Sociology has a huge range of things to learn. It can look at how teachers and kids talk to each other, how friends or family talk to each other, etc. It can also focus on national problems like unemployment, caste conflicts, how state policies affect the forest rights of tribal people, or rural debt. Or, you could look at global social processes like the effect of new flexible work rules on the working class, the effect of electronic media on young people, or the effect of foreign universities on the country’s education system. Sociology is not just about what it studies, like families, trade unions, or villages. It is also about how it studies a certain area. Sociology has been a source of a lot of debate. The ideas of sociologists from different schools are different.
Specialised or Formal Education: As has been said before, the formalistic school says that the study of Sociology is how people interact with each other. These sociologists want sociology to be different from other social studies in what it can do. They think sociology is clean and stands on its own.
• George Simmel thought that sociology should only look at formal behaviour and not look at real behaviour. Sociology is related to other sciences in the same way that the physical sciences are related to math. Geometry looks at the shapes and relationships of things in space, not what they are. In the same way, sociology looks at the ways people interact with each other and do things together, not the relationships themselves. Sociology is a type of social study that looks at how people interact with each other, how they learn to get along with others, how society is put together, etc. In this way, sociology looks at the different ways people interact with each other or the different ways social processes work. Simmel has pointed out some minor patterns in these different types, such as competition, dominance, imitation, work division, subordination, etc.
• Small’s opinion: Sociology doesn’t try to study everything that goes on in society, says Small. Every science is limited in what it can do. Sociology is the study of how people interact, act, and do things with each other based on their genes.
• Vier Kandt’s point of view: Vier Kandt has said that sociology can only be a clear science if it doesn’t study the history of real societies. He says that sociology is the study of science’s unchangeable categories. Love, hate, unity, competition, etc., are all mental relationships that can’t be broken down into smaller parts. In this way, sociology is the study of the deepest connections between people’s minds or spirits.
• Max Weber’s argument: According to Max Weber, sociology is the study of how people act in groups. Social behaviour is that which is related to and decided by the behaviour of others, as seen through the eyes of the interpreter. Sociological laws are generalisations of social behaviour that have been tested and found to be true. They can be used to figure out or get something.
• Von Wiese’s Point of View: According to Von Wiese, sociology is the study of how people get along with each other.
Tonnies has been in favour of the idea of pure sociology. He has made a difference between society and neighbourhood based on how people relate to each other. In this way, the specialistic school says that sociology only looks at one part of social relationships and behaviour, namely their forms, and that this is all it looks at.
The following points have been made against Formalistic School in criticism:
• Other fields of science also study different kinds of social connections: Sociologists from the formalistic school say that sociology is the only field that studies how people interact with each other, but this doesn’t seem to be entirely true. Sociology is not the only science that looks at how people interact with each other. When you study international law, you have to look at things like conflict, war, disagreement, agreement, touch, etc. Political science explains things like who has power and how people interact with each other.
• The idea of “Pure Sociology” is not useful: Pure sociology has been thought of by the specialistic or formalistic school, which has also written a lot about it. However, no sociologists have been able to make pure sociology. In fact, you can’t study one science without also studying the other fields. Pure sociology doesn’t work in the real world.
• There are different kinds of social relationships, just like there are different kinds of geometry. The formalistic school says that the relationship between sociology and other fields is like the relationship between geometry and physics. But by making this connection, people have stopped seeing how different the shapes of geometry and social relationships are. Geometric shapes have a clear shape in space, but social interactions don’t have any shape at all.
• Abstract forms can’t be studied if they aren’t tied to real-world relationships: The formalistic school of thought has made a clear line between abstract forms and real things, so sociology can only be studied in terms of abstract forms. But in reality, you can’t study abstract forms without also studying their specific contents. How can you study competition, strife, hatred, love, etc. in real life without knowing what they are about? In fact, you can’t separate social forms from their content at all, because social forms change as content changes, and content changes all the time. Sorokin said, “We can fill a glass with wine, water, or sugar without changing its shape, but we can’t imagine a social institution whose shape doesn’t change when its members change.”
• The Formalistic School has made Sociology’s field of study much smaller: When the forms can’t be studied separately from the concrete relationships, sociology will have to broaden its focus to understand real relationships, behaviour, and activities. The formalistic school has made sociology much more limited and narrow. Sociology will have to look at more than just the big picture of social ties. It will also have to look at the details of social life.
