classical sociologists

• early positivists

  the creation of a better society is separate from subjective values about what is 'best', and shared an enlightenment view that sociology was a science tasked with uncovering the laws of how society works

  • scientific sociology would reveal the one correct society free from personal opinions
  • comte - sociology is the queen of sciences
• karl marx


  while there is debate about whether karl marx was positivist, he saw himself as a scientist and believed that historical analysis could reveal the development of human society - the evolution through capitalism to communism

  • marx's sociology revealed the truth of that development so takes for granted the value of the ideal communist society
  • similar to comte and durkheim he views science as helping to deliver the good society
• max weber

  in contrast to marx, durkheim and comte, weber makes a distinction between value judgements and facts, which he suggests we can't distinguish between

  • divorcees may be at higher risk of suicide but that doesn't mean we should make divorce harder to obtain, or that people should have every right to die by suicide
  • no value judgements are proven fact as they can be neither proven or disproven

  however they do have some use in sociology, which weber illustrates in stages
• stages of research and values

  weber - values should be present in some parts of research but not others ~

  1. guiding research - our values help us decide what is important and so what we decide to study
  2. data collection and hypothesis testing - values should be absent in this process as it is scientific and may bias our research
  3. interpretting data - we need a value framework to set the findings in, but we have to be explicit about what values we use
  4. sociologists as citizens - researchers should take moral responsibility for their results and the harm it may cause eg. einstein and the nuke