Revision summary
Sociology emerged to explain industrial, political, and secular modern order. Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead, and Parsons mapped that object. Comparison with other types is a method, not a betrayal. Colonial India is inside modernity’s history, not outside sociology. Discuss: pre-eminently modern, not exclusively the contemporary West.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
- Sociology was born as a science of the modern: industry, the nation-state, class, and a worldly explanation of order. The statement is historically fair as origin. It is too narrow as a permanent object, because modernity is studied through contrast with other types.
Body
Why the claim arose
- Auguste Comte and the French Revolution made post-traditional order the puzzle.
- Karl Marx centred capitalist modernity as a mode of production.
- Max Weber asked why rationalisation densified in the Occident.
- Emile Durkheim studied the division of labour as a modern solidarity problem, using simpler types as a foil.
What “pre-eminently” should mean
- The classic questions are urban, industrial, bureaucratic, and secularising societies.
- George Herbert Mead’s self in the city, and Talcott Parsons’s differentiated subsystems, are modern maps.
Limits of the slogan
- Historical and anthropological comparison are internal to the discipline, as Weber’s religions and Durkheim’s totemism show.
- Colonial and Indian caste–agrarian worlds are modern in being transformed by empire, Census, and market, not only as “tradition”.
- Robert K. Merton’s middle-range work can study a factory or a village school with the same tools.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD MOD[Modern society] --> SOC[Sociology's birth questions] COMP[Historical comparison] --> SOC SOC --> NOW[Still mostly modern objects]
Conclusion
Sociology is pre-eminently a child of modern society and still spends most of its energy there. It is not only a description of the West’s present. Marx, Weber, and Durkheim already needed other types to know what was new.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Is religion playing an important role in increasing fundamentalism? Give reasons for your answer.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2016 · Q5(c)). View answer →
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Should sociology ignore tribes and villages?
No. It studies them with modern concepts and as parts of modern states and markets.
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Is the statement Eurocentric?
It is if modernity is monopolised by Europe. It is useful if modernity is a global historical type.
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