The Future of the Sociological Classics (RLE Social Theory)

Buford Rhea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138989351
• eBook ISBN: 9781000155747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this important volume of specially commissioned essays, nine leading sociologists present their answers to the question, 'What use are the sociological classics today?' They report on the latest scholarship, on neglected features of the various masters, on promising applications and unrecognised implications.

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1
Karl Marx: Aspects of His Social Thought and Their Contemporary Relevance

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IRVING M. ZEITLIN

The past several decades have yielded important clarification of Marx’s philosophical outlook. Marx and especially Engels often employed the word ‘materialist’ to describe their method of studying man, society and history. However, the term ‘materialist’ caused a fundamental misunderstanding, and Marx’s dialectical approach was soon transformed into the very caricature he criticized in others. Indeed, the full lesson of Marx’s mediation between Hegel’s idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism has yet to be learned today.

Marx spoke of a ‘rational kernel’ buried in the ‘mystical shell’ of Hegel’s philosophy. What, in a word, was that ‘rational kernel’? It was the critical insight that humans are active, creative beings who constitute their world, and thereby themselves, by means of their practical activity. The human world, Hegel and other idealists had understood, is a ‘superorganic’, historically evolved cultural cosmos in the modern anthropological sense. However, the trouble with this view was that Hegel described social and historical processes in highly abstract metaphysical terms. The real world of human activities and struggles was scarcely discernible behind the Hegelian categories. Hegel had severed reason from its natural-social roots in man, turning it into a disembodied, independent, creative historical subject. ‘Reason’ (or ‘the Ideal’, or ‘the Spirit’) became the guiding immanent principle of history, while the real world was merely the external form of the Idea. For Marx this was an upside-down view of things.

Yet Feuerbach’s materialistic critique of Hegel was equally unsatisfactory. For he transformed the human being into a wholly passive and determined object. Feuerbach and other mechanistic materialists had produced the one-sided doctrine according to which humans are the product of circumstances, pure and simple. However, Marx reminded them that ‘it is humans who make and change circumstances’. Thus Marx sought to overcome the extreme one-sidedness of both the idealist and materialist doctrines in a new dialectical synthesis of his own.

Today contemporary social science has yet to liberate itself from these extremes. In certain currents of social psychology, for example, there exists a powerful idealistic tendency. Humans are portrayed as disembodied, symbolizing, self-indicating and other-indicating role-players. Yet these role-players are anything but active and creative beings since they simply internalize and absorb whatever society decides to implant in them. From this ‘oversocialized’ standpoint there is no human nature that is not wholly a product of society. The human is portrayed as if the stuff of his being were totally ideational. At the same time he is denied any real conscious creativity since he is wholly passive and conditioned. He is all ‘me’, in George Herbert Mead’s terms, and no ‘I’.

This idealistic caricature of the human being has its materialistic counterpart in the highly influential theories of B. F. Skinner — the Feuerbach of today. In all essential respects the present-day behaviorism of B. F. Skinner is hardly to be distinguished from the classical doctrine of J. B. Watson. ‘We can follow the path taken by physics and biology’, writes Skinner,

by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other prerequisites of [so-called] autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior. (1975, pp. 12-13).

Skinner goes on to inform us that the stimulus—response model never solved the basic problems of behavior and was never very convincing ‘because something like an inner man had to be invented to convert a stimulus into a response’ (1975, p. 15). But does Skinner’s conception of ‘operant conditioning’, replete with positive and negative reinforcers, actually achieve greater success in eliminating an ‘inner man’? Let us see. He writes that ‘negative reinforcers are called aversive in the sense that they are the things organisms “turn away from”’ (1975, p. 25). Skinner thus seems not to have noticed that his theory is afflicted by the same contradictions he found in classical behaviorism. For while he denies that organisms have any autonomy whatsoever, he nonetheless conceives of them as turning away from negative reinforcers. Clearly an ‘inner man’ of some kind is present in this scheme too. How otherwise shall we account for the organism’s turning away?

Skinner zealously strives to get rid of the ‘inner man’ and all that it implies, namely, an organism with a will and consciousness of its own. ‘Man’s struggle for freedom,’ he writes, ‘is not due to a will to be free, but to certain behavioral processes characteristic of the human organism, the chief effect of which is the avoidance of or escape from so-called “aversive” features of the environment’ (1975, p. 39). Let us therefore note that Skinner succeeds no better than his behavioristic predecessors in eliminating the inner man. For even in Skinner’s conception of things man has sufficient consciousnes. to distinguish between positive and negative features of the environment; sufficient wil. to wish to escape from its aversive features; and sufficient autonom. to succeed in escaping from aversive features.

