Sociology as an art form

The author asserts that sociology is indeed an art form, one that has a strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, the age in which sociology came into full stature. He explains the degree to which sociology draws from the same creative impulses, themes and styles (rooted in history), and actual modes of representation found in the arts. He shows how the founding sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel constructed portraits (of the bourgeois, the worker, and the intellectual) and landscapes (of the masses, the poor, the factory system), all reflecting and contributing to identical portraits and landscapes found in the literature and art of the period. In addition to marking the similarities between sociologists' and artists' efforts to depict motion or movement, the author emphasizes the relation of sociology to art and literature, with examples such as alienation, anomie, and degeneration.