"Man is double. There are two beings in him: an individual being
which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is therefore
strictly limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality in the
intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation---I mean society. This
duality of our nature has as its consequence in the practical order, the irreducibility of
a moral ideal to a utilitarian motive, and in the order of thought, the irreducibility of
reason to individual experience. In so far as he belongs to society, the individual
transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts." - Emile Durkheim.
The history of
all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave,
patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor
and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted,
now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. -
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (The Communist Manifesto 1848) |
Sociology Subject
Index Specialized Sociology Subfields
Sociology Topical Subjects
Sociology Topical Index
Sociology Books 2012
Customs &
Traditions Index
Index of
Sociologists
World
Sociology Departments |
| The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt
of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against
the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the
external culture and technique of life. - Georg Simmel Society is best conceived as the product of interactions between
component individuals which are controlled by a body of traditions and norms that arise in
the process of interaction. Social control is "the central fact and the central
problem of society" - Park
.According to Max Weber (The Nature of Social Action 1922),
sociology is the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and
thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects
which it produces. |
Sociology books
Sociology of
Religion
Sociology of
Terrorism
Sociology of
Environment
Sociology of
Cyberspace
Gender and Status of
Women
Culture and Cultural Studies |