How Do Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons View the Social World - Research Paper Example

?Sociology How do Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons view the social world? The view of the social world which Karl Marx (1818-1883) holds is a materialist one, which means that the focus is on economic means of production and the roles that people play in creating wealth and transferring it from person to person. It rests on ideas from Hegel and other German philosophers, applied to the context of industrialization in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. Ideas and ideologies are seen as a misleading and at times falsifying force which can alienate the worker from his natural existence. A fundamental concern of Marx is the concept of different classes in society, arranged hierarchically in a pyramid form with a small number of people controlling things at the top, and a very large base number of workers who create the goods which society needs. This arrangement, in Marx’s view, contains an inbuilt source of conflict, since the elite levels seek to exploit the worker levels for their own profit. These tendencies can be resolved by a raising of the consciousness of the workers, and revolutionary activity which overturns the supremacy of capitalist elites and in theory returns more control to the workers. The elites who own the means of production are known as the bourgeoisie, and the workers who supply the labour in the production process are known as the proletariat. The main concern, therefore, in Marx’s view of society is the locus of power and how it is exercised. Marx is critical of the forces that lead capitalist business owners to drive down the wages of workers in order to make more and more profit for themselves. Work is viewed as an ennobling process which brings meaning to the life of a person, but only if there is a fair distribution of the wealth that comes from that labor. Marx was concerned about the future exploitation of workers under Capitalism. Its never-ending accumulation of money for its own sake rather than for general good sets up a cycle of opposition. The closer a worker is to the goods he produces, being able to use them himself and appreciate their value, the more authentic his experience of work is going to be. One consequence of this view of the social world is that it emphasizes the importance of human actions, and does not leave much room for philosophy and religion, which explain things by means of concepts outside human control such as scientific principles, or divine intervention. Humans construct their social reality out of historically inherited traditions, and their reactions to what happens in their lives in relation to others around them. As society after the industrial revolution grew ever more complex, so did social organization become more necessary, and this resulted in the emergence of large bureaucracies to guide and administer social functions. Solidarity between workers becomes necessary in order to hold the greed of the bourgeoisie in check, and in Marx’s view this mutual support and respect between workers is one of the main components of a successful society and a future risk is the erosion of this solidarity and an endless cycle of oppression and revolution. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was a French scholar interested in how society works, and his fundamental concern was the structures and institutions that different societies and groups within society construct in order to manage their day to day lives. Unlike Marx, Durkheim sees religion as an important aspect of the social world, and defines this broadly to include all kinds of beliefs that knit people together. For Durkheim concepts like the contrast between sacred and profane objects or actions are ways of giving meaning to human social actions. In other words religion should be seen as a product of social interaction between people in a group. Durkheim’s attempt to describe the underlying norms and values of society by means of observation of the way that people act formed the beginning of what we now recognize as the discipline of sociology. Looking at late nineteenth century France, and comparing it with primitive societies, Durkheim sees society as an evolving entity which grows more complex as industrialization takes effect. The social world depends on laws to regulate the different needs of members of the group, and as the group becomes larger, with more divergent needs, so the institutions grow more powerful in order to manage that change. Durkheim was also interested in labor and how it affects society and wrote a book entitled “On the Division of Labor in Society” which, like Marx, emphasized the importance of solidarity between workers. Durkheim identified two kinds of solidarity: organic and contractual (Durkheim, 1997, pp. 101-149). Organic solidarity is regulated by the common interests of people in the same group, and happens through unwritten rules of conduct that people adhere to out of loyalty to that group or unit, as for example in a family situation. Society also requires, however, that people behave in appropriate ways in order to maintain harmony and productivity for the general good of everyone. This means that people either opt in to these social requirements, and follow the written and unwritten rules of social institutions like work and education, which encourage co-operation or they have to be forced to comply through social institutions like laws and punishments. The idea of balance in society is important, and Durkheim lists a number of “abnormal forms” in the division of labor which upset this balance, such as “Anomic” or “Forced” division of labor (Durkheim, 1997, pp. 291 – 328), which occur in some kinds of criminal activity and in institutions such as slavery. Max Weber (1864-1920) is concerned with understanding the principles which lie behind human society. He analyzed phenomena like Capitalism and Protestantism to find out what connected them. This merging of interest in economic and social theories is typical of Weber’s work, and he also was fundamentally concerned about the way that individuals relate to each other and to society at large. For Weber, society is made up of the acts of individuals, and so it is important to understand the context and the leading personalities behind any changes that take place in society. This is a difficult undertaking, because the motivation of individual people comes from a mixture of different influences, including