Classical Sociology Theorists

12 Key excerpts on "Classical Sociology Theorists"

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  Illuminating Social Life

  Classical and Contemporary Theory Revisited

  • Peter Kivisto(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  PART I Classical Sociological Theory Introduction Peter Kivisto O f all the many early figures in the history of sociology, four stand out as the most enduringly important: Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel. In different ways, the members of this quartet both shaped the discipline during its formative period and continue to influence sociological thinking today. Although their respective understandings of modern society overlapped in many ways, each of these scholars nonetheless emphasized certain features of contemporary life at the expense of others. Each developed a distinctive theoretical approach that served to provide a novel way of interpreting facets of social life. The course of events since their deaths has proven time and time again that this foursome possessed remarkable insight into the nature and the dynamics of the modern age. Indeed, their insights are crucial to understanding recent social changes associated with the economic transformations brought about by advanced industrial capitalism, the cultural dynamics of modernity and postmodernity, and the political transformations under way as a result of globalization. None of the essays in Part I pretend to capture the fullness of any of the theorists under consideration. Rather, the authors have attempted to extract from the work important elements that can be treated on their own terms but manage at the same time to reveal something of the overall thrust of the particular theorist’s intellectual legacy. Chapter 1, by Stephen Adair, explores the contemporary relevance of a person who historically preceded the other three scholars: Karl Marx (1818–1883). Unlike the others, Marx never held an academic appointment but instead lived his life as a revolutionary outsider

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  The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology

  • George Ritzer, Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy, George Ritzer, Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Part I Introduction 1 Classical Sociological Theory Alan Sica Defining “The Classical” What is meant today by “classical theory”? Scholarly interests in the current period, like so much else in cultural life, are undergoing rapid change owing to the worldwide computerization of knowledge. Whereas nineteenth century theorists, writing mostly in German or French, might have expected reading audiences to number in the hundreds, perhaps a few thousand, today's potential “market” for sociological ideas is limitless, spanning much of the globe in English or another modern translation. Whereas early European theorists had to content themselves with a vague notion of what was being written in North and South America or Asia that might have influenced their thinking, daily interaction now among globalized scholarly groupings has become expected, even routinized. Though sometimes confusing the issues at hand, this cross‐fertilization has often deepened and broadened notions of “the classical.” Given all that, one would imagine that the canon long recognized as “classical theory” might have changed in fundamental ways over the last 20 years or so, as access to computerized knowledge proceeded apace. An exact metric reflecting this historic change in globalized enlightenment could conceivably be constructed using big data sources, but until that is done systematically, other, more traditional means of measuring scholars' enthusiasms might be used. Take, for instance, a British serial founded in 2001 called The Journal of Classical Sociology. Thus far, it has dealt far more with theory than with the actual historiography of sociology as an institutionalized discipline in universities (recalling that it was only named as such by Auguste Comte on April 27, 1839). Not surprisingly, many articles have appeared in recent issues of this journal that deal exclusively with the generally recognized founders of social theory: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel

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  Cultural Theory

  An Introduction

  • Philip Smith, Alexander Riley(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONE Culture in Classical Social Theory

  In a letter of 1675, the scientist Isaac Newton wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The point he was making was that his own contribution to knowledge would not have been possible without those of his intellectual predecessors. Likewise, contemporary cultural theory has been made possible by significant earlier work. Coming to an understanding of this foundation is therefore a step of great importance. While we could begin this process with a discussion of thinkers extending back through the Enlightenment and on to Ancient Greece, perhaps the most useful place to start is in the body of literature generally thought of as classical social theory. More particularly, we begin with the work of four founding figures in sociology, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel, and two other thinkers from roughly the same period, Friedrich Nietzsche and W. E. B. DuBois. While these last two have not traditionally been classified among the founding figures in the emergence of the discipline of sociology, they nonetheless made contributions to the sociological study of culture that have been widely and increasingly recognized in the past few decades. Many current debates are shot through with foundational themes, problems, and perspectives that originate in the works of these six scholars. As thinkers with powerful minds, they provided a set of core concepts and tools that are still serviceable 100 years or more after they were developed. When they are not drawing directly upon them, current authors as likely as not are revising, refining, or critiquing lines of thinking that originated around a century or so ago. We forget history at our peril, and so knowledge of these resources provides an essential starting point and common ground for all cultural theorists.

