Sociological Theory, Research Paper Example

Perspectives of the social world: Marx, Durkheim, weber and parsons

Introduction

Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons have all advanced unique theoretical frameworks from which to approach the phenomenon of society. Sociology as a discipline has taken various concepts from these thinkers as a starting point from which to analyze any number of phenomena constitutive of the social world, alongside the social world as a whole. On the one hand, the conceptual frameworks provided by these thinkers allows for a certain flexibility with which to develop theoretical approaches to a given object of analysis.  On the other hand, we may detect in each of these thinkers a select number of crucial concepts that inform their respective accounts. In other words, what is present in all these theories is a certain bare number of concepts that delineate the fundamental remit of their approaches to describing and explaining the social world. For example, Marx will emphasize economics, particularly the antagonism of classes; Durkheim forwards a structuralist approach, in which relations generated by social structures are crucial to an understanding of society; Weber accents what has been termed in the academic literature an antipositivist or hermeneutic approach, which draws attention to the subjective construction of meaning and influence; Parsons is viewed as one of the initiators of action theory, which assumes many of the ideas of the classical sociological figures in the form of a type of synthesis. In the following essay, we shall examine more precisely how each of these thinkers construe the social world, particularly in light of the concepts and theories that they have advanced, concepts and theories which can be said to represent four distinct sociological approaches. Accordingly, we shall attempt to summarize a certain trajectory of the social that is anticipated in the works of these theorists, that is, how they anticipate the development of society and how such development relates to contemporary society. We shall then argue for the views for or against these accounts according to our reading of contemporary society, in an attempt to determine which approach may be best considered to recapitulate the societal concerns of the present time.

Marx

The academic literature of approximately the last half-century tends to delineate the theoretical ancestry of sociology in terms of three “founding fathers”: Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. As Mike Gane notes, “the new corpus established at the end of the 1960s focused on Marx, Weber and Durkheim as the key founders of the discipline.” (93) The importance of these three thinkers can be construed both in terms of the expansive systems that they developed and the radicality of their conceptual innovations. In contrast to this initial “founding” group, Parsons may be situated as a later thinker, significant for introducing Weber and Durkheim extensively into the Anglophone academic literature, while simultaneously presenting his own unique approach to sociological studies. Yet the pertinence of the idea of the founding of sociology by Weber, Marx, and Durkheim lies in the notion that they allowed for the very perception of the social as a field of intellectual and theoretical study: in essence, their contributions lie in how they created a theoretical object from what had previously been merely an unconscious existential concern separated from the rigors of analysis.

Marx can be viewed as anticipating the object of sociology according to a conceptual innovation that made human relations and the framework in which human relations are carried out central to his systematic. This is summarized in Marx’s well-known reversal of Hegel: in essence, for a rudimentary understanding of Marx’s sociological breakthrough what is required is a brief summarization of Hegel. Whereas Hegel and his followers the “Young Hegelians”, attempted to provide an account of human history according to the dialectical progression of the Spirit and the gradual development of the Idea, Marx essentially “materialized” Hegel’s dialectic. As Adams and Sydie observe, “Marx not only criticized Hegel’s metaphysics, but also parted company with, and strongly criticized, these Young Hegelians, whom he called ‘pseudo-realists.’” (127) That is to say, Marx looked for the trajectory of history as immanent to the material actions of humanity itself, according to their practices, and the organizations of their society. What became evident to Marx was that history was not coextensive with some gradual progression of logic that refined ideas, but rather that at the heart of history was a fundamental social antagonism. While Hegel emphasized the antagonism and eventual reconciliation of ideas in the form of a dialectic consisting of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, Marx conceived of this antagonism in terms of the relationship between the ruling class and the working class. This account is clearly summarized in Marx’s fundamental thesis from The Communist Manifesto: “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.” (219) Such a summarization of history obviously underscores that there is a particular social arrangement at the heart of history itself. This arrangement is acutely a social stratification that summarizes a tension between two groups and reveals itself in all historical arrangements. Accordingly, Marx’s fundamental theoretical gesture is to place human relations at the heart of his account; moreover, it is a socially informed account of human relations, constituted by an antagonism.

