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Science was one factor that made modern society new and different. This meant first of all different from Europe’s immediately preceding history, the ‘middle ages’ understood to have come between the fall of the Western Roman Empire (roughly during the 5th century) and the beginnings of modernity in the Renaissance (mostly 15th and 16th centuries). It meant different secondarily from Classical Greece, Rome, Egypt, and other ancient societies that had flourished around the Mediterranean Sea. And it meant different, third, from the other great civilizations of which Europeans became aware through explorations (and eventually trade and religious missions) launched during the Renaissance. Looking at these three contrasts helped theorists clarify not just what was modern, but what was social. We can see them at work in the development of core themes for classical sociological theory, each of which also reflected how sociological theory was differentiated from work in other emerging social science disciplines.

States. Nested hierarchies of political power and religious authority were central to the Middle Ages. This meant not just that some were ranked higher than others, but that structures of personal authority shaped who fit into recognized groups. Kings did not rule peasants directly. They ruled noble lords who ruled lesser lords, knights, and squires. Their authority only reached the peasants through layers, and at each level, the authority of lords only extended through specific territories.

Medieval kings often claimed to rule by divine right. Legitimate inheritance from the previous king was crucial. Modernity saw a demand to rethink legitimacy, with more emphasis on how well governments served the people in their societies. Politics was reorganized, with classical theorists engaged in trying to shape the outcomes as well as understand the process. Three kinds of political change were crucial:

First, the personal power of individual rulers was increasingly augmented (and eventually replaced) by the rise of state administrative capacity. This took place in an era of repeated wars fought partly over religion and partly to try to consolidate territorial power. Waging war was not just a matter of heroism in battle or having more soldiers than an enemy. It depended on the capacity to manufacture weapons, move troops (and feed and pay them), and increasingly to build ships – which in turn meant harvesting trees in inland forests and getting them to coastal shipyards. Military administration helped advance civilian administration as states took over issuing money, building roads, and eventually old age pensions, health care, and education.

Projects of state administration led to the development of bureaucracy – a term coined by the classical sociological theorist Max Weber (excerpted here) who pioneered its study. This wasn’t all new. Bureaucracy was pioneered in the Chinese Empire, but it grew dramatically in modern nation-states. This meant rationalizing government, using civil servants forbidden to have other jobs (and thus conflicts of interest) and hiring and promoting them on the basis of their skills (rather than their families or political connections). The expanding role of government also reflected social demands, as businesses demanded better money and better roads, and workers demanded pensions, health care, and education. Expecting more of government produced calls to make government accountable.

Second, political power was increasingly organized in terms of nation-states. Wars of religion both reflected and advanced the change. They were projects of trying to produce uniformity among all the inhabitants of a country – all Catholics, say, or all Protestants. Such projects didn’t stop with religion. The idea of nation transformed how modern people thought of culture – not just as elite taste but as a whole way of life. The idea of nation gained material substance with the standardization of national languages in place of local dialects, public education, and infrastructures for shared communication.

Medieval kings could give away a whole region in a marriage or inherit a foreign country where they didn’t even speak the language. Frontiers were vague. Modern nation-states emphasized more or less unified populations with clear territories and borders. Domestic integration contrasted with external conflict and, as in the case of colonies, domination.

National integration was accompanied by a new sense that society mattered. For kings and emperors, ordinary people could be a problem or a resource, but they were seldom a basic value. Indeed, kings and emperors often ruled over collections of societies – the different peoples who lived on the territories they conquered, each with a distinct way of life. Ordinary people didn’t really count in politics. Kings thought of them as potential soldiers, but not citizens. At most, there were efforts to make sure their minimal subsistence needs were met – partly out of moral obligation, partly to avoid crime or rebellion.

Third, during the modern era demands grew for wider political participation. These came first of all from elites. Both landowners and merchants with new wealth resisted being dominated by kings. But at the same time there was pressure ‘from below’. This came in part because ordinary people were organizing themselves in new ways. Small businesses also grew more numerous (and sometimes bigger). Farmers more often owned the land they worked. Craft societies expanded, including more workers. Education became more widespread. So did practical experience in self-government in a host of different organizations from local churches and schools to burial and charity societies.

The idea of ‘consent of the governed’ had powerful appeal to people who thought of themselves as independent citizens capable of making choices about the societies in which they lived. Social contract theory drew on this sensibility, and also on Biblical understandings that God created human beings as free individuals. Thomas Hobbes (excerpted here) suggested that originally free people were likely to discover that by themselves they were vulnerable to theft or even murder. Life in a state of nature might be free, but it would turn out to be “nasty, brutish, and short.” People might therefore give up some freedom in exchange for security. His theory pioneered a recurrent effort to understand society in terms of the choices of self-interested individuals. But it is no accident that Hobbes focused on property. His approach to individuals stressed their capacity to possess more than their capacity to express creativity.¹²

By contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (also excerpted here) held that private property was the enemy of freedom as well as equality. He used social contract theory to argue that those who had given consent to government could withdraw it. Like many of those who shaped early modern society, Rousseau admired the Roman Republic as an example of virtuous self-rule, lost with the transition to empire. They built on Renaissance experiments with self-governing city-states, constituted a radical wing to the 17th Century English Revolution, and were more successful in the American and then the French Revolutions of the 18th Century.

