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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.
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.
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.
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.