Social Inequalities

The modernity that emerged from Enlightenment ideas and the technological innovations of the Industrial offered the promise not only of greater prosperity but also of a more just society. In Europe, at least, the absolute power of monarchs, the aristocracy, and the Church was challenged, and old dogmas were discredited by rational and scientific thought. At the same time, advances in technology brought mechanization to many trades and gave birth to new industries, increasing wealth and bringing hope of improvement to people’s working lives.

Class consciousness

As the modern industrialized society became established, however, it became apparent that it was not the utopian dream that had been expected. By the 19th century, many thinkers had begun to realize that this progress came at a cost, and that some of the promises had yet to be kept. Instead of becoming more just, modern industrial society had created new inequalities.

Among the first to study the new social order was Friedrich Engels, who saw the emergence of a working class exploited by the owners of the mills and factories. With Karl Marx, he identified oppression of this class as the result of capitalism, which in turn fueled and fed off industrialization.

Marx and Engels considered the social problems of industrial society in material, economic terms, and saw inequality as a division between the working class (the proletariat) and the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie). Later sociologists also recognized that social inequality is manifested in a class system, but suggested that the stratification was more complex. Max Weber, for example, proposed that as well as economic situation, status and political standing also play a part. Perceptions of class and the issue of class consciousness became focuses for sustained sociological study of inequality, including the concept of “habitus,” as explained by Pierre Bourdieu.

Racial oppression

While Engels and Marxconcentrated on the economic disparity between the classes, others realized that it was not only the working classes that suffered social injustice. Harriet Martineau highlighted the gap between the Enlightenment ideal of equal rights and the reality of modern society. Her experiences in the US, where she encountered slavery, showed that even in a democracy founded on ideals of liberty, some groups— women, ethnic minorities, and the working classes—were excluded from participation in shaping society. The connection she made with these various forms of oppression was re-explored by bell hooks some 150 years later.

Even when slavery was finally abolished, true emancipation was incomplete; the political exclusion of black people—by being denied the vote—persisted in the USA well into the 20th century. Black people in the USA and Europe also faced prejudices as a hangover from slavery and European colonialism that have persisted to the present day. Sociologists such as W.E.B. Du Bois examined the position of ethnic groups in predominantly white European industrial societies, and in the 20th century attention became focused on the connections between race and social inequality. Elijah Anderson began his study of black people and their association with the concept of “the ghetto”; Edward Said analysed negative Western perceptions of “the East”; and British sociologists such as Paul Gilroy sought to find ways of eradicating racism in modern multicultural societies.

 

Gender equality

Women likewise struggled for political suffrage, but even after this had been achieved they faced  injustice in societies that remained fundamentally patriarchal through the 20th century and up to the present day. It had taken “first wave” feminism over a century to get women the vote, and the task of the second wave, starting soon after World War II, was to examine and overcome persistent social injustice based on gender.

Rather than simply addressing the economic and political factors underlying the continued oppression of women, Sylvia Walby suggested a comprehensive analysis of the social systems that maintain society’s patriarchal structure, while R.W. Connell pointed out the prevalence of conventional perceptions—socially constructed forms—of masculinity that reinforce the concept of patriarchal society

 

I BROADLY ACCUSE THE BOURGEOISIE OF SOCIAL MURDER

Living in England from 1842 to 1844, the German philosopher Friedrich Engels had seen, first-hand, the devastating effects of industrialization on workers and their children. The bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, he said, knowingly causes the workers’ “life of toil and wretchedness... but takes no further trouble in the matter.”

He claimed the bourgeoisie was turning a blind eye to their part in the early deaths of their workers, when it was within their power to change things, so he accused them of “social murder.” In the 1840s, England was seen as the workshop of the world; it enjoyed a unique position at the center of the Industrial Revolution. Engels observed that it was undergoing a massive but silent transformation that had altered the whole of English civil society.

Industrialization had driven down prices, so handcrafted work, which was more expensive, was less in demand; workers moved to the cities only to endure harsh conditions and financial insecurity. The industrialized, capitalist economy lurched from boom to bust, and workers’ jobs could quickly disappear. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie grew richer by treating the workers as disposable labor.

The legacy of industrialism

In Engels’ first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, he described the appalling way of life of the workers, or proletariat, in Manchester, London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, and found similar situations in all these cities. He reported filthy streets with pools of stagnant urine and excrement, filled with the stench of animal putrefaction from the tanneries. cholera outbreaks occurred, along with constant epidemics of consumption and typhus. Workers were packed into one-room huts or the cellars of damp houses that had been built along old ditches to save the house-owner money. They lived in conditions that defied all consideration of cleanliness and health, Engels said—and this in Manchester, “the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world.

