Sociology and Society

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: The first chapter of NCERT's Introducing Sociology sets out what the GS1 society syllabus takes for granted: that an individual's situation is shaped by forces larger than the individual, that a society contains many societies and many inequalities, and that sociology differs from common sense because it follows rules of evidence others can check. It then explains where the discipline came from (the Enlightenment, industrial capitalism and the new cities of 18th and 19th century Europe) and why its growth in India was different: colonial rule ruined Indian crafts instead of industrialising the country, and Indian sociology never drew the hard line between sociology and social anthropology that Western universities did. The chapter is unchanged in the 2026-27 reprint (the text is word-for-word the 2021-22 one). This page teaches the whole chapter and adds, from NCERT's companion book Understanding Society, the core ideas of Marx, Durkheim and Weber and India's four founding sociologists, which later chapters and many GS1 answers rely on.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Individual effort matters, but it does not decide outcomes on its own. NCERT opens with four pieces of advice a student hears: study hard and you will do well; this subject gives you a better chance of a good job; "As a boy this does not seem a correct choice of subject" (or, to a girl, is your choice "a practical one?"); your family needs you to earn soon, or you will join the family business. The first puts the whole weight on the individual. The others bring in the job market, gender and family background. The job market is set by the needs of the economy, which are set in turn by government policy. So the student's choice, a personal worry, is also a public issue that affects students as a collective. Sociology studies society "as an interconnected whole", and one of its tasks is "to unravel the connection between a personal problem and a public issue".

Sociology is a science of society, not a moral philosophy and not common sense. Philosophers and religious teachers ask what a good society ought to be. Sociology is also concerned with norms and values, but with how they actually function in real societies, and the sociologist must be willing to record findings that are not to her or his liking. Unlike common sense, which explains behaviour by "natural" or individual causes and never asks "Why do I hold this view?", sociology is bound by rules of evidence that let others check or repeat its findings.

A discipline has a biography. Sociology's concerns were set by the changes that made modern Europe: new ideas about reason and science, and a new economy of factories, wage labour and industrial cities. Because India's past is tied to British capitalism and colonialism, those writings matter here too, but the same processes worked differently in a colony, and Indian sociology grew out of that difference.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

The Chapter's Six Themes (NCERT's own outline)

Common Sense and Sociology Compared

Founding Figures and Dates

Sociology and Its Neighbours

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

The Sociological Imagination: Personal Problem and Public Issue

NCERT quotes C. Wright Mills (1959) at length. "The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society." Its most fruitful distinction is "between 'the personal troubles of the milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure'". Troubles occur within the character of the individual and the range of his immediate relations with others. Issues transcend these local environments. Mills's examples show history running through individual lives: when a society is industrialised, a peasant becomes a worker; when classes rise or fall, a man is employed or unemployed; when wars happen, a wife lives alone and a child grows up without a father. "Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."

NCERT's activity applies this to homelessness. A photograph of a homeless couple shows a personal misfortune, but its causes (employment, rural-to-urban migration) are social, and the state itself treats homelessness as a public issue: the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin, operationalised from 2016 by the Ministry of Rural Development, gives financial and labour support to houseless families and those in dilapidated kutcha houses to build pucca ones.

Pluralities and Inequalities among Societies

Which society does an individual belong to? Among foreigners, "our society" may mean Indian society; among fellow Indians it may mean a linguistic or ethnic community, a religious group, a caste or a tribe. In the contemporary world we belong, in a sense, to more than one society, so the esteem a job carries depends on the culture of one's "relevant society". NCERT shows that the problem of mapping society is not confined to sociologists. The film-maker Satyajit Ray wondered whether to film the village with its grazing cows and the shepherd's flute, the epics, or the "monstrous, teeming, bewildering city". NCERT asks whether his village is romantic, and sets beside it a sociologist's account of a Dalit, Muli, sitting on the road in front of a village tea shop with his glass and saucer placed beside him, "a silent signal to the shopkeeper that an Untouchable wanted to buy some tea" (Freeman 1978).

