Four: In the City

It’s not an exaggeration to say that sociology is a science of the city. What I mean is that the changes caused by these mass movements of people, shifts in culture, sources of conflict animated early thinkers interested in where this was all going…The first person to really get an office at a university with the word “sociologist” on the door was Emile Durkheim (1858-1917). One of his most well-known studies was research on the social factors surrounding suicide, challenging many of the ideas about suicide in his own time (and our own). Like Comte, Durkheim was interested in where moral guidance and a sense of social connection would come from as urbanization and the trends around it became more pronounced.