Sociology | Class 11 | Introducing Western Sociologists

20 December 2022 · 13 min read

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Introduction

Sociology is sometimes called a child of the "age of revolution." It grew out of a period when European society was being reshaped by powerful new forces, and thinkers needed a new way to understand what was happening around them.

Three great changes, together with the new confidence in human reason, created the conditions in which sociology could emerge. They shaped the ideas of the classical theorists Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. These changes were:

the arrival of the Enlightenment, or the age of reason;
the French Revolution, which stood for the demand for political freedom;
the Industrial Revolution, which brought mass production and factory life.

To make sense of a world in motion, older explanations that relied on nature, religion and the will of the gods were pushed aside, and reason took centre stage. These notes walk through those three revolutions and the three thinkers who built modern sociology on top of them. You can read them alongside our other study notes.

The Age of Enlightenment

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, western Europe saw the rise of strikingly new ways of looking at the world. Taken together, these ideas are known as the Enlightenment. They placed the rational, thinking human being at the very centre of the universe.

The Enlightenment made possible a secular, scientific and humanist outlook, and that outlook in turn helped the Enlightenment grow. The power to think critically turned the individual into a "knowing subject," someone who both produces and uses knowledge.

Only a being capable of reason and thought could now be treated as fully human. For reason to become the defining feature of the human world, nature, religion and the acts of the gods had to be moved out of the spotlight.

The French Revolution

The French Revolution of 1789 announced the idea of political sovereignty at the level of both the individual and the nation state.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man questioned privileges based on birth and declared that all citizens were equal.
Most peasants, who had been serfs or bonded labourers tied to estates owned by nobles, were set free, and the many dues they had paid to feudal lords and to the church were cancelled.
The private life of the free individual now had to be respected by the state, and its laws could not intrude into people's private affairs.
The public world of the state was separated from the private world of the family. Education, especially schooling, became more public, while religion and family life became more private.
The nation state itself was redefined as a sovereign body with a central government.

Liberty, equality and fraternity, the guiding words of the Revolution, became the founding values of the modern state. The Revolution marked an end to the harsh control of the feudal and church institutions that had ruled France before it.

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and laid the ground for modern industry. It rested on two developments:

the systematic use of science and technology in production, including new machines and new sources of energy;
new ways of organising labour and markets on a far larger scale than ever before.

These changes brought deep social upheaval. Workers uprooted from the countryside moved to the growing cities in search of jobs and staffed the new factories. Because factory wages were low, men, women and even children had to work long hours in unsafe and unhealthy conditions simply to survive. The new industrial society also created a need for modern systems of administration, in which the state took charge of public health, sanitation, crime and general development.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in Germany but spent most of his productive years living in exile in Britain. Although he had studied philosophy, Marx thought of himself as a social theorist who wanted to end exploitation and oppression, and he believed that scientific socialism could achieve this.

Marx argued that human society had passed through several stages: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism.

The concept of alienation

Under capitalism, Marx said, people go through a deep and growing process of alienation, which means being cut off from what should be part of their own lives.

First, people are more separated from the natural world than ever before.
Second, as capitalism breaks up older forms of community and pushes relationships to be shaped by the market, people become estranged from one another.
Third, because workers do not own what they produce, a large part of the working population is cut off from the fruits of its own labour.

Even so, Marx saw capitalism as a necessary and forward looking stage, because it built the tools and wealth that could one day support a society free from exploitation and poverty. He believed the working class, the victims of capitalism, would eventually unite in a revolution, overturn the system and create a free and equal socialist society.

Marx's view of the economy

The heart of Marx's economic thinking is the idea of a mode of production.

The economic base is made up of the productive forces and the relations of production.
Productive forces are all the means of production, such as land, labour, technology and energy sources like coal, electricity and petroleum.
Relations of production are all the forms of labour and economic relationship involved in producing goods, including relations based on who owns or controls the means of production.
According to Marx, the way people made their living shaped their ideas and beliefs. In other words, material life shaped human thought, rather than thought shaping material life.

Marx gave close attention to economic processes because he saw them as the foundation of every social system in human history.

