The most important maxim in sociology – indeed in the social sciences as a whole – is that human society is infinitely greater than the sum of the individuals whose activities compose it. It was Durkheim’s main contribution to the subject, but it is often misunderstood. In my eyes at least it does not mean that society is some sort of grand entity, or that the subject-matter of sociology is only about the large-scale institutions, such as the political system or the economy. On the contrary, society is there in the smallest of individual gestures and the most personal of thoughts – and the reverse also applies. You open up your mobile phone and check whether you have any text messages or emails. It is an everyday action and in some respects a private and personal one. Just sit back and think for a moment what such an everyday action involves – it is quite stupendous. It presumes years of technological advance in electronics and computer science, themselves quintessentially collective activities. It presumes a whole history of social time management. Time was not standardised until well into the nineteenth century, even on a national level. Until about the 1840s different parts of the country had their own local times. There was no national railway timetable, for example, until quite late on. There were no internationally-accepted time zones until much later in the century. They were established by a congress that met in 1884 in Washington. International travel and communications were fragmented affairs until then. Many activities we take for granted now were simply impossible. Today you can email or call anyone anywhere in the world on your phone, or get on a plane and know the time it will arrive at its destination. It is so familiar that more or less everyone takes it for granted. Yet the complexity and level of global co-ordination that lies behind those simple actions is simply stunning.

Sociology is revelatory in a way that most other subjects simply can’t match. The main point of sociology, as I would see it, is to prise open the mundane, the everyday, and disclose the richness of what lies behind them. It is to look at the interaction between personal life and the great sweeps of history and institutional change that it presumes but also in some sense contributes to.