Alexis de Tocqueville and others in this tradition sought social foundations for democracy in ‘civil society’. This meant society that was a free product of relations among private persons. Contract was a model for those relations, but not the only one. Friendship, religious community, and the self-governance of medieval guilds and cities also offered models. Tocqueville emphasized the importance of autonomous local communities and communications media able to reach larger scale publics. He helped classical sociological theory recognize how much of human life was organized at a level between the interior privacy of intimate family life (or indeed, the inner personality of the individual) and the exterior direction of the state. Society was the crucial middle ground in which relationships could not be explained entirely by psychology, politics or economics.¹³ Knitting together national societies strengthened democracy’s social foundations and efforts like social security to support the welfare of all citizens. Sociologists have both celebrated success (Durkheim and Parsons) and analyzed shortcomings (Durkheim again, along with Polanyi, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Mannheim).

Political participation is not just a matter of formal electoral processes, thus, but also of civil society organizations and social movements. For example, the US Constitution of 1789 excluded women and slaves, and allowed states to exclude working men who did not own enough property. This was not only unjust, but as Martineau emphasized, a contradiction within seemingly liberal democracy. It called for action and change. Centuries of social movements have struggled to extend democracy to all citizens – and often to increase equality. Movements exemplify the modern idea of people seeking to choose their ways of living in society together.

Revolutions could be celebrated as extreme examples of citizen choice about what kind of government to share. But revolutions also raised two troubling issues. First, there was always the possibility that a new government would be as bad as the old, and that ordinary people who supported the revolution would be excluded from control of the new government. The example of the Russian Revolution was widely seen to demonstrate this. Classical sociological theorists suggested that part of the issue was the power of underlying social conditions that might not support democracy even if most people wanted it.¹⁴ Robert Merton (excerpted here) generalized one dimension of this by pointing out how manifest functions – what seemed to be going on – might contrast with underlying, latent functions. The police might be intended to guarantee security, but instead guarantee property or privilege of some at the expense of the security of others. The revolution might be intended to increase freedom but by tearing down old systems of authority have the latent function of enabling new elites to take power.

This raised the second issue. While peaceful revolutions were theoretically possible, actual revolutions tend to involve violence. The French Revolution started in 1789 but by 1793–4 have become exceptionally bloody. Thousands were killed by the supposedly human guillotine. Many of those killed were themselves revolutionaries, not monarchists, but condemned by other factions of the revolutionary government. The issue has persisted as groups struggling against injustice or abusive governments question whether these can be changed by peaceful means. There is a tradition arguing that violence can be positive, even purifying. The classical sociological theorist Hannah Arendt (excerpted here) argued forcefully against this. Violence should ever be used to resolve political questions, she said, these always needed to be approached as matters of human action, including communication and debate.

Economies. Through much of history, production was mostly for the subsistence of those who produced it. Food was the dominant good, though craft products became increasingly important. With sedentary agriculture larger surpluses were produced – and mostly extracted to feed people in growing cities and support rulers in projects from majestic mausoleums to wars. Trade was initially as much a matter of ritual as material redistribution. Eventually, though, it linked cities and regions and flowed along some very long-distance routes. There was more wealth, more luxury consumption – like fine fabrics or elegant jewelry. But there was not any idea of the economy – as distinct from wealthier cities or rulers or indeed temples – and the political or military capacity to defend them.

The very idea of ‘the economy’ is modern. The word comes from the ancient Greek term for household management. It was extended to thinking about other and larger enterprises. But the modern idea of ‘the economy’ is a significant departure. It refers not just to decisions about investment and consumption, but about an overall system of relationships – buying and selling, of course, but also borrowing and lending, investing and management. These are increasingly organized in an impersonal credit and monetary system and through corporations in which management is a job separate from ownership – and owners can be other corporations, further abstracting away from individuals.

A key feature of the modern era has been the attempt to separate economics from politics. Weber called them different ‘value spheres’ – reflecting among other things the contrast between pursuit of the public good and pursuit of profit. One of the ideas of liberalism has been the notion that to protect freedom in each sphere, they should be free from each other. This is different from, say, a feudal system in which economic exploitation and political domination are organized directly by the same system of power and authority. Adam Smith thought government ‘interference’ in the economy could upset its ‘natural’ self-regulation. Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi both disagreed, holding that it was mistaken to think of the economy as natural rather than historically produced.

Classical economists formulated the idea of universal, natural economic laws in a 19th Century argument against state efforts to control export and import prices. The timing was surprising. In precisely the same period, the social impact of industrialization was so dramatic that observers called it ‘industrial revolution’ and classical sociologists showed that it changed society as much as political revolutions.¹⁵ Agriculture was industrialized first, leading to the decline of rural villages and the rise of cities.