For Skinner, ‘freedom’, ‘dignity’, ‘consciousness’, ‘autonomy’, and so on, are pure fictions. All of these terms imply that man is an active, creative being. But this is precisely what the behaviorists wish to deny. ‘A person does not act upon the world’, says Skinner, ‘the world acts upon him’ (1975, p. 202). Since man is a wholly determined, passive object anyway, Skinner contends, we lose nothing by stripping away the functions previously ascribed to that fictional entity called ‘autonomous man’, and transferring them to the controlling environment.

So we see that Skinner follows closely in the footsteps of Ludwig Feuerbach. The image of man common to both these thinkers is that of a being wholly controlled from the outside. In Skinner’s utopia man will be no less controlled than ever before; but in the new society the environment will no longer be an unplanned determiner. Instead, it will be an environment governed by what Skinner regards as advanced, scientific behavioristic principles.

Several questions suggest themselves about both the theoretical and political aspects of Skinner’s proposal. If men are wholly passive and determined creatures, then who will serve as the active conditioners in Skinner’s new society? If everyone learns only through conditioning, how will the conditioners learn? Who will condition the conditioners? Or does Skinner mean that everyone will condition everyone else? Skinner asks us to remember that man’s environment is ‘largely of his own making’ (1975, p. 205).

But how does a passive, totally determined being make his own environment? Because these and other problems, contradictions and ambiguities are nowhere resolved in Skinner’s theory, we may safely conclude that he has advanced no further than the mechanistic materialists of the nineteenth century and that all of Marx’s criticisms of that doctrine apply with equal force to present-day behaviorism and to theories of a similar kind.

We see, then, that Marx’s mediation between Hegel and Feuerbach is of more than historical interest. His methodological point was to grasp human nature as authentically as possible. Marx was among the first to formulate an adequate conception of man as a socia. being. As early as the Paris Manuscript. he states that man’s life ‘even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life carried out together with others — is an expression and confirmation of social life’ (Marx, 1961, p. 105).

However, what has been almost entirely overlooked is Marx’s view of man as an integral part of the organic world. ‘Man’, Marx stresses again and again, is a natural being, but a unique one.¹ As a human being he not only retains his natural needs (hunger and sex) but acquires new ones — love. to single out the most essential for his happiness. ‘If you love without evoking love in return’, he writes, ‘if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent — a misfortune’ (Marx, 1961, p. 141). It is clear that the Paris Manuscript. as a whole represent Marx’s conception of human nature and human needs. It is this conception that became his implicit criterion for assessing the goodness of social systems. More, Marx’s understanding of alienation embraces, among other things, the process of repressio. in the Freudian sense.

This has been clearly brought out by Herbert Marcuse’s reinterpretation of Freud. At the very center of Freud’s theory one finds an irremediable antagonism between the organic needs of the human being and the requirements of the civilizing process. The development of the ego and super-ego necessarily involves a subordination of the individual’s organic needs (the pleasure principle) to the demands of the socializing agencies (the reality principle). The result is a repression of man’s natural impulses and needs with all that this entails — deep unhappiness, mental and emotional disturbances, and the like. A tragic contradiction prevails in which the advance of civilization exacts from man huge bio-psychic cost. This is the conclusion Freud drew in his late writings, notably in Civilization and Its Discontents.

However, as Marcuse has reminded us, this necessary process does not, in and of itself, account for the deprivation and pain that man has suffered historically (1955). This is evident from the fact that the societies of the past and present have never distributed scarce resources in accordance with individual human needs. On the contrary, scarcity has always been controlled by the privileged elements of society and distributed in accordance with their interests. There-fore, it is not the ‘reality principle’ pure and simple that accounts for man’s suffering. Added to the necessary repression required by an. form of human organization, man has endured the controls of specific institutions of domination. These have not been necessary, strictly speaking, and have therefore exacted from man surplus repression. The pleasure principle has been hedged in and suppressed not simply because man’s struggle with nature has required it, but also and primarily because the privileged interests of those who dominate society have enforced it.

