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Modern Society Essay

1290 Words6 Pages

15410388. Aoife Molloy.

“Sociology emerged as an attempt to understand ‘modern society’. Discuss”.

In this essay I will discuss how modern society is attempted to be understood through the emergence of sociology. According to The Introduction to Sociology (2012:10), sociology is defined as the study of society and social interaction, and society is defined as a group of people who interact with each other, live in a definable area and share a culture. The Modernization Theory describes how modern society came about, according to the review ‘A critique of modernization and dependency theories in Africa: Critical assessment’ (2011:1) modernization is the huge transformation in which a traditional society must undergo in order to become a modern society. This essay will focus on the transition of society from pre modern society to modern society and how the subject of sociology was born in a bid to understand this new modern society.
Sociology came about as a discipline after the pre modern society had ended, in order to understand the new modern society the pre modern society must also be understood. As Fanning said in his book ‘Sociology in Ireland’ (2015:2) “to understand what came later, we must have an understanding of what was there before”. This quote shows that sociology began to develop in an endeavour to understand modern society. Before sociology could be used to help us to understand the modern …show more content…

Allen, K. (2004). Max Weber. London: Pluto Press.
Fanning, B. (2015). Sociology in Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Keirns, N., Strayer, E., Griffiths, H., Cody-Rydzewski, S., Scaramuzzo, G., Sadler, T. and Vyain, S. (n.d.). Introduction to sociology.
Tovey, H. and Share, P. (2000). A sociology of Ireland. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.
Darity, William A. International Encyclopaedia Of The Social Sciences. Detroit, Mich.: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008.

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