Part IV Individual Action and Social Change
Since its inception, sociology has been considered a means to understand and improve what is wrong with the world. Early sociological thinking emerged from the late 18th and early 19th centuries during periods of dramatic social, economic, and political change, such as the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Enlightenment period. The first sociological thinkers, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, were preoccupied with these social changes and the problems they created for society. These thinkers spent their lives studying these problems and attempted to develop programs that would help solve them (Ritzer 2000).
Sociology provides us with the means to examine the social structure or “machinery” that runs our lives. In his book Invitation to Sociology, sociologist Peter Berger (1963) likens our human experience to that of puppets on a stage:
We located ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position as we hang from subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets . . . . Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step towards freedom. (p. 176)
Freedom comes first in identifying the social “machinery” that controls us and second in recognizing that the way society controls us is fundamentally different from the way strings control puppets. We have the power to transform or alter that machinery; we have the power to create social change and to address our social problems.