Sociology

# History

The discipline we today know as **sociology** has its root in the era of the so called **"Enlightenment"**. The Enlightenment is best understood, not as a new fixed set of ideas and beliefs but as a new method of thinking with an emphasis on *reason* that lead to the practice of questioning and re-examining established theories and hypothesis. Both Science and Empiricism can be said to have arisen during that era eventually leading to the emergence of sociology in the mid-nineteenth century. The main premise of the new discipline was, that society could be the subject of scientific explanation just as well as any of the traditional fields. It was **Auguste Comte**, who coined the term sociology in 1839 and who outlined the following three components of sociological enquiry:

1. the analysis of the central elements and functions of social systems, using
2. concrete historical and comparative methods in order to
3. establish testable generalizations about them.

Nevertheless, it was **Emile Durkheim** who really laid the ideational foundation for the discipline of sociology. He held that sociology studied *social facts*, circumstances and conditions external to the individual which determine its course of action. However, sociology came to embrace not only the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment but also ideas of the counter-enlightenment. This included an emphasis placed also on traditions, emotions, rituals and ceremonies. Durkheim especially emphasized subjective feelings such as solidarity and commitment to certain moral codes as equally important to social cohesion as objective social facts as such. This same combination of objective and subjective elements can also be found in Karl Marx and Max Weber. Marx analyzed the economic dynamics of capitalism but also the social and moral problems inherent to that kind of system and Weber combined his scientific approach with a concern for both, material conditions and idea systems.

Both, the enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment were cause and result of radical economic, political and religious transformations that had been taking place all over Europe. One of the most important being the **Industrial Revolution**, the application of power-driven machinery to manufacturing.

Even though today's sociology can be understood as the result of inquiries into broad social changes after the mid-nineteenth century, concern for social bonds and the maintenance of such bonds has existed long before these times and not only in Western Europe. Ibn Khaldun, Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides are all notable examples of theorizers writing about sociological questions before the discipline as such had come into being. Although the questions they posed and the topics they addressed can be found in contemporary sociology as well, they are better understood as philosophers not sociologists. The crucial difference here being their aim to not only understand and predict, scientific approach, but also to moralize and prescribe a better way, ideological commitment. Within that ideological framework, they regarded the order of the world as static and aimed at establishing what the natural and moral order of the world was.
It is very hard to determine who is or is not to be regarded as an important classical sociologist. Many scholars were excluded from that category in their days, mainly due to discrimination because of their race, gender or religion and even today it always depends on the focus one takes and the emphasis placed who results being included as being an important classical sociologists. It is even harder in contemporary sociology especially since an increased fragmentation of the discipline has been taking place during the past 25 years. During this time it has both become more specialized (breaking up into ever more subdisciplines) and more broad (linking to other academic fields).

# Navigating Sociological Theory

The book taken as a foundation for this section relies on two core concepts for the construction of an analytical frame to sociology: **Order** and **Action**. These two concepts have been at the very core of social questions at least since the time of the philosophers of ancient Greece. The questions emanating from the respective concepts are

1. **Order**: What is it that accounts for patterns or predictabilities which leads to social life not being disconnected or chaotic but rather demonstrate the existence of an ordered social universe?
2. **Action**: What are the forces that motivate individuals or groups to act and steer their actions into certain directions?

To the question of order there are two possible answers:

1. **Collectivist**: Patterns of social life are the product of structural arrangements or historical conditions that have shaped society and work *down* on individuals. Society is thus seen as an own reality as such that operated independently from the will of the individual.
2. **Individualistic**: Social order is the result of ongoing interactions between individuals and groups which, thus, create and alter this very same order working its way *up* to society.

To the question of action there are again two possible strands of answers

1. **Nonrational**: Action is regarded to be nonrational when it is guided by values, morals, norms, traditions etc., being a broad spectrum of possible motivations.
2. **Rational**: Action is regarded to be rational when it is motivated by the attempt to maximize rewards while minimizing costs, individuals being calculating and strategic, a narrow spectrum of motivations emphasizing interests over values.

