III Sem Socio - Sociological Theory Cu

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY:
AN INTRODUCTION
III SEMESTER
B.A. SOCIOLOGY
CORE COURSE (SGY3 B03)
UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT
School of Distance Education Calicut,
University, P.O. Malappuram,
Kerala, India-673 635
19453
School of Distance Education
UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT
SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION
B.A. SOCIOLOGY
III SEMESTER
CORE COURSE (SGY3 B03)
SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY: AN
INTRODUCTION
Prepared by:
Sri. Jawhar. CT
Assistant Professor (On contract),
School of Distance Education,
University Of Calicut.
Scrutinized by:
Smt. Badhariya Beegum. P.,
Assistant Professor,
Department of Sociology, Farook College.
DISCLAIMER
“The author(s) shall be solely responsible for the
content and views expressed in this book”
2 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

MODULE I : FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGICAL

THOUGHT
1.1 Emergence of Social thought: Contributions of

Rousseau- The Social Contract, Montesquieu:
Classification of Societies, Saint Simone: Positive
Philosophy
1.2 Auguste Comte: Positivism, Hierarchy of Sciences, Law

of Three stages
I.3 Herbert Spencer: Organic analogy, Social Darwinism,

Types of Society
MODULE II: EMILE DURKHEIM
2.1 Social Fact, Collective Conscience

2.2 Social Solidarity, Division of Labour
2.3 Theory of Suicide, Sacred and Profane
MODULE III: KARL MARX
3.1 Economic Determinism, Dialectical Materialism,

Historical Materialism
3.2 Class and Class Struggle
3.3 Theory of Social Change

MODULE IV: MAX WEBER
4.1 Social Action-Types of Action, Ideal type, Verstehen

Method
4.2 Power and Authority: Types of Authority, Bureaucracy
4.3 Religion and Economy- Protestant Ethics and Spirit of
Capitalism

MODULE I
FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT
1.1 Emergence of Social thought: Contributions of

Rousseau- The Social Contract,
Montesquieu: Classification of Societies, Saint Simone:
Positive Philosophy
1.2 Auguste Comte : Positivism, Hierarchy of Sciences,
Law of Three stages
I.3 Herbert Spencer: Organic analogy, Social Darwinism,
Types of Society
Introduction
This module discus the foundations of social thought in

the context of Europe. As we know modern social thought
emerged in the 18th and 19th century. Historical and geographical
context played an important role in the development of classical
social thought. In this module a discussion on different social,
political, intellectual and cultural context of the development of
classical social thought and modern sociology is carried out.
As we know, all sociological theories are deeply
influenced by their social and historical contexts. In another
words, sociology in general and sociological theories in particular
are not only influenced from that contexts but consider these
social setting as its basic subject matter. Before going in to the
details of different theories I focus briefly on a few of the most
important social conditions that were of the utmost significance

in the development of sociology in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century.
The first part of this unit deals with the emergence of
sociological theories in the nineteenth century in Europe. The
social and intellectual conditions of eighteenth and nineteenth
century Europe triggered the development of sociology and
sociological theory during this period. As we know the proper
understanding of the socio-political and intellectual development
during this period will help us to appreciate the contribution of
the founding thinkers of sociology and social theory.
In this paper we examine the contemporary relevance of
classical sociological theory. The theorists that we discuss in this
paper are vital in two ways: first, because they helped to chart out
the course of the discipline of sociology from its beginning and
to the present time. Second, their concepts and theories still
permeate contemporary concerns. Sociologists still seek to
explain such critical issues as the nature of capitalism, the basis
of social solidarity or cohesion, the role of authority in social life,
the benefits and dangers posed by modern bureaucracies, the
dynamics of gender and racial oppression, and the nature of the
“self,” to name but a few. Classical sociological theory provides
a strong conceptual base for understanding today’s complex
world.
This module also discusses the historical origin of
sociological theory. The aim of this chapter is to describe the
different historical events that helped to shape sociological
theories. It is very difficult to establish the precise date in when
sociological theory began. People have been thinking about, and
developing theories of, social life since early in history.

