The advent of Sociology as social science marked a change in the way of thinking about social reality, separating itself from previous speculative and metaphysical concerns and differing progressively from other sciences as a rational and systematic way of understanding society. As a science, Sociology begins to follow the same general principles applied to all scientific knowledge branches, despite the peculiarities of social phenomena when compared to the phenomena of nature. Sociology is the part of social science that studies the human behavior towards the environment and the processes that connect individuals in associations, groups, political parties and institutions in general. While the individual in its singularity is studied by Psychology, Sociology has a theoretical and methodological basis focused on the study of social phenomena, trying to explain them and analyze the human beings in their interdependencies.

1. 1
SCIENCE AND ADVANCES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOCIOLOGY
Fernando Alcoforado *
The advent of Sociology as social science marked a change in the way of thinking about
social reality, separating itself from previous speculative and metaphysical concerns and
differing progressively from other sciences as a rational and systematic way of
understanding society. As a science, Sociology begins to follow the same general
principles applied to all scientific knowledge branches, despite the peculiarities of social
phenomena when compared to the phenomena of nature [BAUMAN, Zygmunt. Para
que serve a Sociologia? (What is Sociology). Rio de Janeiro: Editora Zahar, 2014].
Sociology is the part of social science that studies the human behavior towards the
environment and the processes that connect individuals in associations, groups, political
parties and institutions in general. While the individual in its singularity is studied by
Psychology, Sociology has a theoretical and methodological basis focused on the study
of social phenomena, trying to explain them and analyze the human beings in their
interdependencies. Understanding the different societies and cultures is one of the
Sociology goals. Therefore, are employed statistical methods and empirical observation.
Sociologists make frequent use of quantitative social research techniques (such as
Statistics) to describe generalized patterns in social relations. This helps to develop
models that can understand social change and how individuals will respond to these
changes. In some fields of study of Sociology, qualitative techniques - as directed
interviews, group discussions and ethnographic methods - allow for a better
understanding of social processes according to the research objective.
The results of sociological research are not only of interest to sociologists. Covering all
areas of human society - from family relationships to the organization of large
enterprises, the role of politics in society or religious behavior - sociology can come to
be interested in different degrees of intensity, many other knowledge areas. However,
the most interested in the production and systematization of sociological knowledge
currently are the state, usually the main funder of research of this scientific discipline,
and organized civil society. The sociological knowledge through its concepts, theories
and methods, may be for people a great tool for understanding the situations they face in
everyday life, of their multiple social relations.
Today sociologists research macro-structures inherent in the organization of society,
such as race or ethnicity, social class and gender, as well as institutions such as family,
social processes that represent deviation, or derangements in these structures, including
crime and divorce and micro processes and interpersonal relationships. Sociology also
researches the power structures and power of the state and of its members, and how
power is structured by forces relations. One aspect that has been the subject of
Sociology studies, and also Anthropology, is the way the constituent individuals in
society can be manipulated to maintain social order and the monopoly of legitimate
physical force. Sociology is a very recent area of interest, but it was the first social
science to be institutionalized. Before, therefore, Political Science and Anthropology.
Sociology is a science that offers different theoretical and methodological guidelines
ruling: (1) positivist-functionalist sociology, whose founder Auguste Comte and its
main exponent Émile Durkheim [CABRAL, Augusto. A sociologia funcionalista nos
estudos organizacionais: foco em Durkheim (The functionalist sociology in

