SOCIOLOGY

Auguste Comte coined the word sociology in the 1830s, but the idea of sociology had been developing for more than a century. The French tradition in which Comte (1798–1857) wrote stretched back through Henri de Saint-Simon, the marquis de Condorcet, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the baron de Montesquieu. But sociology's roots could be traced equally to Giambattista Vico in Italy; Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in England; Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Scottish moralists; and Johann Gottfried von Herder and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Germany. In different ways, these figures all contributed to the rise of a notion of "society" and "social organization" as distinct from government. This idea was prominent in explorations of natural law, pivotal to histories of civil society, and influentially linked to the development of nationalism. Starting in the late eighteenth century, it took on new significance in reflections on social change and attempts to redesign government. The American and especially the French revolutions marked a sharp increase in self-conscious attempts to reorganize society. The latter also brought a conservative reaction, famously from Edmund Burke and Joseph-Marie de Maistre, which stressed the danger of interfering too sharply with the social order inherited from centuries of trial-and-error testing and tradition.

social change and social order

Sociology was from the outset marked by both an engagement with projects of social reform and an understanding of society as quasi natural, even organic—and by the tension between the two. This grew more pronounced during the nineteenth century. New inequalities; industrialization and the squalor associated with rapid urbanization; intensified fear of immigrants; crime; and challenges to idealized family life all brought forth privately organized ameliorative projects, incipient welfare states, and challenging social movements. Sociology took shape while trying to inform each. But at the same time, concern for social order—and attempts to reestablish it after revolutionary disruptions—was enduringly central. The most influential theories of the century were broadly evolutionary and "objectivist" in trying to treat society as a natural phenomenon; Max Weber's interpretative historical sociology marked the most distinguished exception.

Sociology grew in distinct national traditions. A core concern was the course of social transformation associated with urbanization and industrial capitalism and its implications for social solidarity. In Germany, this received classical formulation in Ferdinand Tönnies's distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft (1887). The basic contrast between small-scale village communities featuring dense social networks, face-to-face relationships, and a shared self-understanding with not only cities but also the larger, more abstract, more formally organized society of which they were a part was widely influential. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) addressed a similar theme with an 1893 contrast between "mechanical" solidarity based on similarity (informed by anthropological accounts of segmentary lineage societies) and "organic" solidarity structured through the exchanges and complementarity among differentiated groups and occupations in larger, more modern societies. Sir Henry Maine (1822–1888) in 1861 stressed the shift from inherited status to individually chosen contract. More generally, the rise of modern society was seen as producing a new level of individualism.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) had coined the term individualism in his study titled Democracy in America (1835–1840), and like democracy itself it could be seen as a trend without always being praised. Tocqueville was not a professional sociologist but very much part of the intellectual history of the emerging field. His concerns for how a more egalitarian society that prized individual choice might be held together without turning to tyrannical central government not only reflected ancient questions of political philosophy but also informed the development of sociology. If political scientists commonly approached this question in terms of the best structures of government, sociologists addressed it in terms of the sources of social solidarity, which they saw variously in culture and structures of social relationships.

Perhaps the single most influential sociologist of the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), was also concerned with the distinctive character of modern society but, unlike Tocqueville, unambiguously in favor of its growing individualism. Spencer's American follower, William Graham Sumner, would link Spencer's concept of "survival of the fittest" to individualistic free-market doctrines in the notion of "social Darwinism." Spencer situated his major works of sociology within an attempt to achieve an integrated theory of all evolution, biological—and indeed geological and cosmic—as well as sociological. Perhaps partly for this reason, and also because it was resisted at the ancient universities, sociology did not develop much as an autonomous discipline in Britain, though social reformers and social historians advanced sociological theories, and the social survey was an important factor in policy making and public debate.

