The Age of Revolution

The vehicle of social change was not science itself, since relatively few people at any level of society
were practicing scientists. Rather, the modern era of rapid social change is a product of the many new
ideas that captured people’s imagination during the eighteenth century. The series of revolutions that took
place in the American colonies, in France, and in England all resulted in part from social movements
unleashed by the triumphs of science and reason. The ideas of human rights (that is, the rights of all
humans, not just the elite), of democracy versus rule by an absolute monarch, of self-government for
colonial peoples, and of applying reason and science to human affairs in general—all are currents of
thought that arose during this period. The revolutions of the eighteenth century loosed a torrent of
questions that could not even have been imagined before. The old order of society was breaking down as
secular (i.e., nonreligious) knowledge replaced sacred traditions. The study of laws and lawmaking and
debates about justice in society began to replace the idea that kings and other leaders had a “divine right”
to rule. Communities were breaking apart; courts, palaces, and great estates were crumbling as people
struggled to be free. What would replace them? Would the rule of the mob replace the rule of the
monarch? Would greed and envy replace piety and faith? Would there be enough opportunities in the
New World for all the people who were being driven off the land in the Old World? Would the factory
system become the new order of society, and if so, what did that imply for the future of society? No
longer could the Scriptures or the classics of ancient Greece and Rome be consulted for easy answers to
such questions. Rather, it was becoming evident that new answers could be discovered through the
scientific method: repeated observation, careful description, the formulation of theories based on
possible explanations, and the gathering of additional data about questions arising from those theories.
Why not use the same methods to create a science of human society? This ambitious idea led to the birth
of sociology. It is little wonder that the French philosopher Auguste Comte thought of sociology, even in
its infancy, as the “queen of sciences,” one that would soon take its rightful place beside the reigning
science of physics. It was he who coined the term sociology to designate the scientific study of society.
Comte believed that the study of social stability and social change was the most important subject for
sociology to tackle. He made some of the earliest attempts to apply scientific methods to the study of
social life.