A proper understanding of this historical context will help

us to appreciate the ideas of the early sociologists and their
contributions to the emergence of sociology as a discipline.
So, to understand the emergence of sociology in Europe we need
to appreciate the relationship between social condition and the
emergence of social ideas. There is always a connection between
the social conditions of a period and the ideas, which arise and
are dominant in that period.
1.1 Emergence of Social thought
This module traces the emergence of sociology and
sociological theory by analyzing the intellectual conditions of
eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. As we know, modern
sociology emerged first in Europe. Modern sociology emerged as
a response to the social and intellectual climate prevailing in
Europe in eighteenth and nineteenth century. Auguste Comte,
French thinker has been called as the “father of sociology,” but
around 500 years back Ibn Khaldun, an intellectual from Arab
world developed scientific approach to understand social and
historical phenomenon.
In his analysis of the evolution and development of
civilizations, Ibn Khaldun argued that the advanced societies that
have been developed in densely settled communities are
accompanied by a more centralized political authority system and
by the gradual erosion of social cohesion within the population.
Khaldun’s goal was to explain the historical process of the rise
and fall of civilizations in terms of a pattern of recurring conflicts
between tough nomadic desert tribes and sedentary-type societies
with their love of luxuries and pleasure. As a result such societies
become vulnerable to conquest by tough and highly disciplined
nomadic peoples from the unsettled desert. Eventually, however,

the hardy conquerors succumb to the temptations of the soft and

refined lifestyle of the people they had conquered, and so the
cycle is eventually repeated. Although this cyclical theory was
based on Khaldun’s observations of social trends in the Arabian
desert, his goal was to develop a general model of the dynamics
of society and the process of large-scale social change. His
insights were neglected by European and American social
theorists, however, perhaps partly because of the growing
dominance of Western Europe over the Arab world in succeeding
centuries.
1.2. Contributions of Rousseau- The Social Contract

France, like some other European countries during the eighteenth
century, had entered the age of reason and rationalism. Some of
the major philosophers, whose ideas influenced the French
people, were rationalists who believed that all true things could
be proved by reason. Some of these thinkers were Montesquieu
(1689-1755), Locke (1632-1704), Voltaire (1694-1778), and
Rousseau (1712-1778).
The major ideas of these and several other intellectuals
struck the imagination of the French people. Also some of them
who had served in the French army, which was sent to assist the
Americans in their War of Independence from British
imperialism, came back with the ideas of equality of individuals
and their right to choose their own government. The French
middle class was deeply affected by these ideas of liberty and
equality. So far you have leant about the basic picture of the
French society just before the Revolution.
Rousseau (1712-1778) is the most famous of the three
writers and had tremendous influence on the ideas leading to the
French Revolutions (1789). He is associated with the remark

‘Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains from the state
of nature, human beings moved to develop a general will which
could provide the rationale for exercise of power and even kings
and tyrants could not ignore the power of the general will, hence
the rationale for abolition of kingdoms and bringing in Republics.
Rousseau wrote in his book, The Social Contract, that the people
of a country have the right to choose their sovereign. He believed
that people can develop their personalities best only under a
government which is of their own choice.
In his, Social Contract, Rousseau reveals himself as
obsessed with the demands of life in society, by the relationships
of dependence and subordination which it creates among men. He
was concerned about the rivalries and enemities which such
dependence generates. Society which brings people together in
fact sets them apart and makes them enemies of each other. It is
in these senses that he wrote the famous words by which he is
well known till this day that "man is born free, but found in chains
everywhere".
1.3. Montesquieu: Classification of Societies
Montesquieu was one of the great political philosophers of the
Enlightenment. He was born in France in 1689. Montesquieu’s
early life occurred at a time of significant governmental change.
England had declared itself a constitutional monarchy in the wake
of its Glorious Revolution (1688-89), and had joined with
Scotland in the Union of 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great
Britain. In France, the long-reigning Louis XIV died in 1715, and
was succeeded by five year-old Louis XV. He became a counselor
of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1714. A year later, he married
Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant, who bore him three children.

