Understanding Classical Sociology

Marx, Weber, Durkheim

John A Hughes, Wes Sharrock, Peter J Martin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781446229897
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Praise for the First Edition:

`Totally reliable… the authors have produced a book urgently needed by all those charged with introducing students to the classics… quite indispensable? - Times Higher Education Supplement

This is a fully updated and expanded new edition of the successful undergraduate text. Providing a lucid examination of the pivotal theories of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, the authors submit that these figures have decisively shaped the discipline. They show how the classical apparatus is in use, even though it is being directed in new ways in response to the changing character of society.

Written with the needs of undergraduates in mind, the text is essential reading for students in sociology and social theory.

Introduction

1

BEGINNING CHAPTER ONE

In this chapter we will outline the main background themes which concerned the classic writers, Marx, Durkheim and Weber. These themes were preoccupations in social thought from the beginning of the 19th century and include:

• Sociology’s intellectual character and the ideas which played an important part in formulating the very idea of sociology as a discipline.
• Sociology’s critique of individualism and its ‘conservative’ reaction against the Enlightenment.
• Sociology as a science.
• Understandings of the nature of society.
• The relationship between sociology and history.

It may seem strange to be offering an exposition of the ideas of Marx, Weber and Durkheim in an era when, so it is argued by some in the discipline, the ‘grand narratives’ of thought, as Lyotard (1984) terms overarching theoretical schemes, have lost their validity. New identities, new forms of knowledge, new patterns of social relationships, new sources of division, and more, are all forcing a break, it is claimed, with a past shaped by modes of thought originating over three hundred years ago during the Enlightenment. Marx, Weber and Durkheim are Victorian scholars and it is perhaps hard to grasp that they have anything of relevance to say to a world which has dramatically changed since their time.

Of course, there has always been a prominent strand in sociological thought which is sensitive to the idea that the world or the discipline, most often both, is in an impending state of crisis. Indeed, a strong case can be made that such a sense was critical in the very formation of the discipline in the early nineteenth century as industrialism began to effect major changes in patterns of life throughout Europe. Later in that century, a young French philosophy teacher was particularly concerned with what he saw as the growing instability of social life. Long-established values and ways of life seemed to be breaking down as industrialisation and urbanisation transformed the society of his day. Where once the authority of church and monarchy had gone unquestioned, there now seemed to be no authority which could hold society together. Employers and workers confronted each other with undisguised hostility, rates of crime were rising and individuals tended to see each other simply as means to achieve their own selfish ends. Suicides, too, were increasing as the old links to family and community grew weaker. The young Frenchman, says one commentator, was ‘haunted by the thought that modern society … was a fragile affair, a potentially unstable mix of elements that was always on the verge of dissolving into chaos’. His writings were an effort to try to understand how this state of affairs had arisen so that it could be put right, stressing the ‘urgency of this task, as though he saw himself in a race against time with the gathering forces of anarchy’ (Parkin, 1992: 59). The worried young thinker was Émile Durkheim, who addressed these problems in his first major work, On the Division of Labour in Society, published in 1893. The same kind of concerns that engaged Durkheim then are ones that have provoked ‘communitarianism’ (Etzioni, 1998) and arguments about the necessity for, and loss of, trust (Fukuyama, 1999) in recent years.

In Durkheim, we see not only a motivation for sociological thinking drawn from a sense of impending crisis, but also a formulation of what is, with strong justification, the central question of sociology itself, namely: how is social order possible? Although, and as we shall see, there are many different ways of formulating this question, as well as different answers, it is perhaps to Marx, Weber and Durkheim that we owe the greatest debt for the most systematic attempts to set out just how the question might be addressed; ideas which are of enduring concern and relevance. When poststructuralists tell us, for example, that ‘authors’ are not really free, autonomous and creative spirits, but people whose words and thoughts bear the imprint of the social context in which they live, they are reviving a theme which was fundamental in Durkheim’s work. When the postmodernists insist that we must abandon ‘metanarratives’, that is, the great theoretical schemes which attempt to comprehend vast tracts of reality, we are hearing echoes of Weber’s contention that such schemes are, indeed, unsustainable and that all knowledge is limited, provisional and generated only from a particular point of view. Examples could, we believe, be multiplied. The point, however, is that the issues confronted by these classic sociological theorists, and the ideas they developed from them, are of continuing relevance for the discipline and the world which it tries to understand.