Synthetic School
• Unlike the Formalist school, the Synthetic school wants sociology to be a combination of all of the social sciences or a general science. This is the point of view of modern sociologists like Durkheim, Hobhouse, and Sorokin. According to this point of view, sociology is the science of sciences because it brings together all the other sciences. In this way, the reach of sociology, according to the synthetic school, is both all-encompassing and broad. This argument says that all parts of social life are connected, so studying just one part is not enough to understand the whole thing. Without learning how these ideas work in real life, their studies become boring and pointless.Because of this, sociology should look at all parts of social life as a whole. This point of view helps to make sociology more general and organised.These sociologists have said that sociology should be more thorough and wide-ranging. They have done this by pointing out the bad effects of specialisation, which can be seen in geographical, biological, and economic determinism. Motwani says that sociology tries to “see life as full and as whole.”
Different social studies share the same data, but they have different points of view:
• All social sciences study society, but they all look at it from different points of view and in different ways. From an economic point of view, economics is the study of what men do that affects their economic health and wealth. In political science, power, government, and other things are looked at from a political point of view. Social psychology is the study of how people act in groups.Sociology is different from these other fields because it looks at how people interact with each other. But to study in this field, you have to learn about all of these fields. When studying a social event, you have to think about all of its parts. If you want to look at the reasons of disorganisation in the family from a sociological point of view, you will need help from economics, history, psychology, and other sciences. In this way, sociology covers all the topics of other sciences, which are studied from a sociological point of view with the help of other special sciences. Sociology is different from other studies because it looks at things from different points of view. Green said, “Sociology is a unique field because it focuses on social relationships, even if it looks like it has a lot in common with other fields.” Bennett and Tumin say, “No other field says or claims that the social grouping of men is its most important fact.”
Comparison of Sociology with other social sciences
• Sociology is one of the social studies, which also include anthropology, economics, political science, and history. There aren’t clear lines between the different social sciences, and they all share some hobbies, ideas, and ways of doing things. Because of this, it is very important to realise that the differences between the fields are not always clear-cut and shouldn’t be seen as rules. To separate the social sciences would be to make the differences bigger than they are and ignore the parallels. Feminist ideas have also shown how important it is to look at things from different perspectives. For example, a political scientist or economist wouldn’t be able to study gender roles and how they affect politics or the economy if they didn’t know about sociology of the family or how men and women divide up work.
• Economics is the study of how things and services are made and sold. The classical economic approach focused almost entirely on the relationships between pure economic variables, such as price demand and supply, money flows, output-to-input ratios, and so on. The main goal of the dominant style in economic analysis, however, was to come up with clear rules for how the economy works:
• The sociological approach looks at economic behaviour in the context of social norms, beliefs, practises, and interests. Managers in the business world are aware of this. Large amounts of money are put into the advertising business because people’s habits and ways of living need to change. Feminist economics is a trend in economics that tries to widen the field’s focus by putting gender at the centre of society. For example, they would look at how work at home affects work outside the home.
• Economics has become a subject that is very focused and makes sense because its scope is clear. Sociologists often envy economists for how precise their language is and how well they can measure things. And the ability to turn their theoretical work into practical ideas that have big effects on public policy.But economists’ ability to predict often suffers because they don’t study things like how people act, culture norms, and institutional resistance. Sociologists do. In 1998, Pierre Bourdieu wrote, “A real study of economics would look at all the costs of the economy, not just the costs that corporations care about, but also the costs of crimes, suicides, and so on. We need to come up with an economics of happiness that takes into account all the individual and collective, material and symbolic benefits of activity, like security, as well as the material and symbolic costs of inactivity or unstable work, like the use of medicines (France has the most tranquillizers of any country in the world).”Unlike economics, sociology does not generally offer technical solutions. But it makes you think about things and ask questions. This helps people question their most basic beliefs. This makes it easier to talk about not only the technical ways to reach a goal, but also the social value of the goal itself. In recent years, there has been a rise of economic sociology. This may be because sociology has become more broad and critical.
• Sociology helps people understand social situations better or more clearly than they did before. This can be done by knowing facts or by getting a better understanding of why something is happening (in other words, by having a better academic understanding).
