The Sociology Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained)

Author: DK

• But the self-interest demanded by capitalism weakens these values, and ultimately leads to social collapse. To prevent commercial capitalism from sowing the seeds of its own destruction, Ferguson advocated promoting a sense of civic spirit, encouraging people to act in the interest of society rather than in self-interest.

• Against the background of social uncertainty in France, however, the socialist philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon attempted to analyze the causes of social change, and how social order can be achieved. He suggested that there is a pattern to social progress, and that society goes through a number of different stages. But it was his protégé Auguste Comte who developed this idea into a comprehensive approach to the study of society on scientific principles, which he initially called “social physics” but later described as “sociology.”

• Comte was a child of the Enlightenment, and his thinking was rooted in the ideals of the Age of Reason, with its rational, objective focus.

• The time had come, he said, for a social science that would not only give us an understanding of the mechanisms of social order and social change, but also provide us with the means of transforming society, in the same way that the physical sciences had helped to modify our physical environment. He considered the study of human society, or sociology, to be the most challenging and complex, therefore it was the “Queen of sciences.”

• This states that our understanding of phenomena passes through three phases: a theological stage, in which a god or gods are cited as the cause of things; a metaphysical stage, in which explanation is in terms of abstract entities; and a positive stage, in which knowledge is verified by scientific methods.

• Beginning with mathematics, the hierarchy ranged through astronomy, physics, and chemistry to biology. The apex of this ascending order of “positivity” was sociology.

• For this reason, Comte felt it was necessary to have a thorough grasp of the other sciences and their methods before attempting to apply these to the study of society.

• He divided sociology into two broad fields of study: “social statics,” the forces that determine social order and hold societies together; and “social dynamics,” the forces that determine social change.

• Although Comte was not the first to attempt an analysis of human society, he was a pioneer in establishing that it is capable of being studied scientifically. In addition, his positivist philosophy offered both an explanation of secular industrial society and the means of achieving social reform. He believed that just as the sciences have solved real-world problems, sociology—as the final science and unifier of the other sciences—can be applied to social problems to create a better society.

• After the overthrow and restoration of monarchy, opinion in France was divided between those who wanted order and those who demanded progress. Comte believed his positivism offered a third way, a rational rather than ideological course of action based on an objective study of society.

• The shift in Comte’s work from theory to how it could be put into practice lost him many followers. Mill and other British thinkers saw his prescriptive application of positivism as almost dictatorial, and the system of government he advocated as infringing liberty.

• “The philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point is to change it.” Karl Marx

• 1791 French playwright and political activist Olympe de Gouges publishes the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in response to the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” of 1789.

• Martineau was well known in her lifetime, but her contribution to the development of sociology was not recognized until recently. Today, however, she is regarded as not only the first woman to make a methodical study of society, but also the first to formulate a feminist sociological perspective.

• His primary influence was the German philosopher Georg Hegel, who had proposed a dialectic view of history: that change comes about through a synthesis of opposing forces in which the tension between contradictory ideas is resolved.

• Marx offered a new approach to the study of historical progress. It is the material conditions in which people live that determine the organization of society, he said, and changes in the means of production (the tools and machinery used to create wealth) bring about socio-economic change.

• Five historical epochs were identified by Marx. Each corresponds to an era in which people were clearly defined by their labor.

• Over time, however, oppression fosters a class-consciousness in the proletariat—a realization that together the working class can organize a movement for its collective good. The inherent self-interest of capitalism tends to prevent such a development among the bourgeoisie, and constant competition leads to more and more frequent economic crises.

• Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, who along with Marx are often cited as the “founding fathers” of modern sociology,

• Ferdinand Tönnies, widely regarded as founding fathers of sociology. Tönnies’ major contribution to the discipline was his analysis of contrasting types of social groupings in his influential Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887.

• At the root of Tönnies’ theory was his idea of “will”—what motivates people to action. He distinguished between what he called Wesenwille, “natural will,” and Kürwille, “rational will.” Wesenwille, he said, is the instinctive will to do something for its own sake, or out of habit or custom, or moral obligation. This is the motivation that underlies the social order of Gemeinschaft, the will to do things for and as a part of the community. On the other hand, Kürwille motivates us to act in a purely rational way to achieve a specific goal, and is the type of will behind decisions made in large organizations, and particularly businesses.