These national transformations had a great impact on

Montesquieu, who would refer to them repeatedly in his work.
Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of law to devote himself
to study and writing. Besides writing works on society and
politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number of years through
Europe, including Austria and Hungary, spending a year in Italy
and 18 months in England, where he became a freemason before
resettling in France. He was troubled by poor eyesight and was
completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in 1755.
He constructed a naturalistic account of the various forms of
government and their advances or constrains. He used this
account to explain how governments might be preserved from
corruption. He saw despotism, in particular, as a standing danger
for any government not already despotic, and argued that it could
best be prevented by a system in which different bodies exercised
legislative, executive, and judicial power, and in which all those
bodies were bound by the rule of law.
The Spirit of the Laws is a treatise on political theory first
published anonymously by Montesquieu in 1748. The book was
originally published anonymously partly because Montesquieu’s
works were subject to censorship, but its influence outside France
grew with rapid translation into other languages. He spent around
21 years researching and writing The Spirit of the Laws, covering
many things, including the law, social life, and the study of
anthropology, and providing more than 3,000 commendations. In
this political treatise, Montesquieu pleaded in favor of a
constitutional system of government and the separation of
powers, the ending of slavery, the preservation of civil liberties
and the law, and the idea that political institutions should reflect
the social and geographical aspects of each community.

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu defines three main

political systems: republican, monarchical, and despotic. As he
defines them, republican political systems vary depending on how
broadly they extend citizenship rights—those that extend
citizenship relatively broadly are termed democratic republics,
while those that restrict citizenship more narrowly are termed
aristocratic republics. The distinction between monarchy and
despotism hinges on whether or not a fixed set of laws exists that
can restrain the authority of the ruler. If so, the regime counts as
a monarchy. If not, it counts as despotism. In brief, in Monarchy
a single person governs by fixed and established laws while in
Despotic government, a single person directs everything but his
own will.
1.3.1. Separation of Powers:

Montesquieu argues that the executive, legislative, and
judicial functions of government (the so-called tripartite
system) should be assigned to different bodies, so that attempts
by one branch of government to infringe on political liberty might

be restrained by the other branches (checks and

balances).Montesquieu described the various forms of
distribution of political power among a legislature, an executive,
and a judiciary. Montesquieu's approach was to present and
defend a form of government whose powers were not excessively
centralized in a single monarch or similar ruler (a form known
then as "aristocracy").
According to him, separation of powers requires a different
source of legitimization, or a different act of legitimization from
the same source, for each of the separate powers. If the legislative
branch appoints the executive and judicial powers, as
Montesquieu indicated, there will be no separation or division of
its powers, since the power to appoint carries with it the power to
revoke. He argues that the best way to protect liberty was to
divide the powers into three branches; executive, Legislative and
Judiciary.
Montesquieu actually specified that the independence of the
judiciary has to be real, and not merely apparent. The judiciary
was generally seen as the most important of the three powers,
independent and unchecked. Through this Montesquieu produced
his own analysis and assigned to each form of government an
animating principle: the republic, based on virtue; the monarchy,
based on honour; and despotism, based on fear. His definitions
show that this classification rests not on the location of political
power but on the government’s manner of conducting policy; it
involves a historical and not a narrow descriptive approach.
To sum up, Montesquieu made a significant impact on the
intellectual history of the 18th century and played important role
in the development of social and political thought. The first of
these is his classification of governments, a subject that was
derigueur for a political theorist. Abandoning the classical

divisions of his predecessors into monarchy, aristocracy,

and democracy. The second of his most noted arguments, the
theory of the separation of powers, is treated differently.
Dividing political authority into the legislative, executive, and
judicial powers, he asserted that, in the state that most effectively
promotes liberty, these three powers must be confided to different
individuals or bodies, acting independently. And finally, in his
most celebrated doctrines he tried to the political influence
of climate. Basing himself on doctrines met in his reading, on the
experience of his travels, and on experiments—admittedly
somewhat naive—conducted at Bordeaux, he stressed the effect
of climate, primarily thinking of heat and cold, on the physical
frame of the individual, and, as a consequence, on
the intellectual outlook of society.
1.4. Saint Simone: Positive Philosophy

Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), French social philosopher
and reformer, is a controversial figure in modern social thought,
who—without writing a single enduring work—had a crucial role
in the early nineteenth-century developments of industrial
socialism, positivism, sociology, political economics, and the
philosophy of history. He believed that the problems of his
society could be best solved by reorganizing economic
production. This will deprive the class of property owners from
their means of production and thus they will lose their economic
freedom which was an important value of his time.
When we discuss French Revolution, obviously we will
come to analyse how the feudal French society was divided into
three estates, the first being the clergy, second the nobility and the
third, the commoners. The first two estates between themselves
owned the major portion of the landed property as well as wealth

and status. It is this social and economic structure that Saint-

Simon wanted to reorganise.
Saint-Simon’s main significance for the social sciences is
threefold. He was one of the first to grasp the revolutionary
implications of “industrialization” (a word he himself coined) for
traditional institutions and morality and to conceptualize the
industrial system as a distinctive type. He was also among the
earliest to advocate a naturalistic science of society as a rational
guide to social reconstruction. But he is most important as
provisional formulator of an “evolutionary organicist” theory,
whose influence is reflected in social evolutionary doctrines as
diverse as those of Herbert Spencer, Lester Ward, and Karl Marx.
He directly inaugurated the “positivist organicist”
school—most notably represented by Comte and Emile
Durkheim—which for a century thereafter was to vie with
utilitarianism, Marxism, and Hegelian historicism for theoretical
predominance in the social sciences (Martindale 1960, part 2).
Through Durkheim, his organicist concept of social order carries
over into contemporary “functionalism” in anthropology and
sociology.
In a joint publication Plan of the Scientific Operations
Necessary for the Reorganising of Society, (1822) Saint-Simon
and Comte wrote about the law of three stages through which
each branch of knowledge must pass. They said that the object of
social physics, the positive science of society later renamed as
‘sociology’, is to discover the natural and immutable laws of
progress. These laws are as important to the science of society as
the laws of gravity, discovered by Newton, are to the natural
sciences. The intellectual alliance between Saint-Simon and
Auguste Comte did not last long and in fact ended in a bitter
quarrel.

The most interesting aspect of Saint-Simon was his

significance to the development of both conservative (like
Comte’s) and radical Marxian theory. On the conservative side,
Saint-Simon wanted to preserve society as it was, but he did not
seek a return to life as it had been in the Middle Ages, as did
Bonald and Maistre. In addition, he was a positivist (Durkheim,
1928/1962:142), which meant that he believed that the study of
social phenomena should employ the same scientific techniques
that were used in the natural sciences.
On the radical side, Saint-Simon saw the need for socialist
reforms, especially the centralized planning of the economic
system. But Saint-Simon did not go nearly as far as Marx did
later. Although he, like Marx, saw the capitalists superseding the
feudal nobility, he felt it inconceivable that the working class
would come to replace the capitalists. Many of Saint-Simon’s
ideas are found in Comte’s work, but Comte developed them in a
more systematic fashion. These three classical enlightenment
scholars developed systematic philosophical and social accounts
on different issues related with state, law, politics and religions.
1.2 Auguste Comte : Positivism, Hierarchy of Sciences, Law
of Three stages
2.2.1. Auguste Comte: Positivism
Before going to Auguste Comte's theoretical contributions to
Sociology we will have a shot biographical sketch. It will help us
to locate him in a socio-political context in which he born and
brought up. He had born in Montpelier, France, on January 19,
1798. His parents were middle class, and his father eventually
rose to the position of official local agent for the tax collector.
Although a precocious student, Comte never received a college-
level degree. He and his whole class were dismissed from the

