What is Sociology: Origin and Famous Sociologists

Harriet Martineau was arguably the first female sociologist. She was an early observer of social practices such as economics, social class, religion, suicide, government, and women”s rights.

Martineau was also the first to translate Comte”s writings from French to English, introducing sociology to the anglosphere. She developed a systematic way to compare social institutions in her two most famous works: Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) .

In these works, Martineau expressed the idea that she found the structure of capitalism at odds with the moral principles that people in the United States profess. She pointed out faults in the free enterprise system, where workers were exploited and left in poverty while business owners became wealthy.

Nonetheless, Martineau”s ideas were discounted by her contemporaries on virtue of the male-domination of academia.

Karl Marx was a German philosopher and economist who co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels. In addition to being highly influential over the following centuries, Marx and Engels’ book presents a theory of society that differed greatly from Comte”s (Marx, 2012).

Unlike Comte, Marx believed that societies grew and changed because of the struggles of different social classes over the means of production.

Marx created his theories over the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.

As goods became mass-produced and more and more of the working classes went to work in factories and plants, Marx noticed that the emerging 19th century economic system led to great disparities in wealth between the owners of the factories and those who worked there (Marx, 2012).

Marx believed that the inequalities of capitalism would become so extreme that workers would eventually revolt, leading to the collapse of capitalism.

According to Marx, from the remnants of this collapsed economic system, an equitable economic system where everything is owned communally and distributed as needed would emerge. Marx called this system communism.

Herbert Spencer influenced the work of many early sociologists such as Emile Durkheim. In effect, he rejected both Comte”s philosophy and Marx”s theory of class struggle.

Instead, Spencer believed that the fundamental sociological division in the world was between military societies, where cooperation was secured by force, and industrial societies, where cooperation was voluntary and spontaneous.

According to Spencer, societies grow through economic and other forms of cooperation by social individuals who display a “social self-consciousness.” In societies where industrial and thus peaceful social relations predominate, the principal job of the community is to protect the freedom of all citizens to adapt to circumstances.

Societies, in Spencer”s view, were social organisms (Offer, 2019).

George Simmel was a German art critic who wrote widely on social and political issues. Similar to Spencer, Simmel rejected Comte”s positivism and investigated subjects such as social conflict, the function of money, individual identity in city life, and the fear of outsiders by Europeans.

Simmel generally focused on building theories around the interactions between individuals on a small scale. This form of relationship-focused sociology became known as methodological relationism.

Simmel became largely interested in conflicts and contradictions in the realms of the social world that he was examining.

Despite his immense work on the sociology of interactions, his contributions are often not included in academic histories, sometimes overshadowed by his contemporaries Durkheim, Mead, and Weber (Ritzer & Goodman, 2004).

Emile Durkheim legitimized sociology as a formal academic discipline by establishing the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, in addition to publishing numerous influential sociological works.

Durkheim laid out his theory of how societies transform from a primitive state into a capitalist, industrial society, and believed that people rise to their proper levels in society based on merit.

In a way parallel to Comte, Durkheim believed that sociologists would study objective “social facts,” and that these studies could determine whether a society was healthy or pathologically sick.

While healthy societies were stable, in his view, pathological societies experienced a breakdown in social norms between individuals and society.

Durkheim called this breakdown anomie and studied societal breakdown through the lens of suicide.

In his work, Suicide, Durkheim examined suicide statistics in different police districts as a way to research differences between catholic and Protestant communities.

From the differential rates of suicide among communities where different religions predominate that Durkheim found, he concluded that these differences corresponded to socio-religious factors rather than individual or psychological causes.

George Herbert Mead was a philosopher and sociologist who focused on the ways that the mind and the self develop as a result of social processes.

Mead concluded that the mind and the self develop as a result of social processes, and the way that individuals come to view themselves depends largely on their interactions with others.

Mead also drew a distinction between those that impacted an individual”s life directly — significant others — and the organized and generalized attitude of a social group — generalized others.

Mead”s theories largely developed the symbolic interactionist school of philosophy and sociology, which addresses the manner in which society is created and maintained through face-to-face, repeated, meaningful interactions among individuals (Carter & Fuller, 2016).

Max Weber was a prominent German sociologist who wrote on topics ranging from political change in Russia to the social forces that affected factory workers.

In perhaps his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber — in the view of some sociologists — argued that the beliefs of many Protestants, Calvinists in particular, lead to the creation of capitalism.

On a large level, Weber believed that standard scientific methods were largely inadequate in predicting the behavior of groups in the ways that positivists such as Auguste Comte thought they would be.

Instead, Weber argued that the influence of culture on human behavior, as well as the cultural biases that researchers themselves had, needed to be taken into account.