I wanna get into sociology. Where should I start?

>>9456640
college

>>9456653
Already am on, shamefully.

u dont

>>9456667
What happened?

start with marx, durkheim, weber

As far the fuck away from college as you can, depending what you mean by sociology.

Sociology is an unfortunate discipline in that it tends toward various fads of hyperpositivism and quantification fetishism. As a discipline it is more like economics, political science, and other "I'm only getting this degree as a prelude to being a shallow public intellectual or government bureaucrat" studies, and far less like history or anthropology.

Its history begins with the ultraconfident Auguste Comte and his Mill-esque positivist 'nomothetic' science of humanity, whose methods are tempered by (the still overconfident) Durkheim, then it slumps from its isolation, then it resurges through a methodological fusion with anthropology (born around the same time) and history (notably Weber). It gets infusions from some interesting Italian guys. In France and Germany, it is then mostly eaten and subsumed by those various other disciplines (history+anthro especially). In the Anglosphere, it becomes an overbearing tyrant of quantification fetishism, becoming difficult to distinguish from economics, and monolithically structural-functionalist under Talcott Parsons.

Nowadays if you "study Sociology" what you mean is "I should have gone into economics so I could at least be rich being a soulless cultureless retard; instead, I am writing a ten-year PhD thesis on the rigorously quantified social stratification of how many people ride certain kinds of buses, so I can maybe try to get a public policy job or something (also historians and anthropologists would laugh at my thesis as naive and atavistic)"

>>9456697
I have the Course on Positive Philosophy and Discourse on the Positive Spirit here, are those a good place to start with Comte?
And does Marx require previous knowledge on economics (Smith/Ricardo/etc) or can I just jump into Capital with a companion book?

>>9456729
Most people know Comte these days from constantly hearing him referenced as the thing everyone else was arguing against. "Comtean positivism" is the bad guy, the one all the historicists (et al.) were struggling to combat, the reason Windelband had to divide "nomothetic" and "idiographic."

But it's good as a touchstone and you should definitely read it if you want to understand the kind of law-seeking (nomothetic) behaviour that 19th century scientists, including social scientists, were trying to do. If you want to study humanity (whether historically, anthropologically, sociologically) you need to learn about the different ways the study of humanity has been conceptualised from the ground up, and positivist quantification is a huge one of those.

The same things that motivated Comte and his followers are some of the things still motivating sociologists, quantificationist social historians, empirical psychologists, etc. It seems to be a perennial thing that people return to: the attempt to force humanity to make sense with inductive, law-governing regularity, whether it's via mathematical or computer models, with the gradual discovery of objective laws, with the reduction of social formations to their "functions," with "covering law" models, etc.

You should check out the Naturwissenschaften vs. Geisteswissenschaften debate to see why this is such a big question.

Many of the people who are uncomfortable with such attempts, like historicists, are the same people who dislike Marxism for reducing humanity to an economic-structural calculus, and who disliked linguistic structuralism for trying to reduce human behaviour to models.

Marx is really hard. You should check out David Harvey's lectures on reading Capital, Youtube, which are also available in book form if you prefer.

Durkheim, and then Mauss (try reading The Gift), might be good places for you to start out. Weber too but Weber isn't strictly sociology.

>>9456685
This is correct.

Ignore /pol/ie anti-/lit/.