Ch 6Introducing Western Sociologists — Class 11 Sociology, concept-first.

Sociology is sometimes described as a child of the "age of revolution." It took shape in nineteenth-century Western Europe, in the wake of three connected upheavals across the preceding three centurie…

The Enlightenment refers to a shift in European thought during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which reason, rather than religious authority or inherited tradition, came to be seen as…

The French Revolution of 1789 brought the idea of political sovereignty down from kings and nobles to individual citizens and to the nation-state as a whole.

The Industrial Revolution, beginning in late-eighteenth-century Britain, transformed how goods were produced and, with that, how people lived. It had two connected sides.

The chapter now turns from the general conditions that made sociology possible to three thinkers who, more than any others, gave the discipline its founding ideas.

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, in the Rhineland region of Prussia, the son of a prosperous liberal lawyer.

Marx's account of class begins with a simple but far-reaching idea: what really groups people together into a social class is not religion, language or nationality, but their shared position in the pr…

The chapter's second thinker is Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), often regarded as the founder of sociology as a formal academic discipline.

Durkheim's most basic contribution to sociology was to give it a subject matter of its own, distinct from psychology, biology or philosophy: what he called social facts.

In Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim used his method of studying observable social facts to explain how societies evolve from the primitive to the modern, by classifying them according to the ty…

The chapter's third and final thinker is Max Weber (1864-1920), whose sociology took a markedly different starting point from both Marx's and Durkheim's.

Weber argued that the social sciences had a fundamentally different task from the natural sciences. Where the natural sciences look for objective laws governing the physical world, the social sciences…

Weber used bureaucracy as his central example of rational-legal authority -- a mode of organisation resting on a clear separation between the public role an official occupies and that person's private…

Alienation, in Marx's sense, is the process by which capitalist society estranges human beings -- from the natural world, from each other, from the products and process of their own work, and ultimate…