School · 55 thinkers
Sociology & Social Theory
Sociology became an academic discipline only in the nineteenth century, but its questions are older: Ibn Khaldun’s science of human social organisation (1377), Vico’s new science of the civil world, Montesquieu’s comparison of laws and the Scottish histories of “civil society” (Ferguson, Millar, Smith) prepared the ground on which Saint-Simon and Comte called for a science of society. The journey “How Sociology Emerged from Philosophy” follows this path as far as Durkheim. Since the map has no separate school for anthropology, social and cultural anthropology (Boas, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Douglas, Geertz) and comparative welfare-state research (Esping-Andersen) are placed here as well. The journey takes one route, mainly through French and Scottish thought; others, such as Hegel’s theory of civil society or the German line from Tönnies to Weber, it leaves aside.
55 thinkers of Sociology & Social Theory on the Agora star map, from Henri de Saint-Simon to Andreas Reckwitz, in chronological order.
- 1760–1825Henri de Saint-Simon
Modern society should be run by those who produce – scientists, engineers, bankers and workers – not by nobles and idlers, and its goal should be to improve the lot of the poorest.
- 1798–1857Auguste Comte
Human thought matures from religious to abstract to scientific explanations, and society itself should be studied scientifically.
- 1802–1876Harriet Martineau
To understand a society you must observe it carefully and fairly – and judge it by the ideals it claims for itself.
- 1820–1903Herbert Spencer
Everything – nature, mind and society – evolves from simple to complex, and society works best when the state interferes as little as possible.
- 1838–1917Gustav von Schmoller
Schmoller held that economics must study how economic institutions and structures develop in history and cannot rest on abstract theory alone, and he looked to an active social policy of the state to integrate workers into society.
- 1843–1904Gabriel Tarde
Tarde held that society consists in imitation: inventions arise in individual minds and spread from person to person through custom, fashion and education until they meet rival inventions; sociology should trace these countable flows of beliefs and desires rather than posit collective facts above individuals.
- 1848–1923Vilfredo Pareto
For Pareto, most human action springs not from logic but from lasting sentiments that people afterwards dress up in reasons; science must keep to observed facts, and these show history as a constant circulation of elites.
- 1850–1937Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
Modern society suffers from a crisis of faith and morals that shows even in rising suicide rates; its remedy is not revolution but humanity – patient, critical work for democracy grounded in a religious conscience.
- 1855–1936Ferdinand Tönnies
Modern life replaces close communities held together by feeling and custom with a society of contracts, markets and calculating individuals.
- 1858–1942Franz Boas
For Boas, all human groups share the same mental capacities and differ through history, environment and contact, not racial descent; each culture must be understood from its own history and categories, which work largely unconsciously, like grammar, and no scale of progress ranks them.
- 1858–1917Émile Durkheim
Society is a reality of its own that shapes individuals, and when its shared rules break down people lose their bearings.
- 1858–1941Gaetano Mosca
In every society an organised minority rules an unorganised majority; what differs is how this political class is recruited, how it justifies itself by a political formula, and whether competing social forces keep it bound by law.
- 1858–1918Georg Simmel
Society is made of countless small interactions, and modern things like money and big cities change how people feel and relate to one another.
- 1862–1939Edvard Westermarck
Moral judgements express emotions of approval and disapproval that have become disinterested; since these emotions depend on experience, belief and custom, moral ideas differ between societies and none can claim objective validity – which should make us tolerant, not indifferent.
- 1863–1941Werner Sombart
For Sombart, modern capitalism arose from a new economic mentality, the capitalist spirit, and the historian’s first task is to explain how that mentality came about rather than to derive it from class relations alone.
- 1864–1920Max Weber
Modern life is shaped by rationalisation – calculation and bureaucracy replace magic and tradition, and the world loses its enchantment.
- 1865–1923Ernst Troeltsch
Troeltsch held that Christianity must be understood as a historical force that takes the form of church, sect or mysticism and shapes society accordingly, and he asked how binding norms are still possible once all thought is seen as historically conditioned.
- 1870–1954Marianne Weber
Marianne Weber held that the history of marriage law is a history of patriarchal authority, not of an original mother right; the law should give wives and mothers equal rights, and women can take a full part in creating objective culture, whatever their difference from men.
- 1872–1950Marcel Mauss
There is no such thing as a free gift: giving, receiving and giving back create bonds and obligations, and in them a whole society shows itself.
- 1882–1958Florian Znaniecki
Social facts must be studied with their “humanistic coefficient”, as they are experienced and valued by the people who take part in them; letters, memoirs and life histories are therefore legitimate sources of sociology.
- 1884–1942Bronisław Malinowski
For Malinowski, to understand a people one must live among them, speak their language and grasp their point of view; every custom appears as part of a working whole that meets human needs, and magic serves where practical knowledge cannot master chance and danger.
- 1886–1964Karl Polanyi
A market economy that treats labour, land and money as commodities tears them out of society; society defends itself, and the clash between market and protection can end by destroying freedom itself.
- 1893–1947Karl Mannheim
What people think depends on where they stand in society – so no group, not even intellectuals, sees the whole truth alone.
- 1897–1990Norbert Elias
Over centuries, as states grew and people became more dependent on each other, they learned to control their impulses and to feel shame where earlier generations felt none.