Inequality, NCERT says, is central to differences among societies. It quotes Amartya Sen: some Indians are rich and most are not; some are well educated and others illiterate; some are politically powerful and others cannot influence anything; "Some are treated with respect by the police; others are treated like dirt. These are different kinds of inequality, and each of them requires serious attention" (Sen 2005).

What Makes Sociology Different: Philosophy, Religion and Science

People have always reflected on the societies they live in: philosophers, religious teachers and legislators of every civilisation, and everyone else in daily life. Sociology's observations differ from both philosophical reflection and common sense. Philosophical and religious thinkers ask what is moral or immoral and what a good society would be. Sociology also studies norms and values, "But its focus is not on norms and values as they ought to be... Its concern is with the way they function in actual societies." Empirical study is a large part of what sociologists do. This does not mean sociology is unconcerned with values; it means the sociologist observes and records findings "even if they are not to her/his personal liking".

Peter Berger's comparison makes the point. In a war it is useful to capture the enemy's intelligence reports, but only because good intelligence is free of bias; a spy who reports in terms of his superiors' ideology produces reports useless to both sides. "The sociologist is a spy in very much the same way. His/her job is to report as accurately as he/she can about a certain terrain" (Berger 1963). The sociologist still has a citizen's responsibility for how findings are used, like a biologist whose knowledge can heal or kill, but that is not a sociological question.

Sociology and Common Sense

Common-sense explanations are "naturalistic" and/or individualistic: they assume there are natural reasons for behaviour. NCERT's poverty example contrasts the two kinds of explanation (see the table in Part 1). Common sense is unreflective: it does not ask itself "Why do I hold this view?" The sociologist must ask of any belief, about ourselves or others, "is this really so?" Sociology has a body of concepts, methods and data, "no matter how loosely coordinated", which common sense cannot replace. Its advances are made incrementally and only rarely by a dramatic breakthrough; "meaningful and unsuspected connections can be reached only by sifting through masses of connections."

NCERT's box on unsuspected connections is a lesson in unintended consequences. In much of India descent and inheritance pass from father to son (a patrilineal system), and women tend not to get property rights. So after the Kargil War the Government of India decided that compensation for soldiers killed should go to their widows. It had not anticipated the result: many widows were forced to marry their husband's brother (dewar), sometimes a young child, so that the compensation stayed with the dead man's patrilineal family. A measure designed to protect women was turned by kinship norms into a means of controlling them. The same idea returns in chapter 3 (German unification and the decline of marriage).

The Intellectual Ideas That Went into the Making of Sociology

Influenced by scientific theories of natural evolution and by what travellers and colonial administrators reported of pre-modern societies, early sociologists and social anthropologists sorted societies into types and stages: hunters and gatherers, pastoral and agrarian, non-industrial civilisations, industrialised societies. These features reappear in the 19th century work of Auguste Comte, Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer. Such evolutionary thinking assumed the West was the most advanced and civilised and saw non-Western societies as barbaric and less developed, which is why the Indian colonial experience has to be seen in this light: Indian sociology reflects a tension that goes "far back to the history of British colonialism and the intellectual and ideological response to it" (Yogendra Singh 2004), and has been "particularly thoughtful and reflexive of its practice" (Maitrayee Chaudhuri 2003).

Darwin's ideas of organic evolution were a dominant influence. Society was compared to a living organism, a system of parts each with a function, and traced through stages like organic life. This view shaped the study of institutions such as the family and the school and of structures such as stratification (the functionalist view taken up in chapters 2 and 3).

The Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries, emphasised reason and individualism, and there was a growing conviction that the methods of the natural sciences could be extended to human affairs. Poverty, until then seen as a natural phenomenon, came to be seen as a social problem caused by human ignorance or exploitation, which could be studied and redressed. One way of studying it was the social survey, based on the belief that human phenomena can be classified and measured (chapter 5). Thinkers of the early modern era believed progress in knowledge would solve all social ills; Auguste Comte, considered the founder of sociology, believed sociology would contribute to the welfare of humanity.

