According to Bougle, ideologies based on freedom, equality and democracy have always been born and developed in big cities.
(1870-1940) French sociologist. He is one of the representatives of the School of Demography in Sociology and the School of Social Forms. He was born in S Brieuc. He graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure at the age of 20. He taught philosophy at the Montpellier Faculty of Letters at S Brieuc and at the Sorbonne in 1901. In 1935 he became director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He died on January 25, 1940.
Célestin Charles Alfred Bouglé (1 June 1870 – 25 January 1940) was a French philosopher known for his role as one of Émile Durkheim's collaborators and a member of the L'Année Sociologique.
Bougle continued Comte's understanding of sociology in the second half of the 19th century, together with Durkheim and sociologists such as Levv-Bruhl, Hubert, Mauss, Halbwachs, and George Davy. He is one of the principal representatives of the School of Demography and the School of Social Forms in Sociology.
In his book Les Jdees Egalitarianism (“Egalitarian Ideas”), published in 1908, he explored the relationship between demographic facts and ideas of equality. According to Bougle, using the Durkheimian method of analysis, egalitarian ideas developed in highly populated communities and especially in large cities. Bougle's aim is to investigate the main factors that led to the development of the idea of equality and democracy. According to Bougle, the main drivers of equality are population, population density, and mobility. The increase in these factors facilitates the spread of the idea of equality. According to Bougle, who tested his views with experiments and explained them with a theoretical framework, social differentiation increases as the size and density of the population increase. As a result of this social differentiation, the individual takes on an individualistic personality by getting rid of the narrow and close ties and national values that bind him to the community. As the population density increases, the communication and exchange of ideas between individuals also increase. Thus, superstitions about communities begin to be shaken. On the other hand, population density increases all kinds of interactions between people of various races, classes, families, and religions. According to Bougle, who explains his views by giving examples from history, the spread of the idea of equality to large masses has occurred only twice in the history of humanity. The first of these happened in the last periods of the Roman Empire, that is, during the period of Christianity and Stoic philosophy, and the second was during the French Revolution. Bougle explains the spread of the idea of equality among the masses in these periods with population growth, density, and population mobility. Population growth in the Roman Empire also reduced privileges based on birth and rank.
According to Bougle, ideologies based on freedom, equality, and democracy have always been born and developed in big cities. Bougle is against Sorokin, who argues that the greatest inequalities in terms of wealth, rank, privilege, and prestige occur in big cities and that as the population increases, social stratification and inequality will increase.
Bougle gave great importance to the religious factor in the changes in human history. In his book Essai sur le regime des castes (“Essays on the Caste Regime”) published in 1908, he argued that the religious factor should be taken into account in order to understand the origin and continuity of the caste system. According to Bougle, religion has a great influence on the birth of caste law, the emergence of racial groups, and the unforgivable sin of mixing these groups.