- 1899–1959Alfred Schutz
Everyday life rests on a huge store of taken-for-granted knowledge and types, and sociology must understand how people make sense of their world.
- 1900–1987Herbert Blumer
Blumer held that people act towards things on the basis of the meanings these have for them, that such meanings arise in social interaction and are handled through interpretation; society is joint action, and sociology must study it directly instead of correlating variables.
- 1902–1973E. E. Evans-Pritchard
For Evans-Pritchard, Zande witchcraft does not deny natural causes but explains why misfortune strikes a particular person at a particular moment; within this idiom people reason consistently. The Nuer, he held, keep order without rulers through the balanced opposition of lineage segments.
- 1902–1979Talcott Parsons
Society holds together because people share values, and every social system must solve the same basic tasks to survive.
- 1910–2005Fei Xiaotong
Fei Xiaotong held that rural Chinese society is a society of familiarity in which each person stands at the centre of circles of relationships, closer and more distant, like ripples on water; morality and order there depend on these relationships and on rites, not on contracts and law.
- 1910–2003Robert K. Merton
Social institutions often do things nobody intended, a false belief can make itself come true, and in science those who are already famous get the most credit.
- 1916–1962C. Wright Mills
Your private problems – losing a job, a failing marriage – are often public issues, and seeing that connection is the heart of sociology.
- 1917–2011Harold Garfinkel
Order in everyday life is something people keep making together, moment by moment – and you notice the hidden rules only when someone breaks them.
- 1921–2007Mary Douglas
Douglas held that dirt is matter out of place: purity rules defend a society’s classifications, and anomalies are shunned or made sacred; the body symbolises the social body, and perceptions of risk depend on how strongly group membership and shared rules bind people.
- 1922–1982Erving Goffman
In everyday encounters we perform roles like actors on a stage, managing the impression we make and helping others save face.
- 1925–2017Zygmunt Bauman
Modern life has become “liquid”: relationships, work and identities no longer last, and modern organisation itself made the Holocaust possible.
- 1926–2022Dorothy E. Smith
Sociology should start from people’s actual everyday lives, especially women’s, and trace how distant institutions and paperwork organise them.
- 1926–2006Clifford Geertz
Following Weber, Geertz held that humans are suspended in webs of significance they have spun; because culture is public, its analysis is an interpretive search for meaning that reads a ritual like the Balinese cockfight as a story people tell themselves about themselves.
- 1927–2016Thomas Luckmann
What we take as reality is built up from everyday knowledge we share, and in modern life religion does not vanish but moves out of the churches into private life.
- 1927–1998Niklas Luhmann
Society is made not of people but of communication, and modern society splits into separate systems – like law, economy and science – that each follow their own logic.
- 1928–2007Syed Hussein Alatas
The “lazy native” was a colonial invention that served those who wanted cheap labour; a social science that copies Western concepts without criticism remains captive in its turn.
- 1929–2017Peter L. Berger
People make society, society then feels like hard reality and shapes the people who made it – and religion has long been the canopy that makes this world feel meaningful.
- 1930–2002Pierre Bourdieu
Our tastes, manners and ambitions are shaped by our social background, and this quietly passes inequality on from one generation to the next.
- 1930–2024Johan Galtung
For Galtung, peace is not only the absence of war but also the absence of structural violence – avoidable harm built into unequal social structures, from hunger to lack of medical care; like medicine, peace research should diagnose, predict and treat, and conflicts should be transformed peacefully.
- 1932–2014Stuart Hall
Culture and media are battlegrounds of power: audiences can read messages against the grain, and identities are always being made, never simply inherited.
- b. 1938Anthony Giddens
Social structures do not stand above us – we keep them alive through our everyday actions, and can change them.
- b. 1940Arlie Russell Hochschild
Many jobs require us to manage and sell our feelings, like the flight attendant’s smile – and working women often face a second shift of housework at home.
- 1944–2015Ulrich Beck
Modern societies now produce dangers like pollution and nuclear accidents that know no borders, and must learn to deal with the side effects of their own success.
- b. 1944Raewyn Connell
There are many ways of being a man, one of which dominates the others – and social theory must listen to the global South instead of speaking only from the North.
- b. 1947Gøsta Esping-Andersen
Esping-Andersen argues that welfare states differ in kind, not only in spending: social rights can free people from selling their labour as a commodity, and the division of risks between state, market and family yields liberal, conservative and social-democratic regimes, each shaped by class coalitions.
- b. 1947Saskia Sassen
The global economy is run from a few great cities, where top financiers and low-paid migrant workers depend on each other.
- b. 1948Patricia Hill Collins
Black women see society from a special position as outsiders within, and race, class and gender oppress people together as one system.
- b. 1953Didier Eribon
Leaving the class you were born into leaves a shame that is harder to speak about than shame about sexuality, and understanding it explains something about politics.
- b. 1961Eva Illouz
Our feelings about love and happiness are shaped by capitalism and its culture, so the pain of love is partly a social, not just a personal, problem.
- b. 1965Hartmut Rosa
Modern societies keep speeding up, which alienates us from the world – a good life needs “resonance”, a responsive relationship with people, nature and things that we cannot control.
- b. 1970Andreas Reckwitz
Today being unique and special is valued over being normal, and this new ideal divides society into winners and losers.