on a vaunted higher plane than the authority of any human ruler to countermand, although said rights were not referenced to the sacred beyond mere metaphor. What he announced by his term of the Scientific phase, which came into being after the failure of the revolution and of Napoleon, was that people could find solutions to social problems and bring them into force despite the proclamations of human rights or prophecy of the will of God. In this regard he was similar to Karl Marx and Jeremy Bentham. For its time, this idea of a scientific phase was considered up-to-date, although from a later standpoint it is too derivative of classical physics and academic history. The other universal law he called the 'encyclopedic law'. By combining these laws, Comte developed a systematic and hierarchical classification of all sciences, including inorganic physics (astronomy, earth science and chemistry) and organic physics (biology and for the first time, physique social, later renamed sociologies). Herbert Spencer Was a theorist whose valuable insights have often been drowned in a sea of irrelevance and spacious reasoning. He is popularly known as the British Aristotle and often called the second founding father of sociology. Spencer's ideas have left an indelible impression on the succeeding writers. Spencer's name was associated with the birth of sociology in England. Herbert Spencer was born an April 27, 1820, in Derby in England. He was a man of original and independent thinking. He has contributed to various fields of knowledge like philosophy, biology, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Spencer wrote a number of books. They are as follows. 1) Social Statics (1850) 2) First Principles (1862). 3) The study of Sociology (1873) 4) The Principles of Sociology in three volumes (1876-96) 5) The Man verses the State (1884) Organic Analogy: Spencer is popularly known for his treatment of evolution. The evolutionary doctrine was no doubt the foundation of Spencer's sociological theory. He, however, presented the organic analogy, a secondary doctrine which also played a vital role in his thought system. He identified society with a biological organism. But this comparison of the society with the biological organism was not originally propounded by Herbert Spencer. Several other philosophers had given the concept previously. He established the hypothesis that society is like a biological

organism and then proceeded to defend it against all objectives with great logical force. Indeed, he regarded the recognition of the similarity between society and organism as the first step towards a general theory of evaluation. In his "Principles of Sociology Spencer observed some similarities between biological and social organism:Society is thus viewed as being essentially analogous to an organism, with its interdependent parts or organs making up the body of society. Spencer observed some similarities between biological and social organism:1) Both society and organisms are distinguished from inorganic matter by visible growth, a child grows up to a man, a small community becomes a great city, a small state an empire. 2) Both grow in size and this growth is accomplished by increasing complexity of structure, 3) In the organism and in society there is an interdependence of parts. The progressive differentiation of structure in both is accompanied by progressive differentiation of functions. In both, the differentiation of structure is followed by a similar differentiation of function. 5) The life of society, like the life of an organism is far larger than the life of any of the units of parts.

Karl Marx Theories about society, economics and politics, which are collectively known as Marxism, hold that all societies progress through the dialectic of class struggle. He was heavily critical of the current socio-economic form of society, capitalism, under socialism, he argued that society would be governed by the working class in what he called the "dictatorship of the proletariat", the "workers state" or "workers' democracy".] He believed that socialism would, in its turn, eventually be replaced by a stateless, classless society called pure communism. Along with believing in the inevitability of socialism and communism, Marx actively fought for the former's implementation, arguing that both social theorists and underprivileged people should carry out organized revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic change.

Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own laborpower. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labor - one's capacity to transform the world - is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor that are bought and sold on the market. Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control

that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labor-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo. Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity - when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land or tools necessary to produce. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. .Max Weber Weber was committed to the study of causality, the probability that an event will be followed or accompanied by another event. He also believed that social scientists should not let their personal values influence their scientific research. Sociology should be "value free." One of Webers best known contributions to contemporary sociology is the ideal type. An ideal type is a concept constructed by a social scientist, based on his or her interests and theoretical orientation, to capture the essential features of some social phenomenon. Weber also analyzed the how rationality has become institutionally embedded in modern industrialized societies. He defines rationality in two ways: means-ends and value rationality, both of which refer to types of actions. There are four specific types: practical rationality, theoretical rationality, substantive rationality, and formal rationality. Additionally, Webers work with religion and capitalism involved cross-cultural historical research. Emile Durkheim Have a more lasting impact on modern sociology than those of Comte. Indeed, he became the pioneer in giving sociology the status of a science and its our method of study. Durkheim was born in Lorraine of France in 1858. He was the only founding father who could occupy the part of Professor of Sociology. Although he drew an aspect of Comte's work, Durkheim thought that many of his predecessor's ideas were too speculative and vague. To become scientific, according to Durkheim, sociology must study social facts, i.e. aspects of social life that shape our actions as individuals.

