Ishan BhatnagarAIR 5 · CSE 2025 · 358 wordsTheir whole copy
Opening · a definition
European Enlightenment, in many ways was the harbinger of ideational modernity. And it was in response to the challenge of modernity that sociology emerged as a science of society (John Harris).
Body · points
Role of European Enlightenment in creating intellectual conditions for the birth of sociology
1.> Rationality | Kant argued that enlightenment connoted the "freedom to think for oneself". Thus European modernity stressed rationality, which influenced founding fathers like August Comte to formulate a rational, law-based science of society.
2.> Empiricism | Hume had argued that the world was discoverable through careful observation and quantification of phenomena. This influenced early sociologists such as Durkheim to study social facts such as suicide by looking at suicide statistics.
3.> Humanism | Renaissance focus on divinity of human beings inspired critical sociological thought such as feminist writings of Marianne Weber.
4.> Political Revolutionary thought | T.B. Bottomore has argued that political thought of Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau as the social contract theory prompted sociological reflection on the nature of state and the citizens. For instance, it prompted Marx' critique of the unfulfilled promises of Democratic capitalist state.
5.> Counter Enlightenment thought | Enlightenment thought found its anti-thesis in Counter-Enlightenment thought emphasizing social order and cohesion above the individual. This informed the functionalist thought, such as that of Durkheim, that accorded primary to the individual.
6.> Notion of progress and history | such as Vico Giambatista's conception of history in terms of stages gave inspiration to Comte's "law of three stages" in evolution of society and Marx' notion of Dialectical materialism which conceives of historical evolution in terms of mode of production.
7.> Methodical contributions | Scientific revolution preceding and overlapping with enlightenment gave the inductive and deductive methods of reasoning, bore out in early social surveys, such as Eden's survey of the Poor.
8.> Breaking away from religious knowledge | Voltaire's critique of religion set the ground for early sociology to emerge as an independent basis of scientific knowledge, even leading to Marx' critique of religion as the "opiate of the masses".
Close · a summary
Hence, as per Irving Zeitlin, early sociology was very much in response to the intellectual climate created by the enlightenment.