Ecole Polytechnique for their rebelliousness and their political

ideas.
This expulsion had an adverse effect on Comte’s
academic career. In 1817 he became secretary to Claude Henri
Saint-Simon, a philosopher forty years Comte’s senior. They
worked closely together for several years. Saint-Simon helped
Comte to develop an orientation towards philosophical thinking.
Thus, with Saint-Simon, he developed several major ideas.
However, their partnership was short lived and they ended up
quarreling with each other. Later Auguste Comte published some
of his lecture notes in, Cours de Philosophie Positive.
Comte is known as father of sociology and he was the first
to use the term sociology. He had an enormous influence on later
sociological theorists (especially Herbert Spencer and Emile
Durkheim). And he believed that the study of sociology should
be scientific, just as many classical theorists did and most
contemporary sociologists do. Comte was greatly disturbed by the
anarchy that pervaded French society and was critical of those
thinkers who had spawned both the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution.
He developed his scientific view, “positivism,” or
“positive philosophy,” to combat what he considered to be the
negative and destructive philosophy of the Enlightenment. Comte
was in line with, and influenced by, the French
counterrevolutionary Catholics (especially Bonald and Maistre).
However, his work can be set apart from theirs on at least two
grounds. First, he did not think it possible to returnto the Middle
Ages; advances in science and industry made that impossible.
Second, he developed a much more sophisticated theoretical
system than his predecessors, one that was adequate to shape a
good portion of early sociology.

Comte developed social physics, or what in 1839 he called

sociology. The use of the term social physics made it clear that
Comte sought to model sociology after the “hard sciences.” This
new science, which in his view would ultimately become the
dominant science, was to be concerned with both social statics
(existing social structures) and social dynamics (social change).
Although both involved the search for laws of social life, he felt
that social dynamics was more important than social statics. This
focus on change reflected his interest in social reform,
particularly reform of the ills created by the French Revolution
and the Enlightenment. Comte did not urge revolutionary change,
because he felt the natural evolution of society would make things
better. Reforms were needed only to assist the process a bit.
Comte's major work The Positive Philosophy included his
arguments for a science of society detailing its areas of focus,
methodological approach, and applied use. In early remarks he
called that science social physics, but then switched to sociology,
a term he had previously used in private correspondence. He
modified and expanded on his conception of sociology in
numerous later writings, the most important of which is the
System of Positive Polity.
2.2.2. Hierarchy of Sciences
One of the important pillars of positive philosophy, the
law of the classification of the sciences, has withstood the test of
time much better than the law of the three stages. Of the various
classifications that have been proposed, it is Comte’s that is still
the most popular today. This classification, too, structures
the Course, which examines each of the six fundamental
sciences—mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology,
sociology—in turn. It provides a way to do justice to the diversity
of the sciences without thereby losing sight of their unity. This

classification also makes Comte the founder of the philosophy of

science in the modern sense.
For Comte sociology is to be based on empirical

observation in order to discover determinate social laws and how
these laws can be used to improve social harmony. For Comte,
the discovery of such laws constitutes pure sociology; discovery
of how to use those laws in order to engineer a better society
constitutes applied sociology. Sociology is conceived by Comte
as part of a larger system of knowledge – the positive philosophy.
This system assumes a series of increasingly complex levels of
reality. Each level of reality is governed by a distinct set of
determinant laws that cannot be reduced to (i.e., logically
deduced from) those of another level. Each level thus requires a
separate science to discover its particular laws. These sciences
themselves are presented as social evolutionary developments
that emerge from pre scientific explanation.

Comte used positivism in two ways. In the first version

of Comte’s positivism, these laws can be derived from doing
research on the social world and/or from theorizing about that
world. Research is needed to uncover these laws, but in Comte’s
view the facts derived from research are of secondary importance
to sound speculation. Thus, Comte’s positivism involves
empirical research, but that research is subordinated to theory.
There are two basic ways of getting at the real world that exists
out there—doing research and theorizing.
Although Comte recognized the importance of research,
he emphasized the need for theory and speculation. In
emphasizing theory and speculation, Comte was at variance with
what has now come to be thought of as positivism, especially pure
empiricism through sensory observations and the belief in
quantification. He defined sociology as a positivistic science. In
fact, in defining sociology, Comte related it to one of the most
positivistic sciences, physics: “Sociology … is the term I may be
allowed to invent to designate social physics”.
In the second vision, he used it as the opposite of the
negativism that, in his view, dominated the social world of his
day. More specifically, that negativity was the moral and political
disorder and chaos that occurred in France, and throughout
Western Europe, in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789.
Among the symptoms of this malaise were intellectual anarchy,
political corruption, and incompetence of political leaders.
Comte’s positive philosophy was designed to counter the
negative philosophy and its symptoms that he found all around
him.