• However, people have tried to find connections between the two fields. Marxists have chosen one extreme point of view. Who says that you can’t fully understand the superstructure, which is made up of different social organisations, unless you also look at the economic substructure? So, the economic behaviour of people is seen as a key to understanding their social behaviour, or economics is more important than sociology. On the other hand, sociologists have criticised economic theory for being too reductionist. They say that economists’ view of people doesn’t take into account how different social factors affect economic behaviour.Sociologists have tried to show that economics can’t be a completely independent field of study. For example, A. Lowie’s book “Economics and Sociology” looks at the lists of pure economics and finds two sociological principles that support the classical laws of the market: “The economic man” and “competition or mobility of the factors of production.” In the same way, Max Weber’s “Wirtscharaft and Gesellschaft” is the standard attempt to put some ideas from economic theory into the context of general sociology. Talcott Parsons and N.J. Smelser’s new work tries, along Weberian lines but in a more ambitious way, to show that economic theory is part of sociological theory in general. In fact, Parsons says that economic behaviour can never be fully understood if it is taken out of its social context.In recent years, there have been more connections between two fields. For example, many sociological studies have directly looked at problems in economic theory. A current example is Barbara Cotton’s book “The Social Foundations of Wage Policy,” which tries to use sociology to figure out why wages and salary differences are the way they are in Britain. In the works of Thorstein Veblen and J.K. Galbraith, you can find more cases like this. Also, there are sociological books that look at how economic systems work in general. This is especially true when looking at problems with economic growth in new countries. “Dependency theorists” is a well-known example of this type of work. So, we can say that the two fields are getting closer and closer together.
Sociology and Political science
Like in economics, sociology and political science are using and learning from each other’s methods and techniques more and more.
• Traditionally, political science was mostly about two things: political theory and how the government works. Neither part has a lot to do with how people act in politics. The theory part usually looks at ideas about government from Plato to Marx. Courses on administration, on the other hand, usually look at the formal framework of government instead of how it works.
Sociology is the study of all parts of society, while traditional political science was mostly about studying power as it was shown in official organisations.Sociology focuses on how institutions, including the government, work together. Political science, on the other hand, tends to focus on how the government works.
But sociology and political science have been studying related things for a long time.
• Political sociology is what Max Weber and other sociologists did for a living. The study of how politicians act has become more and more important to political sociology.
• Even in the most recent Indian elections, people paid a lot of attention to how people voted. Studies have also been done on the people who join political groups, how groups make decisions, the social reasons why people support political parties, the role of gender in politics, etc.Marx said that the economic system and social classes have a lot to do with how government institutions and people act. At the end of the 19th century, this way of thinking led Michels, Weber, and Pareto, among others, to study political parties, elite voting behaviour, bureaucracy, and political beliefs.
By then, something else had happened in the United States. This was called the behavioural method to political phenomena. The University of Chicago came up with the idea. In the 1930s, different scholars tried to build a scientific field called “behavioural politics.” However, this attempt is no longer taken seriously.
But there is one more area where these social sciences have become closely related. This is the field of explanation plans and models. Politics has taken on both functionalism and the social order. It’s interesting to see that uprisings in developing countries have sparked a renewed interest in Marxist sociological ideas. Sociologists and anthropologists, not political scientists, are better equipped to understand the forces at work and the changes happening in peasant tribal or caste systems. Sociology is still studied in the areas that Michels, Max Weber, and Pareto opened up at the end of the 19th century. One new thing about these studies is that they compare different things.
It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between political science and political sociology. Marxist studies often use Marxist-socialist ideas as their starting point. As well, sociological approaches to politics and political thinking are becoming more and more accepted as the modern state gets more active in social services.
Sociology and History
“History without sociology has no roots, and sociology without history has no purpose.”
1. Almost always, historians study the past, while sociologists are more interested in the present and recent past.
2. In the past, historians were happy to describe what actually happened and figure out how things went, while sociologists tried to figure out what caused what.
3. Historians study specific facts, while sociologists are more likely to abstract from concrete facts, put them into groups, and make broad statements about them. Today, historians use sociological tools and ideas in their research, which is called “Social History.”
4. Traditionally, history has been about wars and kings. Historically, historians have been less interested in the history of less glamorous or interesting things like changes in land ownership or gender roles in the family. Sociologists, on the other hand, have been most interested in these kinds of things.
5. Radcliff Brown says that “sociology is noetic and history is idiographic.” In other words, sociologists make broad statements about things, while historians write about specific things. This difference is clear in traditional ways of telling history, but it is only partly clear in modern ways of writing history. There are works for serious historians that are full of generalisations, while sociologists sometimes study one-of-a-kind events. “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism” by R.H. Tawny and “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Max Weber are examples of the first type. Thomas and Zelencki’s “The Polish Peasant” is just an account of a peasant family, so it is as idiographic as any historical study can be.
