Sociology and Estrangement Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany Book

So, what is sociology? You would think that a bibliophile who’s decided to commit his life to the discipline would be able to muster a somewhat satisfactory answer, but the truth is I’ve demurred to such enquiries on more than a few occasions, not out of an proclivity for coquetry, but simply out of embarrassed ignorance. Did I have more to offer than a non-too-helpful answer of “we study people; we study societies”? (I probably do, but then I’ll ramble on for 2 minutes and lose my interlocutor: so I do have a response, just not the Christmas stocking version of it.) Sociologists study people; we study society. We’re committed to a certain sort of holism: the idea that society, social institutions, social interaction — whatever ‘social’ object of enquiry we choose to obsess over — individuals engage with and in cannot be duly understood without paying attention to the group. By corollary, we as a group believe that purely atomistic visions of human behavior miss something essential — humans are too interconnected, interdependent, social groups too closely integrated, for that to be possibles (shoot the exceptions at me). As that bromide from the old Masters goes: “No Man is an Island.”