What aspects of Enlightenment do you think paved way for the emergence of sociology ? Elaborate.

Reason and a science of society

• Enlightenment thought treated human institutions as products of history and convention, open to criticism, not as eternal mystery.
• Montesquieu compared climates, laws, and manners, which is already a comparative sociology before the name.
• Condorcet and Turgot pictured progress through stages of knowledge. Auguste Comte later turned that faith into a hierarchy of sciences with sociology at the peak.
• Immanuel Kant’s call to use one’s own understanding weakened the monopoly of church explanation, even though Kant was not a sociologist.

The individual, contract, and the social

• John Locke and later utilitarians centred the rights-bearing individual. That made social order a puzzle: how do separate persons hold together?
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will and social contract asked how inequality is instituted. Karl Marx would later invert contract into class, but the Enlightenment had already politicised inequality.
• David Hume and Adam Smith studied morals and markets as regularities. Smith’s division of labour fed both economics and, through Comte and Durkheim, a sociology of differentiation.

Critique of tradition and sacred monopoly

• Voltaire and Diderot attacked privilege and dogma. A space opened for secular explanation of crime, suicide, and worship.
• Saint-Simon, standing at the edge of Enlightenment and industry, demanded a science of social reorganisation after the French Revolution.

What else was needed

• The French Revolution showed that order can collapse and be remade. The Industrial Revolution showed new classes and cities.
• Conservative responses, which Robert Nisbet stressed, also fed sociology: community, authority, and the sacred as problems, not only as targets.
• Max Weber later read Enlightenment rationality as a world-historical process of disenchantment, which is both an heir and a critic of that age.

Assessment

• The paving aspects are: naturalistic explanation, comparison, progress as a research programme, the individual as unit, and the legitimacy of criticising custom.
• Sociology is not Enlightenment cheerleading. Durkheim rebuilt moral solidarity; Marx criticised bourgeois reason as ideology; Weber feared the iron cage.