With the arrival of industrial production, everything sped up and much less could be taken for granted. Farm production became more efficient, so fewer agricultural workers were needed — they flocked to the growing cities, where jobs were increasingly available in settings like factories and slaughterhouses. Workers were paid in cash, which they had to use to buy everything they needed, from housing to food to entertainment. They jostled in among people from other areas, coming into sudden contact with other languages and cultural traditions.

On top of that, developments in transportation and communication technology were making the world a smaller place. People and information were getting around more quickly and more often, so many people whose grandparents would have lived in a very small world found themselves living in a very large, diverse world. Everything was getting bigger, faster, more powerful — and revolution was in the air, with social arrangements that had lasted for centuries being cast to the wind.

Nothing, it seemed, could be taken for granted any more. What was right? What was wrong? Was there any way to make sense out of the chaos? Theologians and philosophers and historians were doing their best to figure things out, but it was clearly time for a new way of understanding the world.

The Development of “Sociology”

The first person to use the word “sociology” was Auguste Comte, a French thinker who coined the word in the early 1800s to refer to the systematic study of society. Still, it took almost a century for sociology to be fully established as a legitimate field of study.

Figuring out life with positivism

Comte was one of a group of philosophers and historians who believed in the idea of positivism, the idea that the methods of the natural sciences could be productively used to study the social world. Positivism in the philosophical sense is not the same thing as “positive thinking,” but positivism is “positive” in the sense that it represents an optimistic belief in humans’ ability to figure things out and improve their circumstances.

In the early 1800s, even natural science was still somewhat revolutionary — it hadn’t been that long since natural scientists like Galileo faced death sentences for daring to suggest that telescopes and microscopes could be used to supplement, or even challenge, the Church’s teachings about the natural world. If the powers that be didn’t care for the suggestion that the earth

revolved around the sun, you can imagine how they felt about the idea that social arrangements might also be subject to scientific analysis!

This idea, which the early sociologists shared, continues to inspire sociologists today — and it can still feel revolutionary. In Chapter 2 I warn you to prepare yourself for the surprises that sociology might have in store for you, and those surprises can still hit with some of the shock that the early sociologists’ ideas had for their readers. Comte and other early sociologists argued that society might be better organized along principles that were very different from the principles along which it had been organized for centuries, and many people had a hard time accepting that idea. When sociologists today give people information that challenges their long-held beliefs, they meet similar resistance.

Common themes of early sociologists

Comte and the other early sociologists — most of whom would have called themselves philosophers, historians, and/or economists instead of sociologists — had a variety of ideas about the social world, but their arguments shared some common themes. They questioned whether the

traditional tools of their trades were really sufficient for the task of understanding the changing society they lived in.

Philosophers began to wonder whether it was time to make systematic observations of the world rather than speculating about human nature based entirely on their own experiences. Historians saw patterns in the progression of social arrangements through time, and wondered whether scientific theories might help explain human history the way, say, geology had helped to explain the history of the earth. Economists saw the power of the scientific method when applied to trade and commerce, and wondered whether it might not be equally fruitful if applied to other areas of human activity — like politics and religion.

Over time, positivist thinkers from all these fields began to share certain ideas about the social world, ideas such as the following that became the underpinning for the new science of sociology.

No king, priest, or philosopher could simply declare what social arrangements were best; those should be determined by means of empirical study and systematic analysis.

Society was progressing in a manner that wasn’t random. Social change, for better and for worse, made some kind of sense, and it had some kind of order or meaning to it.

Although some amount of inequality might be unavoidable, inequality on the basis of social class, place of birth, or parentage was not only immoral but also inefficient.

Adventures in sociology

Sociology: The most ambitious science

Comte himself believed that the development of sociology was the logical result — in fact, the climax — of the development of science generally.

Comte pointed out that if a village is settled on the bank of a river that sometimes floods, it will be frequently devastated — unless, through scientific observation, the villagers learn to predict the floods. Why, he asked,

sociology departments were popping up left and right.) The bottom line is that all three of these thinkers were tremendously important for the development of sociology as we know it today, despite the fact that sociology as we know it hardly existed during their lifetimes.

