Neither of the Two

Capitalism is a form of life based on social conflicts. Most have been using the effects of these conflicts to predict the fall of capitalism for more than a century. These social conflicts, however, have yet made capitalism fall. There are many causes which one could point at as the source of capitalism’s ability to …

Labelling Power

The terms sociopathy and psychopathy refer to personality disorders that involve anti-social behaviour, diminished empathy, and lack of inhibitions. These analytical categories, in clinical analysis, should be distinguished from psychosis, which is a condition involving a debilitating break with reality. People who are considered sociopaths and psychopaths are often able to manage their condition and …

Understanding Society through Human Behaviour

Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber focused their analysis on the differences between types of societies and their problems from a macro-perspective. In this section we will focus on how society came to be and how sociologists see social interaction from a micro-perspective. The first two prominent figures in this discussion are Peter Berger …

Living in a Rationalised World

The dawn of capitalism in Europe that witnessed major changes in people’s lives had pulled Max Weber’s critical mind. Following the footsteps of Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, Weber apprehended  that capitalist industrialisation would have dire consequences on societies. He, therefore, developed an analysis of modern society that centred on the concept of rationalisation. In …

Class For Itself

The trajectory of societies from the hunter-gatherers to the industrial period had also caught the interest of Karl Marx. He argues that the economic conflict in society as the primary means of change and the base of each type of society in history (that is its economic mode of production) had its own characteristic form …

Advanced Society Means No Anomie

Functionalist theory or also known functionalism, arose out of two great revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first was the French Revolution of 1789, whose intense violence and bloody terror shook Europe to its core. The aristocracy throughout Europe feared that revolution would spread to their own lands, and intellectuals feared that social …

How Do We Think?

We have heard and already familiar with words such as “scientific”, “systematic”, and “objective.” But what is the meaning of each word according to sociologists? Those three words refer to ideas that tell us something about the way sociologists study social behaviour and the kind of knowledge they are trying to produce about social life. …

Looking at Societies through Technological Sophistication

It is very early in the day. A group of male warriors creeps out of the village heading for the savannah. They must be careful not to wake the other members of the tribe. Once they have regrouped on the plains, they begin preparing for the hunt. The eldest members of the group choose the …

Physis and Nomos

The history of the linkage between individuals and societies stretched out since ancient times because many people have been intrigued by it. We can even fairly say that the ancient Greek people might have provided us with the foundations of the study of sociology through the distinction between nature (from Greek word physis) and custom …

It ain’t Letting the Individual Off

Sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals and how those experiences are shaped, even formed by interactions with social groups and society as a whole. For sociologists, the personal decisions a person makes do not exist in a vacuum. Why? The choice people took that is because cultural patterns and social forces made them …