Marx’s system becomes more clear when we consider the reasons for the social stratification and the logic of the separation between classes. For example, one can note that in Plato’s Republic there is also a social stratification posited, as demonstrated in the “Myth of the Metals”, when Plato discusses the constitution of the ideal city in terms of a separation between workers, guardians and philosophers. In Plato, such stratification is viewed from a metaphysical perspective, representative of an ideal city. Marx essentially wants to uncover the non-metaphysical logic of such social stratification, through an emphasis on the material reasons for the creation of separation between groups and classes. The reason that Marx identifies is an earthly, material phenomenon: economics creates classes through the control of the means of production. Workers are “alienated” from production, an alienation which Adams and Sydie describe as follows: “neither the slave nor the serf owns his or her means of production or its production….In capitalist industrial society, alienation has become the common condition of life.” (128) Hence, society is structured according those who control the means of production control and those who are forced to sell their physical labour in order to survive. Accordingly, these working classes become subject to the domination of the ruling class, and a tension lies at the heart of the relationship between the two classes.

Whereas Marx’ s history proceeds through a teleological movement that eventually leads to the evaporation of class difference in communism, what is crucial for the subsequent appropriations of Marx’s theory within sociology is to provide concrete analyses of various social situations. For example, a sociological topic such as crime may be approached from a consideration of how working class groups, deprived of economic resources, are forced towards criminality because of economic inequality and class antagonism. Accordingly, Marxist sociology allows one to approach and predict future developments of society through a careful consideration of economic differences and the antagonism between classes. That Marx’s theory remains current and contemporary is lucidly demonstrated in economic crises, such as the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in America. Accordingly, this social stratification is crucial for Marx, as it becomes more acute over time, eventually leading to an inevitable breaking point, in which the capitalist regime cannot maintain its control over the workers. In consequence, Marx provides a radical account of how societies are constituted, while concomitantly explaining possible behaviour within society according to a precise delimitation of concepts related to economics and class.

Durkheim      

Whereas Marx’s contribution can be viewed as a serendipitous discovery of sociology, insofar as his appropriation of Hegelianism essentially begins from an assumed logic of history that subsequently grants importance to the social world as opposed to the ideal world, Durkheim’s fundamental theoretical concern can be understood as beginning from the phenomenon of society itself. That is to say, Durkheim was immediately concerned with how society functions.

Durkheim was committed to a form of sociological positivism, as influenced by the work of Comte. What such positivism entails is the possibility for the phenomenon of society to be treated as a scientific object. As Clive Seale et al., describe this approach: “positivism is identified with empiricism, which…is a belief in the importance of observation and the collection of facts, assumed to exist prior to theories.” (35) In other words, society is an empirically observable phenomenon; this phenomenon can be observed and perceived to the same degree as any other scientific object. This commitment from Durkheim can be viewed as complimentary to his commitment to a social realism: that social relations exist outside of the individual, irrespective of his existence. What social realism therefore entails is that social structures determine the individual subject, as opposed to the subject determining these social structures themselves. This follows the concept of “functionalism”, which Seale et al. explain as follows: “the idea that society is a system of interrelated forces, all of which tend to combine to produce social stability.” (29) This social realism, therefore, can be tied to Durkheim’s own concept of “social fact”: the social fact cannot merely be viewed as an autonomous choice of an individual, but rather the social fact is something that determines the individual’s behavior. The social fact is therefore symptomatic of the social realism at the heart of Durkheim’s thought, while also demonstrating the hierarchy operative in his thinking: it is society which clearly determines subjectivity.

