Two strangers join a club on the same day. One is a founder's nephew with a spare room and a good surname; the other is a new hire with a skill the club needs and no connections. Within a year the club has a rule book, two cliques, a treasurer nobody trusts and a leader whom some members would follow anywhere. Nobody planned any of it.
Social theory begins with the feeling that such patterns are real, that they push on individuals who did not choose them, and that they can be explained. The founders of the discipline disagreed about almost everything else: what holds a group together, whether conflict is the engine or the disease, whether to explain people from the outside or the inside. They did not all come from Paris and Berlin, and the canon that leaves out Ibn Khaldun, Harriet Martineau and W. E. B. Du Bois is one that sociologists themselves now call incomplete. This piece takes them in their own terms and then lets their critics answer.
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was born in Tunis and worked as a judge, diplomat and adviser across North Africa, Andalusia and Egypt, in a world of rising and falling dynasties. In 1377, in a remote fortress in what is now Algeria, he finished the Muqaddimah, the introduction to a world history, and argued that history needed a new science: the study of umran, human social organisation, with its own regularities that explain events better than the character of kings.
His central concept is asabiyyah, group feeling or solidarity: the bond that makes people defend and follow one another without being paid. He saw it strongest in groups living hard lives together, such as desert and mountain peoples, who can conquer a rich, settled city. But rule brings comfort, taxes and delegation. The conquerors' grandchildren grow used to luxury and hire others to fight, solidarity thins, and a new hardy group takes over. As usually summarised, he held that a dynasty rarely lasts beyond three generations of about forty years, around 120 years.
A toy model: each generation (about 40 years) keeps a fixed share of the last one's group feeling, and the dynasty falls in the first generation where it drops below the challenger's. These are invented numbers for the idea, not Ibn Khaldun's own equations.
Without JavaScript: with group feeling 90, losing 30% per generation, against a challenger at 60, the dynasty runs 90, 63, then 44 and falls in the third generation, about 120 years in.
Ibn Khaldun also wrote about taxes (rates that are too high shrink the tax base), the division of labour and why cities concentrate skills. The critics' main points: his cycle fits the Maghrib he knew better than centralised bureaucratic states such as the Ottoman or Chinese empires; "dynasty in three generations" is a pattern and not a law; and calling him the "first sociologist" can say more about European habits of naming founders than about his work. Many historians prefer to read him as a thinker in the Islamic tradition of history and jurisprudence who asked a sociological question six centuries before the word existed.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) saw that what a society produces, and who controls the means of producing it, shapes its laws, its beliefs and its conflicts. This is the "materialist" part: ideas matter, but they grow in conditions. In Capital (vol. 1, 1867) he asked where profit comes from if goods trade at their value. His answer is that a worker sells her labour power, and a day's work produces more value than her wage replaces. The unpaid part is surplus value; the ratio of surplus to paid labour he called the rate of surplus value (Capital vol. 1, chapters 9–10). The employer's drive to lengthen or intensify the working day is, in this account, built into the system, not a matter of bad character. Class and the three-way contrast with Weber and Bourdieu are in Class, Status and Power (30/02); here is the arithmetic.
Marx's accounting with invented numbers, to show the idea. Whether value is created by labour at all is disputed (see below), so treat this as a statement of his claim, not a measurement.
Without JavaScript: in a 10-hour day where 4 hours produce the worth of the wage, 6 hours are surplus, the rate of surplus value is 150%, and 60% of the day is unpaid in Marx's terms.
Marx's critics are many and from every direction. The marginalist economists, led by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in the 1890s, rejected the labour theory of value and the logic of the "transformation" from values to prices. Predictions of a steadily shrinking middle and a revolution in the most industrialised countries did not happen, and revolutions came in largely agrarian ones. In the twentieth century, states ruling in his name raised hard questions about how far his ideas answer for them, which his defenders and opponents argue about to this day. Others say he treated colonies as footnotes; recent scholars, such as Kevin Anderson, point to his later writing on India, Ireland and Russia as a more complex view. What survived in sociology is the habit of asking who owns, who decides and whose interests an arrangement serves.
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) wanted sociology to be a science with its own subject matter: social facts, ways of acting and thinking that exist outside any one individual and press on them, like a language, a legal code or a custom of mourning (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895). In The Division of Labour in Society (1893) he argued that small, similar communities hold together by resemblance (mechanical solidarity) and complex ones by interdependence (organic solidarity), as in a body whose organs differ. His test case was Suicide (1897). Using official statistics from European countries, he showed that the rate of suicide was steady within a society and differed between groups: for example, it was higher in Protestant than in Catholic populations. He argued that this is a social fact and needs a social explanation.
