DISEÑO Y CÁLCULO DEL ANILLO 5

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was born in the French city of Montpel-lier. Comte, described as “small, delicate, and subject to many illnesses” (Coser 1977, 18) was an excellent student and exhibited an early proficiency in mathe-matics. He even planned to teach mathematics, but found that the income was unsatisfactory (Marvin 1965, 35).

Comte was considered a leader among his classmates. However, his usual behavior was “insubordinate and insolent behavior toward the school au-thorities,” and he was constantly revolting against authority (Coser 1977, 15).

Comte was also involved in revolutionary activities while a student, which ulti-mately resulted in his dismissal, and he never completed a university degree. He did, however, lecture for a period at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, eventually losing that position after criticizing the institution.

Comte’s intellectual life can be divided into three periods (Marvin 1965, 43–46). The first period encompassed six years he spent with the much older Claude Henri de Rouvroy Comte de Saint-Simon. Starting as Saint-Simon’s sec-retary and later his collaborator, Comte worked with Saint-Simon even during periods when the elder mentor could not pay him. Their collaboration ended in 1824 due to a quarrel over whose name would appear on a major publication and developing intellectual differences. The rift between the two men was never re-paired (Coser 1977, 15).

It was during the second period that Comte produced most of his intel-lectual writings. It is also the period during which he became known for devel-oping the scientific view of positivism. He thought sociology could draw on the same resources as the natural sciences, namely observation, experimentation, and comparison (Coser 1977, 5).

In the third period of Comte’s intellectual life, he did not add to his sci-entific material. Rather, he became head of a new religious organization, which he foresaw as someday being led by sociologist-priests. He also practiced “cere-bral hygiene,” which “consisted in abstention from the reading of current litera-ture, especially of periodicals, and the exclusive study of a few masterpieces of the past” (Marvin 1965, 45). The result was that he became increasingly out of touch with scientific and intellectual developments.

In 1826, in the midst of a lecture series, Comte suffered from a mental breakdown. He spent time in an asylum and was then treated at home. He

con-tinued to suffer from mental problems throughout his life. Comte died in 1857.

He was 60 years old.

Anthony Giddens

Anthony Giddens (1938–), director of the London School of Economics from 1997–2003, names globalization and information technology as two of the key issues facing sociologists at the turn of the twenty-first century. He adds that a lessening of tradition in our everyday lives is a third important and conse-quential change that should interest sociologists (Giddens, “An Interview”).

Giddens’s early publications were largely based on his reinterpretation of “classical” European sociologists (Clark 1990, 21; Poggi 1990). He credits Max Weber, one of sociology’s “founding fathers,” who is profiled in chapter 2, with having the most “pervasive and enduring” impact on the nature of sociol-ogy today (Giddens, “An Interview”). When asked why he thinks people should study sociology, Giddens says, “Sociology is a genuinely enlightening subject.

Most people who study sociology are changed by the experience. The reason is that sociology offers a different perspective on the world from that which most people have when they start out in the subject. Sociology helps us look beyond the immediate contexts of our lives and so helps us understand the causes of our own actions better. Sociology also can help us change the world for the better”

(“An Interview”).

Giddens’s own theoretical work is largely a theory of “structuration.” It aims to “provide a conceptual framework for analyzing how human beings make their own history, how society is produced, reproduced and changed (or, in his own shorthand, how it is ‘constituted’)” (Clark 1990, 23). A prolific writer, Gid-dens has authored more than 30 books and over 200 articles and reviews. His books have been translated into 30 languages. Giddens himself is the subject of a dozen more books and recipient of 15 honorary degrees and awards. As 1999 BBC Reith Lecturer, his lectures were published as Runaway World: How Glob-alization Is Reshaping Our Lives (2000).

Abu Zaid Abdal Rahman Ibn Khaldun

Abu Zaid Abdal Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was a historian, philosopher, and founder of Arab social science. Born in Tunis, North Africa, Ibn Khaldun worked for a variety of North African princes as an emissary and in administrative positions. He was active in politics during a period of intense rivalries among the leaders in the Arab world, and even spent time in prison for his activities. Ibn Khaldun lived the last years of his life in Egypt as a scholar, teacher, and magistrate.

He wrote a lengthy history of world that laid groundwork for sociology.