The proletariat were worked to the point of exhaustion, wearing cheap clothing that gave no protection against accidents or the climate. They could buy only the food spurned by the bourgeoisie, such as decaying meat, wilted vegetables, “sugar” that was the refuse of soap-boiling firms, and cocoa mixed with earth.

When work disappeared and wages failed, even this meager diet proved impossible, and many workers and their families began to starve; this caused illness and a continued inability to work, should work become available. Doctors were unaffordable, and very often entire families starved to death. The worker, Engels explained, could only obtain what he needed — healthy living conditions, secure employment, and a decent wage — from the bourgeoisie, “which can decree his life or death.” He was insistent that this hugely exploitative, capital-owning class should therefore take immediate steps to change workers’ conditions and stop its careless murder of an entire social class.

Friedrich Engels

Political theorist and philosopher Friedrich Engels was born in Germany in 1820. His father was a German industrialist who struggled with Engels’ reluctance to attend school or work in the family business. As a teenager, he wrote articles under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald, which gained him access to a group of left-wing intellectuals.

After working for a short time in a family factory in Manchester, England, he became interested in communism. In 1844 he traveled to Paris, where he met Karl Marx and became his colleague and financial sponsor. They jointly wrote The Communist Manifesto, and worked together until Marx’s death in 1883, after which Engels completed the second and third volumes of Das Kapital, along with many books and articles of his own.

THE PROBLEM OF THE 20TH CENTURY IS THE PROBLEM OF THE COLOR LINE

Toward the end of the 19th century, the US social reformer and freed slave Frederick Douglass drew attention to the continuing prejudice against black people in the US. He claimed that although blacks had ceased to belong to individuals, they had nevertheless become slaves of society. Out of the depths of slavery, he said, “has come this prejudice and this color line,” through which white dominion was asserted in the workplace, the ballot box, the legal courts, and everyday life.

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois investigated the idea of the color line in The Souls of Black Folk. A literary, sociological, and political landmark, it examines the changing position of African-Americans from the US Civil War and its aftermath to the early 1900s, in terms of the physical, economic, and political relations of black and white people in the South. It concludes that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line”— the continuing division between the opportunities and perspectives of blacks and whites. Du Bois begins his study by pointing out that no white person is willing to talk about race explicitly, choosing instead to act out prejudice in various ways. But what they really want to know is this: “How does it feel to be a problem?”

Du Bois finds the question unanswerable, because it only makes sense from a white perspective—black people do not see themselves as “a problem.” He then examines how this duality of perspective has occurred and gives the example of his first encounter with racism. While at primary school, a new pupil refused to accept a greeting card from Du Bois, at which point “it dawned on me that I was different from the others.”

He felt like them in his heart, he says, but realized that he was “shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Initially undaunted, he says that he felt no need to tear down the veil until he grew up and saw that all the most dazzling opportunities in the world were for white people, not black people. There was a color line, and he was standing on the side that was denied power, opportunity, dignity, and respect.

Identity crisis

Du Bois suggests that the color line is internal too. Black people, according to him, see themselves in two ways simultaneously : through the reflection of the white world, which views them with amused contempt and pity, and through their own sense of self, which is more fluid and less well defined. These combine to form what Du Bois calls a doubleconsciousness: “...two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

The unfolding history of the black person in the US is, Du Bois claims, the history of this inner conflict, which itself is a result of the external, worldly battle between black and white people. He suggests that a black person wants to merge the doubleconsciousness into one state, and find a true African-American spirit that does not Africanize America, nor “bleach his African soul in a flood of white Americanism.”

The Freedmen’s Bureau

How had black people become the “problem”? To try to explain this issue, Du Bois looks to the history of slavery in the US and the turning point of the Civil War. According to him, slavery was the real cause of the war, which started in 1861. As the Union army of the northern states marched into the South, slaves fled to join it. At first, slaves were returned to their owners, but the policy changed and they were kept as military labor

In 1863, slaves were declared free, and the government set up the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (also called the Freedmen’s Bureau) to issue food, clothing, and abandoned property to the “flood” of destitute fugitive former slaves (men, women, and children). However, the Bureau was run by military staff ill-equipped to deal with social reorganization. The Bureau was also hampered by the sheer size of the task: the promise of handing over slave-driven plantations to former slaves “melted away” when it became clear that over 800,000 acres were affected.