Despite the often bewildering succession of theoretical fashions which sociology seems heir to, the ideas of these thinkers continue to exert a powerful if often unacknowledged influence in the discipline. But what seems to have been lost, especially on the part of students, is an adequate sense of what these thinkers were trying to say and, equally important, what sociological problems they were trying to address. So much so that there is a danger of losing sight of what current debates within the discipline are about, where they arose and what continuities and divergences they represent within the sociological tradition.

It would be quite wrong, of course, to imply that the voices of Marx, Durkheim and Weber have been silenced. On the contrary. If anything, the respect accorded to the three of them has increased over the years since they first wrote. It was not until 1937, with the publication of Talcott Parsons’, The Structure of Social Action, that Durkheim and Weber became firmly established among scholars in the English-speaking world. Interest in their thought gathered momentum with the expansion of academic sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, during the 1960s and 1970s there was an intense and widespread renewal of interest in Marx’s thought. Indeed, in preparing this second edition we naturally made a bibliographic search of an international database of social science publications for the names Marx, Weber and Durkheim – only of the years since 1999 – which yielded, respectively, 315, 204, and 124 items. A further search of abstracts, texts and topics would have inflated these numbers even more. So interest in these classic writers remains strong if perhaps less focused, certainly as far as teaching is concerned. We will have more to say on this issue in the Conclusion.

Marx, Durkheim and Weber are widely, if unfortunately, regarded as the ‘founding fathers’ of modern sociology. Indeed, it would be hard to underestimate the influence of Marx in fields such as social stratification and mobility, education, economic development, the state, culture and media, among others. Even non-Marxist sociologists have adopted concepts and ideas, such as those of class and class structure, class consciousness and alienation, in ways that are clearly derived from Marx’s writings. The influence of Durkheim, too, has been pervasive, though more indirect. Functionalism, for example, in both sociology and social anthropology reflects fundamentally Durkheimian assumptions about the nature of sociology and social life. As we shall see, the whole tradition of structuralist thought in the twentieth century owes much to Durkheim’s later work. Furthermore, it was Durkheim who also pioneered the use of quantitative analysis, using statistical methods, in the investigation of society, driven by his ambition to develop sociology as a rigorous science in place of the speculative and impressionistic approaches of most social thinkers before him. Weber was no less committed to the development of a social science but, coming from a different intellectual tradition, expressed doubts about the validity of viewing societies as structures, as wholes which had properties independent of the elements which composed them. He also inaugurated a tradition of ‘interpretative’ sociology which takes human individuals, their ideas and their actions, as the starting point for sociological analysis. Weber’s rather pessimistic conclusions about the future of industrialised, rationalised modern societies have echoed throughout the years, notably in the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, such as Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer and others, and, more recently, in the thought of Habermas, widely regarded as their intellectual heir. Indeed, it is from the direct and indirect influence of Marx and Weber, prominently mediated by the Frankfurt School, that the thriving contemporary enterprise of cultural studies has derived much of its inspiration, and many of its themes and techniques of analysis. Further, the process of ‘globalisation’, which currently gains so much attention and sometimes meets with fierce opposition, can be viewed as a continuation of long standing processes of the dynamic expansion of capitalism (as identified by Marx) and of thoroughgoing ‘rationalisation’ of social organisation (as emphasised by Weber).