One of the paradigmatic examples of Durkheim’s approach is found in his work Suicide, in which he presents a study of suicide with an attention paid to particular social groups as opposed to individual cases. The purely empirical observation that certain social groups, economic classes, religious denominations, etc. are more prone to suicide demonstrate that each of these societal structures exerts unique pressures upon an individual. Seale et al. describe Durkheim’s conclusions as follows: “His study of suicide envisioned people’s subjectivities (the emotions that led to suicide) as being determined in a law-like way by their degree of integration into larger social structures.” (35) It is thus the consistently higher suicide rate in, for example, wealthy communities as opposed to the poor communities – despite the obviously more difficult living conditions of the poor – which suggests that the fundamental concept with which to think through human behaviour is the greater societal group within which they exist.

Accordingly, Durkheim’s particular approach to sociology is often equated with structural functionalism. Insofar as the societal group can determine the behavior and conduct of individuals, the individual subject must be thought of in terms of his place inside a structural relationship. Accordingly, the aforementioned notion of “social fact” functions in a similar manner to customs or traditions, which provide the society its very structure through a series of normativities that yield its stability and, moreover, allows the society to perpetuate itself into the future.

The continuity at the heart of structural functionalism renders Durkheim’s thought persistently relevant to sociologists, to the degree that he sees such societies as organic wholes that are consistently affective. Durkheim’s conceptual approach thus allows one to perceive society in terms of singular structures that relate and delineate courses of actions for an individual subject. At the heart of Durkheim’s thought is therefore a certain demystification of social practices, as these practices are rather construed in terms of how they operate as “laws of society” (Seale, 35), similar to any other scientific phenomenon. Such a demystification permits for a radical distancing from the effectivity of the social, allowing one to envision other possible arrangements of society: accordingly, Durkheim’s apparatus can be construed as a powerful ethical, not only sociological, analytical tool. That is to say, societal structures are posited as particular arrangement of social relations, informed by various causes endemic to the individual structure itself, and in no way represent any pretense to some universal truth. Accordingly, future societal developments may be construed either in terms of the continued effectivity of a given stricture, or a phenomenon such as social upheaval may be viewed in terms of the break with a previous structure.

Weber

The sociology of Max Weber can be defined in stark opposition to Durkheim’s sociology according to a clear antagonism with the scientific positivism central to Durkheim’s account. In essence, from the Weberian perspective, Durkheim’s reliance on the social fact divests each particular social structure of any meaning that it may have for the subject who finds him or herself within this structure. Weber thus initiates what may be termed a subjective turn within the field of sociology, a turn that does not wish to portray societies as merely another variant of scientific, objective phenomena. In other words, it is precisely the subject’s contribution to the formation of meaning of the given societal structure that allows it not only to perpetuate itself, but also accounts for the fundamental delineation of actions that occur within a social structure, thereby determining courses of action. As opposed to structure, Weber confers an importance to “human social action”, in which the action is crucially defined according to an index related to the subject’s perceptions: the subject also confers meaning to this action, and this meaning is generated throughout the greater social field. As Keith Morrison describes Weber’s position: “in the social sciences knowledge must be of the ‘internal or subjective states of individuals’ in that human beings have an ‘inner nature’ that must be understood in order to explain outward events that lead to their social actions in the world.” (348) Accordingly, meaning disperses itself throughout particular societies through the individual actions of the members of these societies, thus defining such societies’ perception of truth. Weber essentially denotes the omission from the Durkheim perspective of the importance of the meaning of each particular societal structure. Accordingly, one can extrapolate from Weber that the scientific discourse itself is to be considered a specific form of societal organization: the scientific discourse may ascribe significant meaning to terms such as empiricism, objectivity, realism, and so it follows that this meaning informs the courses of actions within the scientific society or community. According to such an emphasis on meaning, Weber may be said to treat the various phenomena that he analyzes through an “immanent” approach, that is, embedding the sociologist in the particular horizon of a given societal group in order to understand how their unique conceptions of meaning create, stabilize and perpetuate societal formations. For example, in Weber’s classical text The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he examines the immanent meaning of Protestantism in order to determine how such meaning leads to definitive courses of action.

