SOC 105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Auguste Comte, Flat Earth, Arab Spring

• School: Stony Brook University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 105
• Professor: Nicholas Wilson

Document Summary

Sociology arose to try and understand two giant, world-historical shifts. An economic system based on private ownership of wealth, which is invested and reinvested in order to produce profit. The process by which modes of precise calculation and organization, involving abstract rules of procedures, increasingly come to dominate the social world. Sociology still cares a lot about big changes like these. Example: the arab spring and current chaos in the middle east and beyond. Example: the economic slowdown in china and how it relates to democracy and state-led development. Sociology has an odd relationship to its founders. Example: from newtonian mechanics to relativity theory to quantum mechanics. On one level, it sounds easy to map the physical sciences" idea of progress right onto the social s(cid:272)ie(cid:374)(cid:272)es . (cid:271)ut the so(cid:272)ial s(cid:272)ie(cid:374)(cid:272)es do(cid:374)"t (cid:449)ork like this. Since social science bends the lens of science back on society itself, social science ideas tend to get rephrased over time rather than superseded.