Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte (19 January 1798 – 5

September 1857) was a French philosopher and writer who formulated the
doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in
the modern sense of the term. Comte is also seen as the founder of the
academic discipline of sociology.
Influenced by the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed
the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of
the French Revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences.
Comte was a major influence on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of
social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His
concept of sociologie and social evolutionism set the tone for early social
theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer,
evolving into modern academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as
practical and objective social research.

Comte's social theories culminated in his "Religion of Humanity", which

presaged the development of non-theistic religious humanist and secular
humanist organizations in the 19th century. Comte may have coined the
word altruisme (altruism)
To develop sociology as a discipline Comte gave the law of three stages:

• Theological stage: Theological stage is a stage in which the mind explains

phenomena or mundane occurences by ascribing them to the unfathomable
gods.
• Metaphysical stage: Abstract forces , powers and essences rather than
spiritual forces are considered responsible for worldly affairs.
• Scientific stage: In this stage humans look at phenomena and arrive at laws
because the aim of positive philosophy is to consider all phenomena as subject
to invariable natural laws.
Comte along with Saint Simon provided the basis for the development of the
discipline at a very nascent stage which was later provided impetus by Emile
Durkheim.
Harriet Martineau (12 June 1802 – 27 June 1876) was a British social
theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist. Martineau
wrote many books and a multitude of essays from a sociological, holistic,
religious, domestic, and perhaps most controversially, feminine perspective.
She also translated various works by Auguste Comte, and she earned enough
to support herself entirely by her writing, a rare feat for a woman in
the Victorian era. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed reading Martineau's
publications. She invited Martineau to her coronation in 1838 — an event
which Martineau described in great and amusing detail to her many readers.
Martineau said of her own approach to writing: "when one studies a society,
one must focus on all its aspects, including key political, religious, and social
institutions". She believed a thorough societal analysis was necessary to
understand women's status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant said
"as a born lecturer and politician [Martineau] was less distinctively affected by
her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation.
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English
philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal
political theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing
conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world,
biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As
a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics,
religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature,
astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved
tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. "The only other
English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity
was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century."Spencer was "the single
most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900: "Who now reads
Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937. Spencer is best known for the
expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of
Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This term
strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into
realms of sociology and ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism.
David Émile Durkheim (15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a
French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline of sociology
and—with W. E. B. Du Bois, Karl Marx and Max Weber —is commonly cited as
the principal architect of modern social science.
Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain
their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social
and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions
have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of
Labour in Society (1893). In 1895, he published The Rules of Sociological Method
and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first
professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique
. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in
Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and
served to distinguish social science from psychology and political
philosophy. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) presented a
theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and
modern societies.
Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a
legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste
Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form
of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive
model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions, if
this term is understood in its broader meaning as "beliefs and modes of
behaviour instituted by the collectivity" and its aim being to discover
structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural
functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology.
In his view, social science should be purely holistic that is, sociology should
study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the
specific actions of individuals.
He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in
1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of
topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social
stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such
as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a
German sociologist, philosopher, jurist, and political economist. His ideas
profoundly influenced social theory and social research. Weber is often cited,
with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as among the three founders of
sociology. Weber was a key proponent of methodological anti-positivism,
arguing for the study of social action through interpretive (rather than
purely empiricist) means, based on understanding the purpose
and meaning that individuals attach to their own actions. Unlike Durkheim, he
did not believe in monocausal explanations and rather proposed that for any
outcome there can be multiple causes.
Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding the processes
of rationalisation, secularisation, and "disenchantment" that he associated with
the rise of capitalism and modernity. He saw these as the result of a new way
of thinking about the world. Weber is best known for his thesis
combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, elaborated in his
book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he proposed
that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" associated
with the rise in the Western world of marke-driven capitalism and the rational-
legal nation-state. He argued that it was in the basic tenets of Protestantism to
boost capitalism. Thus, it can be said that the spirit of capitalism is inherent to
Protestant religious values.
Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a
German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political
theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary .
Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He
married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx
became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for
decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with
German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in
the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the
1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital.
His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent
intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an
adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.
Marx's critical theories about society, economics and politics – collectively
understood as Marxism – hold that human societies develop through class
struggle. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling
classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and
the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by
selling their labour power in return for wages. Employing a critical approach
known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socio-
economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to
its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism. For Marx,
class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability and crisis-
prone nature, would eventuate the working class' development of class
consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the
establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free
association of producers, Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing
that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to
topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.
Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human
history, and his work has been both lauded and criticized. His work in
economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and
its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. Many intellectuals,
labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by
Marx's work, with many modifying or adapting his ideas. Marx is typically cited
as one of the principal architects of modern social science.
Georg Simmel (1 March 1858 – 26 September 1918) was a
German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. Simmel was one of the first
generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the
foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society? in a direct
allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature? presenting pioneering analyses of
social individuality and fragmentation. For Simmel, culture referred to "the
cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been
objectified in the course of history". Simmel discussed social and cultural
phenomena in terms of "forms" and "contents" with a transient relationship;
form becoming content, and vice versa, dependent on the context. In this sense
he was a forerunner to structuralist styles of reasoning in the social sciences.
With his work on the metropolis, Simmel was a precursor of urban
sociology, symbolic interactionism and social network analysis.
An acquaintance of Max Weber, Simmel wrote on the topic of personal
character in a manner reminiscent of the sociological 'ideal type'. He broadly
rejected academic standards, however, philosophically covering topics such as
emotion and romantic love. Both Simmel and Weber's nonpositivist theory
would inform the eclectic critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
Simmel's most famous works today are The Problems of the Philosophy of
History (1892), The Philosophy of Money (1900), The Metropolis and Mental
Life (1903), Soziologie (1908, inc. The Stranger, The Social Boundary, The
Sociology of the Senses, The Sociology of Space, and On The Spatial Projections
of Social Forms), and Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917). He also wrote
extensively on the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well on art,
most notably his book Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art (1916).