Modern markets are vastly larger than earlier ones, and organize a much larger proportion of human activities. Modern society doesn’t simply have markets, as kingdoms, empires, and feudal societies elsewhere have had markets. It is structured in a basic way by markets. Moreover, continuous marketization has meant that activities previously organized in other ways have been reorganized on market bases – like paying for a nursing home rather than caring for aged parents at home. Of course, states could also provide care on a non-market basis, but the dominant trend has been ‘commodification’, the organization of production and provision as for monetized exchange. Property that was previously passed on through generations, like family farms, has been commodified.

The discipline of economics developed to understand this new phenomenon of large-scale economic systems. It was initially called ‘political economy’ largely to signal a concern with trade, production, and wealth at the scale of states not just households. Mainstream economics is not about state-dominated economies, but about private property and how to allocate it in decisions about consumption, savings, and investment. Though grounded in an idealized image of individuals making such decisions, it uses mathematics and statistics to address both larger scale and law-like patterns. Classical sociological theory engaged both the contexts and social organization of economic activity.

A classical sociological theorist as well as economist, Adam Smith (excerpted here) showed how manufacturing was transformed not only by new technology but new social organization.¹⁶ A coordinated division of labor was basic to every factory. This depended not just on management but on an ethic of work discipline, as Max Weber showed, and discipline was also necessary to investment: saving and reinvesting profits rather than only consuming luxuries. While Weber stressed this “spirit of capitalism” which he thought had religious sources. Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi both showed how labor discipline was more coercively enforced, by fear of poverty, the power of capitalists, and government regulation. Trade unions and socialist politics were socially organized responses. Work, management, and investment were all transformed by the rise of large corporations.

Evolutionary theorists examined the transition from the fixed statuses of premodern societies, where most roles were determined by gender, age, descent, and kinship, to modern societies with their range of roles based on individual attributes, achievements, or contracts.¹⁷ Adam Smith analyzed how new divisions of labor made work more productive; markets expanded as different people and whole countries had different things to sell. Herbert Spencer, one of sociology’s great 19th Century founders, saw differentiation as the key to social evolution, including the transition from ‘militant’ societies based on sheer power to industrial societies based on structures of cooperation. It was key as states branched out beyond simply exercising power through a military hierarchy, to undertake a range of different kinds of administration including eventually education, housing, and health care. Emile Durkheim (excerpted here) linked division of labor to ‘dynamic density’ – a matter not of physical crowding but of the number and complexity of transactions typical of modern society – and through this to social integration based not on similarity alone, but on relationships among people who were different from each other. Talcott Parsons continued this functional analysis by showing the relations of economic activity to other institutions, like education. He held that by the post-WWII era, problems of economic exploitation and disruption had been minimized; government policy combined with representation of workers through unions to produce a functional balance.

Functionalist theories emphasized the evolution of spontaneous structures of cooperation, though they thought good policies could help these along. Their examples of ‘earlier’ stages came mainly from smaller scale peoples of the Americas and Africa. But colonialism brought greater knowledge of India, a very large-scale society that didn’t fit the premodern/modern contrast easily. India’s caste system was an almost infinitely complex hierarchy built largely out of kinship and descent, but also religion and occupation. But caste hierarchy was different from class. As Marx analyzed it, class was based on the sale of labor power as part of the relations of production. Others saw class simply as differences of income and wealth. Either way, class was reproduced more in strictly economic distinctions and less in elaborate cultural codes. Later sociologists would use the distinction to analyze the relations between race and class – for example in the US South. Race was embedded in a whole set of cultural norms governing things like who could mix with whom – or drink out of the same drinking fountain. Efforts to forge class solidarity based on the common interests of Black and white workers kept foundering on these caste distinctions.

Issues like this illustrate what Polanyi called the ‘embedding’ of markets in society. To say something like “it’s all just supply and demand” is not realism about economic life but a radical abstraction from actually existing markets and social life. Abstraction can be a useful tool, but when it is confused with more complex reality it becomes ideology and is usually misleading. Similarly, evolution is not just a shift from culturally embedded codes of status to markets and contracts that are somehow autonomous from culture and society. First, changes usually reflect power relations. Second, both markets and contracts are shaped deeply by differentiations rooted in the rest of social life. The different roles and rewards given to women workers offer a prime example.

Karl Marx also pointed out that economic production depended on social organized reproduction – like raising children. Polanyi showed how both family and community mattered. But neither Marx nor Polanyi went deeply into the gender roles that made childrearing and reproduction more generally largely women’s work. This became a theme for 20th century feminist theorists. As Jane Addams (excerpted here) pointed out, much was unpaid, embedded in family relations. And when household labor was paid – commodified – it often meant racial minorities and immigrants working for middle class families.

Marx, Polanyi and others also pointed to the exploitation embedded in the relation of rich countries to colonies. Slavery was one extreme form, developed in its modern form to serve plantation economies. Plantations produced cotton, which the textile mills of Britain or the US North converted into cloth and clothing. Colonies were run for the benefit of capitalist colonizers, as for example Britain undermined craft textile production in India in order to have markets for factory-made goods. Followers of Marx saw former colonies locked into subordinate positions and exploitation. Followers of Parsons and other modernization theorists argued that a process of development could enable them to follow in the path of the already rich countries.