The Material Issues That Went into the Making of Sociology

The Industrial Revolution rested on a new and dynamic form of economic activity, capitalism: entrepreneurs in the sustained, systematic pursuit of profit, markets as the key instrument of productive life, and goods, services and labour turned into commodities whose use was decided by rational calculation. England was its centre. Before industrialisation most of the British lived in villages, as peasants and landlords, blacksmiths, weavers and potters, in small, hierarchical societies of close interaction. Industrialisation changed each of these features:

• The degradation of labour: work was wrenched "from the protective contexts of guild, village, and family". Radical and conservative thinkers alike were appalled at the decline in the status of the labourer and the skilled craftsman. The factory and its mechanical division of labour seemed a deliberate attempt to destroy the peasant, the artisan, the family and the local community, "an archetype of an economic regimentation hitherto known only in barracks and prisons". For Karl Marx the factory was oppressive, yet potentially liberating, because there workers learnt collective functioning and concerted effort for better conditions.
• New industrial cities: the soot and grime of factories, overcrowded slums, bad sanitation, and new kinds of social interaction, captured in the song "Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahan" from the film C.I.D. (1956): in Bombay you find buildings, trams, motors and mills, everything except a human heart; when the rich cut each other's throats, "it's called business".
• Clock-time: in the 18th and 19th centuries the tempo of agricultural and manufacturing work came to be set by clock and calendar. Factory production meant synchronised labour that began punctually, kept a steady pace and ran for set hours on set days. For employer and employee alike, "time is now money: it is not passed but spent."

NCERT's activity gives the speed of Britain's change as 20 per cent of the population in towns and cities in 1810 and 80 per cent in 1910, and asks whether India's path was the same. It was not. Urban centres grew, but with the entry of British manufactured goods "more people moved into agriculture". A.R. Desai's words: the mass of Indian handicraftsmen ruined by machine-made British goods were not absorbed by any developed indigenous industry and "in the main, took to agriculture for subsistence" (Desai 1975).

The Three Revolutions (NCERT Class XI, Understanding Society, ch. 4)

NCERT's companion book gathers the same story under one phrase: sociology "is sometimes called the child of the 'age of revolution'". It was born in 19th century Western Europe after three revolutions:

• The Enlightenment, or the scientific revolution, which put the human being and rational thought at the centre of the universe and made society "amenable to rational analysis". The same book notes its other side: those judged unable to reason, such as "the natives of primitive societies", were treated as not fully human.
• The French Revolution (1789), which announced political sovereignty at the level of individuals and nation-states: equality of citizens, an end to privileges inherited by birth, peasants freed of feudal bonds and dues, a separation between the public realm of the state and the private realm of the household, and the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.
• The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: science and technology applied to production (the Spinning Jenny, the steam engine), the factory system and mass manufacture for world markets, and cities where workers uprooted from the countryside lived in slums. Modern governance, with the state taking charge of health, sanitation, crime control and "development", created a demand for new knowledge, which is why sociology has been called the "science of the new industrial society".

Why Study the Beginning of Sociology in Europe?

Most of sociology's issues (urbanisation, factory production) date from the tumultuous 18th and 19th century changes in Europe, and they are pertinent to all modern societies even though India, with its colonial past and diversity, is distinct. The plainer reason is that "our past, as Indians are closely linked to the history of British capitalism and colonialism". Capitalism in the West entailed a worldwide expansion. NCERT's box gives two strands of it. Between the 17th and 19th centuries an estimated 24 million Africans were enslaved, of whom 11 million survived the journey to the Americas (NCERT's figures). And in the 1800s the British took Indian indentured labourers by ship to cotton and sugar plantations in Surinam, the West Indies and Fiji; NCERT names the writer V.S. Naipaul as a descendant of one of them. R.K. Laxman's account of meeting a Mr Radha Krishna Govindan in Mauritius, a man with a south Indian face and name who spoke no Tamil, only English with a heavy French accent, shows the same colonial and global past.

The Growth of Sociology in India

Colonialism was an essential part of modern capitalism and industrialisation, so Western writing on capitalism matters for understanding change in India; but colonialism also meant that industrialisation's impact in India was not the same. Karl Marx's 1853 comment on the East India Company makes the contrast: India, "the great workshop of cotton manufacture for the world, since immemorial times", was now inundated with English cotton goods poured in at a nominal duty, "to the ruin of the native cotton fabrics once so celebrated".

