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In 1971 Lewis Coser wrote an unusual, and later highly successful, textbook Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. The book differed from the standard social science textbooks of its time. Instead of summarising the main concepts, ideas and theories of various thinkers, as other textbooks have done, Coser aimed to frame these intellectual developments within the wider social and historical context. While other books would usually provide only a few biographical and historical paragraphs, Coser’s work devoted almost as much attention to the history, social environment and biography as it did to the key sociological contributions of respective scholars. He justified this strategy in the following terms:

We have a great number of books that attempt to elucidate what Marx or Weber or Pareto really meant but only few and scattered efforts to use the tools of the sociologist to investigate the role of sociological theorists within the social structure in which they are variously placed. There has been no sustained attempt to show how social origins, social position, social network, or audience found a reflection in the problems that a theorist addressed himself to or in the overall orientation of his life’s work. (Coser, 1971: xiv)

This unusual approach proved popular with the audiences and many students found Coser’s textbook enlightening, informative and accessible. Most of all, this approach made it possible for students to contextualise the development of sociological thinking. Instead of de-contextualised abstract concepts and theories created by some distant experts, one encountered real human beings struggling to make a sense of their own world. By focusing on individual biographies and the wider social, political and historical contexts, Coser made the classics of sociology alive and relevant to one’s own times. Nevertheless, despite the textbook’s success as a teaching tool, Coser’s example was not followed by the majority of authors and publishers and they continued to produce social theory textbooks that lacked a historical, social and biographical grounding.

Classical Sociological Theory and the accompanying volume Con-temporary Sociological Theory follow firmly in Coser’s footsteps aiming to situate the rise and transformation of social thought within its historical, cultural, political and economic background. Moreover, we also aim to locate the development of specific ideas, concepts and theories within the unique biographical experiences of the respective theorists. Like Coser, we too aspire to understand social thought not as a system of fixed ideas and postulates but as a processual phenomenon deeply rooted in the social structures and vagaries of their own time and place. By zooming in on this ‘social ecology of sociological ideas’ (Coser, 1971: xiii) one can make sociological thinking relevant for understanding the social dynamics of the contemporary world. Furthermore, this analytical strategy allows us to see how novel ideas and approaches are created, disseminated and popularised.

As Collins (1998) showed in his monumental The Sociology of Philosophies, original and influential ideas do not just pop up in somebody’s head but are regularly a product of long-term social interaction. In other words, novel and sophisticated concepts and theories are usually created through dialogues, disputes, disagreements and conflicts within the established intellectual networks. It is no coincidence that all major philosophical traditions owe their existence to such active networks of thinkers who developed their new ideas not as solitary individuals but as energetic members of specific schools of thought. For example, the highly influential school of German idealist philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel and Jacobi) developed among individuals who all lived and moved in the same location (mostly Jena and Weimar), developed strong networks of personal connections (with some of them even living in the same street), studied and worked in the same universities and published with the same publishers (Collins, 1998). As we show in this book a similar principle applies to the major schools of social thought as many thinkers developed as a part of already established networks of intellectuals. A second perspective that influenced our approach is drawn from the sociology of knowledge, but deriving more so from Marx than Durkheim, finds its exemplary manifestation in the work of Karl Mannheim, and highlights the political and ideological character of much social thought. In our analyses we draw on both perspectives.

This ‘social ecology of sociological ideas’ helps us identify the profiles of the leading classical and contemporary thinkers. What comes across instantly is that the classical sociologists typically share a very narrow social background – they tend to be almost as a rule white, middle to upper class, heterosexual males who lived and worked in large and powerful Western European imperial states. They would also write and publish almost exclusively in three languages only – English, French or German. This in itself indicates that classical social thought was deeply shaped by the dominant social and political strata of its own time. This has been expressed in contemporary sociological cum political concerns to decolonise and highlight gender imbalances in the sociological curriculum and ‘canon’, though class determinations have strangely been ignored. They have, nevertheless, usefully highlighted the question of what constitutes a sociological canon or a classic. Issues which we can only superficially touch on here. At the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century when sociology became established as a fully fledged academic discipline its key thinkers largely represented the power dynamics of the social world they inhabited.

It is no big surprise that academia resembled other sectors of society where there was little or no place for women, ethnic and sexual minorities, working classes, farmers or individuals with disability. Even those who ticked the class, gender and whiteness boxes but were outside of the European centres of power, lived on the imperial and national peripheries, or did not belong to the main linguistic communities, were likely to be excluded or severely underrepresented. Hence there is no doubt that sociology was created by the narrow circle of relatively privileged intellectuals based in Germany, France and the UK. In this sense one could also argue that their sociological perspectives were significantly influenced by their own biographical, social, economic and political backgrounds. It is no accident that many classical sociologists were preoccupied with the issues that affected their own gender, social class, nation and other categories of identification. Since this was a deeply hierarchical, patriarchal, Eurocentric, imperialist, heterosexual and racist world, no classical sociologist could remain completely immune to these hegemonic views of their time and place. At the same time women, lower social classes, minorities of various kinds and the people outside the metropolitan centres and other groups largely had no voice in the articulation of sociology as a discipline. This is a hard and cold reality of sociology’s origin that one has to face when analysing the contributions of its classics. While in this book we identify some classical thinkers who did not belong to this narrow circle of white middle-class European heterosexual men (i.e. Confucius, Ibn Khaldun and Martineau)¹ and merit inclusion on the originality of their work, the key names that have shaped early sociological thought are inevitably dominated by the establishment.

In a world where most of the population were illiterate and where many groups had few if any rights it was almost impossible to succeed if one was not part of the dominant group. Hence any attempt to find the key pre-twentieth-century sociological thinkers outside the establishment is unlikely to succeed because an overwhelming majority of the world population had no access to the privilege of education, research and scholarship. In this context any attempt to project our contemporary parameters of social inclusion into the past and reframe some religious and communal leaders as early sociologists would really be counterproductive, resembling what Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) referred to as ‘the invention of tradition’. The fact that the overwhelming majority of key social thinkers come from the same narrow social background is a potent indicator of this particular group’s political, social and economic hegemony over the centuries.

Nevertheless, recognising that most early social theorists and sociologists represented the privileged strata should not take away from the quality of their contributions. On the contrary it is necessary to emphasise that many early sociologists have managed to overcome their narrow backgrounds and have produced theories and approaches that offer universalist explanations of the social world. It is precisely because they were able to see beyond their own class, gender, religion, nation or ethnicity that they could develop sophisticated explanatory models that have resonated with many sociologists for the past several centuries. It is their analytical concern with the universal issues that affect all human beings that made classical sociological thought possible and it is this universalism that makes these theories still relevant today. As Mouzelis (1995: 245–6) convincingly argues, the classics of sociology were not imposed on us by some kind of dictatorial decree but their work has been accepted and utilised on the basis of its ‘cognitive potency, analytical acuity, power of synthesis and imaginative reach and originality’.