Sean Tarjoto						Sociological Theory
Sept. 22, 2002						Prof. Stephen Lukes	
	
	Auguste Comte coined the term sociology with in mind the Latin name for friend and the Greek meaning for study. Comte words were chosen in lieu of Quetelet’s description of a phenomenon he termed, “social physics”. Comte’s term meant to place sociology at the head of the class of sciences emerging from of the 18th-century. His idea was to build a science that would be a “concatenation of different disciplines” bridging physics and astronomy with chemistry and biology. At the turn of the twenty-first century, science has brought matter and antimatter together, unraveled the mysteries of life, watched at the beginnings of the universe, and may yet pry open the doors of immortality. Yet, some of sciences’ greatest collaborations and theories would find their proofs at the price of whole cities.  The question left to sociology may be to decipher the role of American democracy and its place as a western symbol of a way of everyday life. American ideals on work, community, and family could facilitate themselves within global community the question is if, how, and/or when they should.
	Comte’s methodology was based on a faith in historical progress. Positivism, as a way of thinking, was Comte’s explanation of the evolution of civilization. The dawn of scientific thought and its rational application to social life was the latest and most complicated series of intellectual somersaults. Comte believed that the history of human thought began spontaneously from within a paradox of causality: principal laws were needed to exist to establish the first real ideas, yet these ideas needed a prior set of laws to exist: "The human mind needed observations to formulate real theory, but it needed theories to connect to a series of observations.” Such observations appeared to the first thinkers and became the building blocks of theologically organized society. Religious understanding, Comte believed, was a way of thinking which was spontaneous in character, allowing human will the opportunity to transcend nature.  He described the paradigmatic shift from theologically-oriented universe (i.e. a rock falls because God wills it) to metaphysical laws (it is in the nature of heavy objects to fall) as a crucial period in history. During this critical transformation, mankind’s perception of the world around him would gravitate toward observations of his own role in the universe. Furthermore, metaphysical laws, as a way of thinking and acting in the world would redefine a social order and stability with the concepts of the city, nation-state and empire, where human nature, in its emotional, active and intelligent capacities, subordinated itself to law and bureaucracy.
Comte predicted a second critical period of transition between religious and secular forms of social order that would usher in the era of Positivism. In this world, scientific rationality would replace isolated speculations (i.e. illuminating the dark room of the Cartesian mind; Hobbe's observation that life is nasty, brutish and short) with particular facts (i.e. the candle emits light waves/particles; virus and bacteria cause death).  Dynamic and rational explanations based on the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy (though not psychology) would be put at the service of industry and finance.  
	Comte said of the Positivist spirit, “All our notions of truth are thus rendered homogenous and thus converge towards a central principle.” Through the systematic convergence of science toward the formulation of a single law, humankind would construct a way of life which could then congregate lesser truths to the higher (or highest) truth illuminated by Positivist philosophy. 
	Yet, if the centrality of Positivist truth is dictated for the sake of a subjects of a social order, as opposed to constructed by those who determine the stability of this social order, then it remains another notion that has yet to be deconstructed and/or “converged” towards a meta-narrative. 
	Sociology, as a branch of science, is a narrative with journalism as its narrator. I offer that role of sociology in the twenty-first century is to study the forces of increasingly technologically-oriented global communication networks and their relationship to the state of civic empowerment. Since these global networks would seek to expose millions of people to events that occur simultaneously, I believe it is important to understand the implicit differences between the structure of global technology and its unintentional (or intentional) affects on health, economics and culture and our environment. These affects situate themselves on several sites of human life simultaneously. Furthermore, their interplay apparently is not fixed on any central structure, since the state of civic structure is rearranging itself everyday, it is possible to rearrange everyday narratives whose content valorizes the intentions of the dominant power. By re-arranging the particular order of images and ideas that seem notoriously omnipresent can become a way of de-contextual zing, censoring, or marginalizing the meaning of dominant images. 
	If journalism is a primary site for the proliferation and marginalization of ideas, then sociology has a closely intertwined relationship to the dominance of any particular idea. Every idea that possesses the power to attract our attention can do so because these ideas are familiar. These ideas feel familiar because they are ever-present in our everyday life, and yet it seems that these ideas tend to appear from a single shelf of ideas in a world that is consistently and simultaneously expanding and contracting. 
