The Ideas of the Founding Fathers

Abstract

The founders of sociology—Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx—intended to create, each in his own fashion, a universal science of society. Nevertheless, they were above all concerned to explain how the 19th century industrial societies had come into existence, to analyse the ramifying effects of industrialism, to elucidate the connections between economic, political and intellectual changes, and to predict the future development of Western societies. Even in their systematic attempts to classify the types of human society, they inclined towards a simple and radical distinction between the modern Western societies and all others; and gave to the former a privileged position as objects of study. This classification was adopted, with modifications, by many later sociologists, and it plays an important part in the work of Tönnies, Durkheim and others, up to the recent writers who differentiate between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies, or ‘urban’ and ‘folk’ societies.