Nature Of Society example essay topic
306 words
The French sociologists (holistic approach), during the eighteenth and nineteenth century were much concerned with the 'nature' of society and of the human social institutions. Their interest slay rather in what human society essentially is, than in the history of it's development, either generally or in particular cases. Thus Comte, like his predecessor and teacher Saint Simon, was much concerned to stress that societies are systems, not just aggregates of individuals. Since the societies were look at as systems, they must be made up of interrelated parts. And they believed that these parts must be related to one another, and to the whole society of which they were parts, in accordance with laws similar to the laws of nature, which, in principle at least, it should be possible to discover. So the understanding of society, like the understanding of the physical organism, was to be achieved by discovering the laws of social organization which operated to maintain the whole structure. This 'organismic' approach to the study of human societies had some limitations and can be dangerously misleading. The 'organic' approach reached its most sophisticated expression in the writing of the French sociologist 'Emile Durkhiem, who is one of the most figures in social anthropology. With Durkhiem, sociology had become in France a seminal discipline that broadened and transformed the study of law, of economics, of Chinese institutions, of linguistics, of ethnology, of art history, and of history. Durkhiem's nephew, Marcel Mauss, was less systematic than he was and paid greater attention to symbolism as an unconscious activity of the mind. Claude L'eve-Strauss, combines reasoning with intensity of feeling, also offered corrections to Durkhiem's views. Acknowledgment 1.
Other Cultures. 1966. John Beattie. 2.
Brittania. Volume four, P. 295 2 b.