One of the great successes of the Bureau was the provision of free schools for all children in the South. Du Bois points out that this was seen as a problem, because “the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro.” The opposition to black education in the South “showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood.”

At the same time, the Bureau sowed division in legal matters. According to Du Bois, it used its courts to “put the bottom rail on top”—in other words, it favored black litigants. Meanwhile, the civil courts often aided the former slavemasters. Du Bois describesmwhite people as being “ordered about, seized, imprisoned, and punished over and over again” by the Bureau courts, while black people were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful (white) men.

The Bureau also opened a Freedman’s Bank in 1865 to handle the deposits of former slave men and women. This initiative was hampered by incompetency, and the bank eventually crashed, taking the dollars of the freedmen with it. Du Bois says that this was the least of the loss, because “all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that a nation which today sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made good.”

The Bureau had set up a system of free (non-slave) labor and ex-slave proprietorship, secured the recognition of black people as free people in courts of law, and founded common schools. The greatest failing of the Bureau was that it did not establish goodwill between the former masters and the ex-slaves; in fact, it increased enmity. The color line remained, but instead of being explicit it now operated in more subtle ways.

Compromise or agitation?

Following the post-war period known as the Reconstruction, some of the newly won black rights started to slip away. A ruling in a US legal case (Plessy vs Ferguson, 1896) made segregation in public places permissible and set a pattern of racial separation in the South that lasted until Brown vs Board of Education, 1954. Anxiety caused by modernity also fueled a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and its nativist white supremacism, accompanied by a rise in racist violence, including lynchings.

In 1895 the African-American politican Booker T. Washington had given a speech now known as “the Atlanta Compromise.” He suggested that black people should be patient, adopt white middleclass standards, and seek selfadvancement by self-improvement and education to show their worth. By foregoing political rights in return for economic rights and legal justice, Washington argued that social change would be more likely in the longer term. This accommodating stance became the dominant ideology of the time.

Du Bois disagreed strongly, and in The Souls of Black Folk he said that while black people did not expect full civic rights immediately, they were certain that the way for a people to gain their rights “is not by voluntarily throwing them away.” Du Bois had hoped to eliminate racism and segregation through social science, but he came to believe that political agitation was the only effective strategy.

Stretching the color line

In 1949, Du Bois visited the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, where two-thirds of the population had been killed during the Nazi occupation, and 85 percent of the city lay in ruins. He was shocked by the experience, which he said gave him a “more complete understanding of the Negro problem.” Faced with such absolute devastation and destruction, and knowing that it was a direct consequence of racist segregation and violence, Du Bois reassessed his analysis of the color line and declared it a phenomenon that can occur to any cultural or ethnic group. In his 1952 essay for the magazine Jewish Life, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” he writes: “The race problem... cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of... human hate and prejudice.” It is therefore not color that matters so much as the “line,” which can be drawn to articulate difference and hatred in any group or society.

Activist and scholar

Du Bois became one of the founder members of the civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His ideas were concerned with people of African descent everywhere, and during the 1920s he helped found the Pan-African Association in Paris, France, and organized a series of pan-African congresses around the world. However, at the time of writing about the African soul, in the early 1900s, he said that the conditions that were necessary to achieve a true and unified African-American spirit had not yet been reached.

Du Bois applied systematic methods of fieldwork to previously neglected areas of study. The use of empirical data to catalog the details of black people’s lives enabled him to dispel widely held stereotypes. For example, he produced a wealth of data on the effects of urban life on African- Americans in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which suggests that rather than being caused by anything innate, crime is a product of the environment. His pioneering sociological research and thinking was a huge influence on later prominent civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Du Bois is recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century.

THE POOR ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE ORDINARY LIVING PATTERNS, CUSTOMS, AND ACTIVITIES OF LIFE PETER TOWNSEND (1928–2009)

Poverty was defined by the social campaigner Seebohm Rowntree at the beginning of the 20th century as astate in which “total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency.” This is the “subsistence level” definition of poverty, which has been used by governments to determine the cost of a person’s basic needs such as food, rent, fuel, and clothing.

Food banks have faced surging demand in recent years. They meet basic needs, but often include non-essential foodstuffs that are now considered normal for people to have.