He proposed two dimensions: how strongly people are tied to a group (integration) and how firmly norms guide their wants (regulation). Too little integration gives egoistic suicide; too much gives altruistic; too little regulation, as in sudden boom or bust, gives anomic; too much gives fatalistic. The tool below is a map of the four, a concept diagram and not a risk calculator. It describes societies and groups, not any person.
A teaching diagram. Durkheim's hypothesis is that social pressure toward each type is lowest in the middle of both dials; the scores here are the distance past the midpoint, scaled 0–100, with no data behind them. If you or someone you know is struggling, findahelpline.com lists services by country.
Without JavaScript: low integration points to egoistic pressure, very high to altruistic; low regulation to anomic, very high to fatalistic; the middle of each dial is the least pressured.
The critique is long and instructive. Maurice Halbwachs (1930) reworked the statistics and found the picture more complicated. Jack Douglas (1967) argued that official suicide figures record how coroners, families and churches label deaths, so differences between groups may reflect differences in labelling. And Durkheim compared whole populations, then reasoned about individuals; the later name for that slip is the ecological fallacy (see Sociological Research Methods, 35/76). He also wrote of "primitive" societies from secondhand reports that anthropologists would not accept today. What lasts is the claim that rates, not just cases, deserve explaining, and that belonging and rules both matter.
Max Weber (1864–1920) answered Marx differently: material interests matter, but so do ideas, and sociology must understand (Verstehen) what actions mean to the people doing them. His tool was the ideal type, a deliberately pure, exaggerated model (the bureaucrat, the prophet) that helps you see how real cases depart from it. In Politics as a Vocation, a lecture in Munich in January 1919, he defined the state as the body that successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate physical force within a territory. And he asked why people obey. His three pure types of legitimate authority are traditional (it has always been so), charismatic (devotion to an exceptional person) and legal-rational (rules, offices and procedures that bind even the holder).
Without JavaScript: a headman's son inheriting by custom is traditional; a preacher followed for her extraordinary gifts is charismatic; an official obeyed because a written rule says her office may demand payment is legal-rational.
Weber's best-known book argument, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), said that an ascetic, work-as-calling outlook in certain Protestant traditions helped create the disciplined spirit modern capitalism needed. Modern bureaucracy, he feared, would then trap its members in an "iron cage" (Talcott Parsons's 1930 phrase for his image; a recent translation says "shell as hard as steel"). The thesis has been contested ever since. Historians such as R. H. Tawney said capitalism was already growing in Catholic cities; in 2009 Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann argued that in nineteenth-century Prussia, Protestant regions' advantage came through literacy and schooling, which Protestant reformers promoted, rather than through an ethic of work. Weber's studies of China and India are also criticised for treating them as the West's opposite. What stays is the idea that authority is a belief people hold, and that the same office can rest on very different foundations.
Georg Simmel (1858–1918) asked a different question: not what society is made of, but what forms social life takes, whatever the content: competition, exchange, secrecy, conflict, the stranger. His essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) argued that city dwellers cope with the flood of stimuli with reserve and calculation. He is best known to students for the effect of number. A pair (a dyad) is fragile: if one leaves, the group is gone, and each member holds a veto over its life. Add a third person and everything changes: the group can survive a loss, a mediator can calm a quarrel, two can ally against one, and a third can profit from a conflict between the others.
Counts are arithmetic: pairs n(n−1)/2, three-person subgroups n(n−1)(n−2)/6, all possible subgroups of two or more 2n−n−1. Lines are drawn up to 12 people.
Without JavaScript: 2 people have 1 relationship; 3 have 3 pairs and 1 three-person subgroup; 10 have 45 pairs and 120 triads; 30 have 435 pairs.
His second idea is the intersection of social circles: modern individuals belong to many groups (a family, an occupation, a faith, a club), and what makes each person distinct is the particular combination. The critics: his essays are brilliant and unsystematic, with few data; Durkheim and Weber built schools, and Simmel, who was long kept off a full professorship in Germany, built readers. His influence went through the Chicago School of urban sociology in the United States, and into network analysis, which counts and maps exactly those ties.