Individuals. In the Middle Ages, and indeed in much of history beyond Europe, most people were peasants, making a living in agriculture, with any surplus production beyond their mere subsistence needs appropriated for cities and their elites. Indeed, they had less leisure time and freedom than people in small-scale societies that lived by hunting and fishing. Peasant lives were short, focused largely on survival, with few choices about consumption. The individuality of a few people – kings, heroic warriors, poets, priests, and philosophers – was celebrated but treated as exceptional. This doesn’t mean that individual qualities weren’t recognized among non-elites or that they were never individually creative. It means their material choices were limited. One effect of producing economic goods beyond the requirements of subsistence was that choice could proliferate. This was a major source of the individualism classical sociological theorists saw as characteristic of the modern era.

Individualism could mean lots of things.¹⁸ It could mean valuing personal freedom over social obligations. It could mean that people should have rights as individuals, like those to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness claimed in the US Declaration of Independence. It could mean that people should look inside themselves to find the authentic inner meaning of their lives or that expressing one’s own thoughts and desires was important. It could mean an honorable independence of mind or a disreputable selfishness.

We saw that Hobbes and other social contract theorists analyzed legitimate government by positing separate individuals and asking about their choices. This is sometimes called atomism or methodological individualism. The basic idea is not to take a stand on how much individualism is good, but to break society into its smallest units for clearer analysis. Emile Durkheim objected, arguing that individuals by themselves were not the smallest units of society. Society was made up, rather, of social relationships; individuals were always embedded in these relationships. Talcott Parsons continued this argument for seeing the social whole which conditioned all such individual behavior.

Most classical sociological theory rejected the idea that individuals were completely psychologically autonomous. “Self and society are twin-born,” wrote the pioneering American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley.¹⁹ This insight was also basic to the work of George Herbert Mead (excerpted in this volume) who saw the self as emerging only in communicative interaction. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, saw individuals as striving for autonomy but never achieving it, partly because of complex and contradictory inner life, but also because they developed in constant and challenging relations with other people.

Georg Simmel (excerpted in this volume) wrote an influential pair of essays asking “how is society possible?” and “how is individuality possible?” He too saw the two as fundamentally interdependent, though sometimes in tension. Social structure provided the conditions for individuality to develop, including freedom. This could never be based on perfect autonomy. At the same time, individuals are not fully contained within their social roles and necessarily experience social structure as external. Simmel’s famous example was the way growing modern cities allowed individuality to flourish, freeing people from the constant gaze and restrictive norms of small communities. This freedom was the result of social conditions – the relative anonymity of urban life for example. It was not just human nature.

Ferdinand Tönnies formulated a similar distinction as a contrast between community and society (or association). Community was grounded in a sentiment of closeness of families as well as individuals; society was built out of more formally chosen associations like business corporations or professional societies. It was still a matter of connections, but with more feeling of autonomy, less of mutuality.²⁰

Many other classical sociological theorists wrestled with shifts in community life, transition to cities, and the growth of more individual chosen and formally organized relationships. Tocqueville saw balance as crucial to the future of democracy in America. Durkheim and many others worried that family, community, and social solidarity generally were being undermined by excesses of individualism.

Parsons saw his work as resolving the question Hobbes had asked: how could social order emerge. He resolved it partly by denying that individuals ever existed outside social order, but also by studying the many different kinds of formal and informal organizations and larger institutions that people created. These gave scope for individuality, but within social relations. And they were knit together with each other in a web of functional interdependencies.

In the mid-20th Century, a number of sociological theorists suggested that Durkheim and Parsons had gone too far in privileging the social whole vs the individuals within it. George Homans and Peter Blau (both excerpted here) offered new theories of how social organization was generated from interaction among individuals. This was microsociology as opposed to the macrosociology of those like Parsons analyzing society at its largest. But it was different from symbolic interactionism, the approach that grew out of the work of George Herbert Mead. Mead’s approach focused on the ways individuals communicated with each other. Homans drew on behavioral psychology, including theories of operant conditioning. He sought an objective account of social exchange and the formation of groups. Peter Blau’s theory built on Homans, but emphasized how exchanges among individuals reflected their interests, a sort of cost/benefit analysis.

These sociological accounts of individuals and community partially mirrored distinctions of liberalism and conservatism in political thought. Liberalism is a tradition of political and social thought founded on individualistic ideas of freedom. Though in their exchange theories neither Homans nor Blau engaged political ideology, they shared the liberal focus on individuals. Conservatism, by contrast, often holds that too much freedom can be a problem if it undermines marriages, communities, and moral commitments. In one of the most famous works of classical sociological theory, Suicide (excerpted here), Emile Durkheim agreed with the conservatives on this point, offering evidence that an excess of freedom – or extremely rapid social change, whether good or bad – could produce ‘anomie’ or normlessness. This deprived peopled of good bases for moral judgement and even finding meaning in their lives; it could contribute to suicide. Here Durkheim followed Tocqueville, who coined the term ‘individualism’. He wanted to distinguish selfishness, which he said was found in all times and places, from the specifically modern equation of freedom with independence. He saw individual rights as basic to modern freedom, but as necessarily organized in social relations and a republican culture of virtue. He thought the Americans he observed were one-sidedly obsessed with personal freedom. In fact, Tocqueville and Durkheim were both political liberals, they were simply worried about excesses of individualism and drew on conservative thought to understand the more communitarian side of the equation.

