Sociology as a discipline might not have been established at all if, alongside the massive changes in living and production conditions, characterized by the ambivalence of technological progress and impoverishment in the mid-19th century, a general sense of unease had not also spread. The question of how modern societies develop and how their principles of order can be discovered was largely driven by the desire to understand and manage social transformations. Amid the rising mass poverty, technological advancement, and the so-called social question, the classics from Marx to Durkheim, Weber, and Georg Simmel felt called to find reasons for new collective uncertainties with the help of the emerging sociology. The introduction aims to provide a sense of the historical situation in which this occurred.