Like the other major founders of sociology, Durkheim was preoccupied with the changes transforming society in his own lifetime. His major writings are 'The Division of Labor', 'the rules of sociological method', 'Suicide' and 'The Elementary forms of religious life'. One of Durkheim's most famous studies was concerned with the analysis of suicide (Durkheim 1952, originally published in 1897). In his book, he has given a fine sociological analysis of suicide which is based as the theory of sociology or collective mind. The book is praised as a research classic. Suicide seems to be a purely personal act, the outcome of extreme person unhappiness. But Durkheim showed that social factors exert a fundamental influence on suicidal behavior. Durkheim defined suicide as "every case of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act performed by the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result". A positive act would be to shoot one or to hang one. In this case, death comes as a direct result of the action. A negative act would be to remain in a burning house or to refuse to take food to the point of starvation. Death in this case comes to an individual indirectly. In his classic study of suicide, he demonstrated that neither psychopathic factors, nor hereditary, nor climate, nor imitation, nor poverty, nor unhappy love and other personal factors are responsible for suicide. Suicide is a social fact and is due to social forces. Individuals are compelled to commit suicide whenever the condition of society departs from a state of balance. Society maintains balance by "integration and "regulation". Integration refers to the extent to which individuals experience a sense of belonging to the group or collective and "regulation" refers to the extent to which the actions and desires of individuals are restrained by moral values. A society, which passes too much integration and regulation, will create four types of suicide such as egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic. Egoistic Suicide: Egoistic suicide occurs when an individual feels him too much isolated from the social group. It results from the lack of integration of the individual into his study of social group. It is very much seen in modern society. Our modern society which is characterized by impersonal self centered and secondary associations leaves the individual socially isolated and extremely cut off from the normal contacts. Therefore, a good number of individuals commit suicide. This led Durkheim to say that egoistic suicide is the index of social disorganization in modern society. By analyzing suicide statistics, Durkheim found that the suicide rate was more in case of the unmarried, widowed, divorced those without children, and those with no strong attachments to religious, social or community groups.

Lajie Ollero Cas-02-201a/ B.S Biology

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Sociology is rooted in the works of philosophers, including Plato (427347 B.C.), Aristotle (384322 B.C.), and Confucius (551479 B.C.). Some other early scholars also took perspectives that were sociological. Chinese historian Ma Tuan-Lin developed, in the thirteenth century, a sociological history by looking at the social factors influencing history in his general-knowledge encyclopedia Wen Hsien Tung Kao (General Study of the Literary Remains). Ibn Khaldun (13321406), profiled below, conducted studies of Arab society (Restivo 1991, 1819). Sociology is a relatively new academic discipline. It emerged in the early 19th century in response to the challenges of modernity. Increasing mobility and technological advances resulted in the increasing exposure of people to cultures and societies different from their own. The impact of this exposure was varied, but for some people included the breakdown of traditional norms and customs and warranted a revised understanding of how the world works. Sociologists responded to these changes by trying to understand what holds social groups together and also explore possible solutions to the breakdown of social solidarity. Enlightenment thinkers also helped set the stage for the sociologists that would follow. The Enlightenment was the first time in history that thinkers tried to provide general explanations of the social world. They were able to detach themselves, at least in principle, from expounding some existing ideology and to attempt to lay down general principles that explained social life (Collins 1994, 17). Writers of this period included a range of well-known philosophers, such as John Locke; David Hume; Voltaire (the pseudonym of Franois-Marie Arouet); Immanuel Kant; Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brde et de Montesquieu; Thomas Hobbes; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As Macionis (1995, 12) explains to introductory students, scholars have been interested in the nature of society throughout history. They typically focused on what the ideal society would be like. During the 1800s, however, scholars began studying how society actually is and how social arrangements actually operate (how society works). Armed with this knowledge, they felt they could better attack social problems and bring about social change (Collins 1994, 42). These scholars became the first sociologists.