How was sociology developed in europe??? i need it to be answered according to stages...?

Question

Stages of sociology developments in Europe...

Answer 1

The Scottish School of writers, late 18th early 19th century, who were considering the relationships between the politiy the econmy and society are often credited with being the first sociologists  although the term had not then been introduced

It was Auguste Comte the Frenchman  in the mid 19th century who coined the term and developed his own positivist approach to the analysis of society.

His ideas were picked up and  much further developed  and  refined by Emile Durkheim at the turn of the 19th/20th century .  His writings formed the basis of  the (for the next 60 years) dominant school of sociology, Functionalist Sociology.

In the meantime there were a group of early/mid 19th century theorists and activists in England and France who were asking why the descriptions of society focused only on men  .. not recognised at the time as Sociologists but these theorists  were the first wave feminists whose work eventually influenced the very influential school of Gender Sociology in the second wave feminism of the 1950-70s

In the meantime, too,  Herbert Spencer  who created an evolutionary sociology (which had strong racist overtones)  was, in his time, the creme de la creme of British social theory.   He introduced the term 'survival of the fittest ' later used in a different field of study. But he was abit of a dead end , sociology wise.

Covering the era of the mid to late nineteenth century Karl Marx, who had been floating around Europe saying rather revolutionary things,  ended up in the British Museum and had a few words to say about the fit between the polity, the economy and culture - you might have heard of some of his ideas and his influence.- (ps his chapter 31, 'On Colonisation',  in 'Capital ' its all about Australia is both funny and insightful).

ps he and Herbert, are buried near each other at Highgate Cemetery in London, so that was probably the foundation  of the famous British retailing empire, Marx and Spencer.

After Marx. lots of parents got worried about sending their kids to college but fortunately for them, the next generation saw the rise of social theorists who were 'arguing with the ghost of Marx'.  Of these Max Weber in Germany  was interesting because he wanted peoples 'meanings' or interpretations of the world to be included in the analysis of how society works..  Sometimes Weberian sociology is called 'Interpretative Sociology'   He also shifted our attention to the power of the bureaucrats and of rational bureaucy itself.  He covered the first couple of decades of the twentieth century.

By the 1930s a group of social theorists got very worried about the way that Germany was using the media to create hatred (using the advertising expertise of Freud's nephew, Edward Bernay)of Jews and power for themselves. this group very wisely shipped themselves off to the States where they got named 'the Frankfurt School'  They made a major major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between power and meaning.

As did a bloke in Italy, who was also fighting the fascists and got locked up by Mussolini to 'shut his mouth forever' Unfortunately  for Mussolini, Gramsci, that was this social theorists name,  had a supportive sister-in-law who smuggled his writings out from prison  so that at the end of the Second World War they got published and became the basis for a whole stream of different theorists all using his concept of Hegemonic power -  

The blokes (then the women) at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary  Cultural Studies BCCCS really flew with Gramsci's mixture of Marxism and Media analysis in the decades after the 2nd World War. They used the concept of hegemony not only to critically analyse class differences but also gender  and racist  divisions.

This English Critical school of Sociology had parallels in French theory, at first in the work of Althusser who fused aspects of marxian analysis wih the Freudian concept of repression in his approach which is called Structural Sociology.

Foucault, initially one of Althusser's structuralists,  in studying the histories of the structures of society argued that power was not based primarily in the political economy but in many capillary like discursive sites of power.- This discourse theory

has been one of the greatest influences in the second half of the 20th century. It was named (by others) as post structuralism.

However,  a separate group of cultural theorists   mainly based in France, were combining the ideas of the linguist Saussure with critical analyses of power and inequality -  Barthes was a major figure in this school of Post Modern cultural theory.