  Karl Marx

  One of the greatest minds of the Victorian era, Karl Marx is generally thought of as an anticultural theorist. This is certainly the case when we focus on his historical materialism. Such a position is most clearly advocated in his late masterwork Das Kapital (Capital ), the first volume of which was published in 1867 (Marx 1956). Here, he proposed what has become known as the base/superstructure model of society. According to this perspective, the real motor in capitalist society was the mode of production (very roughly, the economy) that was concerned with providing for material needs. He identified as key aspects of this sphere the private ownership of the means of production (e.g., factories, machine technology) and a system of relations of production

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  Understanding Law and Society

  • Max Travers(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge-Cavendish

    (Publisher)

  Classical thinkers

    The classical sociologists and law

    Marx

    Durkheim

    Weber

    Sociological jurisprudence

    Savigny

    Sumner

    Petrazycki

    Erhlich

    The American realist tradition

    Holmes

    Pound

    Llewellyn

    The relevance of the classical tradition

    From classical to contemporary sociology

    Debates about method

    The legacy of sociological jurisprudence

    Questions

    Further reading

  Boxes 2.1     Marx’s base-superstructure model

            2.2     Llewellyn on the law school

            2.3     Weber on regulation

  The most difficult and least inviting part of introductory courses in any academic discipline is often the obligatory introduction to classical thinkers. This is, firstly, because the original writings are hard to follow, often simply because they were written in a different historical period. It requires some effort to obtain sufficient background on the political events and intellectual debates that made them interesting at the time. In my experience, students usually find no difficulty in summarising particular thinkers using the many helpful textbook accounts that have been published (for example, Adams and Sydie 2002). What they are often unable to do is make the imaginative leap that enables one to see that the ideas continue to be relevant to the problems and challenges we face today.

  When teaching sociology of law, there is the added problem that theorists have approached the relationship between law and society from within two academic disciplines. Law is the older discipline and was established in universities before the start of the modern period. Sociology was not taught in universities until the early twentieth century, partly through the intellectual and promotional efforts of Emile Durkheim. The term itself was invented in the 1800s by his predecessor Auguste Comte (1975) who was trying to make sense of a century of far-reaching changes in many areas of social life.

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  Sociology

  An Introductory Textbook and Reader

  • Daniel Nehring, Ken Plummer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These problems are obscured in established accounts of sociology’s history, as found in many older introductory textbooks you may read. Recently, however, sociologists around the world have begun to unravel and rework the story of their discipline. The work of Raewyn Connell has been crucial to these efforts. To conclude this chapter, we will examine an extract from her recent book Southern Theory (2007). Reading Connell, R. (2007), Southern Theory, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 4–9 Origin stories Open any introductory sociology textbook and you will probably find, in the first few pages, a discussion of founding fathers focused on Marx, Durkheim and Weber. The first chapter may also cite Comte, Spencer, Tönnies and Simmel, and perhaps a few others. In the view normally presented to students, these men created sociology in response to dramatic changes in European society: the Industrial Revolution, class conflict, secularisation, alienation and the modern state. This curriculum is backed by histories such as Alan Swingewood’s (2000) Short History of Sociological Thought. This well-regarded British text presents a two-part narrative of ‘Foundations: Classical Sociology’ (centring on Durkheim, Weber and Marx), and ‘Modern Sociology’, tied together by the belief that ‘Marx, Weber and Durkheim have remained at the core of modern sociology’ (2000: x). Sociologists take this account of their origins seriously. Twenty years ago, a star-studded review of Social Theory Today began with a ringing declaration of ‘the centrality of the classics’ (Alexander 1987). In the new century, commentary on classical texts remains a significant genre of theoretical writing (Baehr 2002). The idea of classical theory embodies a canon, in the sense of literary theory: a privileged set of texts, whose interpretation and reinterpretation defines a field (Seidman 1994). This particular canon embeds an internalist doctrine of sociology’s history as a social science

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  Deciphering Markets and Money

  A Sociological Analysis of Economic Institutions

  • Jukka Gronow(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Helsinki University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2

