Feudalism: Feudalism was a medieval contractual relationship among the upper classes, by

which a lord granted land to his men in return for military service. Feudalism was further
characterized by the localization of political and economic power in the hands of lords and their
vassals and by the exercise of that power from the base of castles, each of which dominated the
district in which it was situated. This formed a pyramidal form of hierarchy.

Capitalism: Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production and

distribution are privately owned and operated for a private profit; decisions by private actors
in the market rather than by central planning by the government; profit is distributed to
owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses.

Auguste Comte: Auguste Comte was born in 1798 and had a significant part in the
formation of sociology. Comte was the founder of French positivism. Comte can also be
given credit for inventing or coining the term sociology.

Comte was born a Catholic, but somewhere around the age of fourteen, he apparently
stopped believing in God. At the same time, he left the ideals of his royalist family behind
and became a republican. Comte attended the Ecole Polytechnique which was a leading
scientific institution in France at the time. He was kicked out of this school for leading a
student protest.

Comte's philosophy of positivism developed from historical studies of the human mind. This
led to Comte's views of the three stages of the history of sciences. In order as follows, the
stages are:

1) Theological - nature has a will of its own. This stage is broken down into three stages of
its own, including animism, polytheism, and monotheism.

2) Metaphysical state - though substituting ideas for a personal will.

3) Positive - a search for absolute knowledge.

Harriet Martineau: Harriet Martineau, the daughter of a textile manufacturer from

Norwich, was born in 1802. Thomas and Elizabeth Martineau were Unitarians and
held progressive views on the education of girls. The three girls received a similar
education to their three brothers. However, where the boys were sent away to
university, the girls were expected to stay at home.

Harriet thought this was very unfair and in 1823 the Unitarian journal, Monthly
Repository, published her anonymous article, On Female Education. Her brother
James Martineau praised it, and when he discovered that his sister was the author,
said: "Now, dear, leave it to the other women to make skirts and darn stockings, and
you devote yourself to this."

Harriet's father attempted to arrange for her to marry John Hugh Worthington. After
 some hesitation she accepted but later she changed her mind. Instead of marriage,
Harriet continued writing articles for the Monthly Repository. After the death of her
father in 1829, Harriet moved to London where William Fox, the editor of the journal,
paid her a small wage.

Herbert Spencer: Was an English philosopher, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal
political theorist of the Victorian era.

Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of

the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As
a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology,
economics, political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime
he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. In 1902 he was
nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Indeed, in the United Kingdom and the United
States at "one time Spencer's disciples had not blushed to compare him with Aristotle!"

He is best known for coining the concept "survival of the fittest", which he did in Principles of
Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This term strongly
suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and
ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism.

Karl Heinrich Marx: The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx,
is without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century. Although
he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas
gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently
almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be Marxist. This very
success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified and his
meanings adapted to a great variety of political circumstances. In addition, the fact that Marx
delayed publication of many of his writings meant that is been only recently that scholars had
the opportunity to appreciate Marx's intellectual stature.

Émile Durkheim: Emile Durkheim is considered by many to be the father of sociology. He

is credited with making sociology a science, and having made it part of the French academic
curriculum as "Science Sociale". During his lifetime, Emile Durkheim gave many lectures, and
published an impressive number of sociological studies on subjects such as religion, suicide,
and all aspects of society.
Maximilian "Max" Weber: Arguably the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century,
Max Weber is also known as a principal architect of modern social science along with Karl Marx
and Emil Durkheim. Weber's wide-ranging contributions gave critical impetus to the birth of new
academic disciplines such as sociology and public administration as well as to the significant
reorientation in law, economics, political science, and religious studies. His methodological
writings were instrumental in establishing the self-identity of modern social science as a distinct
field of inquiry; he is still claimed as the source of inspiration by empirical positivists and their
hermeneutic detractors alike. More substantively, Weber's two most celebrated contributions
were the “rationalization thesis,” a grand meta-historical analysis of the dominance of the west
in modern times, and the “Protestant Ethic thesis,” a non-Marxist genealogy of modern
capitalism. Together, these two theses helped launch his reputation as one of the founding
theorists of modernity. In addition, his avid interest and participation in politics led to a unique
strand of political realism comparable to that of Machiavelli and Hobbes. As such, Max Weber's
influence was far-reaching across the vast array of disciplinary, methodological, ideological and
philosophical reflections that are still our own and increasingly more so.