For all these reasons, and more, the sheer extent of the influence exerted by these three thinkers makes them essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the nature of modern sociology as a body of thought in which particular problems, theories and perspectives are established. It is, however, important to bear in mind, as we have already hinted, that it is not altogether satisfactory to regard these three as the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology. Important as their contribution has turned out to be for sociology, this should not, even unintentionally, obscure the importance of other scholars. Figures such as Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) were influential in their day even if uncelebrated now. By contrast, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) are beginning to attract greater attention than they ever did in their lifetimes or at any time since. Yet each of them played a crucial part in the development of modern sociological thought. We resist, then, the idea that Marx, Durkheim and Weber are to be regarded as the trinity who created modern sociology. Nevertheless, because of their influence, and because of the ways in which the sociological agenda continues to reflect so strongly many of their concerns, we believe that a presentation of their ideas is a potent way of understanding the nature of sociological thought. Each, in his own way, exhibits the difficult analytic problems which arise from the fundamental insight that human beings are essentially social creatures. It is not individuals who create forms of society, Durkheim argued, but forms of society that create individuals. The point is developed in a variety of ways, in all styles of sociological thinking, from the great generalities of structural Marxism to the detailed investigation of interpersonal interaction. Even Weber, who clearly saw the danger of reducing people to mere puppets whose strings were pulled by invisible social forces, and who wished to preserve the idea of the autonomous individual, none the less insisted than the actions and beliefs of such individuals could only be understood by taking into account the specific cultural characteristics of their social context. Indeed, one of the fundamental theoretical tasks of sociological thought has been to try to reconcile the individual and the social, the personal and the cultural, individual action and social structures. The issues involved are displayed clearly, and forcefully, in the works of all three of these thinkers as are a host of problems surrounding the debates about the nature and form of sociological inquiry.

Of course, we acknowledge the criticism that we should not let the assumptions and preoccupations of Dead White European Males, or DWEMs, govern our thinking about contemporary society and social life. Each of them, from what we know of their biographies, exhibited the patriarchal attitudes and assumptions which were dominant in their time. It is also evident that none of them, not even Marx, could pass contemporary tests of ‘political correctness’ – indeed, as Francis Wheen’s (1999) biography suggests, Marx might be the worst offender of the three. In the same year as Wheen’s book became a bestseller, in a ‘cyber poll’ Marx was voted thinker of the millenium. We take the view, however, that this does not in itself invalidate their sociological ideas. These need to be judged in terms of sociological criteria, and should stand or fall by these. However, there are, in their works, various ideas which have relevance to contemporary critical social thought, including the feminist critique of patriarchal society. Marx and Engels, for example, on the way in which capitalism depends on the unpaid but essential domestic work done by women, or their reduction to the status of property in the context of bourgeois family life, are cases in point. Similarly, Weber’s insistence that not all forms of exploitation are economic, as well as his recognition of the importance of status in social life, is useful in attempting to understand the nature and the persistence of ethnic and gendered inequalities.

The works of these classic theorists, then, provides us with a way of coming to understand fundamental theoretical and methodological issues within sociology as well as a means of appreciating the intellectual concerns which give sociology coherence as a discipline. This point is worth emphasising at a time when several forces are combining to place this coherence under some strain. The impact of postmodernism, for example, and the rise of cultural studies has been to fragment sociology so that a clear sight of its central preoccupations is in danger of being lost. As we have already noted, one paradoxical consequence of the recent revival of interest in general social theory has been a tendency to marginalise the classic authors as ‘writers about modernity’ rather than about the postmodern world which, it is argued, we currently inhabit. However, and as we suggested earlier, many of the issues and problems engaged with by recent theorists were, in fact, originally confronted by Marx, Durkheim and Weber, often with a greater degree of clarity than has been customary of late. Further, in asserting the importance of their ideas we wish also to reassert the validity of the sociological tradition that they did so much to establish. As we have already seen, it is a persistent, and persuasive, claim of postmodern theorists that the era of the ‘grand narrative’, which provides an account of all history, is over and that all knowledge is provisional and partial. Such a view was shared by Weber. His response, however, was not to withdraw into relativism, speculation or navel-gazing, but to begin the elaboration of a programme which would allow for the systematic analysis of the social world, in all its richness and complexity: a task, incidentally, which ‘postmodernist’ writers would regard as futile. To do this, he reasoned, it is necessary to develop a coherent perspective to guide our investigations, and sociology itself is such a perspective, the distinctiveness of which owes much to the works of Marx, Durkheim and Weber.

