Contributions of Classical Social Thinkers

Every theoretical perspective you learned in Module 1 — functionalist, conflict, evolutionary — traces back to a handful of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers who first tried to make sense of a world being transformed by industrialisation, revolution and rapid social upheaval. This topic is the umbrella over four of them — Comte, Durkheim, Marx and Weber — whose specific contributions are examined in depth in their own dedicated topics that follow.

In two minutes

Classical social thought was built by a small number of foundational thinkers — Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber, alongside figures like Herbert Spencer — each responding to the disruption of industrialisation and social change with a distinct account of how society holds together, conflicts, and evolves.

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