This whole section is a rough summary from the introductory chapter of the here referenced book

Neil Smelser takes a different approach to creating a conceptual map of Sociology. In his book *Problematics of Sociology* from 1997 Smelser investigates the four different levels on which sociological analysis usually takes place and at the problematics encountered on each of these different levels. Smelser defines a **problematic** as 'the generic, recurrent, never resolved and never completely resolvable issues' that influence how we pursue our work, how theoretical conflicts arise and how we debate with each other.

Smelser then defines the four levels of sociological research

1. **microsociology**, involves the study of the person and the interpersonal, encompassing social interaction in small groups (may involve theories like Symbolic Interactionism, a relatively new focus of study in sociology and explicitly distinct from psychological studies of the individual
2. **Mesociology** studies intermediate structures that are located at the sub-societal level and involve formal groups, organizations, social movements and some aspects of institutions
3. **Macrosociology** focusing on the nation-state and on societies as a whole, was the main focus of classical sociology and is still a central concern even though there are developments today that can be seen as indicators for the 'decline of the nation-state'
4. **Global Sociology** a focus on the world as a whole or various societies at once, however, since it is very difficult to design theoretically viable comparative studies that involve such a multitude of differently structured societies or different ethnicities, cultures, most studies of global sociology eventually focus on the nation-state as a baseline again.

Smelser also argued that it is misleading to treat Sociology as Social *Science* since it was created out of the context of the already established humanistic tradition in history and philosophy, the scientific tradition of the natural sciences and certain aesthetic traditions. This variety of influences has led to a certain loss of a sense of orientation and led to much internal division and external critique of the discipline.
Smelser defines the three main orientations of sociology as follows

1. **Scientific** orientation, focuses on theoretically closed logical formulations, conducting dispassionate seemingly objective and non-evaluative and deterministic analysis, empirical investigation, precision and measurement and a method of inquiry that seeks to control for as many causes as possible to isolate the decisive one
2. **Humanistic** orientation is the one that focuses on humans and entails a preoccupation with the human condition in general and in particular, it is explicitly normative in perspective and focuses on meanings and whole systems of meanings that constitute culture
3. **Artistic** orientation refers to two different concepts. First, an aesthetic approach to subject matter with an emphasis on patterns, second, an emphasis on the *application* of knowledge

The interplay of these three different orientations lead to two central experiences of sociology

1. **External**: People from the outside often approach sociology with the expectation that it should purely and fully commit to one of the three orientations and then criticize it for failing to do so (the most typical example is scientists raising doubts about the rightful depiction of sociology as a social *science* as they claim it fails to maintain true objectivity and to conduct sufficient empirical research)
2. **Internal**: Sociology is also torn on the inside due to sociologists who adopt these internal critiques and a wide array of different opinions that arise from the orientations regarding ideology and purpose of sociology)

The arising debates are organized by Smelser as follows:

1. Sociology as Value-free (scientific) vs. value-relevant (humanistic)
2. Sociology as offering sound basic knowledge (scientific) vs. Sociology as applied knowledge (artistic)
3. Sociologists as agents of knowledge creation (scientific) vs. Sociologists as agents of ameliorative or revolutionary improvement (artistic and humanistic alike)
4. Emphasis on positive facts and behavior (scientific) vs. emphasis on phenomenology and individual meaning (humanistic)

(Perhaps also American (positivist, scientific) vs. British (artistic, humanistic))

The section on Smelser was written on the basis of a lecture given by Dr Cristina Flesher Fominaya, on the 12th of September 2016 in the class *Advanced Social Theory* and the corresponding handout to this lecture.

# Core approaches and ideas

**Critical theory**, critical theory may be defined as a self-conscious social critique that is aimed at change and emancipation through enlightenment and that does not cling dogmatically to its own doctrinal assumptions. It 'began as an effort to revise Marxism in the face of the flourishing of of subjectively orientated thinking at the beginning of the twentieth century.'
Related to Critical Theory is the Frankfurt School.

# References

1. ↑ Applerouth, Scott, Desfor Edles, Laura, *Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory*
2. ↑  Seidman, Steven, Alexander, Jeffrey,*The New Social Theory Reader*, p. 5