Take some time to understand the basics of what each of these three men thought. All three have become touchstones of sociological thought and will come up many times throughout this book (for example, their views on culture in Chapter 5, their ideas about religion in Chapter 10, and their theories of social change in Chapter 16), so for now I’ll just give you the very basics about who they were and what they thought.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx, born in 1818 in what is now Germany, was the first of these three great thinkers to come along. He never called himself a sociologist — that word was then too new to mean anything to most people — but he was a little bit of just about everything else. He started out studying law, became involved in philosophy and history, and later worked as a journalist and political activist.

Marx’s life and work were inspired by his disgust with the capitalist economic system, especially with the way it kept millions of people toiling in dirty factories and parched fields with very little to show for their work at the end of the day. He was convinced there could be a better way, and he worked to support the Communist Party, a group dedicated to creating a society where everyone shared and shared alike. This rabblerousing got Marx kicked out of Germany, France, and Belgium, and he finally landed in England; he died in London in 1883.

Marx, working with his close friend and colleague Frederich Engels, wrote copious amounts. Some of his work, like the fiery Communist Manifesto, was widely read in Marx’s lifetime, but much of it took decades to be organized, published, and translated. It wasn’t until the 1930s that people truly understood everything Marx was trying to say. (A lot of people still don’t quite get it.)

Sociologists consider Marx important for two main reasons: his general theory of history and his specific ideas about power and exploitation.

Marx on history

Marx’s theory of history is often called materialism (or, even more of a mouthful, dialectical materialism). You may think of a “materialist” as someone who only cares about money and material things — and though Marx in his personal life was the opposite of a greedy cash hound, he did think that material goods make the world go ‘round.

For Marx, the most important forces in history weren’t ideas; they were basically economic forces. Every stage in history, according to Marx, was distinguished by its own mode of production, a way of organizing the production and distribution of material goods. Each mode of production (ancient slaveholding society, medieval feudalism, and so forth) has its own inherent conflicts among different classes, and those conflicts inevitably lead to the failure of one mode of production and the beginning of another.

This was an important new way of looking at history because earlier thinkers, such as the philosopher Hegel, had often seen historical change as being about ideas and culture. Marx dismissed immaterial ideas as relatively unimportant. Historical change, he said, is about class conflict over concrete things.

Marx on capitalism

Marx was particularly concerned with the mode of production that dominated his time (and, he would be disappointed to learn, still dominates ours): industrial capitalism.

Marx wrote about a number of different class groups that he saw having roles in capitalism, but the two most important were:

The bourgeois: the wealthy, powerful people who own the factories, the farmland, and just about everything else.

The proletariat: the people who don’t own much and are forced to work for the bourgeois to feed their families.

Marx thought that capitalism was bad for everyone, but especially for the proletariat.

The proletariat, said Marx, are especially hurt by capitalism because they are viciously exploited by the bourgeois. No matter how much profit a factory owner makes in a day, if his workers don’t have anywhere else to work, all the owner needs to do is pay the workers enough to keep them alive — the bourgeois factory owner keeps all the extra profits, earned on the backs of the hardworking proletariat.

In a larger sense, though, Marx argued that everyone is hurt by capitalism because it’s a system that trades real things (work, food, shelter) for an imaginary thing: money. I might work all day in a factory assembling things that are going to be used by someone else, and I earn money that I use to buy food grown by someone else and to rent a house built by someone else. The value of my labor isn’t measured by what good I do for myself or my society; it’s measured by how much (or how little) money I make.

Marx thought the capitalist system was fundamentally unhealthy, and that it would one day be replaced by a worldwide communist utopia, where everyone would contribute what they’re able and take what they need. Maybe someday it will, but you probably shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for it.

Emile Durkheim

Halfway through this chapter that’s supposedly about the history of sociology, you may be wondering when someone is finally going to bust out and call himself a sociologist. And . . . voila! The French scholar Emile Durkheim spent his life not just practicing sociology, but trying — quite successfully — to convince the world of sociology’s importance.

Durkheim was born in France in 1858, studied philosophy and social theory, and ultimately founded the first European department of sociology. His life had much less excitement than Marx’s, but he was full of new and provocative ideas about society.

