Revision summary
Enlightenment made institutions worldly, comparable, and criticisable. Montesquieu, Condorcet, Rousseau, and the philosophes prepared comparison, progress, and critique. Comte turned the programme into a named science. Revolution and industry supplied the crisis. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber are heirs who also criticised Enlightenment optimism.
Model answer
Introduction
Sociology emerged when industrial and political upheaval made society a problem. The Enlightenment contributed the intellectual permission: reason, comparison, progress, and a worldly account of institutions. It did not, by itself, write the discipline.
Body
What Enlightenment supplied
- Institutions were treated as human products, open to criticism, not as eternal mystery.
- Montesquieu compared laws and manners. Condorcet pictured progress through knowledge. Auguste Comte later turned that faith into a hierarchy of sciences with sociology at the peak.
- John Locke and later utilitarians centred the rights-bearing individual, which made social order a puzzle.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau politicised inequality. Karl Marx would invert contract into class, but the question was already public.
- Voltaire and Diderot attacked sacred monopoly, opening secular explanation of crime, worship, and government.
What else was required
- The French Revolution showed that order can collapse. The Industrial Revolution showed new classes and cities.
- Conservative reaction, which Robert Nisbet stressed, also fed sociology: community, authority, and the sacred as problems.
- Emile Durkheim rebuilt moral solidarity. Max Weber read Enlightenment rationality as disenchantment and iron cage.
Contribution, stated tightly
- Naturalistic explanation, comparison, progress as a research programme, and the legitimacy of criticising custom.
- Sociology is heir and critic, not a hymn to the eighteenth century.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD EN[Enlightenment] --> R[Reason comparison progress] EN --> C[Critique of dogma] IND[Industry revolution] --> SOC[Sociology] R --> SOC C --> SOC
Conclusion
Enlightenment reason, comparison, and critique made a science of society thinkable. Industry and revolution made it necessary. Comte named the science; Marx, Durkheim, and Weber rebuilt it around capitalism, solidarity, and rationalisation.
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Did Enlightenment create sociology in one country?
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Is sociology only Enlightenment rationalism?
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