---
title: "History of sociology"
chunk: 9/11
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sociology"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:24.100525+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Mid 20th century ===
In some countries, sociology was undermined by totalitarian governments for reasons of ostensible political control. After the Russian Revolution, sociology was gradually "politicized, Bolshevisized and eventually, Stalinized" until it virtually ceased to exist in the Soviet Union. In China, the discipline was banned with semiotics, comparative linguistics and cybernetics as "Bourgeois pseudoscience" in 1952, not to return until 1979. During the same period, however, sociology was also undermined by conservative universities in the West. This was due, in part, to perceptions of the subject as possessing an inherent tendency, through its own aims and remit, toward liberal or left wing thought. Given that the subject was founded by structural functionalists; concerned with organic cohesion and social solidarity, this view was somewhat groundless (though it was Parsons who had introduced Durkheim to American audiences, and his interpretation has been criticized for a latent conservatism).
In the mid-20th century Robert K. Merton released his Social Theory and Social Structure (1949). Around the same time, C. Wright Mills continued Weber's work of understanding how modernity was undermining tradition, with a critique of the dehumanizing impact this had on people. Also using the Weberian notion of class, he found that the United States was at the time ruled by a power elite composed of military, political, economic and union leaders. His The Sociological Imagination (1959), argued that the problem was in people seeing their problems as individual issues, rather than as products of social processes. Also in 1959, Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and introduced the theory of dramaturgical analysis which asserts that all individuals aim to create a specific impression of themselves in the minds of other people.
Wright Mills' ideas were influential on the New Left of the 1960's, which he had also coined the name for. Herbert Marcuse was subsequently involved in the movement. Following the counterculture of the decade, new thinkers emerged, especially in France, such as Michel Foucault. While power had earlier been viewed either in political or economic terms, Foucault argued that "power is everywhere, and comes from everywhere", seeing it as a type of relation present on every level of society that is a key component of social order. Examples of such relations included discourse and power-knowledge. Foucault also studied human sexuality with his The History of Sexuality (1976). Influenced by him, Judith Butler subsequently pioneered queer theory. Raewyn Connell in turn identified the stigmatization of homosexuality as a product of hegemonic masculinity.
In the 1960's, sociologists also developed new types of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Paul Lazarsfeld founded Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, where he exerted a tremendous influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. His many contributions to sociological method have earned him the title of the "founder of modern empirical sociology".  Lazarsfeld made great strides in statistical survey analysis, panel methods, latent structure analysis, and contextual analysis.  He is also considered a co-founder of mathematical sociology. Many of his ideas have been so influential as to now be considered self-evident.
In the 1970's, Peter Townsend redefined poverty from the previous definition of 'total earnings being too little to obtain the minimum necessities of physical life', to one which also took into account the relative deprivation caused, meaning that not having access to the typical level of lifestyle was also a form of poverty. During the same decade, Pierre Bourdieu, advancing the concept of habitus, argued that class was not defined solely by economic means, but also by the socially acquired taste which one shared with the rest of the class. Beyond economic capital, he also identified cultural, social, scholastic, linguistic, and political capital. These all contributed towards symbolic capital. Richard Sennett in turn found that working-class people were finding themselves in crisis following rising social status, as it conflicted with the values of their background.

==== Structuralism ====
Structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure". Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 1900s, mainly in France and Russian Empire, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when structural linguistics were facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance, an array of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields of study. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in structuralism.

==== Modernization theory ====
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. Modernization refers to a model of a progressive transition from a 'pre-modern' or 'traditional' to a 'modern' society. Modernization theory originated from the ideas of German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), which provided the basis for the modernization paradigm developed by Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979). The theory looks at the internal factors of a country while assuming that with assistance, "traditional" countries can be brought to development in the same manner more developed countries have been. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, then went into a deep eclipse. It made a comeback after 1991 but remains a controversial model. Political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective becoming influential in modernization theories and in emerging political science.