Founders of Sociology - Comprehensive Study Notes (SOC 151)

Industrialization and Social Change

• Western Europe and North America undergoing industrialization in the 18th-19th centuries.

• New modes of life and production, new social organization and living conditions, new forms of inequality emerge.

• Urbanization and displacement of agrarian poor.

• These changes intrigue some social thinkers. They start examining the causes and consequences of these changes.

Notable founding figures of Sociology in the West

• Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

• Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

• Max Weber (1864-1920)

• George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)

• Topics across these figures include:

  • Industrialization, society and economy, class formation, class struggle

  • Urban vs tribal society, religion, colonialism, social evolution

  • The self in society

Founders outside the Canon

• Jane Addams (1860-1935)

• W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

• Topics: Industrialization, economy and society, urban life, race, gender, migration, poverty, social inequality

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• Capital and labor

• Proletariat (workers) and bourgeoisie (owners)

• Relationship of exploitation

• Economic inequality must end (conflict approach)

• Workers must unite as a class, overthrow capitalism, and own the means of production

• Key works: The Communist Manifesto (1848), The Capital (1867)

Max Weber (1864-1920)

• Class is not enough; status and party too are important

• Conceptualization of power—as the source of conflict

• How power is retained and enforced in existing social structures by some people over others, by rational means

• Whoever controls bureaucracy (efficient management of the organization), is powerful

• But extreme bureaucracy results in its iron cage or inefficiency

• Weber did not condone inequality, but unlike Marx he did not think that inequality could be eradicated

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)

• Focus on social structure and the functions of each part of the structure, rather than social conflict

• Key concepts:

  • Solidarity: mechanical solidarity vs. organic solidarity

  • Inequality: external and internal

  • Anomie: rupture of social order, due to industrialization, individualism, etc.

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)

• Focus: the self in society (symbolic interactionism concerns leading to understanding of how the self is formed through social interaction)

Let’s compare the contributions!

Contrasts: Marx, Weber, Durkheim

• Karl Marx

  • Identifies two classes in conflict: bourgeoisie (owners) and proletariat (workers)

  • Exploitation by capitalists; religion as a potential hindrance to working-class unity

  • Capitalists attempt to individualize workers to dominate them; workers should fight collectively

  • Power is gradational and can yield varieties of class identities that intersect with status (individual prestige) and party (collective affiliation)

  • Religion may form the spiritual strength of rational and modern societies; acts as a social cement in some contexts

  • Individuals can be rational actors; both individuals and collective social entities are relational

  • Solidarity emerges to hold society together via mechanical solidarity in primitive societies and organic solidarity in modern societies

  • Religion forms an important social structure; with modernization it achieves a more sophisticated form

  • Extreme individualism in a modern society can lead to anomie or collapse of social order, potentially contributing to suicide

• Max Weber

  • Adds the importance of status and party alongside class; power is not solely about economic class

  • Emphasizes rationalization and bureaucratic authority as mechanisms of power

  • Power is exercised through rational-legal authority; efficiency and formal rules shape social order

  • Bureaucracy can be efficient but may become an iron cage trapping individuals

  • Inequality is present but not necessarily eradicable

• Émile Durkheim

  • Emphasizes social structure and its functions rather than conflict

  • Solidarity and integration are central; society is held together by shared norms and values

  • Mechanisms of social cohesion differ in traditional vs. modern societies (mechanical vs. organic solidarity)

  • Inequality and anomie are conditions that arise in industrial contexts, affecting social order

Founders outside the Canon: Jane Addams

• Jane Addams (1860-1935)

• First woman from the US to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1931)

• Founder of Hull House—Settlement House in Chicago for immigrant workers and the urban poor (1889)

• Provided practical services: trained, fed, and educated immigrants; organized language and other classes for skill development, employment, and assimilation

• Fought for women’s political and economic rights

• Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWiHtUy mEhw

Jane Addams: Contributions to Sociology

• Conceptualizing sociology/social science as a collaborative field of knowledge production

• Collaboration among scholars, collaboration with people on the margins, collaboration with research subjects—“public sociology”

• Combining empathy with scientific objectivity

• Feminist “standpoint epistemology”—a forerunner recognizing positionality and creating space to represent voices of others without hierarchy; all voices are important

• Early writer on women’s unwaged domestic labor

Important concepts in Addams’ work

• “Lateral progress”: social progress measured by the well-being of common people, not just breakthroughs of a few

• “Radical Meliorism”: socializing care; pragmatic belief that the world can be made better by human effort

• Meliorism as per John Dewey; Addams’ radical meliorism insists on non-paternalistic, egalitarian care toward the oppressed for collective well-being

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

• One of the key thinkers in the sociology of race and racism in the United States

• First Black doctorate from Harvard University (1895)

• Faced barriers: unable to secure tenured positions at top sociology departments (Harvard and University of Chicago)

• Founded the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory at Atlanta University; link: https://berkeleyjournal.org/2016/02/03/w-e-b-du-bois-and-the-atlanta-sociological-laboratory/

• Recommended reading: The Scholar Denied (2015) by Aldon Morris

Theoretical contributions of Du Bois

• “Double consciousness” (1903) in The Souls of Black Folk

• Describes the lived realities of Black people in the US and the tension of having to view themselves through the perspective of a dominant white society

• Constant awareness of being seen as a potential “problem” in many contexts

Activism and public impact

• Civil rights leadership

• Founding member of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1909)

• Global solidarity: active in the Pan-Africanism movement; organized Pan-African Congress meetings in the 1920s

• Maintained correspondence with scholars and activists in the US (e.g., Jane Addams) and in other countries (e.g., B. R. Ambedkar in India) about caste

Discussion questions (for exam prep)

• How do the founding figures’ contributions to sociology vary from the contributions of scholars at the margin?

• What are the similarities and differences between the theories of—

  • Marx and Weber

  • Marx and Durkheim

  • Weber and Du Bois