Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies, sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world.
(Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007). This later became a central principle of Max
Weber’s interpretive sociology, although it is not clear that Weber read Martineau’s
work.
A large part of her research in the United States analyzed the situations of
contradiction between stated public morality and actual moral practices. For
example, she was fascinated with the way that the formal democratic right to free
speech enabled slavery abolitionists to hold public meetings, but when the meetings
were violently attacked by mobs, the abolitionists and not the mobs were accused of
inciting the violence (Zeitlin 1997). This emphasis on studying contradictions
followed from the distinction she drew between morals—society’s collective ideas
of permitted and forbidden behavior—and manners—the actual patterns of social
action and association in society. As she realized the difficulty in getting an accurate
representation of an entire society based on a limited number of interviews, she
developed the idea that one could identify key “Things” experienced by all people—
age, gender, illness, death, etc.—and examine how they were experienced differently
by a sample of people from different walks of life (Lengermann and Niebrugge
2007). Martineau’s sociology therefore focused on surveying different attitudes
toward “Things” and studying the anomalies that emerged when manners toward
them contradicted a society’s formal morals.
Émile Durkheim: The Pathologies of the Social Order
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) helped establish sociology as a formal academic
discipline by establishing the first European department of sociology at the
University of Bordeaux in 1895 and by publishing his Rules of the Sociological
Method in 1895. He was born to a Jewish family in the Lorraine province of France
(one of the two provinces along with Alsace that were lost to the Germans in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871). With the German occupation of Lorraine, the
Jewish community suddenly became subject to sporadic anti-Semitic violence, with
the Jews often being blamed for the French defeat and the economic/political
instability that followed. Durkheim attributed this strange experience of anti-
Semitism and scapegoating to the lack of moral purpose in modern society.
As in Comte’s time, France in the late 19th century was the site of major upheavals
and sharp political divisions: the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris
Commune (1871) in which 20,000 workers died, the fall and capture of Emperor
Napoleon III (Napoleon I’s nephew), the creation of the Third Republic, and the
Dreyfus Affair. This undoubtedly led to the focus in Durkheim’s sociology on
themes of moral anarchy, decadence, disunity, and disorganization. For Durkheim,
sociology was a scientific but also a “moral calling” and one of the central tasks of
the sociologist was to determine “the causes of the general temporary malajustment
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