The continental European pioneer of the social survey was Frédéric Le Play (1806–1882), whose studies of work and family life in the mid-nineteenth century pioneered empirical research. A Catholic conservative, Le Play was concerned not to promote social change but to defend the importance of the institutions that contained it and shaped social solidarity, including religion, parental authority, and social hierarchy. The effort to document social conditions—and social problems—was, however, taken up by a variety of activists and reformers. In Britain, Charles Booth and B. Seebohm Rowntree focused on the extent of urban poverty as well as the diversity of livelihoods of the people of London (building on similar efforts by less analytic social reformers such as Henry Mayhew).

sociology as science

In most of Europe, the project of a scientific sociology was developed with a strong emphasis on theory. Comte coined not only the term sociology, but also positivism, by which he meant a program of scientific work that would guide the reorganization of society. Positivism took shape both as a widely influential movement for administrative reform and as a proposed nontheological religion of society itself (which was practiced well into the twentieth century, most prominently in Latin America but also in Britain, where a Church of Humanity was active in London). Comte's positivism also informed an approach to sociology as a matter of systemic theoretical integration incorporating sound empirical knowledge but never reducible to empiricism. The idea of seeing society as a whole was as central as the idea that it moved through historical stages of development. This would remain pivotal for Durkheim in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was if anything even more concerned with systemic totality, but his primary unit of analysis was not society, but modes of production such as capitalism. Any particular existing state of society was, for Marx, a conjuncture of an underlying causal structure—more or less generalizable across cases—and a number of more specific historical conditions and inheritances. Germany could thus see its future in the capitalist industrialization of England—even if Germany was also marked by political disunity and more advanced philosophy. Marx's theory was influential but not always dominant in a socialist movement that informed much nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sociology throughout Europe (and indeed America, where history was later rewritten to minimize this). The relation between reformist (or even revolutionary) activism and science was a hotly contested concern as sociology began to gain an institutional foothold in universities toward the end of the nineteenth century. As in much connected to the development of modern universities, Germany was here a pioneer.

Comtean positivism had decreed the primacy of objective science, but not so clearly achieved it. Sociologists throughout the nineteenth century struggled with this problem. In the English-language countries, the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and the example of Darwinian biology dominated. In France, Cartesian rationalism remained preeminent, but experimental science grew in significance. In Germany, the Methodenstreit drew distinctions between historical sciences, with their emphasis on particular courses of events, and universalizing sciences that abstracted from such particulars to discern general laws. Sociology was divided between the two perspectives.

These national differences also shaped the way in which sociology was counterposed to other fields in an ecology of emerging disciplines. In the English-language countries, the idea of the "social sciences" situated sociology most influentially in relationship to economics and politics, and often focused sociologists on a struggle against utilitarianism. In France, sociology figured among the "human sciences," shaped deeply by philosophy, which ruled the intellectual hierarchy and the first degree curriculum, but in most direct competition with psychology. In Germany (and to varying extents the Nordic countries and the Austro-Hungarian Empire), sociology was usually one of the "historical" or "cultural" sciences, though some sociologists would contest the grouping with projects of identifying more universal social laws, or at least forms.

In every national context, sociologists sought to claim scientific objectivity. This was not merely a matter of claiming freedom from bias, or even distinctive method, but also distinctive objects of analysis. The very existence of society, or the social, was contested. In France, Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) sought to develop sociology in close relationship to psychology, with extensive use of criminal statistics to document his theories about the centrality of imitation to social life. It was against his theories, in large part, that Durkheim sought to distinguish sociology more sharply from psychology, and to stress the autonomy of social facts (partly in response to the Comtean dictum that each science must have its own distinctive level of reality to study). Gustav Le Bon (1841–1931) drew on both Tarde's and Durkheim's ideas of group psychology in studies of crowds and revolutions, but his studies failed to advance a systematic integration of the two. Tarde's influence largely faded, and Durkheim's heirs dominated.