	During the nineteenth-century, Americans would be seen as part of a daring and dangerous experiment with an ancient political idea that had been last seen practiced by the Greeks. A French adventurer and historian named Alexis de Tocqueville would visit the New World, and observe that Americans favored liberty over equality. Tocqueville himself believed that Europeans were, by political tradition, servile social animals.  Americans were rugged, individualistic, and ready to embrace whatever means would ensure their own freedom (from king, their leader or each other). Tocqueville’s understanding of the American social character was based on his observation that the idea of equality, though tedious to maintain and difficult to measure, would be the lawfully binding force between every citizen who owned property by fortune of their age, color, and gender.  In America, equality became the step stool of liberty. 
	The safeguarding of the right to private property, would be the most sacred of legal mechanisms in the new democracy. With this right, one could pursue their own happiness without fear of the consequences that might appear outside the walls of his inner sanctum, since he was also at liberty to defend that property with force. Today, juridical notion of liberty remain tied to the mechanism of private property. In America, one could be free to pursue one’s own measure of happiness, though he would never have to capitulate to any violation of that liberty on his own property. From early on in its history, civic associations would always be formed with the goal of such cooperation to secure liberty for the pursuit of personal happiness.  The character of democratic community would limit certain kinds of freedom outside one’s own private property. This was the model of democracy that Tocqueville felt should be exported throughout the nations of the Old World. 
	Tocqueville traveled for two hundred seventy-one days from the Atlantic border to the untouched woodlands of the Missouri. His papers described his official purpose as to study the U.S. prison system. He interviewed the seventh president Andrew Jackson, and the former president John Quincy Adams. His companion Gustave de Beaumont also had the privilege of leaving France and the aftermath of the revolution. Though not strictly a sociologist, Tocqueville’s role in the history of sociology is that of a foreign member of the aristocracy who brought with him a particular set of ethics, discourse, and perspective on the meaning of civic relationships.
	Tocqueville observed of the free press, "In America three quarters of the enormous sheet are filled with advertisements, and the remainder is frequently occupied by political intelligence or trivial anecdotes; it is only from time to time that one finds a corner devoted to passionate discussions like those which the journalists of France every day give to their readers (vol. I, Ch. 11)." Yet, he said of American journalists, "They certainly are not great writers, but they speak their country's language and they make themselves heard (vol. II, Ch. 13)."
	For Tocqueville, journalism did not seem to be an integral part of a working democracy, yet the question for students of sociology may be: what is the best kind of journalism? The question of whether sociologists should view their discipline as a higher form of journalism may find some answers by understanding how students of political science view journalism. If journalists have shown themselves as possessing a conflict of interest with the institutions they serve, then how can these interests be separated without crumbling the institutions themselves? Would journalists, working closely with sociologists, begin to see booming population growth and declining civic participation as having something to do with the collapse of democratic institutions? Would the role of journalism be to expose some or all of the deceit involved in the political process, and scrape the truth from the walls of power?  Tocqueville's journalists remain central to the pursuit of American democracy. Sociology, for Comte, is a task to where these pursuits may end. Though their appearances here may simply be part of the collapsed narrative of politics, I hope it is one useful enough to revive its role in democracy. 	
If sociology is also a higher form of journalism, there must be an extent to which it encounters everyday forms of journalism - mass media, television and the daily newspaper, as well as its affect on the social order. Sociologists study the forces of social reality which journalists have to investigate and which we all live in. In keeping with Comte’s idea of rational social progress, sociologists must also keep pace with journalism that claims to be apolitical but is actually an engine of the political process. We should study sociology as a branch of science whose purpose is to give its subject the conceptual and practical tools to enrich their own institutional interactions.  Social in the twenty-first century life can be complex, and not necessarily disorderly. 
Journalism should enlighten the institutional problems of our political processes instead of turning social and political conflict into a spectacle. As cornerstones of democracy, journalists should be willing to listen to sociologists who want to expose the contradictions of social and political life, to see communities develop their sense of place and character, and fight the injustices of everyday life. Sociologists should try to form close partnerships with journalists who see themselves as outside the main currents of political thought, or side with political actors that seek to represent their constituencies.  Sociologists should make their practice of observing the world as their community, as something closely tied to their practice as active civic participants.

	
					Bibliography
	Comte, Auguste. Introduction to positive philosophy. Ed. & Trans. Frederick Ferré. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill:1970.
Comte, Auguste. Sociology 302 -- History of Social Thought Auguste Comte. On-line. March 25 2000. http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Sociology/302/comte/comte.html. September 22, 2002.
De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. On-line. April 12, 2001. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/toc_indx.html. September 22, 2002.