2. 2
organizational studies: focus on Durkheim). Available on the website
<http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1679-39512004000200002>,
Rio de Janeiro, 2004); (2) the comprehensive Sociology initiated by Max Weber's
hermeneutic-comprehensive theoretical and methodological matrix [WEBER, Max.
Metodologia das ciências sociais (Methodology of social sciences). Campinas:
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1999]; (3) Sociology based on materialist
dialectics initiated by Karl Marx who even not being a sociologist began a fruitful line
of sociological explanation [MARX, Karl. O Capital (The Capital). Rio de Janeiro:
Civilização Brasileira, 1999]; and, 4) sociology based on the analysis of the world-
system designed by Immanuel Wallerstein (Wallerstein, Immanuel. Unthinking Social
Science. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). These four theoretical and methodological
guidelines, originated by its four main classical authors, are detailed in the following
paragraphs.
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) defends the thesis that Sociology function is to speed up /
develop the process of evolution of society. Addresses that it is inevitable that societies
evolve for industrial European model, but is a function of Sociology allow this move to
accelerate. Comte has the ideological basis positivism that supports the idea that
scientific knowledge is the only way to true knowledge. According to the positivists can
say only that a theory is correct if it was proven by valid scientific methods. For Comte,
the progress of mankind depends entirely on scientific advances. By founding
positivism, Comte want this just perform the universal function of humanity's moral
lighthouse, guiding their emotional impulses towards altruism and the cult of the great
human achievements of all history, able to unite society. A reading that contextualize
the author and do not let it scare by certain elements dated in their thinking allows us to
understand the Comte today, enjoy dimensions of its positivism still eclipsed by the
gigantism of his own figure, and his undeniable influence on the development of
sociology, which occupies the "great hall" as founder. He supports the idea of order,
which says that society should respect the natural order of evolution of society. He does
not agree with drastic social revolutions. He agrees with the progress, but progress
within an established order [COMTE, Auguste. Discurso sobre o espírito positivo
(Discourse on the positive spirit). São Paulo: Edipro, 2016]. The motto "Order and
Progress" of the Brazilian flag was adopted inspired by the thought of Auguste Comte.
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) was one of the thinkers who most contributed to the
consolidation of Sociology as an empirical science and its establishment in academia,
becoming the first university professor of that discipline. Durkheim was intended to
defend the rules relating to the study of society. Rules on the observation of social facts,
the distinction between the normal and the pathological, the formation of social types,
the explanation of social facts, the administration of evidence. Social facts should be
treated as things and Sociology should be considered an autonomous science.
According to Durkheim, the achievement of this autonomy is the most important
progress that needs to be done in Sociology. Durkheim, besides be considered one of
the founders of modern Sociology, is considered the father of Sociology of Education.
Durkheim states that education is a process of socialization of the young generation by
the adult generation and the construction of the social is made largely for education. It is
the absorption by the individual of a series of rules and principles (moral, religious,
ethical, behavioral, etc.) that determine their behavior in society. Durkheim sees society
in a integrated manner creating cohesion in general that would be maintained by rules of
coexistence (Durkheim, Émile The rules of sociological method São Paulo:.. Edipro,
2012).

3. 3
(DURKHEIM, Émile. As regras do método sociológico (The rules of sociological
method). São Paulo: Edipro, 2012).
For Max Weber (1864-1920), Sociology is a science that seeks to understand social
action, considering the individual and his actions as a key point of the research. His
theory opens the so-called "methodological individualism" approach that understands
that the collective forms of life (or even society as social totality) must be explained
from their individual bases, opposing thus the "methodological holism". The action is a
human behavior to which individuals linked to a subjective meaning and action is social
when it is related to another individual. Demonstrates that understanding takes place
from the sense that the individual attributes to certain conduct. The goal of Weber is to
capture the sense of an activity or a relationship of the individual based on the
construction of meaning, motivation of social action, as well as the analysis of
influencing factors of human behavior. Respecting the autonomy of each science, each
exploring a particular sector of reality, due to a specific point of view, Weber stresses
the inevitable interaction between all disciplines. By applying the method of
understanding human social facts, Weber elaborates the foundations of a
Comprehensive or Interpretative Sociology [WEBER, Max. Conceitos sociológicos
fundamentais (Fundamental sociological concepts). São Paulo: Edições 70- Brasil,
2000].
The contribution of Karl Marx (1818-1883) to the sociological thought was mainly look
at the "conflict theory" in which social organization and its change are based on the
struggles of classes intrinsic to society. In one of his most famous phrases, written in
1845, Karl Marx said that, until then, philosophers had interpreted the world in various
ways and that would fit now to turn it. Consistent with this idea during his life,
combined the study of the social sciences with the revolutionary militancy, creating one
of the systems most influential ideas of history, Marxism. Directly or indirectly, the
German philosopher work originated several policy areas are committed to changing
society based on the struggle of social classes. The theory advocated by Karl Marx is
based on the radical critique of capitalism in which predominates the exploitation of
workers by the bourgeoisie demonstrated in his work The Capital [MARX, Karl. O
Capital (The Capital). Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1999]. From his
perspective, there were those who are owners of productive capital constituted the
exploiting class (bourgeoisie) and employees are who did not own property
(proletarians). To end the exploitation of man by man, Marx advocated the construction
of socialism that was implemented in several countries and has not achieved the desired
results.
Immanuel Wallerstein defends the thesis that we should abandon the legacy of
nineteenth century Social Science reviewing some assumptions that still remain today as
the explanations of the national development who he considers meaningless because
what should prevail is the development the capitalist world-system, ie, the unit of
analysis should be not only the nation-state or national society, but the world system as
a whole. Wallerstein conceived the theory of the world system which is a system of
social economic, political and cultural, born at the end of the European Middle Ages
and evolved to become in a planetary system. Imannuel Wallerstein shows the limits in
the paradigms of Social Sciences of the nineteenth century and proposes a new
paradigm based on the world-systems theory that he conceived. Wallerstein identifies
the origin of the modern world system in sixteenth-century Europe. A slight superiority