  Economic Sociology in a Theory-historical Perspective

  Classical sociology and economics

  The emergence of sociology as an academic discipline is usually dated to the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. In later codifications of its history, the list of its founding fathers varies a bit in different accounts, but at least Emile Durkheim from France and Max Weber from Germany are unanimously counted into them. The position of some others, for instance Thorstein Veblen from the USA and Georg Simmel from Germany, is less certain. However, as sociologists commenting on economics and developing an alternative conceptions of major economic institutions they easily exceed the achievements of Durkeim and can well compete successfully with Weber for the title of one of the founding fathers of economic sociology. The classical sociologists who were looking for the legitimation of the new science they claimed to represent faced a dual challenge from economics and psychology (Noro 2016). Economics and psychology had established themselves as independent fields of academic study only shortly before. Modern science of economics stood on the shoulders of the classical political economy that had been part of the project of European Enlightenment at the 18th century. It was also associated with the somewhat younger and influential philosophical doctrine of utilitarianism. Psychology had, in its turn, emerged as an independent discipline in Germany with Wundt’s studies of consciousness and the mind based mostly on introspection. The new science of sociology distanced itself from them both and criticized them, explicitly or implicitly, for their individualism and/or utilitarianism. The new field of sociology was presented as an alternative to the Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism and the new Marginalist economics, which it claimed was principally wrong or at least seriously restricted in its understanding of human action and social institutions. On the other hand, economics acted in many ways, not only as a contrast but also as a model of a theoretical—or ‘abstract’—science of human behavior. However, in particular in the German context, economics was understood to be closer to natural science than history, which was the general guide to understanding human action. This was the case with the older German school of historical economics. The competition between the new theoretical or abstract school of economics with the old historical school left deep traces in the emerging sociology’s understanding and analysis of human action and economic institutions. This is most evident in the writings and self-understanding of Max Weber as a sociologist. He developed his sociology in close dialogue with the economists and economic historians of his time.

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  Sociological Theories of Health and Illness

  • William C Cockerham(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4

  Classical Theory

  Durkheim and Weber

  A “canon” is a set of exemplary texts that defines a field. The three established canons in sociology are found in the work of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx (Connell 1997; Ritzer and Stepnisky 2018; Royce 2015). While there are other candidates from sociology’s classical era, these three have stood the test of time. They did not appear together as the most important canons of sociology in English-language introductory textbooks until the 1970s, but once it happened, their status has continued to the present day (see, for example, Giddens et al. 2018; Henslin 2019; Macionis 2018; Ritzer and Murphy 2019). While there is an inconclusive debate mentioned in the last chapter about who else’s work should be canonized, there is general agreement about these three scholars from sociology’s classical period (Royce 2015). Many classical theorists are, of course, only of historical interest since they no longer apply to our time; however, some of the theories of Durkheim, Weber, and Marx have persisted as authoritative sources for present-day theorizing in medical sociology.

  As will be seen in later chapters, theory construction in sociology tends to be cumulative and the classics provide building blocks and legitimacy for many current theories (Baert 2007), including those in medical sociology (Cockerham 2013c). As Patrick Baert (2007) points out, sociology takes its founders very seriously. Consequently, theory formation often proceeds in a cumulative fashion with present work building on the past. In this regard, sociology is much like the practice of case law in which the precedence set by prior court decisions is taken into account in determining present-day legal verdicts. Since Talcott Parsons, sociologists in all specialties have used the classics as authoritative foundations for new theories. “Underlying this intellectual genre,” states Baert (2007:121), “is the assumption that the classics need to be consolidated, combined, recycled and built upon—as if sociologists have taken on board Newton’s aphorism that ‘if I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’”

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  Class Stratification

  Comparative Perspectives

  • Richard Breen, David B. Rottman(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2

  STRATIFICATION THEORISTS

       

  Introduction

  The study of stratification boasts an enviable pedigree within sociology. Virtually all the central figures in the development of the discipline were concerned to some degree with stratification, and for many it was the primary focus of their work. And today stratification and social class remain the objects of a great deal of theoretical and empirical endeavour on the part of sociologists. Later chapters of this book examine the application of approaches to the study of social class derived from current theorizing. In this chapter we begin to lay the groundwork for that by considering the work of a number of theorists of social stratification, selected on the basis of their relevance to the core issues around which debates in the area currently revolve. Thus we deal first with the so-called ‘classical’ theorists – Marx and Weber – and then with such contemporary writers on the topic of stratification as Michael Burawoy, Anthony Giddens, John Goldthorpe, Frank Parkin, Richard Scase, and Erik Olin Wright.