Indian sociology also had to deal with colonial officials' and Western scholars' ideas about India that were not always correct. NCERT's example is the Indian village portrayed as unchanging: in keeping with Victorian evolutionary ideas, Western writers saw in it a remnant of "the infancy of society" and saw in 19th century India the past of European society.

The colonial heritage also shows in the split between sociology and social anthropology. A standard Western textbook definition of sociology is "the study of human groups and societies, giving particular emphasis to the analysis of the industrialised world" (Giddens 2001); social anthropology was the study of simple, non-Western, "other" cultures. In India the story is different. M.N. Srinivas: in a country of India's size and diversity there are "a myriad 'others'", and "the other" can be encountered "literally next door" (Srinivas 1966). Social anthropology in India moved from "primitive people" to peasants, ethnic groups, classes, ancient civilisations and modern industry, and "no rigid divide exists between sociology and social anthropology in India".

The Classical Thinkers (NCERT Class XI, Understanding Society, ch. 4)

The chapter names Comte, Marx and Spencer; NCERT's companion book introduces the three thinkers the rest of this book uses (chapter 2 sets Marx's class and conflict against Durkheim's social solidarity and collective conscience).

• Karl Marx (1818-1883): society passes through modes of production (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and, he believed, socialism). An economic base of productive forces and production relations supports a superstructure of religion, law and ideas: "material life shaped ideas, ideas did not shape material life". Change comes through class struggle once a class is conscious of its interests ("The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle", Communist Manifesto, first published February 1848). Capitalism alienates, and a ruling class spreads a dominant ideology.
• Emile Durkheim (1858-1917): society is a social fact, a moral community above the individual; social facts "are like things", external yet constraining, observable in patterns such as a community's suicide rate. The Division of Labour in Society (1893) contrasts mechanical solidarity (similar members, repressive law) with organic solidarity (interdependence, restitutive law).
• Max Weber (1864-1920): the social sciences seek an "interpretive understanding of social action" through empathetic understanding and value neutrality; the ideal type models a phenomenon's main features, as in his three types of authority and bureaucracy (chapter 3).

India's Founding Sociologists (NCERT Class XI, Understanding Society, ch. 5)

• G.S. Ghurye (1893-1983) headed the Bombay department for 35 years from 1924, founded the Indian Sociological Society in 1951 and wrote Caste and Race in India (1932).
• D.P. Mukerji (1894-1961), of Lucknow, held that the first task of an Indian sociologist was to study India's living traditions.
• A.R. Desai (1915-1994), a Marxist, wrote Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948; this chapter quotes its 1975 edition on ruined handicraftsmen) and called the welfare state "something of a myth".
• M.N. Srinivas (1916-1999) did fieldwork in Rampura near Mysore from 1948, coined sanskritisation and dominant caste, and defined westernisation.

The Scope of Sociology

Sociology's scope is extremely wide. It can study meaningful interaction between a shopkeeper and a customer, teachers and students, friends or family members; national issues such as unemployment, caste conflict, the effect of state policies on the forest rights of tribal people, or rural indebtedness; and global processes such as new flexible labour regulations, the electronic media and the young, or foreign universities entering the country's education system. "What defines the discipline of sociology is therefore not just what it studies... but how it studies a chosen field."

Sociology is one of a group of social sciences with anthropology, economics, political science and history, and the divisions among them are "not clearcut". The distinctions are "to some extent arbitrary" and should not be seen in a straitjacket fashion. Feminist theories, which NCERT's glossary describes as emphasising "the centrality of gender in analysing the social world", have shown the need for an interdisciplinary approach: a political scientist or economist cannot study gender roles without a sociology of the family and of the gender division of labour.