Class struggle

Marx believed that the most important way to divide people into social classes was through their place in the process of production, not through religion, language or ethnicity. People who share the same position in production, he argued, come to form a class.

As the mode of production changes, conflicts break out between classes. Marx saw this class conflict as the main engine of social change. The collapse of the old feudal farming system and the rise of capitalism created a new urban, property-less class, the working class. Small peasants and serfs lost their land and their older means of survival, and became people who had to sell their labour for wages in order to live.

Two classes being opposed is not enough to produce open conflict on its own. Workers must first become aware of their shared class interests and identity, and of the interests of the classes ranged against them. Through political struggle this awareness grows into what Marx called class consciousness. A revolution takes place when a ruling class is overthrown by the classes it had dominated.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

Marx did not think revolutions happened automatically out of economic change. Social and political processes were also needed to remake society. He noted that the ruling ideas of an age usually defend the position of the ruling class. Such ideas may, for example, lead poor people to blame fate or past deeds for their poverty rather than the way they are exploited. Yet dominant ideas do not always win, and rival ideas can challenge them.

Emile Durkheim

Durkheim is often regarded as the founder of sociology as a formal discipline, because he was the first professor of sociology. As a young man he was sent to a rabbinical school, but he later gave up his religious beliefs and called himself an atheist. His moral upbringing still shaped how he thought about society, and he came to see a community's moral rules as the force that shaped people's behaviour. His wish to study religion in a secular, scientific way took final shape in his last book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

The idea of the social fact

Durkheim held that society exists as a moral order that stands above and beyond any single individual.

Social facts are the parts of social reality, such as norms, laws and customs, that press people to act in line with the group. They lie outside the individual, they are general across a society, and they guide behaviour. Because of this, Durkheim argued, sociology could be a genuine science built on solid, observable evidence, much like the natural sciences.

His view of sociology had two key features:

Sociology studies what Durkheim called the "emergent" level, the level of collective life at which social things appear. Institutions like religion and the family, values like friendship and patriotism, and groups such as parties, communities and nations exist at a higher level of reality than the single person, and sociology studies this level.
Sociology should be an empirical science. Even though it deals with things as abstract as social facts, it can still rest on real, testable evidence. Social facts behave like objects: they are outside the individual, yet they shape how the individual acts.

The division of labour in society

In his first book, Durkheim set out to explain how society moved from the earliest forms to the modern age. He sorted societies by the kind of social solidarity, or bonding, that held them together.

Mechanical solidarity is found in small societies and rests on the likeness of their members. People do similar work and live in similar ways, so they think and feel alike. Such societies keep strict, punishing rules, because any break with shared standards is felt as a threat to the whole community.
Organic solidarity marks modern society and rests on the differences between members. People do many different jobs and depend on one another, rather like the organs of a body, and this interdependence holds them together while still allowing each person to be distinct.

In modern society the law is mainly restitutive, which means it tries to repair the harm done by a wrong. In early societies the law was repressive, aiming to punish the wrongdoer and express the anger of the group. Modern life gives the individual far more freedom, while in early societies the person was almost completely absorbed into the collective. Durkheim's calm, secular study of these bonds helped lay the foundation for sociology as a new social science.

Max Weber

Weber wrote on a huge range of subjects, but he is best known for building an interpretive sociology of social action, power and domination. He was also deeply interested in how modern society becomes more and more rational, and in how the great world religions related to that change.

For Weber, the main task of the social sciences was to reach an "interpretive understanding of social action." By social action he meant any human behaviour to which the actor attaches a meaning or purpose. Sociology, he said, works through empathetic understanding, a kind of "feeling with" others rather than merely "feeling for" them.

Weber was among the first to face the special problem of objectivity in the social sciences. The social world is built out of human meanings, values, feelings and ideals, and the social scientist has to deal with these honestly. To capture them, a sociologist must imaginatively place themselves in the shoes of the people being studied, while keeping their own values out of the way. This discipline is what Weber called value neutrality.

The sociologist must record other people's values faithfully and objectively.
Weber admitted this was very hard, since social scientists are themselves members of society who carry their own opinions and prejudices.
Staying value neutral, he said, takes great self control and an "iron will."

