Introduction to Classical Sociology: Themes and Revolution

The Emergence of Sociology in Response to Three Revolutions

This core module introduces you to some of the main themes in classical sociology.  It’s a huge subject. One way of approaching it is to see the emergence of sociology as a response to three revolutions: the intellectual revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries (‘The Enlightenment’), the industrial revolution that it helped to foster, and the French and Haitian Revolutions of the late 18th Century which sent shock waves through Europe. The intellectual revolution led people to ask whether it was possible to do a science of history and society as well as a science of nature; the industrial and political revolutions led people to say that some such science was necessary, because the forces they unleashed – new ideas about politics (e.g. human rights, democracy, equality) new forms of organization (especially emerging nation-states), new types of social groups and new types of relationships between people (e.g. class, colonial) – were deeply disruptive of the old European order.   Just as science can be driven both by pure curiosity and by the desire to harness nature’s energies for human purposes, so sociology has its ‘pure’ scholars, its partisans and its reformists.  The four writers – three European and one African American – we will look at all combined these multiple qualities. They all offered both techniques of thinking that continue to have major influence. Their foundational concerns with questions of capitalism and modernity, class and social hierarchies, nationalism and racism, alongside their general attempt to grapple with the question of how societies change remain central to the sociological approach. These four thinkers were all also public figures, concerned with the political, economic and cultural problems of their day. This dedication to studying and commenting on society in an active and involved way remains an aspiration central to many sociologists’ enduring interest in the subject.
They asked three sorts of question:
1.  The big ones: Does history have a coherent overall shape?  How does change happen?  What holds societies together? 
2. Questions of political and cultural diagnosis: what are the major groups and forces at work today?  How is politics in the conventional sense affected by social factors such as class, or status, ethnicity, or religion, or the state of the economy?
3.  Is social science a science?  Some of them thought that sociology could be a science comparable to physics, that thechange remain central to the sociological approach. These four thinkers were all also public figures, concerned with the political, economic and cultural problems of their day. This dedication to studying and commenting on society in an active and involved way remains an aspiration central to many sociologists’ enduring interest in the subject.
They asked three sorts of question:
1.  The big ones: Does history have a coherent overall shape?  How does change happen?  What holds societies together? 
2. Questions of political and cultural diagnosis: what are the major groups and forces at work today?  How is politics in the conventional sense affected by social factors such as class, or status, ethnicity, or religion, or the state of the economy?
3.  Is social science a science?  Some of them thought that sociology could be a science comparable to physics, that the laws of social life and/or of history might be discovered; others were committed to ‘science’ in a more general sense, as systematic inquiry even if there were no timeless laws that stretch across history; others just made very confident general statements about social life that cannot be ‘tested’ in any obvious way.