6.Also, historical descriptions of things like the industrial revolution tend to be very general and have been used as a source of information for sociological studies.
7. Even with these similarities, there are still differences. History is mostly about the past and tries to explain how things have changed over time. Sociology, on the other hand, is still mostly about looking for trends and making generalisations. But works like Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” and Pitrim Sorokin’s “Social and Cultural Dynamics” are making it harder to tell the difference between history and sociology. H.R. Trevor-Roper has tried to make a weak distinction between the two by saying that the historian is interested in how personality and big social forces interact and that the sociologist is mostly interested in these social forces themselves. But it’s becoming more and more clear that history and sociology can’t be split in a big way. They both talk about how people live in societies, sometimes from the same point of view, and it looks like they will continue to borrow a lot from each other.
Today, on the other hand, history is much more about society, and social history is what history is made of. Other than the actions of rulers, wars, and monarchy, it looks at social patterns, gender relations, mores, customs, and important organisations. “Sociology without history is rootless, and history without sociology is fruitless,” as the saying goes.
Sociology and Psychology
People often say that psychology is the study of behaviour. It is mostly concerned with the person. It wants to know about her or his intelligence and ability to learn, her or his motivations and memory, nervous system, response time, hopes, and fears.
2. Social psychology is a bridge between psychology and sociology. Its main focus is on the individual, but it is also interested in how the person acts in social groups with other individuals.
Sociology tries to figure out how behaviour is organised in society and how different parts of society shape people’s personalities. For example, their economic and political system, their family and kinship structure, their society, norms, and values. It’s interesting to remember that Durkheim, who tried to give sociology a clear purpose and method in his famous study of suicide, didn’t look at the individual intentions of people who commit or try to commit suicide. Instead, he looked at statistics about the different social traits of these people.
4. J.S. Mill thought that a general social science couldn’t be called well-founded until it could be shown that its generalisations, which had been proven through induction, could also be shown to be logically deducible from laws of mind. So, it was clear that he wanted to put psychology above all other social studies. Durkheim, on the other hand, made a big difference between what sociology studies and what psychology studies. Sociology was supposed to study social facts, which were thought of as being outside of each person’s mind and having a forceful effect on them. Social facts can only be explained by other social facts; they can’t be explained by psychological facts. “Society isn’t just a group of people put together; it’s a system made up of them and represents a certain level of reality with its own characteristics.” So sociology and psychology are two completely different fields of study. But if you take Durkheim’s ideas to the extreme, you might think that most of psychology is social psychology.
So, Mill and Durkheim’s views are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Most sociologists, though, have taken stances in the middle. Ginsberg says, “Many sociological generalisations can be proven more strongly if they are linked to general psychological laws.” In a similar way, S. F. Nadal said that moving to lower levels of analysis, like psychology and biology, can shed light on some of the problems that social inquiry brings up. German scholars like Dilthey, Max Weber, and others came to believe that sociological theories can be improved by trying to figure out the deeper meanings of social behaviour. This kind of understanding was called “common sense psychology,” but neither Dilthey nor Weber were against the growth of a scientific psychology in a broad sense, and Weber even agreed with some of Freud’s ideas.
6.In the same way, psychologists from the post-Freudian school, like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm, have emphasised how sociology and psychology are both important to the study of human behaviour. The role that society plays in shaping how people act is given even more attention. Fromm’s idea of “social character” is meant to show how a person’s psychological traits match up with those of a certain social group or social order. Even though sociology and psychology are seen as having some things in common, they are still different. Several studies show how sociology and psychology are different from each other. Sociological and psychological explanations of strife and war have been at odds with each other. In the same way, social division and political behaviour have always been studied in different ways.
7. According to Bottomore, psychology and sociology are still, for the most part, two different fields of study in almost every area of research. But some people have tried to put them all together. One of the best works to do this is by Gerth and Mills. According to them, social psychology is the study of the interaction between an individual’s personality and the way society is set up. It can be looked at either from a sociological or a biological point of view. They have even come up with the idea of role as a way to connect the two fields. Social role is where the person and the social structure meet, and it is used in the same way as both a central idea and the social structure.
Even with all of these attempts, sociology and psychology still give different explanations for behaviour. If they are to be brought closer together, the conceptual and theoretical links between them will need to be worked out more thoroughly.