Martineau first. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876), from Norwich in England, was a journalist and novelist who lost most of her hearing in youth and wrote her way to financial independence. In 1834–36 she travelled through the United States and published Society in America (1837) and, a year later, How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), a guide to studying a society you do not belong to. In 1853 she translated and condensed Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy (Comte, who coined the word "sociology", approved her version), and it made his work readable in English.
Her method, in plain terms: look at institutions and everyday life, not only at laws and leaders; talk to people of every rank; and judge a society against the principles it claims for itself. Applied to America, it turned the nation's creed of equality into a ruler, and measured slavery and the legal position of women against it. The tests are still taught as good practice: compare what people profess with what they do; do not trust only your hosts; know your own prejudices.
The critics say she often relied on the people she was introduced to and on a moral sense she took for granted, and that her stage-by-stage view of civilisation, common in her century, ranked other societies in ways sociologists now reject. For a century the discipline mostly forgot her; since the late twentieth century, sociologists have returned her to the founders' list.
Then Du Bois. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the first Black American to earn a Harvard doctorate, and the author of what is often called the first sociological case study of a Black community in the United States. Commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, he and his assistant Isabel Eaton spent about sixteen months, from August 1896 to December 1897, going door to door in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward, and they conducted more than 5,000 interviews. The Philadelphia Negro (1899) set out employment, housing, crime, education and social class in the ward, and argued that the conditions it found came from discrimination and history, not from any inborn difference. He then ran the Atlanta University studies from the late 1890s and made data graphics for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The sociologist Aldon Morris, in The Scholar Denied (2015), argues that Du Bois and his Atlanta colleagues founded a rigorous scientific sociology which the white-led discipline sidelined.
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he named a lived experience, double consciousness: "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." He also wrote that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." Theory and measurement went together: the same man who wanted to count the line wanted to describe how it felt to cross it. His critics, including later Du Bois himself, pointed to the elitism of the "Talented Tenth" idea of 1903, which put hope in an educated few. Scholars debate what "double consciousness" fully means and how far it travels beyond the American case; later thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon, drew on related ideas in a colonial setting.
| Thinker | Core question | Carries the name | The usual objection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ibn Khaldun | Why do dynasties rise and fall? | Asabiyyah | Fits the Maghrib better than other states |
| Martineau | Does a society live by its own principles? | Observe morals and manners | Relied on hosts and a stage view of progress |
| Marx | Who owns, and who works for whom? | Surplus value | Labour theory of value; failed predictions |
| Durkheim | What binds individuals into a society? | Social fact, anomie | Ecological fallacy; official statistics |
| Weber | Why do people obey, and what do actions mean? | Ideal type, three authorities | The Protestant ethic thesis is contested |
| Simmel | What forms does social life take? | Dyad and triad | Brilliant but unsystematic |
| Du Bois | What is the colour line, measured and lived? | Double consciousness | The Talented Tenth; scope of the concept |
One thing to notice: most of the entries are about how people are classed (by property, by status, by group size, by race) and about whether the classing is natural or made. Later courses, Stratification & Inequality (35/78) and Race, Ethnicity & Migration (35/79), are that question pursued with data.
Classical social theory is a set of lenses, not a set of answers. Ibn Khaldun saw solidarity rise and fade, Martineau tested a nation against its own creed, Marx followed ownership, Durkheim followed belonging, Weber followed meaning and obedience, Simmel followed the shape of the group, and Du Bois measured the colour line and described how it feels. Each lens shows something the others miss, and each has a critic worth reading.
Try this: pick a group you belong to (a team, a family, a club) and describe it in one sentence each through Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Note which sentence was the hardest to write; that is the lens you use least.
Sources. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377), trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, 1958); the "three generations of about forty years" summary as given in the standard reference literature (Wikipedia, "Asabiyyah"); the model on this page is invented. Martineau, Society in America (1837), How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1853). Marx, Capital vol. 1 (1867), chapters 9–10; Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System (1896); Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins (2010). Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897); Halbwachs, Les causes du suicide (1930); Douglas, The Social Meanings of Suicide (1967). Weber, Politics as a Vocation (lecture of 28 January 1919), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), Economy and Society (1922); Becker and Woessmann, "Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History," Quarterly Journal of Economics 2009. Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) and Sociology (1908). Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899: about sixteen months of fieldwork from August 1896 to December 1897 and more than 5,000 interviews, as stated on Wikipedia, "The Philadelphia Negro"), The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Morris 2015. The counts and the toy models on this page were run in node. This piece describes schools of thought and is not advice; the suicide discussion is about statistics on societies, and findahelpline.com lists support by country.