Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book situates sociology in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts and examines how the founders of the discipline developed competing analyses of the processes elementary to social and moral life through their distinctive sociological contributions. Surveying a range of sociological analyses from Comte to feminism, postmodernism and rational choice theory, this book examines the various attempts that have been made to reconstruct the discipline over the last century, and the challenges facing it today. Individual chapters examine `Human Sociology', `Sacred Sociology', `Tragic Sociology', `Heroic Sociology' and `Normative Sociology'. The book moves on to discuss post-classical thought, and the attempted reconstruction o
Human Sociology
Human Sociology
Introduction
This chapter returns to the founder of sociology, Auguste Comte, and examines how the early development of the discipline took place in a context marked by a series of controversies concerning ‘human nature’ and the proper roles of reason, emotion, and religion in the governance of society. Students of sociology are taught that Comte sought to construct a rigorously ‘positive’ approach towards the acquisition of knowledge. What is less widely known is that Comte invested his positivism with two major aims that delineate the fundamental parameters of the sociological ambition: these were to gain scientifically valid data, and to increase the moral content of society by portraying it as a transcendent entity that embraced the intellectual and emotional capacities of humans.
In seeking ...
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