Sociology and Economics

Economics studies the production and distribution of goods and services. Classical economics dealt almost exclusively with the relations of pure economic variables (price, demand, supply, money flows, input-output ratios), and its dominant aim was precise laws of economic behaviour; the political economy approach places economic activity in the framework of ownership of the means of production. Sociology looks at economic behaviour in the broader context of norms, values, practices and interests. Corporate managers know this: large investment in advertising exists "to reshape lifestyles and consumption patterns". Feminist economics draws in gender, for example by linking work at home to productivity outside.

NCERT is fair to economics: its narrow scope has made it a focused, coherent discipline, and sociologists "often envy the economists for the precision of their terminology and the exactness of their measures" and their ability to make policy suggestions. Yet economists' predictions often suffer from neglect of individual behaviour, cultural norms and institutional resistance. Pierre Bourdieu (1998) asked for "an economics of happiness" that counts all profits and costs, individual and collective, material and symbolic, including crimes, suicides and the costs of precarious employment. Sociology rarely gives technical solutions; it encourages questioning of basic assumptions and so "a discussion of not just the technical means towards a given goal, but also about the social desirability of a goal itself". Recent years have seen a resurgence of economic sociology.

Sociology and Political Science

Conventional political science focused on political theory (ideas about government "from Plato to Marx") and on government administration (the formal structure of government rather than its actual working). Sociology studies all aspects of society and the relationships between institutions, including government. The two have long shared interests: sociologists like Max Weber worked in political sociology, which increasingly studies actual political behaviour. Recent Indian elections have seen extensive study of voting patterns, membership of political organisations, decision-making in organisations, reasons for supporting parties and the role of gender in politics.

Sociology and History

Historians "almost as a rule" study the past; sociologists the contemporary or recent past. Historians once delineated actual events, establishing how things actually happened, while sociology sought causal relationships; history studies concrete details, sociology abstracts, categorises and generalises. Conventional history was about kings and wars; changes in land relations or in gender relations within the family were the sociologist's interest. Today history is far more sociological: "social history is the stuff of history", studying social patterns, gender relations, customs and institutions other than rulers and wars.

Sociology and Psychology

Psychology, the science of behaviour, deals primarily with the individual: intelligence, learning, motivation, memory, the nervous system, hopes and fears. Social psychology is the bridge: it keeps a primary interest in the individual but studies how the individual behaves in groups. Sociology studies behaviour as organised in society, how personality is shaped by the economic and political system, family and kinship, culture, norms and values. NCERT's telling example: Durkheim, seeking a clear scope and method for sociology in his study of suicide, "left out individual intentions" of those who commit or attempt suicide "in favour of statistics concerning various social characteristics of these individuals".

Sociology and Social Anthropology

Anthropology in most countries includes archaeology, physical anthropology, cultural history, linguistics and the study of "simple societies"; social and cultural anthropology are the parts closest to sociology. Sociology was deemed the study of modern, complex societies and social anthropology that of simple societies. Social anthropology developed when Western-trained anthropologists studied non-European societies thought of as exotic and uncivilised, an unequal relationship rarely remarked upon earlier; now the erstwhile "natives", "be they Indians or Sudanese, Nagas or Santhals", write about their own societies. Anthropologists who claimed neutrality were in practice comparing those societies with the Western model.

Two changes have redefined both disciplines. Colonialism and global processes reached the remotest village (under British rule its land laws, administration and revenue changed and its manufacturing collapsed), so the old assumption of a bounded simple society no longer holds. And methods have been exchanged: social anthropology's long fieldwork, living in the community studied, and sociology's surveys and statistics are now used by both, macro and micro. Indian sociology has been "far more eclectic in borrowing from both traditions", studying both complex urban India and tribes in a holistic fashion, and in India "sociology and social anthropology have had a very close relationship".

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

Using the Chapter's Tools in an Answer

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: match thinkers to ideas and books: Mills (sociological imagination, 1959); Berger (sociologist as spy); Comte (founder of sociology, 1798-1857, not NCERT's misprinted 1789); Marx (mode of production, class struggle, alienation); Durkheim (social facts, mechanical and organic solidarity, suicide statistics); Weber (interpretive understanding, ideal type, political sociology); Srinivas ("the other" next door; Rampura). Know the three revolutions and what each contributed.

