The science of society itself — from the classical founders who made human association an object of inquiry, through the American builders of structural and interactionist theory, to the Frankfurt School and the French tradition that turned analysis on culture, power, and the body.
French philosopher who named sociology and argued it should be the queen of the sciences — the last to emerge because it studies the most complex phenomena. His law of three stages (theological, metaphysical, positive) proposed that human thought evolves toward scientific understanding of society itself.
Can help you study: Positivism, the three stages of knowledge, social statics and dynamics, the classification of the sciences, and the origins of sociology as a discipline.
English philosopher who applied evolutionary thinking to society before Darwin published. His synthetic philosophy treated society as an organism that grows, differentiates, and integrates. Enormously influential in his lifetime; now remembered mainly for what his critics made of him.
Can help you study: Social evolution, the organic analogy, differentiation and integration, the principles of sociology, and the relationship between biology and social theory.
German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary who argued that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. His analysis of capitalism — commodity fetishism, surplus value, alienation, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall — remains the indispensable starting point for critical social theory.
Can help you study: Historical materialism, class struggle, alienation, commodity fetishism, surplus value, ideology, the critique of political economy, and the relationship between economic base and social superstructure.
English writer who translated Comte into English and then surpassed him in method. Her How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) is the first systematic methodology for the social sciences. She studied American society as a participant-observer decades before the method had a name.
Can help you study: Comparative method, participant observation, the study of institutions, abolitionist sociology, and the relationship between morals as professed and morals as practised.
French sociologist who established sociology as an academic discipline. His rules of sociological method insisted that social facts must be treated as things — external to the individual and exercising constraint. His study of suicide demonstrated that even the most apparently individual act has social causes.
Can help you study: Social facts, mechanical and organic solidarity, anomie, the division of labour, suicide as a social phenomenon, collective consciousness, and the rules of sociological method.
German sociologist who distinguished Gemeinschaft (community, held together by essential will — kinship, shared life) from Gesellschaft (society, held together by arbitrary will — contract, calculation). The tension between the two remains one of the most productive concepts in the discipline.
Can help you study: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, community and society, essential and arbitrary will, and the social consequences of modernisation.
German sociologist who studied the forms of social life rather than its contents — the dyad, the triad, the stranger, the secret, the metropolis. He understood that society is not a substance but a process: sociation, the dynamic forms through which people associate.
Can help you study: Forms of sociation, the stranger, the metropolis and mental life, the philosophy of money, conflict, secrecy, and the micro-geometry of social interaction.
German sociologist who insisted that sociology must be an interpretive science — seeking not laws but the meaning of social action. His work on rationalisation, bureaucracy, the Protestant ethic, and ideal types established the methodological foundations of the discipline.
Can help you study: Interpretive sociology (Verstehen), ideal types, rationalisation, bureaucracy, the Protestant ethic, legitimate authority, the iron cage, and the methodology of the social sciences.
American sociologist, historian, and civil rights leader. His Philadelphia Negro (1899) was the first rigorous empirical study of an African-American community. He introduced the concept of double consciousness and insisted that the colour line was the problem of the twentieth century.
Can help you study: Double consciousness, the colour line, empirical urban sociology, racial formation, the Talented Tenth, Pan-Africanism, and the relationship between social science and social justice.
American philosopher and social psychologist at the University of Chicago who argued that the self arises in social experience. The I acts spontaneously; the Me reflects the attitudes of others. The generalised other is the community’s voice internalised. His students published Mind, Self, and Society posthumously in 1934.
Can help you study: Symbolic interactionism, the social self, the I and the Me, the generalised other, role-taking, and the emergence of mind through social interaction.
Harvard sociologist who built the most ambitious theoretical system in the history of the discipline. His AGIL scheme argued that every social system must solve four problems: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latent pattern maintenance. The system was magnificent, controversial, and ultimately surpassed.
Can help you study: Structural functionalism, the social system, AGIL, pattern variables, the theory of action, and the ambition to build a unified theory of society.
Columbia University sociologist who preferred theories of the middle range — precise enough to test, broad enough to matter. He distinguished manifest from latent functions, introduced the concepts of unintended consequences, self-fulfilling prophecy, and role strain, and studied the sociology of science.
Can help you study: Middle-range theory, manifest and latent functions, unintended consequences, the self-fulfilling prophecy, anomie and deviance, reference groups, and the sociology of science.
