Spencer argued that it was through structural differentiation that societies became functionally better adapted, and the industrial societies of the nineteenth century were essentially demonstrating a form of social evolution, emerging out of the more static and hierarchical societies that preceded them. This took the form of structural differentiation through which simple societies develop over time into more and more complex forms with an increasingly diverse array of separate social institutions and functional adaptation the way that societies accommodate themselves to their environment. But the essential notion of stages of development in ideas and culture in a modified form has been accepted.Įnglish philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820- 1903) drew on Comte's ideas and argued that, just as the world of nature was subject to biological evolution, so societies were subject to social evolution. His laws of three stages have been more or less rejected by the contemporary sociologists. The static sociology studies the conditions of the existence of society while the dynamic sociology studies the continuous movement or laws of the succession of individual stages in society.Īuguste Comte's ideas have influenced several major sociologists like Sorokin, J.S Mill, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and several others. Biology is a science that precedes sociology and thus shares common features with this science. The idea of this division is borrowed from biology that is in keeping with his notions of a hierarchy of sciences. He argued that the history of the sciences demonstrated this pattern of movement, with social life being the last area to move into the positive stage and sociology the final discipline.Īuguste Comte divided sociology into two major parts – static and dynamic sociology. Comte saw each science as passing through three stages: the theological (or religious), the metaphysical (or philosophical) and finally the positive (or scientific), with each stage representing a form of human mental development. Comte's ideas were extremely influential and his theory of the development of the sciences was an inspiration to other thinkers working with theories of evolutionary social development. Comte's positivist philosophy was clearly inspired by what he saw as the fabulous predictive power of the natural sciences. The task of sociology, according to Comte, was to gain reliable knowledge of the social world in order to make predictions about it, and, on the basis of those predictions, to intervene and shape social life in progressive ways. His positivist approach was based on the principle of direct observation, which could be explained by theoretical statements based on establishing causal, law-like generalizations.
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