In countries influenced by Germanic intellectual traditions, positivism was recast in terms of the Methodenstreit and strong engagements with economics and law. The Austrian Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) pioneered an analysis of history as the result of the operations of "blind natural law," which he thought centered on struggles between social groups, including races. This was developed more critically and systematically by Gustav Ratzenhofer (1842–1904) as a theory of social interests and the lawfulness of all human organization. Ratzenhofer spent most of his career in the Austrian army, writing in the 1890s a series of studies showing "sociological knowledge" to be the necessary underpinning of politics and indeed all other social sciences. His positivist account of how interests gained lawful expression in social processes later underpinned the work of many of the first university-based sociologists (including not least Albion Small and other founders of the "Chicago school").

None of the most important early academic sociologists in Germany held his main academic appointments as a sociologist or institutionalized a department. Tönnies (1855–1936) was affiliated with the University of Kiel for more than fifty years but only for eight as a full professor. Berlin—both the city and the university—was a more vital center for German sociology. Yet anti-Semitism helped to minimize the academic opportunities for Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who gained a chair only late in his life after an intervention from the more socially respectable and academically central Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber himself was prominent in history, law, and economics as well as sociology—an interdisciplinary tradition that would continue with his brother Alfred Weber (1868–1958) and Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), a founder of the sociology of religion. Simmel distinguished sociology as a neo-Kantian inquiry into social forms from the concrete manifestations of those forms in empirical specifics. But he was nonetheless interested in both sides of the universalizing/particularizing distinction, as his Philosophy of Money (1900) showed. Max Weber and Tönnies were more deeply historical in orientation but also engaged in developing conceptual frameworks that would make interpretation and analysis of historical patterns systematic and allow at least qualified generalization. Weber's specific notion of analyzing "ideal types" was designed to allow the integration of attention to subjective categories informing social action and objectification through study of how concrete cases related to more abstract formulations.

Sociology gained academic stature most prominently through the work of Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, and others who came to maturity in the 1890s. From then until World War I, they laid foundations for the new discipline and recruited many of those who would carry it forward as an autonomous field in the universities after the war: Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) extended the Weberian tradition; Leopold von Wiese (1876–1969) pursued the formal analytic approach of Simmel; and Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) was the most influential of the several Durkheimians (whose influence was at least as great in anthropology). Though Germany produced a number of influential sociologists, it was slow to institutionalize the discipline in departments. Durkheim achieved this in France, persuading the Sorbonne to include sociology in the name of his chair (alongside education), and founding both a school of followers and a significant journal, the Année sociologique. L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929), though he was perhaps more a political philosopher than a sociologist and saw sociology less as a separate discipline than a theme to be pursued by many, eventually founded a department at the London School of Economics (where Mannheim was later drawn to the faculty) and the Sociological Review. But while European thought was enormously influential, academic institutionalization and graduate training was more advanced in the United States.

World War I was a sharp blow to the generation of the 1890s, and to the broadly progressive orientation of late-nineteenth-century sociologists. Both history and human nature appeared more problematic, and the challenges of achieving social integration that had driven many of the earlier sociologists demanded reconceptualization as a much-longer-term research program. The Italian Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), who had previously published major contributions to economics, became perhaps the single most influential European sociologist of the years after World War I. For the rest of the twentieth century, the relationship between the rational and the irrational, important earlier to Weber, gained new centrality as a fundamental sociological problem.

See alsoComte, Auguste; Durkheim, Emile; Marx, Karl; Simmel, Georg; Spencer, Herbert; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Weber, Max.

bibliography

Bottomore, Tom, and Robert A. Nisbet, eds. A History of Sociological Analysis. New York, 1978.

Coser, Lewis A. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. Edited by Robert K. Merton. 2nd ed. New York, 1977.

Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930. New York, 1958. Reprint, with a new introduction by Stanley Hoffman, New Brunswick, N.J., 2002.

Levine, Donald N. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago, 1995.

Nisbet, Robert A. The Sociological Tradition. New York, 1966.

Craig Calhoun