What are the intellectual ideas that …

Intellectual ideas into the making of sociology

• Sociologists and social anthropologists sought to categorise societies into types and to distinguish stages in social development. These features reappear in the 19th century in works of early sociologists, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer.
• Efforts were therefore made to classify different types of societies on that basis, for instance: Types of pre-modern societies such as hunters and gatherers, pastoral and agrarian, agrarian and non- industrial civilisations. Types of modern societies such as the industrialised societies.
• Such an evolutionary vision assumed that the west was necessarily the most advanced and civilised. Non- western societies were often seen as barbaric and less developed. Indian sociology reflects this tension which go far back to the history of British colonialism and the intellectual and ideological response to it.
• Darwin’s ideas about organic evolution were a dominant influence on early sociological thought. Society was often compared with living organisms and efforts were made to trace its growth through stages comparable to those of organic life.
• This way of looking at society as a system of parts, each part playing a given function influenced the study of social institutions like the family or the school and structures such as stratification.
• The intellectual ideas that went into the making of sociology have a direct bearing on how sociology studies empirical reality.