Marx, Durkheim, Weber

Formations of Modern Social Thought

Ken Morrison

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446232378
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

`This is an excellent introduction to classical social theory. For most students it is the only book on the subject that they will need. The expositions are clear and comprehensive, outlining with almost alarming clarity ideas with which many of us have to struggle? - Alan Bryman, The Management Centre, University of Leicester

This is a thoroughly revised, expanded version of the best selling student text in classical social theory. The book provides an authoritative, accessible undergraduate guide to the three pivotal figures in the classical tradition. Readable and stimulating, the book explains the key ideas of these thinkers and situates them in their historical and philosophical contexts. The student gains an immediate understanding of what is distinctive and relevant about these giants of sociology.

The book includes a glossary with over 150 entries. For a decade, the book has been required reading on undergraduate degree programmes. This new edition, refines the material, extends the analysis and enhances our appreciation. It is a nugget in its field.

1

Introduction

The Origins and Foundations of Modern Social Theory: 1750–1920

Modern social theory first emerged during the period of the ‘great transformation,’ a term used by Karl Polanyi to describe the massive social change which took place in Europe between 1750 and 1920.¹ In practical terms, it is possible to outline some of the steps leading to these developments by looking at three geographical centers in European society: France, Germany and England. Generally, the story begins in France in the decade of the 1780s as France approaches the revolution. The French revolution of 1789 was one of the most decisive determinants leading to the development of a theory of society that was officially separate from philosophy. By the time the revolution had ended, it had delivered three distinct blows against society, history and politics. First, in asserting the reality of individual rights and freedoms, the revolution shook individuals in their political and social foundations. Second, the economic and political consequences of the revolution rocked the foundations of feudal society in its social and economic existence. Third, the political and social changes of the revolution shook the framework of philosophy in its inward looking and introspective existence. These blows to society, history, philosophy and politics set the stage for the development of an autonomous social theory by creating a division in philosophy along two distinct lines of development. In the first place, it necessitated a break with the philosophic tendency to look inward in favor of a direct encounter with reality and history. As Herbert Marcuse points out, this tended to bring philosophy into the sphere of history.² In the second place, all of the philosophical concepts which had been preoccupied with abstraction began to pattern themselves after social and historical content. By 1800, social and historical concepts had been brought more fully into the sphere of philosophy and these came fundamentally to rest in the subject matter of society and history. This had a profound effect on the development of social theory since all of the economic and political theorizing which had been packed into the philosophic mind since Plato and Aristotle had become externally manifest in the social and historical world as a consequence of the revolution in France.

By 1810, the impact of historical development on philosophy was fully realized in the work of Georg Hegel. It was Hegel who, in 1806, responded to the events of the French Revolution in his writings and, despite its philosophic language, his works were extremely forward looking in their focus on society and history. Hegel’s response to the revolution not only changed philosophy and history, it also led to the development of an autonomous social theory distinct from philosophy itself.³ Hegel brought this about in several ways. First, he took the view that the French revolution fundamentally changed the way thought understood reality and history. Previously, history had been seen as fixed in its political and social existence. The rapid decline of French society after the revolution led Hegel to observe that one form of social and political existence was replacing another and this led to the view that society itself changes from one form to another. This made it clear that economy and politics were obviously linked to society and history, a point which had not been stated in precisely this way before. It was Hegel, therefore, who was the first to understand that historical change took a social form and that this manifested itself in terms of a set of distinct stages of development from ancient, feudal and industrial societies.⁴ Second, in showing a direct line of political development from slavery to the modern state, Hegel was able to make political functions the focus of social and historical development. This step made it clear that philosophy could only understand history by adopting social concepts and that history was, in fact, social in nature. Third, Hegel’s philosophy was forward looking in its focus on individual freedom and self realization. In making the individual part of historical development, Hegel was one of the first to make individual experience the subject matter of historical and social analysis, a step which became more fully developed in the writings of Marx.⁵ Fourth, to the extent that Hegel believed that history was marked by distinct stages of development, he was the first to conceptualize the different stages of society as distinct social forms which followed a pattern of social and historical development. In addition, all these social forms, according to Hegel, represented actual ways of thinking and being which could be separately studied by looking at the social and political characteristics of a given society.⁶