However, in 1979 the British sociologist Peter Townsend said that “poverty” should be defined not in absolute terms, but in terms of relative deprivation. He indicated that every society has an average level in terms of living conditions, diet, amenities, and the type of activities people can participate in. Where an individual or family lacks the resources to obtain these, they are socially excluded from normal life, as well as being materially deprived. Other factors, such as poor skills or bad health, must also be taken into account.

Townsend — a leading campaigner who cofounded the Child Poverty Action Group — pointed out that there was an assumption that poverty had been steadily decreasing in affluent societies. But he drew attention to the increasing income gap between those at the top and lower levels of society, and said that when a country becomes wealthier, but income distribution is markedly uneven, the number of people in poverty is bound to increase.

 

THERE AIN’T NO BLACK IN THE UNION JACK

In his book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, British sociologist Paul Gilroy focuses on racism in Britain in the 20th century. He points out that in the 1970s Britain worried about its “national decline” almost obsessively, and many commentators ascribed this to the “dilution of homogenous and continuous national stock”— specifically, Gilroy says, to the arrival of black people in Britain.

Gilroy indicates that fixed notions of nationality, such as “Britishness,” may not be intentionally racist, but they have racist consequences. In seeking to define Britishness, 20th-century writers always seemed to imagine a white Britain—black people were seen as permanent outsiders. They were denied authentic national membership on the basis of their “race,” and it was often assumed that their allegiance lay elsewhere.

While accepting that the idea of race has been a historical and political force, Gilroy says that it is no more than a social construct a concept created in society. Where some sociologists have suggested a discussion of “ethnicity” or “culture” instead, Gilroy proposes that we should abandon all of these ideas. Whatever terms we use, he says, we are creating a false idea of “natural” categories by putting disparate people into different groups, leading to a division between “them” and “us.”

 

Raciology

According to Gilroy, all these types of discussion leave us enmeshed in what he calls “raciology”—a discourse that assumes certain stereotypes, prejudices, images, and identities. Anti-racists find themselves inverting the position of racist thinkers, but are nevertheless unable to displace the idea of racism altogether. The solution, Gilroy suggests, lies in refusing to accept racial divisions as an inescapable, natural force, and instead developing “an ability to imagine political, economic, and social systems in which ‘race’ makes no sense.”

 

Introduction

Humans are social creatures. Throughout our evolution, from our days of foraging and hunting animals, we have tended to live and work in social groups, which have become progressively larger and more complex. These groups have ranged from simple family units, through clans and tribes, villages and towns, to cities and nation states. Our natural inclination to live and work together has led to the formation of civil societies, which have been shaped by the increasing breadth of our knowledge and sophistication of our technology. In turn, the nature of the society we live in influences our social behavior, affecting virtually every aspect of our lives.

Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society. Albion W. Small US scholar (1854–1926)

Sociology is the study of how individuals behave in groups and how their behavior is shaped by these groups. This includes: how groups are formed; the dynamics that animate them; and how these dynamics maintain and alter the group or bring about social change. Today, sociology’s scope ranges from the theoretical study of social processes, structures, and systems, to the application of these theories as part of social policy. And, because societies consist of a collection of individual people, there is an inevitable connection between the structures of society as a whole and the behavior of its individual members. Sociologists may therefore focus on the institutions and organization of society, the various social groupings and stratifications within it, or the interactions and experiences of individuals. Perhaps surprisingly, sociology is a comparatively modern discipline. Although philosophers in ancient China and ancient Greece recognized the existence of civil society and the benefits of social order, their concern was more political than sociological— how society should be organized and governed, rather than a study of society itself. But, just as political philosophy emerged from these civilizations, sociology appeared as a result of profound changes in Western society during the Age of Enlightenment.

There were several aspects to these changes. Most noticeably, technological advances had provided the machinery that brought about the Industrial Revolution, radically changing methods of production and creating prosperous industrial cities. The traditional certainties based on religious belief were called into question by the philosophy of the Enlightenment. It was not only the authority of the Church that was undermined by this so-called Age of Reason: the old order of monarchies and aristocracies was under threat, with demands for more representative government leading to revolutions in America and France.

Society and modernity A new, modern society was created from the Age of Enlightenment. Sociology began to emerge at the end of the 18th century as a response to this transformation, as philosophers and thinkers attempted to understand the nature of modernity and its effects on society. Inevitably, some simply bemoaned the erosion of traditional forms of social cohesion, such as the family ties and community spirit found within small, rural societies, and the shared values and beliefs offered by a common religion. But others recognized that there were new social forces at work, bringing about social change with a potential for both social order and disorder In keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment, these early social thinkers sought to make their study of society objective, and create a scientific discipline that was distinct from philosophy, history, and politics. The natural sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology) were well established, and the time was ripe for the study of humans and their behavior.