Durkheim’s view of society

Compared to Marx, Durkheim had a fundamentally different — and much more positive view — of society. Reading Marx, you almost get the impression that he thinks we’d all be better off on our own, living by the work of our own hands. Marx appreciated the fact that working together in organized settings allowed us to produce magnificent things (like, say, indoor plumbing) that we couldn’t create as individuals, but in general Marx thought people were apt to stab each other in the back if given the opportunity, so he was generally suspicious of society.

For Durkheim, humans are fundamentally social. In fact, thought Durkheim, our social life — at home, work, play, and worship — is what defines us, what gives us meaning and purpose. It’s what makes us truly human, and that fact is what makes sociology — the study of society — so important.

In his book The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim set out his vision of what sociology is and how it should be done. Specifically, he said that the job of the sociologist is to study social facts: facts that are true of groups of people rather than individuals. Here are a few examples of social facts:

Australia is a democracy.

Thirty-four percent of men have beards.

The average income of a Porsche owner is $104,000.

Those are facts about groups of people, and though they don’t tell you anything about any one individual — for example, whether any given man will have a beard, or the income of a particular Porsche owner — they tell you something specific about a group of people, who might then be compared to other groups (for example, Toyota Camry owners). Those are the facts Durkheim thought sociologists should take as their special area of concern.

Durkheim agreed with Marx that society was changing, but rather than a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots, Durkheim thought that we were becoming more differentiated from one another in all kinds of ways.

Earlier in history, when society was relatively simple, there were just a few different jobs people performed: hunter, gatherer, farmer, priest. Now, there are thousands of different jobs that need doing, and they’re very different from one another: software engineer, preschool teacher, forklift operator, screenwriter. This functional differentiation, thought Durkheim, was both necessary and — in broad terms — a good thing. Our shared social values help us work together productively and, for the most part, peacefully.

Sociology to die for

To prove the usefulness of sociology as a discipline, Durkheim chose to study a topic that would seem deeply personal, much more the domain of the psychologist or philosopher than the sociologist: suicide. By demonstrating that sociology could help us understand something so intensely private and individual, Durkheim showed the power of his newly invented sociological method.

In his book Suicide, Durkheim pointed out that though any individual person’s decision to commit suicide was, of course, personal — a person’s reasons for taking his or her life may be completely unknowable — in aggregate, suicides seem to have shared social causes. Durkheim observed that predictably, year in and year out, some countries have higher suicide rates than others. Whatever combination of factors cause people to commit suicide, they seemed to be greater in Sweden than in Spain; further, they were greater among unmarried people than married people, and greater among men

than women. Putting aside the question of any one individual’s motivation, Durkheim said that a group’s suicide rate is a social fact that ought to be explained by other social facts.

In a pioneering use of social statistics, Durkheim gathered lots of numbers summarizing the suicide rates and other characteristics of many groups and lined them up in tables to see which social facts seemed to be related (see Chapter 4 for more on the use of statistics in sociology today). In the end, Durkheim concluded that there were actually different types of suicide that tended to happen for different reasons. For example, egoistic suicides were more frequent in groups with weak social ties (for example, countries with religious values emphasizing individualism) and altruistic suicides were more frequent in groups with extremely strong social ties (for example, the military).

The specifics of Durkheim’s study are less important than the way he went about doing it: defining and explaining social facts about groups. Explaining an individual’s behavior, according to Durkheim, is a different thing than explaining a group’s behavior. Whether or not Durkheim’s conclusions about suicide were correct, he was right to point out that understanding why one Spaniard committed suicide (a matter of psychology) doesn’t tell us anything about why Spaniards in general committed suicide at a lower rate than Swedes;

and understanding the causes of Spain’s suicide rate (a matter of sociology) doesn’t tell us anything about why any one Spaniard committed suicide.

Great sociology from a troubled marriage

Max Weber

Marx and Durkheim are easy to compare and contrast because their views about what matters in society were so strikingly different. Marx thought it was all about conflict; Durkheim thought it was all about cooperation. Marx was concerned with the material world; Durkheim was concerned with the world of ideas and values. Max Weber (pronounced VAY-ber if you want to say it the way he did) is much harder to pigeonhole because for Weber it was not such an either/or question. If they had to choose which of the three great sociological thinkers was most “right,” most sociologists today would say Weber because Weber appreciated that social life is marked by both conflict and cohesion. Sometimes we fight, sometimes we get along; the trick is to understand why and when.