In terms of future societal evaluation, Weber’s theory therefore emphasizes a rigorous understanding of the meanings of unique social groups in order to understand how societies may be allowed to develop according to these very meanings that are conferred to action. Moreover, in Weber there is a certain heterogeneity present in social groups, as unlike Durkheim, there are pronounced differences in the meaning central to various social groups. Thus, in the specific context of Western culture, as Weber notes, the importance ascribed to rationality plays itself out in the unique development of the Occidental society. The emphasis on rationality corresponds to the subsequent “disenchantment” of the world, which concomitantly leads to the usurpation of traditional societal structures, such as religion, as the rational meaning assumes a dominant position over the traditional, religious or mythological meaning. The development and actions of Western society is therefore unique according to the central concepts that are ascribed meaning within this paradigm. Weber’s theory, in essence, allows us to posit the unique development of particular social formulations.

Parsons          

Talcott Parsons’ theoretical trajectory can be viewed as a constant evolution, informed by various conceptual encounters throughout the development of his thought, which is eventually crystallized under the term “action theory.” Accordingly, Parsons’ “action theory” can be abstracted as the result of a combination of classical sociological theories. Hans P.M. Adriansens writes that “Parsons claims that his action theory synthesizes the classical initiatives in a meaningful way and that it solves some fundamental dilemmas which have plagued social theory for a long time.” (347) In essence, Parsons’ endeavors to enact a certain synthesis of Durkheim’s commitment to a positivism and social realism, while also incorporating the notion of subjective meaning that is crucial to Weber’s account. Thus, on the one hand, Parsons notes the general determining effect of societal structure and the perpetuation of structure central to Durkheim. On the other hand, Parsons’ also allows for individual meaning and action within this structure. According to what may be understood as a tension between these two respective approaches, society is therefore constituted by a negotiation between these two realms. Clive Seal notes that, “conservative thinkers such as Parsons…stress the value of consensus and social order.” (36) Accordingly, meanings may differ within certain greater societal structures; nevertheless there is a minimal level of interaction between such meanings that constitute the entire structure: this is precisely the underlying consensus that allows society to function.

The conceptual importance of Parsons’ thought may be therefore defined in terms of his presentation of a more heterogeneous account of societal organization. Parsons does not perform a certain reduction – like in the cases of Durkheim, Weber and Marx – to notions such as structure, meaning, or class struggle, insofar as he views these approaches as insufficient to describe the general dynamism of the societal formation. In other words, these accounts do not posit the heterogeneity of action, for example, the possibility that a different account of meaning can emerge within a given social group. What is central to Parsons is thus a dynamic theory of action, which incorporates a multiplicity of meanings, action and structural relations to provide an account of its object.

Accordingly, the phenomenon of societal change, or the consideration of the future of society, as perceived from Parsons’ theory becomes simultaneously more facile and more complex. More complex, insofar as there is not a simple teleology to society, reducible to meaning, or economic struggle, etc.,.: this teleology is replaced by a heterogeneity, since society is constituted by a plurality of meanings – some, of course, more dominant than others – and a relationship between such meanings.  Yet societal change also becomes easier to account for: since Parsons’ recognizes the centrality of such heterogeneity, change becomes more easily to account for within his system. That is, society can be understood in terms of particular local tensions that may manifest themselves and cause deregulations in the structure, however these tensions must be resolved through consensus in order for the particular society to continue to exist.

