How those social structures may influence our belief systems
is studied by the sociology of religion.
And the social influences on how people think, how they reason, is studied by
a very important subdiscipline called the sociology of knowledge.
And I could go on and on with this list, making it longer and longer, but
let me mention one more.
Today, we do not believe anymore that scientific thought
develops in a social vacuum.
We now can see that even in science,
the flow of ideas is influenced by social developments.
And this is the intriguing field of study that is called the sociology of science.
So, how people think and feel and act is profoundly
influence by the social networks in which they are enveloped, so to say.
Maybe I should say the networks that they are.
And that is an extremely fruitful insight, something that became the cornerstone
in the sociologies of Emile Durkheim and of Norbert Elias.
But then Marx narrows it down a bit,
because he believes that the most important interdependencies between
human beings are those having to do with survival.
For example, the gathering of the food that you need in order to stay alive.
Dividing the economic tasks in such a clever way that the group,
the collectivity may live and procreate