
•Key Concepts / Ideas
•The Enlightenment
•Positivism
•Dialectics / Dialectical Perspective
•Alienation
•I. The Social and Intellectual Context
•Sociology: “An intellectual response to a crisis”
•17-18th century Europe and the world, a series of ongoing “crises”
•“The world turned upside down”
•The Scientific Revolution
•Industrial Revolution/Capitalism: 1750’s
•1776: The American Revolution
•1789- The French Revolution
•Colonialism, the Anti-Slave Revolution in Haiti
•(a) the discovery of “Society” distinct from “nature”
•(b) the individual-society relationship
•(c) the discovery of “social change”
•Social institutions are neither “natural” nor divine, but humanly created
entities; can be transformed through social action
•II. The Enlightenment
•18th Century Intellectual and social movement
•To “shed light” of “REASON” on “society”
•Newtonian scientific method to understand society: application of REASON
www.notesolution.com