Outline The Beginnings Of Sociological Theory

This assignment will outline the beginnings of sociological theory including historical development of the main theories, namely functionalism and Marxism, and a view of interactionism. The social context in which each of these theories emerged will be detailed with inclusion of possible effects of the social issues at the time.
It is often said that sociology is the ‘science of society’. Society is commonly seen as the people and institutions, and the relationships between them. The patterns formed by relationships among people, groups, and institutions for the ‘social structure’ of a society. A series of political upheavals that were instigated as a result of the French Revolution in 1789 created social chaos and many early social
Within this new society a few tended to profit greatly whilst the peasants who had left agriculture for factory work found only low wages, bad treatment, and poor living conditions due to such a massing of humanity and industrial waste. Accompanying these issues were a long list of problems created by this urbanisation which attracted the attention of early sociologists such as Durkheim. The division of labour produced alienation among workers, and the increased prosperity of the late 19th century generated greed and passions that threatened the equilibrium of society. Durkheim drew attention to anomie, or social disconnectedness, and studied suicide as a decision to renounce life. Following the Dreyfus Affair, a political scandal which divided France during the 1890s and early 1900s which involved the wrongful conviction of Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) for treason. Durkheim came to regard education and religion as the most potent means of reforming humanity and moulding new social institutions. His The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) is an anthropological study centring largely on symbolism of religion and the origins and functions of this, which Durkheim saw as expressing the collective conscience of a society and thus producing social
The history of feminist politics and theory is often cited as consisting of three “waves.” First-wave being women’s suffrage movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second-wave feminism is associated with the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s where feminists began concentrating on less “official” barriers to gender equality, addressing issues like sexuality, reproductive rights, women’s roles and labor in the home, and patriarchal culture and finally, third-wave feminism is associated with feminist politics and movements that began in the 1980s and continue on to today. This emerged out of a critique of the politics of the second wave, as many feminists felt that earlier generations had over-generalized the experiences of white, middle-class, heterosexual women and ignored (and even suppressed) the viewpoints of women of colour, the poor, gay, lesbian, and transgender people, and women from the non-Western