In seven volumes, he covered the history of Arabs and Berbers, the nature of civ-ilization, and the meaning of historical events (Baali 1988). He advocated

em-pirical research and has been called an excellent deductive sociologist who was

“more positivistic than Durkheim” (Gellner 1975, 203).

After the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, interest in Ibn Khaldun’s work and his analysis of civilizations was revived (e.g., Ahmed 2002). Today, the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development (ICDS), an in-dependent applied-social-science research institution in Egypt that applies so-cial science perspectives to serve Egypt and Arab development, bears his name.

Harriet Martineau

British-born Harriet Martineau (1802–76) is sometimes called the

“Mother of Sociology” and the first female sociologist. She is perhaps most re-membered for translating Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy (1896, orig.

1838) into English. However, Martineau was an important sociologist in her own right. She sought “to create a science of society that would be systematic, grounded in empirical observation, and accessible to a general readership, en-abling people to make personal and political decisions guided by a scientific un-derstanding of the principles governing social life” (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1998, 31). William Graham Sumner, profiled in chapter 3, took on some of her ideas about rights (Healy 1972, 65).

Because her parents were Unitarians, Martineau received more edu-cation than most females of her day. She spent much of her time with books and writing after losing most of her hearing at age 12 (Pichanick 1980). Martineau was never, however, allowed to pursue a university education.

Always a prolific writer, Martineau began to sell her writing to help sup-port her family after her father’s death in 1826. She authored hundreds of books, articles, and editorials on topics including literature, children’s literature, poli-tics, history, religion, economics, and sociology. In 1830 alone, she wrote 52 ar-ticles for a Unitarian journal, one novel, a book-length manuscript on religious history, and three essays for writing contests. Martineau’s 25-volume series on economics (written in 24 months) outsold numerous other popular authors of the time, including John Stuart Mill and even Charles Dickens (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1998, 26).

Martineau saw her writing talent as a way she could educate the public on social issues. She spent two years in America (1834–36). Society in America (1836), How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) were all results of that trip. In Society in America, she tackled a sociological analysis of the issues of slavery abolition, race, and women’s rights.

How to Observe Morals and Manners discussed the methods of fieldwork. Her other sociological works include Eastern Life: Past and Present (1848), a book about the social construction of religion she wrote after a trip to the Middle East, and Household Education (1849), a work on childhood socialization. Overall, her works laid the groundwork for both the interpretive and feminist paradigms of modern sociologists (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1998, 239).

C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills (1916–62) was a colorful, contentious, and influential figure in American sociology. He was a tall man (6´2˝), originally from Texas, de-scribed as speaking with a “thundering drawl” (Horowitz 1983, 4). Mills culti-vated a renegade image with his motorcycle and leather jacket. After riding to work, he would deposit “his paratroop boots on the podium before lecturing to his enthralled students” (Tilman 1984, 9). He reportedly bragged about his prowess with women, married three times, and fathered a child during each marriage.

As a student at the University of Texas–Austin, Mills excelled in soci-ology and other subjects he liked with professors he respected. His work in other areas was only average. Yet several of his professors recognized his abilities even as an undergraduate and his talent for presenting interesting lectures (Horowitz 1983, 19–21; Tilman 1984, 6–7). Always one to do things his own way rather than bow to conformity, Mills received both a baccalaureate and master’s degree from the University of Texas on the same date in 1939 (Horowitz 1983, 19). He went to the University of Wisconsin to obtain his doctorate.

By most accounts, Mills was a controversial figure, and not particularly well liked in academic circles. His career was marked with estrangement, fric-tion, and acerbic relationships with many other academics. Even his oral disser-tation defense proved contentious. As Horowitz reports in his biography of Mills, “Mills was unwilling to make the small changes asked of him and in turn had a dissertation committee unwilling to acknowledge his achievements. The defense became a standoff, and the dissertation was quietly accepted without ever being formally approved” (1983, 53).

Mills took a position at the University of Maryland and later moved to Columbia University, where he stayed until his death. He gained public notori-ety at Columbia as a social critic. Unlike many academics, he was an excellent writer who addressed his topics in straightforward and readable language. As El-well explains, Mills “writes about issues and problems that matter to people, not just to other sociologists, and he writes about them in a way to further our un-derstanding” (“Sociology of C. Wright Mills”).