Perspectives on the contemporary social world

When considering the work of the aforementioned theorists in regards to the phenomenon of modern or contemporary society, all four provide useful conceptual tools with which to theorize the social world. Essentially, the three classical figures of Durkheim, Marx, and Weber all perform a certain reduction in their methodological approach. Durkheim emphasizes a reduction to structure; Marx, suggests a reduction towards an economic antagonisms between classes; Weber suggests a reduction towards immanent, subjective meaning. The significance of such reductions is that they intimate a certain over-simplification of the complexity of society; for example, there is a methodological inclination to explain any societal phenomenon that might exist according to the parameters of the respective theories. In contrast, Parsons’ synthesis of various strains of classical sociological thought attempts to capture a more dynamic picture of how society actually functions, according to the heterogeneity of the societal system, and the diverse number of meanings and structures that may constitute any given social structure. However, the problem with Parsons’ account is that it essentially fails to capture the “big picture” of society itself: rather, because he emphasizes such a heterogeneous combination of elements constitutive of society, his thought loses its theoretical potential. That is to say, Parsons’ thought, in a certain sense, re-mystifies human society, making it the product of a vast number of elements and actions, all reconciled through some mysterious form of consensus. Accordingly, Parsons’ account be viewed as a clear reflection of our current capitalist society: the radical number of elements that constitute the capitalist system, the heterogeneity of capitalism itself, assigns capitalism some type of incomprehensible, ineffable, metaphysical status, much like old theologians would speak about God.

In this regard, the phenomenon of capitalism becomes crucial to think about modern societal formations, particularly in America. Despite a heterogeneity of elements that may constitute capitalism, it is still nevertheless capitalism itself which organizes such elements. This is clear in current American society, in everything from pop culture to economic crises: even in light of such economic crises, there is no radical reform of the societal economic system. Rather, there is an emphasis placed on maintaining this very capitalist economic system. Certainly, it is possible to explain such a phenomenon in its own subjective terms, like in a Weberian approach that emphasizes subjective meanings; yet the dominance of capital throughout society seems to imply that the determining societal phenomenon is an economic phenomenon. In this regard, it would appear that the Marxist sociological perspective still remains the most pertinent, as it was precisely Marx who anticipated the extent to which economics and the division between classes informs all aspects of social life. Marx provides a certain macro-level perspective, which perhaps remaining antiquated to current postmodern trends that emphasize “the end of metanarratives.” However, the true question is the extent to which such a macro-level perspective is correct and rigorous: for example, the concepts of “alienation” and the “control of the means of production” do not appear to be merely reminiscent of a metanarrative, but are rather radically pertinent concepts that exist everywhere in present-day society. Insofar as contemporary society views a continual dominance of the economic over every other sphere of social life, this would suggest that economics remains the fundamental delineating, central point of modern society. Such a view of society, therefore, does not entail any individualized or subjective account of what the meaning of society, but rather, in a combination of both Marxist and Durkheimian thought, is the identification of the particular workings of a social structure and furthermore, the identification of this particular social structure as economic, and more specifically, capitalist in nature. This is not so much a reduction towards the economic as the only relevant factor in society: rather it is an understanding of how the economic is the most dominant structurally organizing principle in society. Accordingly, Marx’s analyses remain pertinent to the extent that contemporary society remains defined by economic relations, as evidenced in the globalize economy and the division of labor that exist across the world (for example, third world countries serving as producing goods for first world countries). The importance of the Marxist analysis of society lies in this very identification, as opposed to mystifying society through an appeal to subjective meaning or an account of dynamical systems of human relation. In other words, societal structure is delineated as societal structure according to a precise element, the economy, and more specifically a capitalist economy. Accordingly, Marx provides a means by which to think the crucial organizing principle of contemporary society, an organizing principle that one encounters in every aspect of everyday existence.

Works Cited

Adams, Bert N. and R.A. Sydie. Sociological Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2001.

Adriaansens, Hans P.M. “The Conceptual Dilemma: Towards a Better Understanding of the Development in Parsonian Action-Theory”, In Talcott Parsons: Critical Assessments. Ed. P. Hamilton, London: Routledge, 1999.

Gane, Mike. “General Sociology: Introduction”, In Emile Durkheim: Critical Assessments of Leading Sociologists. Ed. W.S.F. Pickering, London: Routledge, 2001.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin, 2004.

Morrison, Ken. Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought. London: Sage, 2006.

Seale, Clive. Researching Society and Culture. 2004. London: Sage, 2004.