Social Theory

The Classic Tradition

Although philosophers and social thinkers have thought about the features of society and social organization since the earliest civilizations, society and social relations became a unit of systematic analysis in the 18th and 19th centuries. Social theory developed as an endeavor to explain and predict the social forces—such as political revolutions, the industrial revolution, the rise of capitalism and socialism, urbanization, and the development of scientific thought—that altered the social world.

The Enlightenment period gave rise to a wide range of social theories in Europe, particularly in France. Philosophers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Condorcet, in accord with the intellectual currents of the era, employed reason rather than divinely ordained and unchangeable truths in order to analyze social order. Enlightenment philosophy called for the use of the scientific method to analyze social issues and to create a more rational world. However, as a result of the failure of the French [Page 1439]Revolution (among other things) to fulfill its promises of a free and democratic society ruled by human reason, the optimistic ideas of Enlightenment thinkers about individual rights, human perfectibility, and social progress came to be subjected to criticism by conservative thinkers such as Bonald and Maistre. The critics of the Enlightenment thinkers focused on order in society by prioritizing religion, traditions, customs, and seemingly unshakable institutions such as church, family, and community.

The Enlightenment, as well as the conservative reaction to it, laid the groundwork for the founding of sociology as a distinctive discipline and for much early social theory. The French philosopher Auguste Comte coined the term sociology in 1818 and saw it as a discipline devoted to the systematic, even positivistic, study of society. Developing a science of society constituted the focus of Comte's work, as well as that of his successor in French sociology, Emile Durkheim. Durkheim founded the discipline of sociology by establishing its methodology and by defining macro-level social facts as the unit of analysis. Overall, his social theory focused on the importance of morality in society and the problems caused by the decline in the power of the moral system. Durkheim became very influential in many fields, especially through his ideas and by creating a scholarly journal devoted to the study of sociology, L'Année Sociologique, which became a strong center for the proliferation and spread of theoretical (and empirical) ideas in early 20th-century France.

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