Social Theories In The 19th And Early Twentieth Century

Harrington described social theories as analytical frameworks or models used to examine different social phenomena. The term ‘social theory’ includes ideas about ‘how societies change and develop, about methods of explaining social behaviour, about power and social structure, gender and ethnicity, modernity and ‘civilisation’, revolutions and utopias’ (Harrington 2005,) When looking at social theory today, certain central themes take precedence over others, themes such as the nature of social life, the relationship between self and society, the structure of social institutions, the role and possibility of social transformation, as well as themes such as gender, race and class (Elliot, 2008)

The social conditions that people lived in, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were of the greatest significance of the production of sociology, the different problems and social disorder that resulted from the series of political revolutions escorted in by the French Revolution in 1789 distressed many early social theorists, when they eventually came to the conclusion that it was impossible to return to the old order , they wanted to find new sources of order in societies that had been disturbed by the different dramatic political changes.

“The Industrial Revolution was a set of developments that transformed Western societies from largely

Marx embraced a materialist alignment that focused mainly on material units such as wealth and the state. Marx said that the problems of modern society could be traced to real material sources like the structures of capitalism. Yet he maintained Hegel's importance on the dialectic, counterfeiting a position called dialectical materialism that held that material processes, relationships, conflicts, and contradictions are responsible for social problems and social