By 1844–45, many of the developments in Hegel’s philosophy began to be consolidated in the writings of Marx and Engels and, as a result, the philosophical and historical concepts changed once again. With Marx and Engels, the critical elements of Hegel’s philosophy began to turn more distinctly into social theory. But, where Hegel had used philosophic concepts, Marx used economic and social concepts to explain historical development.⁷ Where the French revolution had shaped Hegel’s historical perspective, it was the economic and industrial changes in England which shaped Marx’s and Engels’ thinking. Where Hegel had absorbed society and history into philosophy, Marx was absorbing philosophy into history and economy and this led to the use of distinct economic concepts to understand society and social existence. This shift from philosophy to economy necessitated the second critical transition of philosophic concepts to the sphere of political economy and the study of industrial capitalism.

Parallel to these developments, large scale social changes were taking place in Europe and in England, and these occurred on several different fronts. First, by 1830 industrial capitalism had replaced the old feudal economies of the preceding period and Adam Smith had laid the foundations for the first study of capitalism, making him the founder of modern political economy. Second, the mechanical discoveries necessary for industrial production had made England the ‘workshop of the world’ and therefore an industrial center. This began to dissolve the old agrarian economy of the countryside and led to rapid developments in commerce, science and industry. As a result, agricultural land began to be used for commercial purposes and land-holders began to evict tenant cultivators from their agricultural holdings, leaving them without the means of economic livelihood. This not only set in motion a period where property in land began to be privatized, but it also began an extensive transfer of the rural population from the countryside to the industrial centers, where they became an impoverished class and a problem population. Third, economic changes occurring in land and labor necessitated the rise of a new working class of wage laborers who were forcibly separated from the land as a primary means of economic survival.⁸ At this stage, the migration of philosophic concepts into history and social theory had become more complete and, by the time Marx had published Capital in 1867, social and historical concepts were more fully incorporated into social thought and began to form the first theories of society.

In France, there were similar developments. At the time, French social thought was being shaped by thinkers such as Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) who were grappling with the themes of revolution, social progress and industrial change. Comte and Durkheim, for their part, founded a school of social theory which was largely shaped by the themes of science, by a conservative response to the French revolution and by a rejection of philosophy as a basis of social inquiry. By 1830, an important step was taken with the appearance of Comte’s Positive Philosophy.⁹ For his part, Comte had described the age primarily in terms of the development of the scientific method which he wanted to extend to the study of society.¹⁰ In France, this began a period of reaction against speculative philosophy, culminating in the work of Durkheim who wanted to found a scientific theory of society. With the publication of such works as The Division of Labor in 1893 and Suicide in 1897, Durkheim began to differentiate himself from Comte’s theory of society, essentially by conceiving of society as a structure of social elements existing outside the individual. This led Durkheim to turn his attention to the study of what he called ‘the two great currents of social life’ which he thought had formed ‘two distinct types of structure’.¹¹ This made Durkheim the first to identify the study of ‘structure’ as the single solitary subject matter of social theory, and as a result structural concepts began to be more formally incorporated into the study of society.