Philosophy and Sociology
1. Modern philosophy and sociology were created at the same time to understand Europe’s social problems in the 19th century. At first, the goal of sociology was to come up with a social theory that could be used to guide social policy. This goal has now been given up. Even so, sociology and philosophy do have some links. First, there is a philosophy of sociology, which is similar to a philosophy of science in that it looks at the methods, ideas, and reasons that sociologists use.
Sociology and moral and social theory are related in many ways. Sociology is the study of how ideas affect how people act in groups. Moral and social theory looks at values, and sociology looks at values and how people judge them as facts. Sociologists sometimes have to decide what is fact and what is worth. Social theory doesn’t know how to tell the difference between facts and values until it gets some training.
3. You could say that studying sociology leads to a search for meaning in life. Durkheim thought that sociology had to help come up with new questions about philosophy. This led him to talk about epistemology, which is a part of philosophy. Karl Mannheim said that sociology of knowledge had implications for philosophy. Both of them thought that sociology could help philosophy in a direct way. But this is the wrong way to do it. Philosophy is what the sociology of information is built on, not the other way around.
4. You could also say that a lot of sociology starts with philosophical ideas, even though it goes on to think about them. Sociological study will become pointless if it doesn’t look at the bigger problems in society that are linked to philosophical worldviews and social doctrines. Early Marxism was very helpful for social research because it was not just a sociological theory, but also had an intellectual base that was helpful for social research. Beatrice Webb’s social study was helped by the fact that she took part in social movements and believed in a social doctrine.
In short, each social science, including philosophy, has its own area of study, but they are working together more and more and learning from each other faster. The best way to think about the unity of social science is as a unity of methods and ideas, not as a universal past.
Sociology and Social Anthropology
Archaeology, physical anthropology, culture history, many types of linguistics, and the study of all parts of life in “simple societies” are all parts of anthropology in most countries.
1. We are interested in social anthropology and cultural anthropology because they are similar to sociology. Sociology is thought to be the study of modern, complicated societies, while social anthropology is thought to be the study of simple societies.
2. We’ve already seen that each field has its own background or biography. Social anthropology started in the West at a time when social anthropologists trained in the West studied countries outside of Europe that were often thought of as strange, wild, and undeveloped. This difference between those who studied and those who were studied has been talked about too much in the past. But things have changed, and the people who used to be considered “natives,” like Indians, Sudanese, Nagas, and Santhals, now talk and write about their own societies.
3.When it comes to how they study, social anthropologists have come to support the functionalist approach and field work as the main way to gather data. Social anthropologists found that the functionalist method worked well because tribal and agricultural societies in Asia and Africa didn’t change much over time. Field work was an important way to gather information because most of these groups didn’t have historical records and were small enough to be seen working as a whole.
4. On the other hand, the historical method still rules sociology, as can be seen in the works of L.T. Hobhouse, Max Weber, and even Marxist scholars. During the post-colonial era, however, there was a new movement towards combining the two fields. Sociology and social anthropology are getting closer together because of the rise of new nation states. As a result of the process of nation building, these new states have become more divided. They have become like both modern industrial societies and ancient small-scale societies. Because of this, studying “Developing Societies” needs both a sociological and a social anthropological method.
5. In the past, anthropologists wrote about the features of simple societies in a way that seemed neutral and scientific. In practise, they were always using the model of modern societies in the West as a way to judge these other societies.
6. Sociology and social science have also changed because of other changes. As we saw, modernity led to a process in which even the smallest village was affected by global events. Colonisation is the most clear example of this. Under British rule, the most remote village in India had its land rules and government changed, its way of making money changed, and its manufacturing industries went out of business. This shrinking of the world has been made worse by modern global processes. Studying a simple society was based on the idea that it was limited. We know that this is no longer true.
7. The way social anthropology used to look at simple, non-literate societies had a big impact on what it looked at and how it looked at it. Social anthropology usually looked at societies (even simple ones) as a whole, in all of their parts. When they did specialise, it was based on where they lived, like the Andaman Islands, the Nuers, or Melanesia.
8. Sociologists study complicated societies, so they often focus on parts of society like the bureaucracy, religion, caste, or a process like social mobility.
9. Social anthropology has a long history of doing fieldwork, living in the society being studied, and using ethnographic methods of research. Sociologists have often used the poll method, statistics, and questionnaires to get quantitative data and find out about things.
