The Context of Sociology

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 centuries that had already remade the way people lived: the Enlightenment (or the scientific revolution), the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Between them, these processes transformed not just European society but, as Europe's reach extended outward, much of the rest of the world too.

This chapter takes up the ideas of three thinkers from sociology's classical tradition who, between them, laid the foundations of the discipline: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Their insights remain influential today, even though later sociologists have gone on to criticise and substantially rework them. But since ideas about society are themselves products of the social conditions that produced them, it makes sense to start with a short account of the context sociology itself emerged from, before turning to each thinker individually.

The modern era in Europe, and the conditions of modernity now taken for granted, were the product of the same three processes: the Enlightenment, or the dawning "age of reason"; the drive for political sovereignty that the French Revolution embodied; and the system of mass manufacture the Industrial Revolution introduced. Because these three processes are already covered at length in the opening chapter of Introducing Sociology, what matters here is their intellectual fallout: a shift in how people thought (reason displacing revealed truth as the basis of knowledge), how they were governed (citizens holding rights in place of subjects owing loyalty to a monarch), and how they earned a living (factory-based mass production replacing small-scale agrarian and craft work). Together, all three turned Europe into a new kind of society -- urban, industrial, secular and fast-changing -- that older religious and philosophical frameworks could no longer make sense of, creating the demand for a systematic, evidence-based way of studying society. That demand is what gave sociology its reason for existing, and it is the backdrop against which Marx, Durkheim and Weber each built their own distinct account of the discipline.