• Among those who had studied philosophy but been drawn to the new branch of knowledge was Émile Durkheim, who believed that sociology should be less of a grand theory and more of a method that could be applied in diverse ways to understanding the development of modern society.

• Auguste Comte had laid the foundations with his theory that the study of human society is the pinnacle of a hierarchy of natural sciences. And, because society is a collection of human animals, the idea grew that of all the natural sciences, biology was the closest model for the social sciences.

• Among those inspired by Darwin was Herbert Spencer, a philosopher and biologist who likened the development of modern society to an evolving organism, with different parts serving different functions.

• Durkheim upheld Spencer’s functional idea of separate parts serving a purpose and the notion that society was greater than the sum of its individual elements.

• And Auguste Comte’s “positivism” (his belief that only scientific inquiry yields true knowledge) helped to shape the scientific methodology that Durkheim felt would reveal how modern society functions.

• He argued that the basis for sociological study should be what he called “social facts,” or “realities external to the individual” that can be verified empirically.

• But where Marx had associated them with capitalism, and Weber with rationalization, Durkheim connected the development of modern society with industrialization, and in particular the division of labor that came with it.

• “Is it our duty to seek to become a… complete human being, one quite sufficient unto himself; or… to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism?” Émile Durkheim

• What differentiates modern society from traditional ones, according to Durkheim, is a fundamental change in the form of social cohesion; the advent of industrialization has evolved a new form of solidarity.

• The idea that society is structured like a biological organism composed of distinct parts with specialized functions became a significant approach to sociology, known as functionalism.

• Organic solidarity can only work if elements of mechanical solidarity are retained, and members of society have a sense of common purpose.

• Individuals felt increasingly unconnected with society, and especially the sort of moral guidance that mechanical solidarity had previously given them.

• Individuals felt increasingly unconnected with society, and especially the sort of moral guidance that mechanical solidarity had previously given them. Durkheim used the word anomie to describe this loss of collective standards and values, and its consequent sapping of individual morale.

• While Weber accepted that any study of society should be rigorous, he argued that it could not be truly objective, because it is the study not so much of social behavior but of social action, meaning the ways in which individuals in society interact.

• Industrialization had been achieved through advances in science and engineering, and the capitalism that accompanied it called for purely rational decisions based on efficiency and cost-benefit analysis (assessing the benefits and costs of projects).

• While the rise of capitalism had brought many material benefits, it also had numerous social drawbacks; traditional cultural and spiritual values had been supplanted by rationalization, which brought with it a sense of what Weber called “disenchantment” as the intangible, mystical side of many people’s day-to-day lives was replaced by cold calculation.

• Weber was concerned with these effects on the individual “cogs in the machine.” Capitalism, which had promised a technological utopia with the individual at its heart, had instead created a society dominated by work and money, overseen by an uncompromising bureaucracy.

• A rigid, rule-based society not only tends to restrict the individual, but also has a dehumanizing effect, making people feel as though they are at the mercy of a logical but godless system.

• Although there is a greater degree of interdependence between people as jobs become more and more specialized, individuals feel that their worth in society is determined by others rather than by their own skills or craftsmanship.

• Although there is a greater degree of interdependence between people as jobs become more and more specialized, individuals feel that their worth in society is determined by others rather than by their own skills or craftsmanship. The desire for self-improvement is replaced with an obsessive ambition to acquire a better job, more money, or a higher social status, and creativity is valued less than productivity.

• By the 1960s, Weber had become mainstream, and his interpretive approach had all but replaced the positivism that had dominated sociology since Durkheim.

• Despite his dismissal of Marx’s interpretation of the inevitability of historical change, Weber predicted the endurance, and global triumph, of the capitalist economy over traditional models as a result of rationalization.

• During the Cold War that developed after World War II, very few US sociologists openly adopted a socialist standpoint, particularly during the anti-communist witch-hunt that was known as McCarthyism.

• He maintained that by the mid-20th century the US middle classes, alienated from the processes of production, had become divorced from traditional values, such as pride in craftsmanship, and dehumanized by ever-increasing rationalization.