Herbert Marcuse, a critical theorist and humanistic Marxist, also noted that exaggerated freedom could undermine the specifically capitalist form of modern society. This depended on self-discipline – even psychological repression. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for example, Weber had described the importance of saving and reinvestment, both dependent on resisting impulses to enjoy luxuries. Equally, it was important for workers and managers alike to be committed to hard work, disciplined, and rationalistic. Parents absorbed this orientation and objected to their children choosing lifestyles that emphasized liberation over authority and discipline. But by the late 1950s and 1960s, Marcuse argued, capitalism had become more consumer-oriented. Workers were motivated less by discipline and more by the cash to purchase the ever-growing ranging of consumer goods – Cadillacs with fins, for example, refrigerators with ice-makers. This brought a loosening of repression. Artistic and Bohemian lifestyles and liberated sexual expression spelled a challenge for capitalism and the prioritization of social authority.

The issue for classical sociological theory was not only judging how much or what kind of individualism was good. It was also how to understand societies in which so much of social organization was based on the idea of individual choice. This was full of paradoxes and questions. Did individualism promote the idea of romantic love? Yes. Did individualism contribute to rising divorce rates? Also yes. Was there freedom in children being able to choose different occupations and places to live from those of their parents? Yes. Was family transformed by this freedom? Yes. For one thing, nuclear families were increasingly separated from extended families (grandparents, cousins, etc.). Typical families became smaller.

Individualism’s most important early appearance was in religion. The Protestant Reformation encouraged ordinary people – to read the Bible for themselves (not leave that to priests), pray in terms they made up for themselves (not simply by official prayers handed down by the church), and develop a personal relationship with God.²¹ These ideas had an influence on the rise of science, which depended on researchers thinking and judging facts for themselves, not simply accepting what was traditionally understood to be correct.

Pervasive individualism often hid important biases. Analysis spoke of individuals in the abstract – the human being. But in both theory and research the focus was often on white men. These were equated with individuals in general, producing misleading, falsely universal claims. The experience and situations of women were different from those of men – and left out when the focus was on an abstract, allegedly universal individual. For example, the sociological pioneer Jane Addams (excerpted here) pointed out the belated recognition of household work, done mainly by women, but commonly forgotten both by economists and labor organizers. Likewise, focusing on the abstract individual obscured race. In The Souls of Black Folk, (excerpted here) the great classical sociological theorist W.E.B. Du Bois developed the concept of ‘double consciousness’ to address what it meant to live with the duality of fitting into a universal category (whether individual or citizen) only with the recognition that one also embodied a marked difference.

The Wider World: Classical sociological theory was shaped by a new sense of how large and diverse the world was. Recognition of the existence of other societies helped Europeans recognize their own more clearly. The French, Germans, and English all compared themselves to each other. But more distant and radically distant civilizations also had an important effect on classical sociological theory.

For a thousand years, Europeans had known little about this wider world. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe had not been central to any of the world’s large empires or expansive civilizations. There were great empires in China, India, Persia, and the Muslim Mediterranean while Europe was a relative backwater.

Connection to the Western Roman Empire is the reason Europeans thought of themselves as ‘the West’. The Eastern half of the Roman Empire did not ‘fall’ in the 5th Century the way the Western did; it split off. Centered in Constantinople, and henceforth commonly known as Byzantium, until the 15th Century it remained central to civilization from the Eastern Mediterranean into Asia. It was also the center of Orthodox Christianity while most of Western Europe was Catholic (and later Protestant). Orthodoxy linked Greek, Russian, Syrian, Egyptian (Coptic) and Ethiopian branches of Christianity, though without the central authority of a Pope. Western Europeans had little engagement with their fellow Christians to the East.

Constantinople was a Greek city, located in what is now Turkey. In 1453, it was conquered, renamed Istanbul, and made the capital of a growing, Turkish-led Ottoman Empire – the most recent of the great Islamic empires. Refugees from Byzantium flowed into Italian cities like Venice and from there into other parts of Europe. They brought texts and learning from ancient Greece and Rome the were preserved in the East while temporarily lost to the West. Their intellectual contributions helped to spark the Renaissance.

Even more important in this regard were the contributions of Arabic scholars.²² An Islamic ‘golden age’ had flourished from the 8th Century to the 14th. Among its most important centers was Andalusia, in Spain, long more closely connected to countries around the Mediterranean than to Northern Europe. The Arab Empires traded widely, and presided over perhaps the most ‘globalized’ phase of history before the rise of the modern Western-dominated capitalist world-system. Shakespeare’s character Othello, for example, was a general in the Venetian Army that fought the Ottomans over Cyprus. He was also a ‘Moor’ – the name Christian Europeans gave to Muslims from the North African territories of the Andalusian Islamic Empires.