Canadian-American sociologist who studied the interaction order — what happens when people are in each other’s presence. His dramaturgical approach treated social life as performance: front stage, back stage, impression management, face-work. Asylums (1961) and Stigma (1963) are masterworks of close observation.
Can help you study: Dramaturgy, the interaction order, impression management, frame analysis, stigma, total institutions, and the sociology of everyday life.
American sociologist who argued that deviance is not a quality of the act but of the reaction to it. His Outsiders (1963) showed how moral entrepreneurs create the rules whose violation creates deviants. Later, Art Worlds (1982) applied the same collaborative perspective to artistic production.
Can help you study: Labelling theory, deviance as social process, moral entrepreneurs, art worlds, the sociology of occupations, and the argument that social life is collective action.
American sociologist who founded ethnomethodology — the study of the practical methods by which people produce and maintain the sense of social order. His breaching experiments revealed how much invisible work sustains ordinary interaction. Social order is not a fact; it is an ongoing accomplishment.
Can help you study: Ethnomethodology, breaching experiments, accountability, indexicality, practical reasoning, and the ordinary methods by which people produce social order.
Scottish philosopher whose Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) argued that nations stumble upon establishments which are the result of human action but not the execution of any human design. He is considered the father of modern sociology by many Continental scholars.
Can help you study: Civil society, spontaneous order, civic virtue, the stadial theory of progress, and the Scottish Enlightenment origins of social science.
Scottish jurist and social theorist at the University of Glasgow. His Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771) argued that the mode of subsistence — hunting, herding, farming, commerce — determines the form of government and the relations between the sexes.
Can help you study: Stadial theory, the economic basis of social structure, the origin of ranks and authority, and the Scottish Enlightenment analysis of progress.
German philosopher who directed the Institute for Social Research and defined critical theory as theory that seeks human emancipation. His Eclipse of Reason (1947) argued that instrumental rationality had consumed every other form of thought.
Can help you study: Critical theory, the distinction between traditional and critical theory, the eclipse of reason, instrumental rationality, and the Frankfurt School programme.
German philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist. His Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, with Horkheimer) argued that the Enlightenment had turned against itself, producing the culture industry and the administered world. His Negative Dialectics refused to let thought settle into system.
Can help you study: The culture industry, negative dialectics, aesthetic theory, the authoritarian personality, the critique of mass culture, and the argument that after Auschwitz the relationship between culture and barbarism must be rethought.
German-American philosopher who argued in One-Dimensional Man (1964) that advanced industrial society creates false needs that integrate individuals into the existing system of production. The Great Refusal — the protest against that which is — was the only authentic response.
Can help you study: One-dimensional thought, repressive tolerance, the Great Refusal, Eros and civilisation, the critique of advanced industrial society, and the relationship between liberation and aesthetics.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Jürgen Habermas — the philosopher and sociologist who reconstructed critical theory around the concept of communicative action. His Theory of Communicative Action (1981) argued that modernity’s pathology is the colonisation of the lifeworld by systems of money and power. University of Frankfurt.
Can help you study: Communicative action, the public sphere, system and lifeworld, discourse ethics, the colonisation of the lifeworld, and the unfinished project of modernity.
French sociologist and nephew of Durkheim who demonstrated in The Gift (1925) that exchange is never purely economic — every gift creates an obligation to receive and to reciprocate. He coined the concept of the total social fact: a phenomenon simultaneously economic, legal, moral, religious, and aesthetic.
Can help you study: The gift, total social fact, techniques of the body, exchange and reciprocity, and the anthropological foundations of sociology.
French sociologist who demonstrated that taste is not innocent. His concepts of habitus (embodied dispositions), field (structured social spaces), and capital (economic, cultural, social, symbolic) revealed how social inequality reproduces itself through culture. Distinction (1979) showed that aesthetic preferences are class markers disguised as personal choice.
Can help you study: Habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence, distinction, cultural reproduction, reflexive sociology, and the relationship between culture and class.
French philosopher and historian who argued that power is not held but exercised — it circulates, produces knowledge, constitutes subjects, and creates truth itself. His archaeological and genealogical methods revealed how institutions (the clinic, the prison, the asylum) produce the very categories they claim merely to describe.
Can help you study: Power/knowledge, archaeology of knowledge, genealogy, discipline and punishment, biopolitics, the history of sexuality, and the analysis of how institutions produce the subjects they govern.