• The adoption of a sociological imagination implied a move from the objective study of “what is” to a more subjective answer to the question of “what ought to be?”

• One category of experimental methods Garfinkel advocated became known as “breaching experiments.” These were designed to uncover social norms—the expected, but largely unnoticed, ways people construct a shared sense of reality. Breaching these norms—for example by asking his students to address their parents formally as “Mr. X” or “Mrs. X” or to act as though they were lodgers—often provoked exasperation or anger, as the foundations of the social order were challenged.

• Power is no longer exercised by coercing people to conform, but by establishing mechanisms that ensure their compliance.

• The belief system of any society evolves as people come to accept certain views, to the point that these views become embedded in that society, defining what is good and bad, and what is considered normal or deviant.

• Indeed, Foucault points out that political resistance, in the form of revolution, may not lead to social change, as it challenges only the power of the state, not the ubiquitous, everyday

• The so-called “second-wave” feminism of the 1960s to 1980s snowballed from the insight of the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) that “one is not born a woman: one becomes one.”

• Her idea that there is a difference between sex (what determines whether one is biologically female or male) and gender (the social forces that act upon one to be feminine or masculine) paved the way for a reappraisal of the role of gender in society.

• Her studies of tribes in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia showed that many behavioral differences between males and females were culturally, rather than biologically, determined.

• Gender and sexuality are neither as polarized in this way, nor as fixed and unchanging as we have come to believe, but can be fluid, covering a whole spectrum of gender identities.

• We are performing a role that does not in fact exist; in essence, there is no original template for “female” or “male”—the original itself is derived. So, if one is born female, one behaves in what is considered to be a “feminine” way (by, for example, desiring a male partner), and comes to accept the fact that sex with men is associated with that gender.

• Butler’s widening of the issue of sexuality and gender was a cornerstone of what came to be known as queer theory.

• Even when slavery was finally abolished, true emancipation was incomplete; the political exclusion of black people—by being denied the vote—persisted in the USA well into the 20th century.

• He claimed the bourgeoisie was turning a blind eye to their part in the early deaths of their workers, when it was within their power to change things, so he accused them of “social murder.”

• The unfolding history of the black person in the US is, Du Bois claims, the history of this inner conflict, which itself is a result of the external, worldly battle between black and white people.

• In 1863, slaves were declared free, and the government set up the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (also called the Freedmen’s Bureau) to issue food, clothing, and abandoned property to the “flood” of destitute fugitive former slaves (men, women, and children).

• The Bureau also opened a Freedman’s Bank in 1865 to handle the deposits of former slave men and women. This initiative was hampered by incompetency, and the bank eventually crashed, taking the dollars of the freedmen with it.

• Du Bois reassessed his analysis of the color line and declared it a phenomenon that can occur to any cultural or ethnic group. In his 1952 essay for the magazine Jewish Life, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” he writes: “The race problem… cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of… human hate and prejudice.” It is therefore not color that matters so much as the “line,” which can be drawn to articulate difference and hatred in any group or society.

• he produced a wealth of data on the effects of urban life on African-Americans in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which suggests that rather than being caused by anything innate, crime is a product of the environment.

• In 1895 he became the first African American to receive a PhD when he gained a doctorate in history at Harvard University.

• However, in 1979 the British sociologist Peter Townsend said that “poverty” should be defined not in absolute terms, but in terms of relative deprivation.

• Bourdieu, however, develops the idea significantly. He defines habitus as an embodied set of socially acquired dispositions that lead individuals to live their lives in ways that are similar to other members of their social class group.

• He suggests that a child learns these things from their family, and then from their school and peers, who demonstrate to the growing child how to speak and act, and so on. In this way, he says, “the social order is progressively inscribed in people’s minds.”

• Within the working classes, Bourdieu found that people liked reading novels and magazines, betting, visiting music halls and boutiques, and owning luxury cars. The choices were relatively limited and they were determined not by cost, but by taste. He realized that people who were members of a certain class, or “class fraction” (class subset), shared tastes because they shared dispositions, or “habitus.”