One of the earliest precursors to classical sociological theory was Ibn Khaldun, an Andalusian Muslim of Yemeni background who was born in Tunis and worked mostly as a diplomat in North Africa. His book, the Muqaddimah, offered a universal history of the world, with attention to the differentiation of cultures, physical environments, and politics within it.²³ It influenced not only other Arab thinkers and those of the Ottoman Empire but also Europeans from Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli to the German philosopher Georg Hegel.

The Ottoman empire was impressively cosmopolitan. When Christian rulers expelled Jews from Spain in 1492, most were absorbed into the Ottoman lands. This created the Sephardic diaspora, spread through Eastern Europe and the Middle East – by contrast to the Ashkenazim, who had been settled in Europe since the Middle Ages. Jewish Biblical thought, reflections on law, and understanding of the challenge of sustaining a minority culture all had a significant influence on classical sociological theory.

Parts of Southeastern Europe were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. Conflicts with Tsarist Russia were recurrent. But Ottoman advance to the West was blocked when Vienna withstood devastating siege in 1529 and 1683. This gave Europeans – including classical sociological theorists – an enduring sense of Europe’s civilizational frontier. The very idea of civilization was shaped by awareness of the world to the East of Europe.

The word ‘civilization’ is rooted in the Latin term for an organized community or way of life. It was used increasingly from the 17th and 18th centuries to denote a process of ‘developing’ to a higher state of culture. It mattered to the rise of classical sociological theory in two ways. First, Europeans had to acknowledge that there were other great civilizations besides their own. They looked manly to the East for examples, but also to the ancient world. Second, Europeans focused on the idea of development to look for a sequence through which all peoples might pass as they moved from less civilized to more. They looked to their own history but also to peoples throughout the world they regarded as less civilized, especially in Africa and the Americas.

Europeans liked to think of themselves as becoming more civilized. It was not just history; it was aspiration. Civilization was linked to the development of states, not least through the elite culture of courts and palaces. Norbert Elias explored this ‘civilizing process’ in Europe.²⁴ His work was shaped by Max Weber’s earlier studies of how political, legal, and cultural change entwined. Weber recognized that bureaucracy, which he analyzed as central to the consolidation of European nation-states, had actually originated in ancient empires (without the word, which he coined later). Weber put the history of religion at the center, and wrote studies of India (Hinduism and Buddhism) and China (Confucianism and Taoism). These informed his exploration of why capitalism emerged in Europe rather than, say, Japan – the non-Western society he thought the best candidate.

Focusing on civilization is broader than focusing on individual nation-states. Empires overlap civilizations more closely, and often connect their regions. But the idea is cultural and sociological more than political. Confucianism developed in China, for example, and the Chinese Empire is almost inconceivable without it. But Confucianism also became important throughout East Asia and in some places beyond. It guided not just politics but family life, ritual, ethics, and the pursuits of intellectuals.

Weber saw religion as central to civilizations, but religious traditions could mingle with each other and spread across civilizations. Western civilization was mainly Christian, but with multiple versions of Christianity and important influences from Judaism (not to mention pagan Greeks, Romans, and early Germans). Conversely, Western Christianity was distinct from Eastern, or Orthodox. Buddhism developed in India but influenced China and even more profoundly Japan as well as many societies in Southeast Asia.

This raised but didn’t settle the basic question of why the coexistence of religions in a common or at least overlapping civilizational context could become instead a bitter conflict. South Asia has offered a paradigmatic example. Its Hindu traditions are ancient, but also always plural. There was no single premodern Hindu orthodoxy – just as there was no single Indian language. Into this context came Muslim conquerors who established the Mughal empire. Despite arriving by conquest, they established an impressively tolerant, cosmopolitan empire. Though religiously Sunni, the Mughals were deeply influenced by Persia in matters of art and culture. They invited intellectuals, poets, and spiritual leaders of different backgrounds into their courts.

The Mughals ruled over most of South Asia, including what are now India and Pakistan, from the 16th Century until replaced by the British Empire in the 19th. Indeed, they were the last foreigners to successfully subjugate Afghanistan, over which they fought with Persia, and which went on to be a challenge for the British, Russians, and US. Mughal India was a remarkable center of learning and cosmopolitan culture. A common South Asian civilization incorporated Islam as well as Hinduism and other religions, though in the 20th century movements of Muslims and Hindus sought to purify each from the influence of the other.

Compared to the Arab world, Persia produced both a different version of Islam and a distinctive civilization. This is partly because of a long prior history in which Zoroastrianism was its leading religion. There had been powerful empires in what is now Iran since ancient times. Indeed, Herodotus is considered the founder of history for chronicling the Persia’s recurrent wars with Greeks in the 5th Century BC. In popular culture, these are probably remembered most for the story of a runner seeking Spartan reinforcements for Athenians at the battle of Marathon. But an enduring sociological significance was to identify Persians with tyranny. Not only was the Persian Empire ruled by powerful figures like Darius the Great and Xerxes. The Persians appointed tyrants – using that word – to rule conquered Greek city-states.