Mills’s topics included white-collar jobs, bureaucracy, power and author-ity, the social elite, rationalization, social problems, communism, the cold war, ide-ology, the social sciences, and sociology itself. During his time at Columbia, Mills published some of his most important works, including The Power Elite (1956), addressing the organization of power in the United States; The Causes of World War III (1958), decrying the U.S.-Russian arms race; The Sociological Imagination (1959), addressing social science itself; and Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960), a comment on the Cuban Revolution and U.S.–Latin American relations.

He died in his sleep of a heart attack, his fourth, when he was only 45 years old.

Albion Small

Albion Woodbury Small (1854–1926) was born in Buckfield, Maine.

He received his bachelor’s degree from Colby College in 1876. Small then

con-tinued his studies at the Newton Theological Seminary, and in Europe at the Uni-versity of Berlin and the UniUni-versity of Leipzig. Upon his return to the United States, he took a position as professor of history and economics at Colby, later becoming president of the school.

Small was appointed professor of sociology at the University of Chicago in 1892. At that time, “the university was less than two years old and not yet open to students” (Bannister 1987, 37). Small’s appointment was the first pro-fessorship in sociology in the United States. His annual salary was $7,000. That was not an extraordinary amount for Chicago professors. It was, however, high for even the most well-known professors elsewhere.

For three decades, Small chaired Chicago’s sociology department and edited the prestigious American Journal of Sociology. He coauthored the first American textbook on sociology, Introduction to the Study of Sociology, in 1894 with his pupil George E. Vincent. Small served two terms as president of the American Sociological Society (the organization that would become today’s American Sociological Association) and was elected a member of the Interna-tional Institute of Sociology in 1913 (Bannister 1987, 33; Hayes 1927, 160).

“The characteristic thing about Small is that he was almost universally well-liked. As a scholar, he was creative and serious; as a teacher, devoted and helpful; for tedious administrative tasks, willing and industrious; as a colleague, friendly, warm, indulgent; as a person, ethical, spiritual” (Becker 1971, 3–4).

Another biographer portrayed Small and his sociological perspective by de-scribing Small as “a man of distinct personality. Of all his traits the most funda-mental is that he is earnest about life” (Hayes 1927, 184). Small was also interested in “moral” society and social reform. As his biographer continues,

“Sociology he regards as a study of life with a view to understanding it in order that its values may be realized by men. His interest is primarily ethical; that is, it is an interest in the values of human experience and the method of their reali-zation. He became and remained a sociologist because he believed that this re-alization of values could be promoted by understanding.”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) was born the daughter of Mississippi slaves. It is her parents that Wells-Barnett says gave her “the interest in politics, the clear sense of justice, and the confidence for independent thought which are hallmarks of her sociology” (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1998, 151).

She attended Rust College until her parents’ death from yellow fever in 1876 re-quired that she go to work to support her five younger siblings.

Wells-Barnett took a job teaching school in Memphis. She also worked as a journalist and became and part-owner of the Free Speech and Headlight of Memphis. She gained quite a bit of notoriety among the black community by re-fusing to move to the segregated section of a railroad car and a subsequent law-suit she brought against the railroad. Although her case was won in circuit court, it was lost on appeal.

Wells-Barnett worked nationally and internationally for a variety of civil rights causes. She was a founding member of the National Association for Ad-vancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a number of other organizations, including a neighborhood center and the first kindergarten in a black neighbor-hood. She was also a suffragist.

It was lynching, however, that became Wells-Barnett’s lifelong cause.

She wrote of her crusade against lynching, “I felt that one had better die fight-ing against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap” (1970, 62). In The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895), Wells-Barnett used newspaper statistics from the white press to systematically analyze lynching. Her antilynching campaign would result in the offices of the Free Speech being burned to the ground, more extensive writing opportunities, a public-speaking career, an opportunity to take her cause inter-nationally, and an eventual move to Chicago.

Wells-Barnett’s contributions to sociology include the creation of social theory viewed through race relations, her part in the long-overlooked social analyses by African Americans, a focus on justice and morality, and a focus on the intersection of race, class, and gender that has been central to modern femi-nist theory (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1998, 171–72). Among the numerous acknowledgments of her work across society, Wells-Barnett’s likeness was placed on a 1990 U.S. postage stamp.