SOCIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS FOR ‘SOCIAL SUFFERING’ SOCIOLOGY AS A SOCIODICY

Abstract

This article aims to deal with sociology as a sociodicy which offers objective and secular explanations to social suffering. Sociology emerged in the early nineteenth century in response to the social sufferings stemming from the challenges of rationality. Under the pressure of rationality, religious theodicies, which justify and legitimise the social order by offering responses to social inequalities and injustices, failed to fulfil their functions. A crisis of legitimacy and the need, therefore, for a new form of theodicy, which would offer rational responses to social sufferings and legitimise modern social order, appeared. Consequently, sociology emerged as a sociodicy and it began to offer a sociodicies, which were functional equivalent of religious theodicies, in the early nineteenth century. Sociodicies, which were offered by sociology, were stripped their theological contents and references until the second half of twentieth century, so they became methodological, objective and secular sociological responses to social sufferings.

Keywords

• Sociology
• Social Suffering
• Sociodicy
• Theodicy
• Rationalisation