Chapter 8: British Sociology

BRYAN S. TURNER

British sociology British sociology had its nineteenth-century origins in three streams of Victorian social thought. First, there was the liberalism of J. S. Mill, who made important contributions to the philosophy of the social sciences and to the analysis of democracy, in which he was much influenced by the study of American society by Alexis de Tocqueville. Second, the emergence of sociology was related to social reformism and town planning in such figures as Patrick Geddes and Charles Booth. Third, its major intellectual figure—Herbert Spencer—was part of a broader intellectual movement of social evolutionism associated with Charles Darwin. Spencer (1884) in The Man versus the State attempted to reconcile the liberalism of the British utilitarians with the evolutionary theories of Darwin. There were also early institutional developments at the London School of Economics (LSE) with the creation of the Martin White chair of sociology that went to the liberal The ...

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