In the 18th century, a great classical sociological theorist, Charles de Secondat, better known as Montesquieu, wrote a highly influential book called Persian Letters. This used the device of two imaginary travelers to hold up a mirror to European civilization. More generally, learning about differences (real or imagined) from other civilizations was a way for Europeans to learn about their own – and debate their aspirations for how they wanted it to develop. In his major work, The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu sought to understand the differences among countries not just by their specific legal or political systems but by the ‘spirit’ which lay behind them. Behind monarchy he saw love of honor, behind democratic republics he saw virtue. But behind despotism, he saw fear.²⁵ More generally, Persia, Islam and the East came to symbolize the despotic or tyrannical rule many Europeans wanted to avoid by developing republics, democracies, and constitutional monarchies.

Karl Marx saw ‘oriental despotism’ as the product of a distinctive ‘Asiatic mode of production’. China, Marx argued, had developed a massively powerful state that enabled it to solve certain problems. State capacity was needed, for example, to build dams and dredge the Yellow River, controlling floods and providing effective transportation. On the basis of such projects, along with technological innovation and the disciplined work of a huge population, China became the most advanced economy in the world at the time when Western capitalism was gathering steam. But eventually the dominance of the state blocked innovation.

China, like Russia before it, underwent revolution that eventually brought Communist parties to power. But classical sociological theorists analyzed both revolutions as driven by social factors beyond ideology. Exploitation of peasants had increased with growing cities and urban elites demanding bigger shares of what was produced. Middle classes grew but were frustrated by intransigent old states that failed to create opportunities for them by modernizing. And, of course, wars destabilized old regimes. Perhaps things could have turned out otherwise, but in these cases, weak social institutions allowed new autocrats to replace the old. Modernization came in some areas, but without political liberation or strong civil society.

Colonialism, Race, and Modernization: Ironically, the same Europeans who were proud of developing legitimate rule at home used force and conquest to establish colonies abroad. This produced an extreme version of the disembedding and disruption Karl Polanyi analyzed as part of the ‘great transformation’ in Europe itself. Colonial rule was often despotic.

Europeans set out on voyages of exploration with agendas of curiosity, scientific exploration, religious conversion, and opening up trade routes. They were astonished at the variety of human life they found, as well as animals and ecology. Explorations did transform science, notably biology as well as sociology which were entwined in the emergence of evolutionary theory. And missionaries did spread Christianity around the world (though often as an adjunct to power not a peaceful alternative). But agendas of economic gain and state power quickly came to dominate.

Spain and Portugal took the lead, extracting silver and good from brutally administered mines in Latin America. Britain followed, conquering India and establishing lucrative trade in both directions (as distinct from extraction alone). India and neighboring countries like Burma (Myanmar) were also integrated into British trade with China. British, Indian, and US merchants made fortunes selling Opium grown in South Asia to Chinese merchants in exchange for silver, and when the Chinese government tried to crack down on addiction and the trade that fueled it, Britain responded with military force. The US was an ally in Britain’s Opium War.

European colonizers soon came into conflict with each other. France and Britain fought each other in North America (and US expansion, which was itself in many ways colonial, came into conflict with Spanish colonies). Piracy was an attempt to seize a share of the gold Spain and Portugal tried to carry to Europe from Latin America, and was backed by European countries. There were also major naval battles. A 19th Century ‘race for Africa’ helped pave the path to WWI as different European powers clashed while trying to grab shares of Africa for themselves.

While European empires fought each other, they also established a new global economy with devastating social implications. In some parts of the world, inhabitants were displaced or murdered to make room for settlers. This was the history forged in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Americas. In other parts of the world, like both India and Egypt, Europeans ruled over conquered states and civilizations, establishing trade relations to European benefit.

But colonialism never meant just trade or just political power, it was also a transformation in what Marx called ‘relations of production’. Extracting mineral wealth called for mines, and working these was commonly deadly. Plantation agriculture was also brutal, but it flourished to supply markets with sugar, cotton, tea, and eventually rubber. The slave trade grew to support this new economy. Slaves were extracted from Africa as gold was extracted from South America. They were sold into work in the mines. They were sold to work on the plantations. An expanding shipping industry linked these different sites.

Settlement, mineral extraction, plantations, slavery, and indeed shipping all shaped distinctive kinds of societies. So did colonial domination – which affected both the dominated and the dominators. The impacts lasted past struggles for independence, creating distinctive postcolonial social formations.

Impacts started with death and human destruction. They included both blocked paths of economic growth, in some cases, and in others channeling of growth into modes of production that unequally benefitted colonial countries. They included arbitrary national borders, drawn for colonizers convenience and often at odds with the organization of indigenous society in Africa. They also included opportunities for some to work in imperial administration, and not only in their home countries. There opportunities in the colonial militaries and in business. The British Empire launched the global South Asian diaspora – that for example saw Mahatma Gandhi make his early career in South Africa, after education in London, and before eventual return to transformative leadership in India. Talented youth from French as well as British colonies had the chance for elite education in the colonial center. This shaped their movements for independence, which were often indebted to European socialism and labor politics – and indeed to Marx and related strands of classical sociological theory.