10.The difference between a simple society and a complicated one needs to be rethought a lot today. India is a complicated mix of old and new, village and city, caste and tribe, and class and society. There are villages right in the middle of Delhi, the main city. European and American customers from different parts of the country call call hubs.
11. Indian sociology has taken ideas from both systems in a much more eclectic way. Sociologists from India often looked at Indian societies that were both part of their own culture and not. It could also be an all-around look at both the complicated, different societies of modern India’s cities and the study of tribes.
12. People used to worry that as simple societies died out, social anthropology would lose what made it unique and start to look more like sociology. But there have been useful talks between the two fields, and methods and techniques used today often come from both. Anthropological studies have been done on the government and globalisation, which are very different from the usual topics of social anthropology. On the other hand, sociology also uses quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as macro and micro approaches, to study how complicated modern societies are. Because sociology and social anthropology are very similar in India.
13. On top of this, the works of Block, Sodden, Godlier, and others have helped spread the Marxist method to social anthropology. This has helped connect the two fields. On the other hand, sociologists who work in modern industrial societies like the United States have started to use social anthropology tools more and more. For example, Talcott Parsons and R.K. Merton’s works try to use a functionalist method to study industrial societies, and William Whyte uses participant observation to study modern industrial society. So, the fields are becoming more and more similar to each other.
How Sociology Is Important
Sociology is a science that looks at society: Before sociology, the study of society wasn’t done in a scientific way, and society hadn’t been at the centre of any other science. Sociology has made it possible to study society in a way that is truly scientific. Sociology has become so important because it is linked to so many of the world’s problems that it is thought to be the best way to study all the social sciences.
Sociology looks at the role of institutions in the growth and development of people. Sociology is the scientific study of the big social institutions and how people relate to each of them. Institutions are the parts of society that make it work. These include the home and family, the school and education, the church and religion, the state and government, business and work, the community and associations, and so on. Sociology looks at these institutions and how they affect how people grow and change. It also offers ways to make these institutions stronger so that they can help people more.
Sociology is important for understanding society and making plans for it. Society is a complicated thing with many different parts. Without sociology, it would be impossible to understand and solve its many issues. People are right when they say that we can’t understand society or fix it if we don’t know how it works and is put together. Without sociology’s research, there would be no way to plan society in a way that works. It helps us figure out the best way to reach the goals we’ve all agreed on. Before social laws can be put into place, people need to know a certain amount about society.
4. Sociology is very important when it comes to solving social issues. The world today has a lot of problems that can be solved by scientifically studying society. Sociology’s job is to study social problems using science research methods and come up with ways to solve them. The study of human affairs from a scientific point of view will eventually give us the body of knowledge and rules that will let us control and improve society life.
5. Sociology has shown us how important and valuable people are on their own. Sociology has helped us change the way we feel about people. In a specialised society, we can only directly experience a certain amount of the whole organisation and culture. We don’t know much about the people in other places. Sociology is important if you want to understand and appreciate the reasons why people live the way they do and the situations they live in.
Sociology has changed the way we think about crime and its issues. The study of sociology has changed the way we think about different parts of crime. Criminals are now seen as people with mental problems, and steps are made to help them get back on their feet and become useful members of society.
Sociology has made a big difference in making human culture richer. Sociology has made a big difference in making human culture richer. Science and research have helped us figure out what was going on in society. Lowie says that most of us are happy with the idea that the way we do things is the only reasonable or even possible way. Sociology has taught us how to think logically about questions about ourselves, our religions, habits, morals, and institutions. It has also taught us to be unbiased, analytical, and critical. It helps people learn more about themselves and about other people. By comparing countries and groups that are not like his own, he makes his life richer and more full than it would be otherwise. Sociology also shows us how important it is to get past our own prejudices, goals, and hate of other classes.
Sociology is very important when it comes to solving foreign problems: The physical sciences have helped bring the countries of the world closer together. But the world has fallen behind in social issues because of how quickly science has changed. Politically, the world is split, which causes worry and war. Men haven’t been able to make peace. Sociology can help us figure out what’s going on and what’s making people upset.
Sociology is important because it keeps us up to date on what’s going on in the world today: It helps people become good citizens and find answers to problems in the community. It adds to what people know about the world. It helps a person figure out how he fits into society. One of the most important needs of modern society is the study of social phenomena and the ways and means of supporting what Giddens calls “social adequacy.” Sociology is interesting to people of all kinds of minds because it has a direct effect on many of the world’s first problems.
