David Seager
Intro to Sociology
3/15/2016
Sociology
“Sociology is the systematic study of human society” (Macionis). It looks deeper into how society affects the way people behave and respond to certain things. Thinking about the way society influences people and people influence society has been around for a very long time. Early philosophers such as Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, and K’ung Fu-tzu were some of the earliest philosophers to think about the dynamics of society. These great thinkers date back to around 322 B.C.E. Further in time other thinkers such as Saint Thomas Aquinas, Christine de Pisan, and also william shakespeare looked deeper into how society worked. Although social thinking had been around for a long time, it was not explored deeply until the early nineteenth century when french social thinker Auguste Comte explored the idea of sociology and shared his way of thinking with others. Comte was the first thinker to introduce sociology as an academic discipline. “This makes sociology one of the youngest academic disciplines - far newer than history, physics, or economics, for example”(Macionis). He wanted to understand how society worked and how it could be improved. Comte broke society up into 3 stages: the theological, metaphysical, and scientific stage.
The theological stage was from the …show more content…
This stage was also known as the enlightenment stage. During this stage the belief shifted from everything happening because of god to the forces of nature are why things happen. “Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), for example, suggested that society reflected not the perfection of God so much as the failings of a selfish human nature” (Macionis). Everything that happens is from our own doing and anything negative that happens is a result of our own selfish human