Sociology Now, Census Update

3.The nature of the economy. Should only a few people have most of the wealth

and most of the people have very little, or should it be more fairly distributed?

4.The meaning of individualism. What rights and responsibilities does an individ-

ual have toward him- or herself and to others?

5.The rise of secularism. How can religious ideas about God and morality be

reconciled with scientific beliefs about rationality and economic ideas about the

marketplace?

6.The nature and direction of change. Where are we heading? Is it, as Dickens said,

writing about this very time, the best of times or the worst of times?

This dramatic change in American and European society—the Industrial Revo-

lution, the political revolutions in America in 1776 and France in 1789—changed the

way we saw the world. Even the language that we used to describe that world was

transformed. It was during this era that the following words were first used with the

meaning they have today: industry, factory, middle class, democracy, class, intellec-

tual, masses, commercialism, bureaucracy, capitalism, socialism, liberal, conservative,

nationality, engineer, scientist, journalism, ideology—and, of course, sociology

(Hobsbawm, 1962). Politically, some revolutionists thought we should continue those

great movements; conservatives thought we’d gone too far, and it was time to retreat

to more familiar social landscapes.

Sociologists both praised and criticized these new developments.

Classical Sociological Thinkers

The word sociologyitself was introduced in 1838 by a French theorist, Auguste

Comte. To him, it meant “the scientific study of society.” Most of the earliest sociol-

ogists embraced a notion of progress—that society passed through various stages from

less developed to more developed and that this progress was positive, both materi-

ally and morally. This notion of progress is central to the larger intellectual project

of “modernism” of which sociology was a part. Modernism—the belief in evolution-

ary progress, through the application of science—challenged tradition, religion, and

aristocracies as remnants of the past and saw industry, democracy, and science

as the wave of the future.

Auguste Comte.Comte (1798–1857) believed that each society passed through

three stages of development based on the form of knowledge that provided its

foundation: religious, metaphysical, and scientific. In the religious or

theological stage, supernatural forces are understood to control the world. In

the metaphysical stage, abstract forces and what Comte called “destiny” or

“fate” are perceived to be the prime movers of history. Religious and

metaphysical knowledge thus rely on superstition and speculation, not science.

In the scientific, or “positive,” stage (the origin of the word positivism) events

are explained through the scientific method of observation, experimentation,

and analytic comparison.

Comte believed that, like the physical sciences, which explain physical facts,

sociology must rely on science to explain social facts. Comte saw two basic facts

to be explained: “statics,” the study of order, persistence, and organization; and

“dynamics,” the study of the processes of social change. Comte believed that soci-

ology would become “the queen of the sciences,” shedding light on earlier sciences

and synthesizing all previous knowledge about the natural world with a science of the

social world. Sociology, he believed, would reveal the principles and laws that affected

14 CHAPTER 1WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?

JAuguste Comte coined the
termsociologyas the scientific
study of society.