What is the place of Marx, Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, Mead and Weber in the development of sociology?
Karl Marx was the first major proponent of the conflict perspective. He believed that inequality between classes causes conflict between groups of people and that society must change in order to fulfill the needs of all the people.Auguste Comte was the French scientist who gave sociology its name and promoted the scientific study of society. Herbert Spencer extended his work developing the idea that society was an organic whole that could be studied much like the human body- the beginnings of structural-functionalism.Emile Durkheim also promoted sociology as a science and strucutural -functionalism as a perspective with his emphasis on social facts explaining other social facts -for example in his classic study ,Suicide. George Herbert Mead focused on how we use symbols, including language and how our use of symbols influences our social dev elopement and social life.Max Weber’s analysis of the major dynamics of society and social change provides the foundations for much of the sociolo
