The age of revolution

Sociology is sometimes called the child of the 'age of revolution'. It was born in 19th-century Western Europe, after three revolutions that transformed how people lived, first in Europe and then across the world. This chapter introduces three classical thinkers who laid its foundations: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.

1. The Enlightenment (late 17th and 18th centuries), the dawning of the 'age of reason':

• It placed the human being at the centre of the universe and rational thought at the centre of the human being. The thinking individual became the 'knowing subject', both producer and user of knowledge.
• (Its darker side: those thought unable to reason, such as 'natives' of 'primitive' societies, were treated as not fully human.)
• Since society was made by humans, it could be analysed rationally. For reason to take the central place, nature, religion and the acts of gods had to be displaced. The Enlightenment helped develop attitudes we now call secular, scientific and humanistic.

2. The French Revolution (1789) announced political sovereignty for individuals and for nation-states.

• The Declaration of Human Rights asserted the equality of all citizens and questioned privileges inherited by birth. Serfs (bonded labourers tied to aristocrats' estates) were freed, and feudal and church taxes were cancelled.
• Citizens had rights and were equal before the law. A line was drawn between the public realm of the state and the private realm of the household: religion and the family became more 'private', while education (especially schooling) became more 'public'.
• Its ideals, liberty, equality and fraternity, became the watchwords of the modern state.

3. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, had two sides:

• the systematic application of science and technology to production: new machines like the Spinning Jenny (which greatly increased productivity in textiles) and new sources of power like the steam engine, leading to factories and mass manufacture for distant markets;
• new ways of organising labour and markets on a huge scale.
• Socially, uprooted rural people crowded into cities; low wages forced men, women and children to work long hours in hazardous conditions; the urban came to dominate the rural; the rich lived in cities, but so did workers, in slums.
• As the state took charge of health, sanitation, crime control and 'development', it needed new kinds of knowledge about society. Sociology arose partly in response, and has been called the 'science of the new industrial society'.

Example (new): today a city government planning bus routes needs to know where people live and work and when they travel; collecting and studying such information about society is the kind of need that helped sociology grow.