  The classical theorists: Karl Marx

  One characteristic of late capitalism is the explosion of choice that it offers to the consumer. This phenomenon is rarely better illustrated than in the vast array of books and articles that present, explain and interpret the writings of Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, Max Weber. We do not wish to widen this wealth of choice by providing a comprehensive review of their work. Rather, our aim is to present a summary of the ideas of Marx and Weber as they have been carried forward to influence contemporary approaches to stratification, and, especially, class. We do this because, to a very considerable degree, these two writers established the context that continues to shape contemporary debate. In particular, we want to draw out two issues that retain particular importance in the study of stratification. These issues were highlighted in Chapter 1 : they are, first, the distinction between what we called an objective and a subjective commonality of position; in other words, the distinction between the fact (recognized by an observer) of a group that shares a common position on one of the bases of social power and the recognition of that fact and its significance by the members of that group themselves. And the second issue concerns how many bases of stratification can be said to exist in society. So in dealing with each issue we will be concerned to show how the broad approaches to stratification adopted by Marx and Weber illustrate the framework that we developed in Chapter 1

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  An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion

  Classical and Contemporary Perspectives

  • Inger Furseth, Pål Repstad(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3

  Classical sociologists and their theories of religion

  The aim of this chapter is to give an introduction to the classical sociologists and their theories of religion. Although Freud was a psychologist, he is included here because his theory of religion had a major impact on the sociology of religion. The chapter is organized chronologically and covers from 1850 to around 1950 – even if a few of the writers lived and wrote beyond 1950. We have attempted to organize each subsection by using a consistent scheme. After a brief presentation of a particular theorist, we describe his theory of individual and society, before we take a look at religion and refer to some of the critique that has been raised. We also attempt to offer suggestions as to how different theories may be used in empirical studies of religion.

  In this chapter and the following, we will in some instances look at possible connections between the context of the theorist under consideration, his Sitz im Leben, and his sociological interpretations. It should be noted that our review of sociologists only includes men: sociology of religion has, until recently, been a massively masculine affair. Towards the end of the chapter, we will attempt to relate the theorists to each other. In particular, focus is directed on the distinction between structural and actor-oriented theories and its consequences for the view of religion.

  3.1 Karl Marx: Religion as projection and illusion

  Karl Marx (1818–83) was born the son of a lawyer in Trier, Germany. His parents were Jewish, although his father later converted to Protestantism. In 1841 Marx finished his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin. During the following decade, he moved between Cologne, Brussels, Berlin, and Paris. In Paris, he and Friedrich Engels participated in revolutionary groups. The Communist Manifesto was published here in 1848. Marx had to flee the following year, and he settled in London, where he lived the rest of his life. Through his writings, Marx introduced into social theory the concepts of historical materialism and social class theory, an emphasis on the significance of technology, the theory of human alienation, and the idea that collective actors can achieve control of nature and social relations. Though there is no systematic treatment of religion in Marx’s writings, it is possible to detect his view of religion by taking a look at his general social theory and his theory of alienation.

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  The History and Philosophy of Social Science

  • H. Scott Gordon(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Review, 1927). It is evident from our survey of Durkheim’s work, however, that he did not regard this precept as imposing much constraint on the domain or content of sociology. He felt that the academic scholar should distance himself from partisan politics; he himself joined no political faction and, except for the Dreyfus affair, avoided direct participation in contemporary political controversies. But politics in a larger sense of the term was in fact the inspiration of his life’s work. Social questions caught his attention as a young man, not primarily because of the intellectual challenge they presented to one who wished to be a pure scientist, but because the investigation of them promised to provide solutions to the profound problems of modern civilization and, more specifically, to furnish scientific guidance for policies that would reverse the decay of French culture. He wished to be both a scientist and a moral mentor. In the latter role he adopted a consequentialist stance, arguing that the moral quality of acts and institutions is to be determined by reference to the ends they serve. The role of scientific sociology is to clarify this relationship, thereby combating ignorance, wishful thinking, and deceit. He rejected the utilitarian consequentialism that had devolved from Bentham and the Mills because of its focus on the ends of the individual; in his view, society has ends of its own. Durkheim could be described as a ‘holistic utilitarian’, but he did not consider it necessary to devise a term to describe his philosophy, since, from his youth, he regarded his essential views on morality, and science, to be adequately represented by the word ‘socialism’.