4. 4
of capital accumulation in the UK and France, due to internal political circumstances at
the end of feudalism, triggered a process of expansion that culminated in the global
system currently existing economic exchanges. In the nineteenth century, almost all the
territories of the planet had been incorporated into the capitalist world economy
(WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel. The modern world system - Vol. 1, 2, 3. Berkeley and
Los Angelis: University of California Press, 2011).
According to Wallerstein, the capitalist world-system is very heterogeneous in cultural,
political and economic, covering large differences in civilizational development,
accumulation of capital and political power. Unlike positivist theories of modernization
and capitalist development, Wallerstein does not attribute these differences to a delay in
certain regions with others that the dynamics of the system would tend to delete, but the
very nature of the capitalist world-system. The capitalist world-system is inherently a
division between the core, periphery and semi-periphery, due to the division of labor
between regions. The center is the area of great technological development which
produces complex products and the periphery is the area that supplies raw materials,
agricultural products and cheap labor force to the center. The economic exchange
between periphery and center is uneven. The periphery has sell their products cheap
while purchase expensive products from the center, and this situation tends to reproduce
itself automatically, almost deterministic, although it is also dynamic and change
historically. The semiperiphery, in turn, is an intermediate development region which
functions as a center to the periphery and periphery to the center.
The school of the theory of the world system has as founder Immanuel Wallerstein and
as its leading members Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi and
Theotonio dos Santos, intellectuals linked to the "dependency theory", which state that
"dependence" expressed subordination of peripheral countries in relation to the central
capitalist countries whose economic backwardness was not forged by their agricultural
exporting state or its pre-capitalist heritage but by capitalist development pattern
dependent on the country and its insertion subordinated to world capitalism. Therefore,
to overcome the underdevelopment of the peripheral countries would rupture with
dependence and not the modernization and industrialization of the economy as
recommended, for example, by ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America),
which may involve even the break with capitalism itself. Criticism of Imannuel
Wallerstein to global capitalism and its support for anti systemic movements spread his
fame in the academic world and become intellectuals linked to this approach heralds of
anti-globalization and radical critique of neoliberalism movement. The fundamental
work of Immanuel Wallerstein's The modern world system was originally published in
three volumes in 1974, 1980 and 1989 (WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel. The modern world
system - Vol. 1, 2, 3. Berkeley and Los Angelis: University of California Press, 2011).
* Fernando Alcoforado, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor of Territorial
Planning and Regional Development from the University of Barcelona, a university professor and
consultant in strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is
the author of Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova
(Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São
Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado.
Universidade de Barcelona, http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e
Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX
e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of
the Economic and Social Development-The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Muller
Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe
Planetária (P&A Gráfica e Editora, Salvador, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e

5. 5
combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011),
Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012) and
Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV,
Curitiba, 2015).