Revision summary
Sociology arose as a science of society after industry and revolution. Comte named it; Durkheim, Marx, and Weber gave it method and objects. Rationality is both a method and, in Weber, a historical process. Scientific temper uses comparison, rates, and social facts. The Census later became a public file for that temper.
Model answer
Introduction
Sociology became a distinct discipline when European order after industry and revolution was treated as a worldly object of reason. Rationality and scientific temper meant explaining groups by evidence and comparison, not by theology or court chronicle.
Body
Rationality as a new object and a new method
- Auguste Comte named sociology as a positive science of social order and progress, placed after biology in a hierarchy of sciences.
- Max Weber later made rationality itself a historical process: legal-rational authority, calculation, and disenchantment.
- Karl Marx treated capitalist production as a lawful, if conflictual, structure that could be studied, not only morally denounced.
Scientific temper
- Emile Durkheim demanded social facts be treated as things: external, constraining, and comparable, as in the study of suicide rates.
- The French Revolution and the factory made society a problem that natural law and sermons could not settle.
- Census counting, later NFHS-type surveys, and comparative history supplied files that a scientific temper could use.
Distinct from neighbours
- Economics kept price, political science kept the office, and psychology kept the mind. Sociology claimed patterned relations among institutions as its own field.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD EN[Industry and revolution] --> SOC[Sociology] R[Rationality] --> SOC ST[Scientific temper] --> SOC SOC --> D[Durkheim facts] SOC --> W[Weber action] SOC --> M[Marx class]
Conclusion
Sociology emerged when Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber treated society as knowable by reason and method. Scientific temper meant evidence, types, and rates. Distinctness is that joint map of relations, not a claim to own every neighbouring fact.
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