  The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a transition period in European socialist thought. The modern conception of socialism as denoting the replacement of the market mechanism by an administrative system of economic planning centralized at the level of the nation-state, despite the clear expression of it by Saint-Simon several decades earlier, was then only in embryo and would not definitively appear in political philosophy until concrete examples of such a mode of economic organization had been provided by the military-oriented economies of the major European states in the first World War. Many who described themselves as socialists, such as the English Fabians, were concerned mainly with the inequality of the distribution of income, and took their inspiration from David Ricardo’s theory of rent, either directly, or indirectly via Henry George’s popularization of its thesis in Progress and Poverty (1879). Socialists who regarded themselves as followers of Marx and Engels focused their intellectual attention on the Marxian theories of value and exploitation, and their political energies on the promotion of the class struggle that was fated to destroy capitalism, without any substantial delineation of the socialist mode of social order that would succeed it. The older ideas of the utopian writers were reflected in socialist theories advocating a world composed of small autonomous communities in which the sense of social solidarity that had been eroded by capitalism and industrialism would be regenerated. Some writers, on the other hand, took socialism to denote a heretofore unknown liberation of the individual not only from the constraints imposed by institutions such as churches and governments, but from those mandated by less formal pressures to conform to communal standards of behaviour. Oscar Wilde, for example, one of the greatest eccentrics of the age, construed socialism as a world of sublime individualism, one in which everyone could indulge his personal idiosyncracies without fear of law or convention (‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, Fortnightly Review,

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  Theoretical Criminology from Modernity to Post-Modernism

  • Wayne Morrison(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge-Cavendish

    (Publisher)

  Rules of Sociological Methods, social science can be value free. The sociologist or criminologist is to be detached and objective in his analysis. Society and social phenomenon are actual entities existing ‘out there’, and it is possible for the observer to come to describe and explain them using various other indices.

  Social solidarity

  In The Division of Labour and Society Durkheim argues that there are two types of social solidarity which characterise societies. Durkheim uses these types, or models, in a similar way to a methodology that Weber had used in looking at the vast variations in human society, namely we need to develop ideal types or models which guide us in our understanding. Neither kind of social solidarity will exist in pure form. In modern societies, organic solidarity predominates. While in pre-modern, more simple societies, mechanical solidarity dominates.

  In Durkheim’s work there is always a duality of processes and functions in operation. For example, the very concept of society involves an almost positive notion of solidarity (ie the achievement of cohesiveness or integration) and regulation (ie restraints upon the pursuit of self-interest of people).

  In pre-modern societies mechanical solidarity is based on likeness and uniformity, on shared values, ideas and beliefs among the social body. These shared ideas, values and beliefs constitute what Durkheim calls the ‘conscience collective’. The life situation in pre-modern societies is a clear response to the homogeneity of groups which demonstrate similarities between individuals and the strength of the common moral symptoms. We may say that there is very little emphasis upon individuality or individual personal identity, on the contrary, the emphasis is on integration into the group and group identity.

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  Class American Socty Ils 103

  • Leonard Reissman(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As has been intimated throughout, Weber’s analytical distinctions offer the most meaningful framework for interpreting and understanding stratification in a modern industrial society. The theory is broad, ranges far, and includes a variety of different manifestations of stratification under one explanatory roof. Its principal shortcoming seems to be not so much due to Weber as to succeeding sociologists who have failed to take up the cues of his theory and to give them the empirical testing they need and deserve. As it now stands, the theory does have, at many crucial points, an airy abstractness about it that cannot always be related to reality. The very important question, for example, of how the three aspects of power are interrelated, needs explicit testing. So too does the matter that Weber never fully settled as to the priority among these aspects; is economic class, for example, the dominating characteristic of stratification in industrial societies, and do the others simply follow from it? Research developed from Weber’s formulations no doubt would yield conclusions to modify the theory itself, and the result would be an immeasurable gain for the understanding of the many facets of stratification and of its operation in society.

  Functionalism: Stratification, Survival and Social Values

  THE functional theory of stratification, at least as expounded by Parsons and by Davis and Moore,34 conveyed a special quality of its own. This quality emerged from the total concern by the functionalists with the manipulation of formal categories of analysis, with abstract qualities, more so than was true of other theorists. Marx, Weber, and Warner began from a concrete basis: the forms and character of classes as they were found to exist in modern industrial society. Each of the three, in his own manner, went on from there to a more general analysis that was meant to have wider application. The functionalists, on the contrary, began from the opposite direction. They started with more abstract concepts that carried a cross-cultural tone and a sense of universality. Thus, American patterns of stratification were viewed as a single case, and even “industrial society” was only one variation among several possible types of social organization. In part, this approach was anthropological in orientation and especially close to the cultural views of Malinowski.35

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