The family does not just play the role of primary socialization and moral education of children; it has historically also served as a source of stability, permitting a division of labor and shared resources. Is a family without children still a family? Of course. At least…I think so. Is the dog my wife and I love and care for a member of our family? I would say yes—do family members have to be humans? If dogs count, what about goldfish, or chickens? I mean to suggest that, regardless of theoretical approach, the definition of family is a bit more slippery than it first seems to be. For example, some would define a family as a group who share a common bond and live together. Divorced parents and their children (more on this in the next section) don’t live together; are they still a family? What about “commuter marriages” where a couple are married but live in different states? You’re still a family even if you live apart, right? Are you still a family if you live alone? Others would define “family” more broadly—are not, for example, your great-grandparents or your third cousins are still family, even if you have never met them, or they passed away before you were born, right? Go back far enough, and all human beings, and ultimately, all living things, are related to one another. If we are tempted to define family in terms of biology, then biologically speaking, every form of life on earth that lives or has ever lived, is a family member.

When we think of crime, we often distinguish between violent crime, in which people are subjected to or threatened with violence; and nonviolent crime, which does not involve subjecting people to, or threatening people with, violence. This is a legal distinction, not a sociological one. But violence itself is viewed as legitimate when carried out by the state. The state can be thought of as a monopoly on legitimate force, needing to have a military to protect its external borders and law enforcement to protect people from one another within. If a police officer uses force to restrain or arrest a resistant suspect, she is not engaging in deviance (though in the U.S. police are expected to both uphold and obey the laws of the land, and a police officer who uses force deemed excessive faces legal sanctions). Nor is a soldier fighting for her country, even if that violence is lethal, resulting in the deaths of other human beings, if those deaths are enemy combatants. A boxing match is not deviant, provided of course it takes place in a carefully controlled setting like a boxing ring and not a spur of the moment exchange of blows in a barroom (this would also be considered a crime). People are willing to accept violence, even a great deal of violence, provided they view it as legitimate; they will often tolerate little illegitimate violence, and so violent crimes are usually the most heavily policed and severely punished.

As I mentioned earlier, from about the 1950s up until the end of the twentieth century, social scientists distinguished between sex—something that was biologically “given”—and your gender—what you learned to do, how we learn to be men and women in the context of our respective societies. As we learned more about human beings, the assumption that sex is biologically given came into question. Some people are not born either male or female—a small proportion of babies are born intersex, meaning that biologically, they are born with a configuration of sex organs, hormones, or other markers which is not clearly either male or female. When a baby is anatomically intersex, historically they have been assigned to one or the other sex, and the infant’s body was made, through surgery, to conform to this identity. But with hormones, chromosomes, or other biological elements, many do not find out they are intersex until later in life and may live and die as their assigned sex without ever knowing. So yes, sex is rooted in biology. But it’s another case of average differences with a bit of overlap, a space of uncertainty across one or more biological aspects.

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.

Physics can teach you how to split an atom; deciding whether you want to build, or advocate for or against, nuclear power or nuclear weapons or both or neither involves application of that knowledge. Knowledge has value in and of itself because it gives you agency, the ability to more effectively influence what happens in your own life. Some of the findings of sociological research are grim; and might make you feel out of control. But the purpose of knowing is to figure out how to take that knowledge with you and use that knowledge in your own life. What you ultimately do with that knowledge isn’t up to me; it’s up to you.

The interaction is the basic unit—the atom—of sociology. Economists study the economy; chemists study chemicals; sociologists study interaction.

If I left society and became a hermit, living in the woods and detached from all other human contact, I would still be a product of society, because everything I take with me, knowledge-wise, came from someone or somewhere else. I probably didn’t learn it on my own; it was taught to me. Even the words I speak, and the thoughts I think in those words, are the product of the social environment in which I was raised, schooled, taught how to be a person. This is the fundamental lesson of sociology, I think: socialization. People learn how to be people from other people, through the process of interacting with them.

One of the challenges of sociology is how to see the human world from multiple perspectives at the same time. From above, from the window of an airplane in mid-descent, you can see the structures, both complex and orderly. As the plane gets ever closer to the ground, individual buildings and roads, and then individual houses and cars, sharpen into focus, and finally, near the ground, the people that have made them what they are, come into view. The view from the ground reveals the same social world seen through very different eyes. Disembark from the flight, enter the airport terminal, grab your luggage, and a new world opens up before you. The bustle of travelers, the rolling of wheeled luggage, and the harried conversation of families, friends, and airport staff…from the ground, the personal abounds, replacing the majestic order from above with the messy flux of everyday life.