Principles of sociology - University of London International ...

21 Principles of sociology
24
If we were to dig a little deeper and do some research, we would find
more evidence of the regularities of social life.
For example:
• economic data show that the patterns of employment, output, imports
and exports of a country are very similar from one year to the next
• demographic data – that is, information about the distribution of
populations – show that in any given country roughly the same number
of people are born each year, get married and get divorced
• rule breaking – reported crimes, arrests, rates of mental illness and
even suicide rates are much the same year in and year out
• social differences – there are significant and consistent variations
between different social groups in a society: for example, those from
economically poorer social backgrounds – sometimes referred to in
sociology as socially deprived or lower social class – are more likely, on
average, to end up with lower educational qualifications, work in lowpaid
jobs, have worse health and die at younger ages.
Sociology is about documenting and explaining these kinds of regularities
and patterns. So, whereas journalists, the mass media and to some extent
the general public, are more interested in the unusual and troublesome,
sociologists are more interested the usual, the everyday, the ‘taken-forgranted’.
Origins of sociology
The formal study of sociology began in the nineteenth century as an
attempt to make sense of massive changes that were sweeping over
Western Europe at that time. European societies were industrialising
and there was a mass movement of people from the rural to the urban
areas. Traditional institutions of power and control, such as the Church
and landed aristocracy, were losing much of their influence. The late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were times of reform and revolution
and new sources of power, such as the property-owning capitalist class
and organised labour movements were beginning to emerge. The fact that
societies could be transformed so dramatically in such a comparatively
short space of time led scholars to start exploring the sources of social
order and change, and the subject we now know as sociology was born.
These early sociologists tried to make sense of this new industrial age
by identifying what they believed were its essential characteristics and
comparing them with what had gone before. We shall be looking at these
theories in more detail in Chapter 4, but we can introduce two of the most
influential figures here.
For Karl Marx (1818–1883), whose ideas were later to transform the
world, the modern age was characterised, above all, by a new form of
free market economy that he called industrial capitalism. Marx was
very critical of capitalism. He argued that most of the wealth it created
remained in the hands of the small owning class who made their profits by
exploiting the labour power of the workers. However, capitalist societies
were constantly changing, and Marx was optimistic that they were
sowing the seeds of their own destruction. The injustices they produced,
and people’s increasing awareness of them, would lead to revolutionary
change and the creation of what Marx believed would be fairer communist
societies where resources would be distributed to people according to their
needs. See the section on Karl Marx in Chapter 4 for further reading.