Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

o Authored the first sociology

text, ‘Principles of
Sociology’

o Most well known for

proposing a doctrine called
“Social Darwinism”

o Suggested that people who

could not compete were
poorly adapted to the
environment and inferior

o This is an idea commonly

called survival of the
• How societies change and evolve over time?

• The society evolves and passes through certain

stages

• How societies change from simple to complex.

Complex to double complex and double to
much more complex .

• Simple society to differentiated society

• Rural to urban
• Societies were bound to change necessarily
• Spencer believed that societies undergo transformation
through increasing differentiation and integration. He outlined
four main stages:
• Simple Society
• Small, primitive groups with minimal organization.
• No formal leadership or structured institutions.
• Families live independently with little coordination
• Compound Society
• Multiple families or clans begin to organize.
• Emergence of basic leadership roles like chiefs.
• Some coordination in decision-making and resource
distribution.
• Doubly Compound Society
• Clans merge into tribes with more complex governance.
• Development of military, civil administration, and local
governments.
• Trade and communication systems begin to form.
• Trebly Compound Society
• Tribes evolve into nation-states.
• Highly specialized institutions: legislature, judiciary, military,
media.
• Advanced infrastructure for communication and
transportation.
• Key Concepts Behind the Progression
• Differentiation: As societies grow, roles and institutions
become more specialized.
• Integration: These specialized parts must coordinate to
maintain social order.
• Survival of the Fittest: Societies that adapt effectively to
change thrive; others dissolve.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

 Durkheim moved sociology

fully into the realm of an
empirical science

 Most well known empirical

study is called Suicide,
where he looks at the
social causes of suicide

 Generally regarded as the

founder of functionalist
theory
Emile Durkheim is known more
for his concept Social facts.

Durkheim talked about pattern

Durkheim talked about pattern of thinking,

feeling and acting

The moment we talk of pattern we reduce

the importance of individual humans
• Individual human Behaviour, personality,
thinking, feeling, acting will be studied by
social psychologists

• Sociologists are not interested in individual

assets

• Pattern of thinking: ex: Children are gift of

god
• Pattern of feeling : ex: killing female
foeticide
• Pattern of acting: ex: child reproduction

• Anything which is patterned like pattern

thinking, pattern feeling and pattern acting
beyond individuals is social fact
• Why these
Indian couples
are opting to
not have kids
• Family, Finances and Profession …..Decoding
the Reasons:
• Pattern of thinking: ex: children are extra
responsibility( may be not burden)
• Pattern of feeling : ex: No longer view having children as
the next natural progression in their married life.
• Pattern of acting: ex: Child free life

• Patterned - Social Fact

“Desh Ke liye Kurban”
• Emile Durkheim (Social fact): Sociology is
relationship between social facts.

• Suicide: Before Durkheim suicide was considered as

individual private matter resulted from alienation,
sufferings, depression

• Durkheim says suicide rates vary from society to

society (urban, rural)

• If society progress also, if society regress also

• Suicide rate are reflective of social features

• Social rates also depended on degree of
social integration

• As long as the integration between the ego

(individual) and the larger society is normal
no suicide

• The moment our relationship with society is

extreme either way more prone to suicide.

• Egoistic suicide: More focused on self. Ego

is strong (unmarried no job)

• Anomic Suicide: Norms of society are not

clear

• Altruistic: Ego is completely substituted by

social concern(Sati)
 What Durkheim means by Egoistic Suicide

According to Durkheim, there is an undeniable relationship

between religion and suicide rates.

There is a relationship between being

married or being single and suicide rates.

There is a relationship between the

stability of people's economic position and
suicide rates
and there is also a relationship with the
sector of society in which people are
working and suicide rates.

Those correlations, he says, cannot be

ignored.
•Building on those observations, Durkheim now constructs
his own sociological explanation.

•The suicide rate is a characteristic of a social collective,

it's a social fact.

• Social cohesion, the strength of the social web, may

explain some of the regularities in the figures.

•Why are the suicide rates for married people, for example,
lower than for singles? Married people are bound with
stronger ties to society than single people.
A similar argument can be used in explaining differences
between religious groups.

The social cohesion amongst the Jews is higher than the

social cohesion amongst the Protestants, let alone the
atheists. So it comes as no surprise that we find the
higher suicide rate amongst the non-believers than
amongst the people of the Jewish faith, the faith of
Durkheim's own ancestors.

The rise in suicide rates that is tended by a gradual

lowering of social cohesion, is called by Durkheim,
egoistic suicide.

He has also stated that Social cohesion is low in modern

western societies and that this tendency makes it very
difficult to protect the people in those societies from the
type of suicides that he calls egoistic.
 Altruistic Suicide
• And to do that, he says that when social cohesion is extremely
strong, that also might lead to a rise in suicide rates. He calls this
altruistic suicide.

• An example that he gives here is the soldier who sacrifices his life
in a suicide attack because he can not conceive of himself as a
separate individual anymore.
 Anomic suicide
Why Social regulations are indispensable

• Society imprints in our minds that we should

harmonize our desires with our means.
• It tells what we can hope to achieve
and what we should abandon because it is
not realistically obtainable.
• When everything works well, we internalize
those limits. We don’t even realize that they
are not simple inevitabilities that they are
actually social facts, external and coercive
codes that we once have internalized and
that lead us to desire only what we may one
day possess.
• Now, in modern societies this mechanism doesn't work
the way it should.
• We are often confronted with uncertainty about, or
even with an absence of, rules and regulation, and this
is what Durkheim calls a situation of anomie.
• A stable middle-class
position protects just as well
against suicide as a stable
position amongst the poor,
but when the economy
becomes very volatile and
people may lose all their
money overnight, or when
very poor people may all of a
sudden become very rich,
then the whole population is
touched by this general
• There is a weakening of that overarching, unifying
conscience collective, the cultural codes now are in
disarray, and under those circumstances people do
not internalize any kind of limit anymore and they
become dissatisfied beyond repair.
• And then again, a rise in suicide rates
that is most noticeable amongst
groups who suffer most acutely from
the economic uncertainties.
• For example, the people who work in
the financial professions, but also
other groups who experience the most
extreme changes in their economic
situation over a relatively short period
of time.
Thank You
Robert K. Merton an American Sociologists
1910-2003)
He is considered as modern sociologists.
Expanded our understanding of the concept of
social function by pointing out that any social
structure probably has many functions, some
more obvious than others.
He distinguished between manifest function
and Latent Function:
Manifest function the recognized and intended
consequences of any social pattern
Latent functions the recognized and unintended
consequences of any social problem.
 Max Weber (1864-1920)

 Much of Weber’s work was

a critique or clarification of
Marx
 His most famous work, The
Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism directly
challenged Marx’s ideas on
the role of religion in
society
 Weber was also interested
in bureaucracies and the
process of rationalization in
society
• Max Weber Approach is analytical Approach

• In analytical approach more into subjective

meaning

• Why people act the way they act?

• His main themes were to examine the effect

of religious ideas on economic activities:

• to analyse the relation between social

stratification and religious ideas
M N Srinivas (1916-1999)

 Known for his work

on caste and caste
systems

 Social stratification,
Sanskritisation and
Westernisation in
southern India

 The concept of
‘Dominant Caste’