Journey · 12 stops
How Society Became Thinkable
From Ibn Khaldun to Raewyn Connell’s critique of a sociology written in the global North: how society became an object of science – and who got to describe it.
Stops
Stop 1 of 12: Ibn Khaldun
Can society itself be the object of a science? In 1377, in a remote fortress in what is now Algeria, the North African historian Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah, the introduction to his world history, and proposed a new science of umran – human social organisation. Dynasties rise on asabiyya, the group solidarity of desert peoples, and decline within a few generations as urban luxury dissolves it. European scholarship took wide notice of him only in the 19th century, after partial translations and de Slane’s French translation of the Muqaddimah (1862–68).
Stop 2 of 12: Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte gave the new science its name. In his Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–42) he argued that every branch of knowledge passes from theological through metaphysical to “positive”, scientific explanation – and that the science of society, the most complex of all, comes last. He first called it “social physics” and then, in the late 1830s, “sociology”, a word that had appeared before only in an unpublished manuscript by the Abbé Sieyès. Sociology was to discover the laws of order and progress; Comte ended by founding a secular “Religion of Humanity” to put them into practice.
Stop 3 of 12: Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau brought Comte to English readers with a condensed translation in 1853 – but she had already attempted something he never did: a manual for observing a society. How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) warned travellers against their own prejudices and told them to study institutions, records and even suicide statistics rather than chat with a few locals. Applying the method in Society in America, she measured the United States against its own ideals and found slavery and the exclusion of women from political life wanting.
Stop 4 of 12: Karl Marx
Karl Marx, Comte’s younger contemporary, also looked for laws of history but drew the opposite conclusion: not ideas but the way people produce their lives shapes society. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being,” he wrote in 1859, “but their social being that determines their consciousness.” Society appears as a structure of classes and conflict, and capitalism as a historical form that will pass. Every later sociologist had to settle accounts with Marx – some by extending him, more by arguing against him.
Stop 5 of 12: Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim made sociology an academic discipline with a method of its own. Social facts – laws, morals, language, religious practices – exist outside individuals and constrain them, and must be studied “as things”. In Suicide (1897) he chose the most private act imaginable and showed that its rates rise and fall with social integration and regulation: even despair has social causes. Society, for Durkheim, is a reality of its own, held together by shared beliefs and threatened by anomie when norms lose their grip.
Stop 6 of 12: Max Weber
Max Weber agreed that sociology must be a science, but insisted that it must also understand. Social action is oriented to others and carries a subjective meaning, which the sociologist has to grasp in order to explain what people do. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05) he showed how religious ideas – the Calvinist calling – could help shape an economic order. Where Durkheim saw society as a reality “like a thing”, Weber saw webs of meaning and an advancing rationalisation that “disenchants” the world.
Stop 7 of 12: W. E. B. Du Bois
After travelling through the United States in 1904, Weber wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois, praised The Souls of Black Folk and asked him for an essay, which appeared in his journal in 1906. Du Bois had already done what few sociologists of his time attempted: for The Philadelphia Negro (1899) he went from door to door through the city’s Seventh Ward, and at Atlanta University he organised annual empirical studies of Black life. Long sidelined by the white academic mainstream, he is now recognised as a founder of empirical American sociology.
Stop 8 of 12: Ida B. Wells
Du Bois was not the only one counting. Ida B. Wells, a Memphis journalist whose press had been destroyed by a mob in 1892, treated lynching as a social fact to be measured. In Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895) she compiled the cases largely from the white press, including the Chicago Tribune’s annual lists, so that no one could dismiss her figures as partisan: in most lynchings rape was not even alleged. In 1909 she signed the call that led to the NAACP, but was soon kept at its margins.
Stop 9 of 12: Jane Addams
At Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago, residents around Florence Kelley had already mapped the nationalities and wages of the surrounding immigrant district, house by house, in Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895) – a survey that anticipated the urban research of the Chicago School of sociology. Addams wrote for the American Journal of Sociology, yet her work was later filed under “social work”; today she is read again as a social theorist and philosopher of democracy.
Stop 10 of 12: Erving Goffman
The Chicago School made the city its laboratory, and in 1953 the University of Chicago awarded a doctorate to Erving Goffman, who turned to the smallest units of social life: encounters. From observations on a Shetland island and in a psychiatric hospital he built a sociology of the everyday, in which we present ourselves like actors, guard our “face” and cooperate to keep situations from collapsing. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956; expanded US edition 1959) showed that society is made and remade in every conversation, queue and dinner party.
Stop 11 of 12: Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu admired Goffman and published his books in French in his own series. But he asked what a focus on situations leaves out: why do people bring such unequal resources into an encounter? His answer was the habitus – dispositions of taste, speech and bearing acquired through one’s class – and the forms of capital at stake in social fields. Distinction (1979) showed that even a preference for a painting or a dish is a social marker: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”
Stop 12 of 12: Raewyn Connell
But whose society had become thinkable? Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory (2007) observed that the canon of sociology, from its founders to Giddens and Bourdieu, was written in the metropoles of the North and claimed to speak for humanity, while colonised societies appeared mainly as “primitive” contrasts or as data. She read social thinkers from Africa, Iran, India and Latin America as theorists in their own right. The journey that began with Ibn Khaldun in North Africa ends with the demand that social theory be made from many places at once.
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