In stressing the idea of a sociological tradition we are not, at the same time, proposing that there is the equivalent of a sociological canon; that is, a set of principles which define the discipline and to which all practitioners adhere. As we are at pains to point out throughout this book and its companion volume, Understanding Modern Sociology, (Sharrock et al, 2003), sociology is not a unified discipline. If anything it is a collection of diversified programmes each trying to work out how to undertake the systematic analysis of social organisation, to put it as generally as we can. Accordingly, very often the differences between sociological approaches are about fundamental matters affecting the very nature of the discipline and about how some of its basic concepts are to be understood – both issues are prominent throughout the discussions to follow. Sociology has a tradition in much the same sense we might want to say that Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism, among others no doubt, are part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The differences between them are very often fundamental, regrettably frequently to the point of deadly rivalry, but, nevertheless, they possess sufficient thematic commonality for us to see them as part of a religious tradition. It is perhaps best not to take the analogy too far, though it does capture what we mean in talking about the sociological tradition. It is not, to reinforce the point, a claim that there are, or even ought to be, prescriptions as to how sociology is to be done.

For now, we want to prepare for the more detailed discussion which follows in subsequent chapters by outlining some general themes which constitute sociology’s distinctiveness.

Sociology’s Intellectual Character

Recognisably sociological ideas have been part of the Western intellectual tradition for centuries, certainly since the time of the first Greek philosophers. However, it is not our purpose here to review the complete history of social thought. What we are about is setting the scene by briefly summarising some aspects of the European thought to which Marx, Durkheim and Weber responded. In this respect, our starting point is the reorientation of European intellectual life in the eighteenth century: the Enlightenment. The authority of tradition, of religion, of custom, were all subjected to examination by ‘Reason’ and found wanting as so much superstition and mystification. Received wisdom was to be replaced by scientific knowledge obtained through careful and systematically organised inquiry and experimentation, rather than by means of mere speculation or the unquestioned acceptance of customary beliefs. The result was the growth of science and technology from the seventeenth century onwards, which provided the capacity to control and exploit the environment and the forces of nature in unprecedented ways. Indeed, it is this spirit of rational inquiry which, it is argued, typifies the modern world.

Inevitably, it was not long before this new faith in reason and science was seen as relevant to the organisation of human affairs. Thinkers increasingly came to regard society and its arrangements not as matters which were preordained and inevitable, but as things which could be changed for the better in the interests of the general welfare. For the radical theorists of the French Enlightenment, it was existing social institutions, notably the church and the state, which constituted the major obstacle to the liberation of humanity. ‘Man is born free’, wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), ‘but is everywhere in chains’. Meanwhile in Scotland, a remarkable generation of intellectuals, including Adam Smith (1723–90), John Millar (1735–1801) and Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), applied their formidable powers to the analysis of human societies. Ferguson, for example, wrote that society had a definite structure and the relation of its parts to the whole was the ‘principal object’ of a social science. Clearly, the development of this social science would have just as corrosive an effect on established beliefs and ideas as natural science had on beliefs about the natural world; perhaps more so since the implications of the new social theorists’ ideas were to challenge the foundations of the social and political order. The idea of God as the supreme being was opened to doubt, the rights of monarchs to rule put to question, and the accepted hierarchies of the traditional social order increasingly challenged.

Of course, throughout history there have been challenges by the dispossessed against the holders of power and privilege. These were rarely conceived, however, as attempts to alter the shape of society itself, a shape which was typically considered to have been divinely ordained or beyond human capacity to alter. Such challenges were often directed at reasserting traditional rights rather than arguing for the major restructuring of society itself. By contrast, what the eighteenth century generated was a group of thinkers who argued that social arrangements themselves, rather than wickedness, ill luck or divine retribution, could be the source of human misery and inequality. For some, as we have suggested, the conclusion to be drawn was that society itself required radically restructuring. But how was this to be brought about? By what principles should the new order be organised? In order to change society it was first of all necessary to understand it. For Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who coined the name for the discipline, sociology was to be the science by which an understanding of society could be achieved and, thus, provide the basis for its reconstruction. In this respect, with his em...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Karl Marx
• 3 Max Weber
• 4 Émile Durkheim
• 5 Conclusion
• References
• Index