In an academic course, the teacher has to make clear what the student can expect from the program, its didactic organization in the light of its academic goals. Often those aims and claims of the course are presented in formal language with boring lists with bullet points that experienced students have learned to skip as soon as they come inside. But please stay with me when I want to say just a few words, very informal words, on this subject. My children were born here in Amsterdam, and as a responsible father, I had to teach them how to ride a bicycle, because that is our main means of transportation here. In the beginning, you are running next to the bike, trying to catch your child every time they threaten to lose their balance and fall in the grass or fall off bike. But after a few days of lightly bruising their arms and knees, and maybe after a few tears, they surprisingly quickly discover the trick. And at the end of the week, you see them disappear between the trees in the distance. Seeing them drive away, still a bit unsure, that for me was the best part. You know that from now on they can do this without you. That one week of bicycle lessons captures in way what it is to be a parent, steering your children to independence. What I really do hope to achieve here is that you will be able to read the original texts of the great thinkers of social science, and that you can understand them and that you can use them in your own work, whether that is to work as a sociologist or a journalist or a creative writer or a civil servant or maybe a minister of the church. And I hope that in time, you will find it so easy to read some of these authors that you will experience genuine pleasure in doing it. The intense satisfaction of being intellectually challenged and stimulated by the intriguing thoughts of some of the sharpest minds in the history of mankind living in another social world and yet so close to us. That is what I really want for you. To learn to understand the texts written by some early sociologists, and maybe one day you will discover a few treasures in the works of an author whose contributions were not mandatory readings for this book. Let's say the works written by Herbert Spencer or the great Georg Simmel. If you can read them all on your own, then you have acquired a new and a very important skill. That is our main aim for this course. The second aim is that we want you to become acquainted with a certain style of reasoning, a way to approach the subject matter of sociology, the dynamics of human societies. Although our offers differ from one another, they share at least one thing, the passionate wish to scientifically study all the aspects of social life. They want to anchor their arguments in hard data. They may have many differences. Some are devout Catholics, some are raised in the Jewish faith, others are outspoken atheists, but they all share this wish to explain social life without having recourse to heavenly interference, and here we see the beginnings of principles and empirical attitude. We recognize an early version of sociology as new science. And the third and final goal of this course is to raise your sensitivity for the relationship between theories and empirical research. We intend to show you how new data inspired great thinkers to come up with new theoretical options, and how, on the other hand, new theories led to new testable hypotheses, and to the collection of data that were not considered interesting before, because they appeared to have no theoretical relevance. And then there is something else that I would like you to achieve, that is a goal that you will not find in the official lists. I hope that this course will be an interesting and maybe even exciting journey for you. I hope that this course, from time to time, will make you happy.