This is an important extrapolation by Marcuse from Freud’s own concepts. For it preserves Freud’s general insight and prevents the extreme flattening out of man’s nature that one finds in certain sociologistic doctrines. At the same time the extrapolation alerts us to the fact that man suffers more than he must owing to the effects of specific forms of social organization which are unnecessarily repressive. This idea is certainly implied by Marx’s concept of alienation, a condition in which man ‘does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies, but is physically exhausted and mentally debased’ (1961, p. 73). Doubtless what Marcuse calls surplus-repression is an element of alienation. In a passage reminiscent of the Paris Manuscript. and probably inspired by them, Marcuse writes:

For the vast majority of the population, the scope and mode of satisfaction are determined by their own labor; but their labor is work for an apparatus which they do not control, which operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if they want to live. And it becomes the more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes. Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties but work in alienation. Work has now become general, and so have the restrictions placed upon the libido: labor time, which is the largest part of the individual’s life time, is painful time, for alienated labor is absence of gratification, negation of the pleasure principle. (1955, p. 41)

There is a definite compatibility, therefore, between Marx and a reinterpreted Freud.

The greatest value of Marx’s dialectica. view of man lies in his recognition of both the active and the conditioned sides, of the natural and the social dimensions. Man, for Marx, is a being with natural-social needs. The fulfillment of those needs is the measure of a good society.

The Problem of Order

It follows from Marx’s recognition of man’s active side, that he can never become a totally socialized and conditioned being. There always remains a residue of resistance in the human being to the repressive rules, roles and relationships imposed upon him. Even Skinner, as we have seen, has to admit that it is i. man’s nature to try to avoid and escape the ‘aversive’ features of his environment. The question arises, then, as to how social order is maintained in the face of this human characteristic.

From the time of Aristotle political theorists had maintained that moderate property-ownership and, hence, economic independence for the majority of society’s members, was a precondition of the stable polity. A large middle class can mediate successfully between the extremes of wealth and poverty and can moderate the tensions between them. A situation of this sort may have existed in the English countryside prior to the Enclosure movement. Poor as some of the English peasant-proprietors may have been at that time, the vast majority had unrestricted usufruct of the land they tilled, and they owned their instruments of production. In these circumstances everyone or almost everyone had a stake in the existing order, and Aristotle’s principle was realized in practice.

But with the Enclosures and the beginnings of capitalism, there occurred certain changes in the social structure which rendered Aristotle’s logic obsolete. For now one witnessed the phenomenal growth of a class of propertyless proletarians. Since they owned nothing, they could have no stake in the system. If such a class had remained small, it would have constituted little or no threat to the existing order. But when this class became a nation within a nation, to paraphrase Disraeli, it was bound to create conflicts and antagonisms.

So the question is this: how is social order maintained in a society containing a very large class of persons with no material interest in the prevailing system? Marx’s reply is highly complex. To begin with there is the Hobbesian element. Doubtless fear of the Leviathan, of the coercive state apparatus, played a role in engendering the compliance of the dominated class. In addition, the fact that the wage-laborers were totally dependent for their livelihood on the owners of the means of production meant that fear of losing their jobs also contributed to their compliance. The extreme dependence of the working class was also noted by Durkheim. He spoke of the ‘forced division of labor’, a condition in which, owing to the fundamental inequalities between employers and workers, the contractual relationship between them was objectively coercive and unjust (Durkheim, 1933, pp. 374f.). Similarly Max Weber wrote that capitalism presupposes a class of workers who offer their services ‘in the formal sense voluntarily, but actually under the compulsion of the whip of hunger’ (1961, p. 209).

Besides the ‘whip of hunger’ and the fear of the Leviathan there is still another reason why dominated groups generally tend to obey and comply. Although the organized ruling minority has the vastly superior might of the state at its disposal, and can therefore repel challenges to its rule by force, this is done only as a last resort. As a rule it succeeds in stabilizing its dominance by making it acceptable to the ruled masses. This is accomplished by means of what Marx called the ruling ideology. Every ruling class endeavors to justify its exercise of power by resting it on some higher moral principle. Marx’s ‘ruling ideology’ is thus equivalent to Weber’s ‘legitimation’, Mosca’s ‘political formula’, Pareto’s ‘derivations’, Sorel’s ‘myths’ and Gramsci’s ‘ideological hegemony.’

The ruling ideology is not merely propaganda. Nor is it a great fraud with which to trick the people i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Karl Marx: Aspects of His Social Thought and Their Contemporary Relevance
• 2 Hobbes, Toennies, Vico: Starting Points in Sociology
• 3 Max Weber and Contemporary Sociology
• 4 Sociology’s Quest for the Classics: The Case of Simmel
• 5 Vilfredo Pareto: Socio-Biology, System and Revolution
• 6 Durkheim’s ‘Elementary Forms’ as ‘Revelation’
• 7 George Herbert Mead
• 8 The Uses of Classical Sociological Theory
• 9 Revisiting the Classics throughout a Long Career
• Bibliography
• Index of Names