Because of the nature of the Industrial Revolution and the capitalism that it fostered, the first of the new “social sciences” to emerge was economics, pioneered by Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, better known as The Wealth of Nations, in 1776. However, at the same time, the foundations of sociology were also being laid, by philosophers and theorists such as Adam Ferguson and Henri de Saint-Simon, and in the early part of the following century by Auguste Comte, whose scientific approach to the study of society firmly established sociology as a distinct discipline.

Following in Comte’s footsteps came three ground-breaking sociologists, whose different approaches to the analysis and interpretation of social behavior set the agenda for the subject of sociology in the 20th century and beyond: Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Each identified a different aspect of modernity as the major factor in creating social order, disorder, and change. Marx, a materialist philosopher and economist, focused on the growth of capitalism and the subsequent class struggle; Durkheim on the division of labor brought about by industrialization; and Weber on the secularization and rationalization of modern society. All three have had an enthusiastic following, influencing sociology’s major schools of thought to the present day.

 

A social science

Sociology was a product of the Age of Reason, when science and rational thinking began to reign supreme. Early sociologists were therefore anxious that, for their discipline to be taken seriously, their methods should be seen to be rigorously scientific—no mean feat, given the nature of their subject: human social behavior. Comte laid the ground rules for the new “science” of sociology, based on empirical evidence in the same way as the natural sciences. Marx, too, insisted on approaching the subject scientifically, and Durkheim was perhaps the first to gain acceptance for sociology as a social science in the academic world.

To be scientific, any research method must be quantitative—that is to say, have measurable results. Marx and Durkheim could point to facts, figures, and statistics to back up their theories, but others maintained that social research should be more qualitative. Weber especially advocated an interpretive approach, examining what it is like to live in modern society, and the social interactions and relationships that are necessary for social cohesion.

Although this viewpoint was initially dismissed by many as unscientific, sociology has become increasingly interpretive in the latter half of the 20th century, with a methodology that includes a combination of quantitative and qualitative research techniques

 

Social reform

For many sociologists, sociology is more than simply the objective study of society, and the quest to analyze and describe social structures and systems. Sociological theories, like theories in the natural sciences, have practical applications, and can be used to improve the society in which we live. In the 19th century, Comte and Marx saw sociology as a way of understanding the workings of society in order to bring about social change. Marx famously said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it,” and his many followers (sociologists as well as political activists) have taken this to heart.

Durkheim, who was nowhere near as politically radical as Marx, made great efforts to have sociology accepted as an academic discipline. To gain the approval of the authorities, he had to demonstrate not only the subject’s scientific credentials, but also its objectivity, especially in light of the political unrest that had existed in Europe for more than a century following the French Revolution. This somewhat “ivory tower” approach, divorced from the real world, dominated sociology for the first part of the 20th century, but as sociologists gradually adopted a more interpretive stance, they also advocated sociology as a tool of social reform.

This was particularly noticeable among sociologists with a Marxian perspective and others with a leftwing political agenda. After World War II, sociologists, including Charles Wright Mills and Michel Foucault, examined the nature of power in society and its effects on the individual—the ways in which society shapes our lives, rather than the way we shape society, and how we can resist these forces. Even in more mainstream sociology, the mood was changing, and the scope of the subject broadened from the academic study of society as it is, to include practical applications informing public policy and driving social change. In 1972, Howard Becker, a respected US sociological theorist, wrote: “Good sociology... produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal.”

 

Institutions and individuals

 As a reflection of the increased emphasis on the relevance of sociology, the subject gained greater acceptance, and even popular interest, in the second half of the 20th century, and as more thinkers turned their attention to social issues, so the scope of sociology broadened. Evolving from the traditional study of the structures and systems of modern society and the forces of social cohesion and causes of social disorder, it began to examine the connections between these areas and the interactions of individuals and social groups.

A century or so ago, sociologists were divided into those who approached the subject on a macro level (looking at society as a whole and the institutions that it is constituted of), and those who approached it on the micro level— focusing on the individual’s experience of living within a society. While this distinction still exists to an extent, sociologists now recognize that the two are closely connected and many concentrate their work on groups that fall between these two approaches—social classes; ethnic, religious, or cultural groups; families; or groups that are defined by gender or sexual orientation.

