Sociology

Auguste Comte French philosopher; founder of positivism and father of sociology as a scientific discipline. Disciple of Saint-Simon; proposed to reorganize society on scientific bases following the dual revolution (French and industrial). Key Concepts Law of Three Stages: each science and each society passes through three historical stages: Theological: explanation by supernatural agents (fetishism → polytheism → monotheism) Metaphysical: explanation by forces and abstract essences Positive (scientific): explanation by observable and measurable laws — the only valid stage Positivism: only knowledge based on observable facts and verifiable relations is legitimate; rejection of metaphysics and theology as immature Hierarchy of Sciences: mathematics → astronomy → physics → chemistry → biology → sociology (the most complex and most recent) Sociology: positive science of society — Social Physics; divided into statics (order, structure) and dynamics (progress, change) Religion of Humanity: late phase — Comte proposed replacing God with Humanity as the object of worship, with rituals and positivist calendar (Positive Politics) Influenced by Saint-Simon — social reorganization through science and industrialism Condorcet — historical progress and human perfectibility Montesquieu — laws in social history French Enlightenment — reason and science Influenced Émile Durkheim — scientific sociology John Stuart Mill — methodology and positivism (with reservations) Twentieth-century logical positivism (distant reading) Brazil — the motto “Order and Progress” on the flag is directly Comtean Works Course in Positive Philosophy (6 vols., 1830–1842); Discourse on the Positive Spirit (1844); System of Positive Politics (4 vols., 1851–1854). ...

W. E. B. Du Bois William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was an African-American sociologist, historian, philosopher, and activist born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1895 he became the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, with a historical dissertation on the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade; he also studied in Berlin, where he absorbed the craft of German social science. His work inaugurated African-American urban sociology with The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and, with The Souls of Black Folk (1903), established a philosophical vocabulary for thinking about modern Black experience. He was a co-founder of the NAACP (1909) and a central figure in pan-Africanism. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party; he then moved to Ghana, where he acquired citizenship and where he died in 1963. ...