1. The French Revolution (1789) — political order could be made, not inherited: society itself became an object of design and study.
2. The Industrial Revolution — urbanisation, factories, a new class order, unprecedented social problems (slums, labour, alienation): old explanations failed.
3. The scientific/intellectual revolution — the method of natural science (Newton) tempted thinkers to a "social physics."
The founding lineage (know each in one line):
• Auguste Comte (1798–1857) — coined the name; positivism; the law of three stages (theological → metaphysical → positive/scientific).
• Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) — social evolutionism; "survival of the fittest" applied (wrongly, later shown) to societies.
• Karl Marx (1818–1883) — class conflict as the motor of history; the material base of social order (full treatment in Unit 3).
• Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) — the first professor of the discipline (Bordeaux); Rules ofSociological Method (1895): social facts as things, external to and coercive of the individual; founded the first school (L'Année Sociologique).
• Max Weber (1864–1920) — interpretive sociology; rationalisation, bureaucracy, authority, religion and economy (Units 3, 6).
Later currents (name-drop accurately): the Chicago School (urban sociology, 1920s); Talcott Parsons' structural functionalism (order through shared values); Robert Merton (manifest/latent functions — see Unit 6); conflict theory's revival; symbolic interactionism
(Blumer, building on Mead); phenomenological and critical traditions; feminist and postcolonial sociology; today's computational and digital sociology.