moral values inherited from their upbringing, events in the past and in the present, economic forces, and some emotional factors which are not entirely rational. Another important concept for Weber is authority, which he describes as having different legitimate types such as traditional, based on rules handed down from the past, rational-legal, based on well thought-out logical principles, and charismatic, based on strong leadership. All of these can become embedded in the institutions which a society erects. Government agencies most often rely on an embedded legal-rational authority in the extensive bureaucracies that they create, while political parties can rely on both traditional and charismatic kinds of authority. Some of this thinking is similar to Marxist analysis, but Weber was much more interested in individuals rather than whole classes. Weber notes that the concept of social action is important, and defines this as something which needs to be interpreted: “In “action” is included all human behaviour when and in so far as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it ....Action is social ... it takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course.” (Weber, 1964, p. 88) A very influential part of Weber’s work is his studies on rationalization, which he sees as a tendency in capitalist societies to regulate everything tightly towards the production of economic goals. He depicts this negatively, as a trap because it prevents people from developing and working towards their own internally generated meanings. Weber’s fear for the future is that people will not be able to escape from rigidly structured society that pursues distant ends which people neither understand nor support. Without these meanings there is no emotional attachment to society and people will become alienated and unhappy. Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) was an American sociologist who brought some of the ideas of European sociologists like Durkheim and Weber into an American context. He was considered to use a functionalist approach, which looked at what the institutions were doing in society and why they were doing these things. The view he had of society was that it was a large system, composed of many different parts which tended to work together in equilibrium, dealing with and adapting to changes as they came along. Different parts of the system depend on each other, and institutions are set up to absorb potential disturbances. Stuctures can be formal, like the legal system, or can be conventions that are not explicitly written down, like for example the different role expectations of male and female persons in society, but both types are very influential in ensuring that the whole system of society functions with maximum efficiency and fulfils the needs of that society. There is a recognition that the individual is sometimes at a disadvantage, and his or her needs may be overlooked or ignored in the drive for the whole system to regulate itself. It could be said that Parsons was too much concerned with systemic issues and not enough concerned with the individual and with subjective meanings and values. His view of the social world is rather static, and built on the notions of consensus and a tendency towards equilibrium, which is quite the opposite of Marx’s view of society. One of the most fundamental concerns of Parsons was to understand in detail how why institutions like hospitals and universities created their own little systems which dictated to people what their roles should be. So for example the required role of a sick person is observed in American hospitals at least to consist of four requirements, namely to withdraw from other roles or at least reduce involvement; to accept being sick and not be blamed for it; to be genuinely sick but at the same time unaccepting of this state, preferring wellness; and finally to seek and follow the advice of medical professionals who provide care for them. (Shepard, 2010, p. 439) While this analysis does not completely explain the way that American society deals with sickness and sick people, it was nevertheless a useful methodological contribution to sociology because it helped draw attention to some of the unspoken rules that operate within institutions. Parsons views society as being a system in which people enact multiple such roles, more or less voluntarily and with varying degrees of awareness of what they are doing. Education, for example, is another part of the system which helps to reproduce knowledge, but also social values and structures through the generations. By learning these things young people are enlisted into the service of this greater social system, and they learn the skills that this system needs to sustain itself economically. This analysis is quite different from the views of Marx because it does not fully consider the tensions or conflicts in the system, nor explain how and why people rebel against dominant cultural norms and values. Capitalist society is taken as if it were a self-regulating system, and this means that Parsons may not be able to detect some of the future risks and dangers to American society, and his model may be good at analysing current societies but inadequate to assist with making future predictions. Talcott Parsons’ proposal of a four-part analytical system clarifies the functional necessities, also called functional imperatives, of society: adaptation, goal-attainment, latency and integration. The first two imperatives help to maintain the boundaries between a society and the environment outside it, while the second two refer to the processes that operate within a society. This amounts to a new theory of sociology which can be applied across the board to help describe the features of different societies. It uses the language of cybernetics, and thanks to its flexibility, it can be applied even in complex situations where identification with multiple societies exists, and where societies overlap or change in unpredictable ways. References Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. Introduced and edited by Lewis A. Closer. New York: The Free Press, 1997 [originally published in French in 1893]. Parsons, Talcott. 1991. Social System. London and New York: Routledge. [First published in 1951) Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Introduced and edited by Talcott Parsons. New York: The Free Press, 1964. [first published in 1947] Shepard, Jon M. Sociology. 10th edn. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010. Read More