By 1905, with the publication of works such as Marx’s German Ideology and Capital, Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labor and Suicide, and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a body of knowledge was formed and a common perspective emerged which began to define social thought separately from historical thought, leading to a perspective referred to as structural theory. Based on the works of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, structural theory is the name used to describe a family of perspectives in social thought which use specific techniques of interpretation for studying history, human nature and society and, in the main, it gets its name from the tendency to conceptualize society as a structure of social fields which exist outside the individual. The central idea is that these structures first constitute themselves as diverse social fields, which include the economy, the political structure, the family system and the field of law and religion. These social fields were thought to structure social activity, impose external limits on action and compel individuals to act in ways which often override their personal considerations and their private will. The tendency to conceive of society as a structure of social fields existing outside the individual and as having the power to structure social interchanges, led to a third transition in the development of social thought which changed the concepts once again. With Durkheim’s assertion that social thought was separable from philosophy, and that the structure of society was separable from the structure of history, it meant that all the philosophic and critical language of Hegel and Marx was to be converted into investigative concepts and into an investigative language for identifying elements of structure which were thought to exist outside the individual.

It was therefore Durkheim who had discovered a distinct subject matter which owed nothing to the already constituted disciplines of philosophy, psychology or history. Durkheim, in fact, was the first to identify the external structure of society by outlining a system of duties and obligations lying outside the individual that constituted a new subject matter ‘to which the term social was to be applied’.¹² Durkheim’s structuralist language had for the first time asserted the existence of a field of social activity lying beyond the individual, and this led to a more systematic study of the structure of society as a field of investigation. As a result, observation, description and classification replaced the search for historical laws and the underlying themes of economic development that had been established by Marx.

In Germany, the work of Max Weber (1864–1920) represented a fourth shift in the direction of modern social theory. Though he was born in 1864, Weber did not write his first theoretical work until 1903 when he published his first formal theory of capitalism. By this time, Weber’s overall theory of economic organization had established the study of capitalism as a central focus of modern social theory.¹³ In contrast to Marx, who focused on the economic changes of the early nineteenth century, Weber’s theoretical work was largely in response to the themes of late modern society which focused on the direction of historical change and civilization processes taking place in the West. Later, this led to a series of broad historical works on ancient economies, feudalism, bureaucracy, household organization, the formation of rational law and the history of world religions.

In looking at society from the perspective of what he called the overlapping social spheres of religion, economy, politics and law, Weber was among the first to assert that a theory of society could be obtained only by looking at the causal influences of various social spheres, which he conceived of as forming different ‘departments of life’. Rather than restricting his analysis to the economic sphere, as Marx had done, Weber focused on the affects of the religious sphere on the economic and political spheres. Weber, in fact, develops the concept of the ‘social sphere’ into a methodological tool, which he used to study the legal and political influences leading to the formation of modern social classes and the specific influences of the religious sphere on the development of capitalism and the formation of the modern economy. This made Weber one of the first to challenge Marx’s theory of capitalism and to question his claim about the role played by economic forces in social and historical development.¹⁴

The fundamental insight by Weber that society could not be understood without looking at the role played by the overlapping social and institutional spheres cannot be overestimated. He thought the political, economic, religious and legal spheres of society defined the nature of social life in the changes occurring after the period described by Marx in the nineteenth century. This led him to look at the underlying conditions leading to the formation of the modern household as it became separate from the sphere of work, and to examine the changes taking place in the modern class system, the formation of status groups, the function of statute law and the overall formation of modern economies.¹⁵ Subsequently, Weber’s comparison of modern economies with ancient and feudal economies led him to identify patterns of development as diverse as the social activity resulting from the adoption of Roman law in the West, to the technical utilization of scientific knowledge for purposes of the rational mastery over reality.

In addition to this was Weber’s methodological innovations and the role they played in the development of the social sciences. In contrast to Marx or Durkheim, Weber challenged the validity of adopting a straightforward scientific view of society that was modeled on the methods of the natural sciences. It was within this framework that Weber put forward a general theory of social action, which he outlined in a work entitled Economy and Society, and it was this that established his difference from Durkheim. Whereas Durkheim had explicitly focused on trying to found a method of investigation which broke with speculative philosophy by adopting scientific positivism, Weber questioned the necessity of adopting the methods of the natural sciences in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Karl Marx
• 3 Emile Durkheim
• 4 Max Weber
• Glossary of Concepts
• Bibliography
• Index