The concept of ideal types

Weber offered another tool for doing sociology, the ideal type. In Weber's hands the ideal type:

is a tool of method, not a description of a perfect world;
is a simplified model of a social phenomenon that is logically consistent;
highlights the features thought to matter most for analysis, while playing down others;
is not meant to be an exact copy of reality, but a way to make analysis clearer.

Weber put this tool to work in two famous ways. First, he studied how the ethics of certain Protestant Christian groups helped drive the growth of capitalism in Europe. Second, he used the ideal type to set out three kinds of authority: traditional authority, which rests on custom and precedent; charismatic authority, which rests on the special personal qualities of a leader; and rational-legal authority, which rests on clear rules and laws.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy was, for Weber, the form of organisation that best expressed the rational-legal authority of the modern age. It rested on a clear split between the public sphere and the private sphere, and it set out plain rules for how officials should behave. As a public institution, it limited officials' power to their defined duties and did not give them unchecked authority.

Defining features of bureaucratic power

Fixed official duties: officials work within set areas of responsibility, governed by rules and regulations. The regular tasks of the office are shared out in a fixed way, and only qualified people are appointed to carry them out.
A hierarchy of offices: posts are arranged in a graded order, with higher officials supervising lower ones, so a decision can be appealed upwards.
Written records: the work of the office rests on written documents, the files, which are carefully kept.
Trained staff: office management is a specialised, modern activity that needs skilled and trained people.
Conduct in office: official work demands an official's full attention and is bound by strict rules and procedures.

Weber described bureaucracy as a modern form of political authority, in which each person is given a defined task, the authority to carry it out, and recognition for their skill and training. It is a hierarchical form of organisation in which every member holds some measure of authority and power.

Why it still matters

Marx, Durkheim and Weber were writing more than a century ago, yet the questions they asked are very much alive today. Take one number from January 2026. Oxfam reported that the total wealth of the world's billionaires reached 18.3 trillion dollars in 2025, the highest level in history, after jumping by more than 16 per cent in a single year. That was about three times faster than the average of the previous five years. The 2.5 trillion dollars added in 2025 alone was almost equal to the entire wealth held by the poorest half of humanity, roughly 4.1 billion people.

This is exactly the kind of pattern Marx tried to explain. He argued that under capitalism a small group owns the means of production while most people own only their labour, so the rewards of work flow upwards. His idea of alienation, of workers cut off from the fruits of what they make, is easy to picture when a handful of owners gain more in a single year than billions of people hold in total.

Weber would notice something else in the same report. Oxfam found that billionaires are around 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens. Weber studied how economic class turns into power and authority, and how modern societies are run through large, rule bound organisations. When wealth converts so directly into political influence, his questions about who really holds power feel completely current.

Durkheim adds the last piece. He cared about social solidarity, the glue that holds a society together. Researchers who study inequality warn that when the gap grows this wide, that glue comes under strain and trust in shared institutions can weaken, which is close to what Durkheim worried about. You can carry these three lenses straight into today's headlines about jobs, wages and technology. To see how classic ideas connect to current events, explore the Learnacy Hub, and browse more Class 11 Sociology notes in our resources library.

Important terms

Alienation: a condition in which people are ruled by forces they have themselves created but which now confront them as outside powers. Under capitalism this separation happens from nature, from other people, from oneself and from one's work. Marx called it a state of self estrangement.
Charismatic authority: authority based on the unusual sanctity, bravery or exemplary character of a person, which followers accept as a source of legitimacy.
Surplus value: the extra value created by a worker over and above what is needed to pay for their labour time.
Office: a public post with formal, impersonal authority and clearly defined duties.
Enlightenment: an 18th century movement in which thinkers rejected the idea that tradition or religion was the final authority, held up reason as the only sure source of truth, and saw human beings as the sole bearers of reason.
Bureaucracy: a form of organisation based on separating the private and public spheres and governed by clear rules and laws.
Productive forces: all the means used in production, including labour, land, technology and energy sources.
Social solidarity: the bonds of shared belief and mutual dependence that hold the members of a society together.

Sources

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