Sociology has also responded to the accelerating pace of change. Since World War II, many social conventions have been challenged and new social norms have taken their place. In the Western world, the civil rights and women’s movements have done much to address racial and gender inequalities, and sociological theories have also helped change attitudes to sexuality and family life. Here, as Zygmunt Bauman advises, “The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom.”

 

The global age

Technological innovations have arguably brought about social changes comparable to—or more far-reaching than—those wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Increased automation and computerization, the rise of the service industries, and the growth of consumer society have all contributed to the shape of society many of us live in today. While some sociologists see this as a continuation of the process of modernity, others believe we are now entering a postmodern, post-industrial age.

Advances in communication and mobility have also made the world a smaller place. Sociologists have recently turned their attention to the importance of cultural and national identity and to the effects of globalization, especially on local communities. With new forms of communication—particularly the Internet and fast international travel—have come entirely new social networks. These do not depend on face-to-face contact, but bring together individuals and groups in ways that were unimaginable even 50 years ago. Modern technology has also provided sociology with a sophisticated means of researching and analyzing the evolution of these new social structures

Sociology did not establish its credentials as a discipline until the 20th century, but its many strands of thought, approaches, and fields of study had evolved from centuries of work by historians and philosophers Although the first recognizably sociological study was made by Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century, the pioneers of sociology as we know it today only began to emerge from the late 18th century, when society underwent a sea-change in Western Europe: Enlightenment ideas were replacing traditional beliefs, and the Industrial Revolution was transforming the way that people lived and worked. These observers identified social change being driven by forces that became known as “modernity,” which included the effects of industrialization and the growth of capitalism, and the less tangible (but no less significant) effects of secularization and rationality.

A social science Modern society was the product of the Age of Reason: the application of rational thought and scientific discoveries. In keeping with this mood, the pioneers of sociology, such as French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon and his protégé Auguste Comte, sought to provide verifiable evidence to support theories. Comte believed that not only could the forces of social order be explained by rules similar to the laws of physics and chemistry, but that applied sociology could bring about social reform in the same way that applied sciences had led to technological advances Like Comte, Karl Marx believed that the purpose of studying society is not simply to describe or explain it, but also to improve it. He was just as keen to be scientific, but chose as his model the new science of economics, identifying capitalism as the major factor of modernity driving social change.

Almost a century before Marx, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson had warned of the threat to traditional social cohesion posed by the self-interest of capitalism, and both Harriet Martineau and Marx’s colleague Friedrich Engels described the social injustices of industrialized capitalist society in the mid-19th century. Another pioneer sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, echoed Ferguson’s ideas with his description of two very different forms of social cohesion in traditional and modern societies— a concept variously interpreted by many subsequent sociologists.

Toward the end of the 19th century, sociology proved itself as a field of study distinct from history, philosophy, politics, and economics, largely thanks to Émile Durkheim. Adopting Comte’s idea of applying scientific methodology to the study of society, he took biology as his model. Like Herbert Spencer before him, Durkheim saw society as an “organism” with different “organs,” each with a particular function.

An interpretive approach While Durkheim’s objective rigor won him academic acceptance, not all sociologists agreed that it was possible to examine social issues with scientific methods, nor that there are “laws” of society to be discovered. Max Weber advocated a more subjective—“interpretive”— approach. Whereas Marx named capitalism, and Durkheim industrialization, as the major force of modernity, Weber’s focus was on the effects on individuals of rationalization and secularization.

A strictly scientific discipline was gradually supplanted by a sociology that was a study of qualitative ideas: immeasurable notions such as culture, identity, and power. By the mid-20th century sociologists had shifted from a macro view of society to the micro view of individual experience. Charles Wright Mills urged sociologists to make the connection between the institutions of society (especially what he called the “power elite”) and how they affect the lives of ordinary people. After World War II, others took a similar stance: Harold Garfinkel advocated a complete change of sociological methods, to examine social order through the everyday actions of ordinary people; while Michel Foucault analyzed the way power relations force individuals to conform to social norms, especially sexual norms—an idea taken further in Judith Butler’s study of gender and sexuality.

By the end of the century, a balance had been found between the objective study of society as a whole and the interpretive study of individual experience. The agenda had been set by a handful of ground-breaking sociologists, and their various methods are now being applied to the study of society in an increasingly globalized late-modern world.