What Sociology Is

Why do people in one country marry later than people in another, or take their own lives at different rates, when each person's choice feels entirely private? Asking that kind of question is what led Émile Durkheim, according to Wikipedia's Social fact article, to argue that sociology should be the empirical study of ways of acting that exist outside any one person and press on that person from outside. Sociology looks at the patterns that appear when many individual lives are added together, and at the forces that shape those lives. This chapter sets out what the subject is, where its name came from, two ideas that every later chapter uses (the social fact and the sociological imagination), and how sociologists gather evidence.

What Sociology Is

Wikipedia's Sociology article opens by calling sociology "the scientific study of human society", and says its focus is social behaviour, relationships and interaction. It says that social researchers "draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques", and that newer approaches include analytical, mathematical and computational methods, with agent-based modelling and social network analysis as examples. The word "scientific" matters here, and the idea behind it is discussed under "How Sociologists Work" below.

Where the Word Came From

The Sociology article's History section says: "The term sociology was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès," in an unpublished manuscript. Wikipedia's Auguste Comte article adds that Comte introduced the term "sociologie" as a neologism in 1838, and notes that Sieyès had used the word earlier with a different meaning. That makes the two dates 58 years apart (1838 minus 1780, computed in Python). Before settling on the new word, the Comte article says, he had used the phrase "social physics", which Adolphe Quetelet later took for his own work.

Comte's "law of three stages" is also described in his article: society and knowledge pass through "the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive" stages. It is a historical claim that later thinkers have criticised; this chapter reports it only as one of the early attempts to treat society scientifically (the criticism is my own general knowledge; check).

Durkheim and the Social Fact

The Social fact article quotes Durkheim's definition: "A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint". Elsewhere he described such facts as "manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual" that are "invested with a coercive power". The article lists his examples: social institutions such as kinship and marriage, together with currency, language, religion and political organisation.

The word "coercive" is easy to misread. Nobody is claiming that a policeman stands behind every rule. A speaker of English who says "I goed to the shop" is corrected by listeners without any law being involved, and the language was there before the speaker was born (this is my own illustration of the idea, not an example from the article).

The Sociological Imagination

Wikipedia's Sociological imagination article credits the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his book The Sociological Imagination (1959), and defines the term as "the awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society." The article as I read it does not set out the common distinction between "personal troubles" and "public issues", so what follows is from general knowledge (check): Mills is usually taken to mean that when one person loses a job it is a personal trouble, but when millions are out of work it is a public issue that needs a social explanation.

The gap between 1895 and 1959 is 64 years (computed in Python), so the sociological imagination is an idea about habits of thought, not a method that began with the founders. It takes Durkheim's insight (society presses on the person) and turns it into a question anyone can ask about their own life: which parts of my situation are mine alone, and which are shared with many people in the same position?

How Sociologists Work

The Scientific method article describes the method as "an empirical method for acquiring knowledge through careful observation", and lists its typical elements: characterising the subject by observing, defining and measuring it; hypotheses; predictions; and experiments as "tests of all of the above." Sociology applies this spirit to people, but human society rarely lets researchers run controlled experiments, so the Sociology article's mention of both qualitative and quantitative techniques matters.

• Quantitative work counts and compares, for example survey answers or rates such as Durkheim's suicide rates.
• Qualitative work looks closely at meaning, for example interviews or watching a community (my gloss on the two terms; check).
• Computational work, per the Sociology article, includes agent-based modelling and social network analysis.

The Sociology article also names Durkheim, Marx and Max Weber as "typically cited as the three principal architects of sociology", and lists four traditions in Randall Collins's survey: "functionalism, conflict, symbolic interactionism, and utilitarianism". Chapter 2 takes up the first three.

Where to Read More

• Encyclopaedias. This chapter uses six Wikipedia pages: Sociology, Sociological imagination, Social fact, Émile Durkheim, Auguste Comte and Scientific method. The Sociological imagination and Social fact articles appeared complete in the fetch. The other four were each cut off by the fetch tool: I read only the first 100,000 characters of about 324,000 (Sociology), 240,000 (Durkheim), 194,000 (Comte) and 291,000 (Scientific method), so later sections of those pages are not reflected here.
• Primary texts. Mills's The Sociological Imagination and Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method are short enough to read directly. I have not read either; the descriptions above come only from the Wikipedia pages.
• Practical. Pick a statistic from a news story and ask which social facts might lie behind it.

Exercises