It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of fool-
ishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was
the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything
before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct
the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period....
—Charles Dickens (1859)
THESE ARE THE FIRST LINESof one of Western literature’s greatest novels, A Tale of Two
Citiesby Charles Dickens. In it, Dickens recounts the saga of the French Revolution, at once
one of the most exciting, hopeful, and momentous events in history, and among its most
bloody, cruel, and tragic, a period of unparalleled optimism about the possibilities of human
freedom and some of the most bar-
baric and repressive measures ever
taken in the name of that freedom.
But which is it: best or worst,
wisdom or foolishness, light or dark-
ness? Dickens insisted that it was
both—and there lies the essence of sociological thinking. It’s difficult to hold both ideas in
our heads at the same time. More often, we take a position—usually at one extreme or the
other—and then try to hold it in the face of evidence that suggests otherwise. We find it
easier to take an extreme position than to occupy a vague middle ground of ambivalence.
Besides, logic and common
sense insist that it can’t possi-
bly be both.
That’s what makes sociol-
ogy so fascinating. Sociology is
constantly wrestling with two
immense and seemingly contra-
dictory questions: social order
and social disorder—how it often feels that everything fits together perfectly, like a
smoothly functioning machine, and how everything feels like it’s falling apart and society is
What Is
Sociology?
3
Sociology is a way of seeing the world.
It takes us beyond the “either/or”
framing of common sense, and looks
at how most social issues are really
“both/and.”