The prospect of learning something from history is what makes sociologists tick. It is through developing a systematic understanding of the forces which shape our lives that we can exercise any control over them. The founding thinkers of sociology, who came to prominence during the development of what we are pleased to call modernity, thought so. It is the intimate relationship between the development of sociology and the development of modernity that the course begins with.

This relationship is an intimate one, because it is only with the social change instituted in the development of the modern world that a discipline such as sociology - and social science in general - could either exist or have anything to study. It seems as we come to the close of this century that the issues which concerned the founders of sociology are equally pressing. Problems of social exclusion and poverty, human rights abuses by countless governments, the freedom of the individual and the power of the state: one does not have to travel too far in time or in space to find some example of preventable human suffering being justified as inevitable, natural, or all for the best, a set of circumstances that would have been familiar to this lot: