Social Theory, Sport, Leisure by Ken Roberts

Author:Ken Roberts [Roberts, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781317385851
Google: RBO4CwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-30T03:20:57+00:00

European and American sociology

Before 1939 European sociology was a failing project. As explained in Chapter 1, Auguste Comte is acknowledged as the founder of sociology because he coined the word. He died in 1857, and he did not leave a discipline that was sinking firm roots. In fact, it was not until 1895 that Europe’s first university department of sociology opened and its first professor of sociology, Emile Durkheim, was appointed at Bordeaux. Sociology then began to spread, but its growth was neither rapid nor dense. From 1905 onward the subject was taught at the London School of Economics, but nowhere else in Britain until after the Second World War. Most of the sociology that was defined as ‘classical’ after 1945 had been produced outside sociology (most notably by Karl Marx and Max Weber). Sociology did not become the monarch of the social sciences that Comte and Durkheim had intended. In the early twentieth century economics and politics developed more vigorously as independent social sciences. So did history, geography and law.

European sociology was floundering. Its foundations were fragile. This was because sociology had been tied (by Comte) to a unilinear view of historical change, and the evolution of societies was supposedly coupled with the evolution of the human species. Hence social anthropology, the study of the allegedly simple societies of so-called primitive people, became allied with physical anthropology, not sociology, which studied modern people and their societies. Classical sociology was produced in an age when scientists were classifying humanity into different races. Sociology was also given in-built vulnerability by Comte’s insistence that it be kept apart from ‘social physics’ – collecting facts about current populations and their social conditions. Friedrich Engels’s research in the 1840s into the condition of the working class in England is the only example of a classical theorist (as a collaborator in creating Marxism) who personally explored the lives of people in the society in which he lived. Durkheim’s study of suicide used existing statistics rather than his own original fieldwork. His book on religion was based entirely on secondary sources. Having helped to develop Marxist theory, in his later life Engels took a different, more Durkheimian approach in studying the origins of the family and gender relations. Researching current social conditions was left to social reformers, and their efforts became the basis for a separate academic subject that was called social administration in Britain (a title later replaced by social policy), from which classical sociology kept a clear distance. It was economics and social administration, not sociology, that helped to pave the way for the development of social democracies and welfare states in post-1945 Europe. Economics, politics and social administration, not sociology, produced the great public intellectuals of the early and mid-twentieth century.

From the 1870s onward America began to develop a different kind of sociology. Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) is generally regarded as the first American sociologist. He is best known for his phrase ‘the looking glass self’ (we see ourselves as others see us)

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