For Mains: NCERT's own exercises ask why the history of a discipline matters, how sociology differs from common sense, how disciplines now borrow from each other, and how to understand a personal problem sociologically. A good answer moves from a concrete example (subject choice, homelessness, poverty) to the structures behind it, and uses the colonial contrast to explain why Indian patterns differ from European ones.

Avoid: explaining social outcomes by individual character alone; treating the history of sociology as a purely European story; and repeating the misprinted dates.

Practice Questions

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers). Mains items 1 to 4 are NCERT's own exercises.

Prelims:

1. Consider the following pairs as given in NCERT's Introducing Sociology:
   

   1. C. Wright Mills : the personal troubles of the milieu and the public issues of social structure
      
   2. Peter Berger : the sociologist compared to a spy who reports accurately on a terrain
      
   3. Auguste Comte : considered the founder of sociology
      Which of the pairs given above is/are correctly matched?
      (a) 1 and 2 only (b) 2 and 3 only (c) 1 and 3 only (d) 1, 2 and 3

2. According to NCERT, which one of the following is a sociological rather than a naturalistic explanation of poverty?
   (a) People are poor because they come from "problem families"
   (b) People are poor because they are unable to budget properly
   (c) Poverty is caused by the structure of inequality in class society and experienced by those with chronically irregular work and low wages
   (d) People are poor because of low intelligence and shiftlessness

3. After the Kargil War, compensation for soldiers killed was directed to their widows, which led in many cases to forced marriages of widows with their husbands' brothers. NCERT uses this to illustrate:
   (a) the sociological imagination of policymakers
   (b) an unintended consequence of a state measure working through a patrilineal kinship system
   (c) the decline of joint families
   (d) the functionalist theory of stratification

4. Which one of the following was NOT among the three revolutions that NCERT's Understanding Society says paved the way for sociology?
   (a) The Enlightenment (b) The French Revolution (c) The Industrial Revolution (d) The Russian Revolution

5. With reference to sociology in India, consider the following statements:
   

   1. NCERT says no rigid divide exists between sociology and social anthropology in India.
      
   2. M.N. Srinivas wrote that in India "the other" can be encountered literally next door.
      
   3. Colonial writers portrayed the Indian village as a rapidly changing institution.
      Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
      (a) 1 and 2 only (b) 2 and 3 only (c) 1 only (d) 1, 2 and 3

6. In his study of suicide, as described by NCERT, Durkheim:
   (a) interviewed the families of those who committed suicide
   (b) left out individual intentions in favour of statistics on the social characteristics of those who committed suicide
   (c) relied on psychological tests of individuals
   (d) studied only one village in depth

Answers: 1 (d); 2 (c); 3 (b); 4 (d); 5 (a), since colonial writers saw the village as unchanging, a remnant of "the infancy of society"; 6 (b).

Mains:

1. Why is the study of the origin and growth of sociology important? (150 words)
2. Discuss the different aspects of the term "society". How is it different from your common-sense understanding? (150 words)
3. Discuss how there is greater give and take among the social sciences today, with examples from economics, political science and history. (250 words)
4. Identify a personal problem faced by someone you know and attempt a sociological understanding of it. (150 words)
5. "The impact of industrialisation on colonial India was not the same as in the West." Examine with reference to handicrafts, urbanisation and the growth of Indian sociology. (250 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Introducing Sociology (Class XI), ch. 1 "Sociology and Society", Reprint 2026-27: ncert.nic.in PDF; 2021-22 print in the book archive, Wayback copy (the two texts are identical).
• NCERT, Understanding Society (Class XI), ch. 4 "Introducing Western Sociologists" and ch. 5 "Indian Sociologists", Reprint 2026-27: kesy204 PDF, kesy205 PDF.
• NCERT, Introducing Sociology, ch. 2 "Terms, Concepts and their Use in Sociology" (Marx's and Durkheim's key concepts): kesy102 PDF.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Auguste Comte" (substantive revision 13 January 2026): plato.stanford.edu/entries/comte.
• Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, publication note (written late 1847, first published February 1848), Marx/Engels Internet Archive: marxists.org.