sociology. VI T HE I NTELLECTUAL I DEAS THAT W ENT INTO THE M AKING OF S OCIOLOGY Influenced by scientific theories of natural evolution and findings about pre-modern societies made by early travellers, colonial administrators, 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. The Indian colonial experience has to be seen in this light.
Indian sociology reflects this tension which “go far back to the history of British colonialism and the intellectual and ideological response to it…” (Singh : ). Perhaps because of this backdrop, Indian sociology has been particularly thoughtful and reflexive of its practice (Chaudhuri ). You will be engaging with Indian sociological thought, its concerns and practice in greater detail in the book, Understanding Society (NCERT, ). 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. We mention this here because the intellectual ideas that went into the making of sociology have a direct bearing on how sociology studies empirical reality. The Enlightenment, an European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries, emphasised reason and individualism.
There was also great advancement of scientific knowledge and a growing conviction that the methods of the natural sciences should