Sociology - scientific study of human social behavior.

As the study of humans in their collective aspect, sociology is concerned with all group activitieseconomic, social, political, and religious. Sociologists study such areas as bureaucracy, community, deviant behavior, family, public opinion, social change, social mobility, social stratification, and such specific problems as crime, divorce, child abuse, and substance addiction. Sociology tries to determine the laws governing human behavior in social contexts; it is sometimes distinguished as a general social science from the special social sciences, such as economics and political science, which confine themselves to a selected group of social facts or relations. The Evolution of Sociology A number of Western political theorists and philosophers, including Plato, Polybius, Machiavelli, Vico, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, have treated political problems in a broader social context. Thus Montesquieu regarded the political forms of different states as a consequence of the working of deep underlying climatic, geographic, economic, and psychological factors. In the 18th cent., Scottish thinkers made inquiries into the nature of society; scholars like Adam Smith explored the economic causes of social organization and social change, while Adam Ferguson considered the noneconomic causes of social cohesion. It was not until the 19th cent., however, when the concept of society was finally separated from that of the state, that sociology developed into an independent study. The term sociology was coined (1838) by Auguste Comte. He attempted to analyze all aspects of cultural, political, and economic life and to identify the unifying principles of society at each stage of human social development. Herbert Spencer applied the principles of Darwinian evolution to the development of human society in his popular and controversial Principles of Sociology (187696). An important stimulus to sociological thought came from the work of Karl Marx, who emphasized the economic basis of the organization of society and its division into classes and saw in the class struggle the main agent of social progress. The founders of the modern study of sociology were mile Durkheim and Max Weber. Durkheim pioneered in the use of empirical evidence and statistical material in the study of society. Weber's major contribution was as a theorist, and his generalizations about social organization and the relation of belief systems, including religion, to social action are still influential. He developed the use of the ideal typea working model, based on the selective combination of certain elements of historical fact or current realityas a tool of sociological analysis. In the United States the study of sociology was pioneered and developed by Lester Frank Ward and William Graham Sumner. The most important theoretical sociology in the 20th cent. has moved in three directions: conflict theory, structuralfunctional theory, and symbolic interaction theory. Conflict theory draws heavily on the work of Karl Marx and emphasizes the role of conflict in explaining social change; prominent conflict theorists include Ralf Dahrendorf and C. Wright Mills. Structural-functional theory, developed by Talcott Parsons and advanced by Robert Merton, assumes that large social systems are characterized by homeostasis, or "steady states." The theory is now often called "conservative" in its orientation. Symbolic interaction, begun by George Herbert Mead and further developed by Herbert Blumer and others, focuses on subjective perceptions or other symbolic processes of communication. The forerunner Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 - March 14, 1883) was a German[1] philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism. Marx summarized his approach to history and politics in the opening line of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto (1848): "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction.[2] Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, socialism will in its turn replace capitalism and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism which will emerge after a transitional period, the "dictatorship of the proletariat", a period sometimes referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy" .[3][4] See, for example, Marx's comments in section one of The Communist Manifesto on feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical process: "We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged...the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer

tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property." Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1848),The Communist Manifesto On the one hand, Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socio-economic change. He argued that the structural contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way to communism: The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. - (The Communist Manifesto)
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On the other hand, Marx argued that socio-economic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. He argued that capitalism will end through the organized actions of an international working class, led by a Communist Party: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." (from The German Ideology) While Marx remained a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence gained added impetus with the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution in 1917, and few parts of the world remained significantly untouched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. Philosophically, Marx was a materialist and several of those who he influenced were nihilists. His analysis of history describes socialism as a phase of history that has already occurred in many parts of the world[citation needed]. Ibn Khaldun, whose Muqaddimah is viewed as the earliest work dedicated to sociology as a social science. Ibn Khald n , Ab Zayd 'Abdu r-Ra man bin Mu ammad bin or Ibn Khaldoun (full name, Arabic: [1][2] Khald n Al-Hadrami, (May 27, 1332 AD/732 AH - March 19, 1406 AD/808 AH) was a North African polymath - an astronomer, economist, historian, Islamic scholar, Islamic theologian, hafiz, jurist, lawyer, mathematician, military [3] strategist, nutritionist, philosopher, social scientist and statesman-born in North Africa in present-day Tunisia. He is [4] [5] [6][7] considered a forerunner of several social scientific disciplines: demography, cultural history, historiography, the [8] [4][7][8][9][10] philosophy of history, and sociology. While he is considered one of the forerunners of modern economics,[7][11][12] he is preceded by the Indian scholar-philosopher Chanakya.[13][14][15][16] He is considered by many to be the father of a number of these disciplines, and of social sciences in general,[17][18] for anticipating many elements of these disciplines centuries before they were founded in the West. He is best known for his Muqaddimah (known as Prolegomenon in the West), the first volume of his book on universal history, Kitab al-Ibar. The Muqaddimah, or the , Amazigh: Tazwarit n Ibn Xldun, "Introduction"), or the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun (Arabic: Prolegomena in Greek, is a book written by the North African historian Ibn Khaldun in 1377 which records an early [1] Muslim view of universal history. Many modern thinkers view it as the first work dealing with the philosophy of history [2] [1][3] [3] [4] [5] and the social sciences of sociology, demography, historiography, and cultural history, and as one of the forerunners of modern economics in ancient times.[6][7][8][9][10] The work also deals with Islamic theology and the natural sciences of biology and chemistry. Ibn Khaldun wrote the work in 1377 as the preface or first book of his planned world history, the Kitab al-Ibar (lit. Book of Advice), but already in his lifetime it became regarded as an independent work. Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo (23 June 1668 - 23 January 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magnum opus is titled "Principles/Origins of [re]New[ed] Science about the Common Nature of Nations" (Principi di Scienza Nuova d'intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni). The work is explicitly presented as a "Science of reasoning" (Scienza di ragionare), and includes a dialectic between axioms and "reasonings" (ragionamenti) linking and clarifying the axioms. Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history, although the expression is alien from Vico's text (Vico speaks of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically").[1] He is otherwise well-known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum ("true itself is fact" or "the true itself is made"), a proposition that has been read as an early instance of [2] [3] constructivist epistemology. Overall, the contemporary interest in Vico has been driven by peculiarly historicist [4] [vague] interests (see esp. Tagliacozzo 1981). .