But in the experience of colonial elites, as of Black Americans, there was pervasive ‘double consciousness’ (to use Du Bois’ phrase). They were at once part of the educated class and sometimes the power structure, and part of the dominated population of the colonies. They were privileged in some ways, yet stigmatized by race. For race – what Du Bois called “the color line” – ran through every aspect of European colonization. It also brought the impact of colonialism into the heart of rich societies that understood themselves as white. After all, without Black, or Brown, or Yellow, or Red what reason was there for the category of white? Europeans fought with each other, but they colonized and enslaved almost exclusively “people of color”.

Ending colonialism was the first order of business for subjugated peoples. It was accomplished only by struggle. In the largest single colony, India, the anti-colonial movement was impressively and famously non-violent. This may be one reason that, though they had been recurrently violent throughout their history in India, British colonizers managed a relatively peaceful exit. They did share in responsibility for the horrors of the Partition that followed, dividing majority Hindu India from the new Muslim state of Pakistan. Elsewhere – in the Belgian Congo, in French Algeria – colonial resistance to independence movements was recurrently, sometimes horribly violent.

There were efforts to forge solidarity among those oppressed in different parts of the world by different colonial powers. The Pan-African Movement (in which Du Bois was active late in his life) sought African unity rather than conflict among the countries into which Europeans had separated Africans. International communism found adherents in the colonies, especially those with industrialized working classes. The most wide-reaching such alliance was the Non-Aligned Movement formed at a great Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. Participants refused to take sides in the Cold War, insisting that their peoples needed decolonization, economic development, and peace – not a conflict between capitalism and communism. Unity was hard to achieve, however, not least because of religious and nationalist divides. The US and Europe (First World) and the USSR (second World of Communism) both worked actively to recruit allies and keep the Third World divided.

The two sides offered support for different projects of development. The West proposed that countries in the Third World follow European and American leadership in combining democracy and capitalism. The USSR proposed that Third World countries choose socialism. Both sides followed classical sociological theory in describing the different paths they advocated as ‘modernization’.

Modernization was understood largely in functionalist terms. Following Parsons, this meant combining economic growth with harmonious social integration. The coordinating role of the state should be balanced with individual freedom and psychological autonomy. Within this broadly modernizing frame, socialism meant more state planning, capitalism meant private property rights. The West advocated democracy as a matter of free elections and free press. The Communist East ridiculed this ‘bourgeois’ approach as overly individualistic and ineffective in providing real democracy to the poor or racially subjugated. The USSR said it was building institutions that brought workers more effective voice in management. To oversimplify a complex history, the West ‘won’ the Cold War because business institutions delivered prosperity better than the managerial institutions created by actually existing socialism – even if neither delivered fairness. Whether it could have been otherwise – could the Soviet Union have been better run, less distorted by Stalin’s political paranoia and violence – remains a question.

Marxist and other critics of ‘modernization theory’ questioned two core claims. First, they argued that the functionalists ignored the extent to which already ‘developed’ countries blocked the path of those less well off. The idea of ‘development’ implied that there was a completely ‘internal’ explanation of what enabled a country to advance. Did it have enough entrepreneurs, good enough schools, the right mix of freedom and social order? But, critics suggested, if there were already big corporations and lots of exports from the rich countries then the less ‘developed’ faced a much harder path. And this was true even if the rich were not actively destabilizing or undermining the less developed – for example, in order to buy their oil at good prices. As the Brazilian sociologist (and later President) Fernando Henrique Cardoso put it, most countries could enjoy only ‘dependent development’ dominated by one or more rich countries and their corporations.²⁶

Second, critics said the modernization theorists suppressed the extent of conflict and contradiction in Western history. Functionalist theory did not pay enough attention to race, for example, and downplayed class inequality. Extraordinarily deadly world wars should have been seen as a problem within the idea of modernization, not just a threat from without. Likewise, the Holocaust should be seen as modernity gone awry, not some sort of carryover of the premodern. For example, Polanyi powerfully analyzed it as one – problematic – response to the same great transformation that also brought labor politics and the welfare state. Modernization theory, he suggested, needed to own the problems and failures of liberalism as well as its appeal.

Oddly, fascism was sometimes described as essentially Eastern, relieving the West of responsibility. Germany was described as marginal to the West. This came not just from French or English thinkers, but from Germans seeking their own claim to distinctive civilization. They looked both to ancient German tribes and to the East, as in the idea of Aryan racial connections to India.

During the Cold War, the idea of the East shaped by historical empires was adjusted to fit the new contrast of democratic, capitalist countries to communism. This tended to overshadow an important distinction. Hannah Arendt distinguished the kinds of authoritarianism which had existed throughout history from modern totalitarianism.²⁷ Exemplified by Fascism and the Communisms of both Stalin and Mao, this involved attempts to remake society in fundamental ways, not simply a harsh or unfree form of rule. The Cold War saw intense fears of military confrontation between East and West. However, the only actual wars were between smaller countries supported by the US, Russia, or China – like North and South Korea. It remains the case that the deadliest wars the world has ever known have not been between civilizations, or empires, or the West and Communists in the East, but between mainly European nation-states.