• The social class of a person can be discerned from how they walk, talk, laugh, cry, and so on—from everything they do, think, and say. For the most part, because they are born and raised within a particular group habitus, individuals are generally unaware of the ways in which habitus both enables and restricts how they think, perceive, act, and interact with the world around them.

• A person’s cultural capital is their capacity to play “the culture game”—to recognize references in books, films, and theater; to know how to act in given situations (such as apt manners and conversation at the dinner table); to know what to wear and how; and even who “to look down your nose at.”

• Economic capital refers, quite simply, to monetary resources and property. A person’s cultural capital is their capacity to play “the culture game”—to recognize references in books, films, and theater; to know how to act in given situations (such as apt manners and conversation at the dinner table); to know what to wear and how; and even who “to look down your nose at.”

• Bourdieu says the habitus is often obvious through “judgments of classification,” which are pronounced about a thing, such as a painting, but act to classify the person speaking. Where one person describes a painting as “nice,” and another as “passé,” we learn little about the artwork, but much more about the person and their habitus.

• Every field has a set of rules that reflects the group habitus, to the extent that the rules seem “common sense” to them.

• “Those who talk of equality of opportunity forget that social games… are not ‘fair games’.” Pierre Bourdieu

• Because Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital rests so heavily on the constantly reproduced habitus, which is embedded in all of us, he seems quite pessimistic about the possibility of social mobility.

• The interaction of institutions and individuals usually reinforces existing ideas, but it is possible for someone from a lower social class to gain cultural capital by, for instance, being sent to a “good” school.

• Sociologists and economists traditionally accepted the idea that social class was linked to money: as workers earned higher incomes and gained more possessions, they would move into the middle class and enjoy not just prosperity, but also an increased sense of dignity.

• The workers interviewed by Sennett use the word “educated” to stand for a range of experiences and feelings that move beyond pure schooling.

• James holds himself responsible for not having more self-confidence and for having failed to “develop.”

• Success in IQ tests and schooling is seen as a way of freeing an individual from his or her social conditions at birth—everyone who truly has merit or intelligence will rise. This belief in equality of opportunity is at the heart of the American Dream.

• If a person is worthy of escaping poverty, he or she can do so. If he or she does not have the ability to “make it,” however, what right does that person have to complain?

• It is often assumed that masculinity is a natural, biological state that cannot be altered. R.W. Connell claims, however, that it is not a fixed thing, but an acquired identity:

• When the masculine role moves toward a more “female” position (as in homosexuality), there is a corresponding loss of status and power. In this way, the patriarchal position aligns with the hegemonic ideal in Western societies.

• In The Will to Change (2004), she says: “I often use the phrase ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics.”

• If challenged, these ideas may be reinforced through violence; but sometimes the cold stares or mockery of a group of peers is enough to pull someone back into behavior more appropriate to their gender role. A crying boy or an angry girl may quickly become aware of having transgressed the gender roles that have been defined for them.

• One of the most insidious things about patriarchy, hooks says, is that it is not spoken about, and we cannot dismantle a system as long as we are in “collective denial about its impact on our lives.”

• Second-wave feminism of the 1960s to 1980s, with its emphasis on “sisterhood,” is criticized by hooks as opportunistic and as representing the interests of middle-class white women.

• Walby notes that the “first wave” feminism of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and the US focused on the private, rather than public, nature of patriarchy.

• Walby points out that in Marxist terms, housewives are the producing class, while husbands are the class that benefits “individually and directly” from women’s unpaid labor.

• As capitalism grew, women lost forms of work that had once been open to them (in textiles, for instance) through the growth of industrialization. They moved into a position that was disadvantaged in two ways: vertical segregation (being offered employment only in the lower grades of work) and horizontal segregation (being seen as suitable only for particular areas of work).

• For example, during World War II, British women were needed to work in munitions factories. The trade unions were unhappy about this and persuaded the UK government to introduce legislation (the Restoration of the Pre-War Practices Act 1942) to ensure that women would be removed from employment in factories at the end of the war.

• Central to Walby’s examination of patriarchy is her insistence that we see patriarchy neither as purely structural (which would lock women into subordinate positions within cultural institutions) nor as pure agency (the actions of individual men and women).