2.2.3. The Law of the Three Stages

In his early works Auguste Comte tried to discover the
successive stages through which human race had evolved. In his
study he began from the state of human race, not much superior
to the great apes, to the state at which he found the civilised
society of Europe. In this study he applied scientific methods of
comparison and arrived at The Law of Human Progress or The
Law of three Stages.
According to him, knowledge originates as theological,
becomes metaphysical, and culminates as positive (or scientific).
Theological explanations ascribe events to actions of supernatural
agencies. Metaphysical explanation assumes that outcomes
reflect underlying essences. And positive explanation, according
to Comte, relies solely on the objective observation of
relationships. The three stages of the evolution of human thought
are
1. Theological Stage: In the theological stage, the mind
explains phenomena by ascribing them to beings or forces
comparable to human beings. In this stage, human being
attempts to discover the first and the final causes (the origin
and purpose) of all effects. Thus, human mind at this level
supposes that all phenomena are produced by the immediate
action of supernatural beings. For example, some tribes
believed that diseases like small pox, cholera were the
expressions of God’s anger.
2. Metaphysical Stage: In the metaphysical stage, the mind
explains phenomenon by invoking abstract entities like
‘nature’. These abstract entities are personified abstractions.
Human beings pursue meaning and explanation of the world

in term of ‘essences’, ‘ideals’, ‘forms’, i.e. in short, in a

conception of some ultimate reality, such as God.
3. Positive Stage: In the positive stage human beings cease to
look for ‘original sources’ or final causes because these can
be neither checked against facts norutilised to serve our
needs. Human mind at this stage applies itself to the study of
their laws, i.e. their invariable relations of succession and
resemblance. Human beings seek to establish laws which
link facts and which govern social life (Coser 1971).
In this ‘The Law of Three Stages’ of knowledge we can
see three types of knowledge such as, first, theological or
fictitious knowledge, second, metaphysical or abstract knowledge
and, third, scientific or positive knowledge (Comte, 1998: 71).
Knowledge begins by trying to explain things on the basis of
supernatural phenomena (theology). This is then challenged by
the negative critique of philosophy (metaphysics). Finally, the
entire process culminates in positive science.

Intellectual stages correspond to three stages of social

organization from a warrior-military society (theological), a
professional-commercial society (metaphysical), to a human-
industrial society (science). This ‘Law’ is seen as an inevitable
series of evolutionary stages that every (Western) society is fated
to pass through as it progresses from the childhood of the family
unit to the adolescence of the state before reaching maturity by
covering the whole of humanity. The bellow table illustrates
Comte’s three stages of theoretical knowledge.
Form of Social basis Organization Social

knowledge type
1 Theological The family Military Warrior
2 Metaphysical The state Commercial Lawyer
3 Positive Society/ Industrial Scientist

science Races/
Humanity
Comte emphasized on the development of positivist

methodology to understand social phenomenon. According to
him, the resources upon which sociology can explain the laws of
progress and of social order through three methods. They are, first
of all, the same that have been used so successfully in the natural
sciences: observation, experimentation, and comparison.
Observation does not mean the unguided quest for miscellaneous
facts. "But for the guidance of a preparatory theory," the observer
would not know what facts to look at". "No social fact can have
any scientific meaning till it is connected with some other social
fact" by a preliminary theory. Hence, observation can come into
its own only when it is subordinated to the statical and dynamic
laws of phenomena but within these limits it remains

indispensable.
The second scientific method of investigation,
experimentation, is only partly applicable in the social sciences.
Direct experimentation is not feasible in the human world. But
"experimentation takes place whenever the regular course of the
phenomenon is interfered with in any determinate manner. . . .
Pathological cases are the true scientific equivalent of pure
experimentation." Disturbances in the social body are "analogous
to diseases in the individual organism, and so the study of the
pathological gives, as it were, privileged access to an
understanding of the normal (Coser 1971).
The scientific method of inquiry of central importance to
the sociologistis comparison, above all, because it "performs the
great service of casting outthe . . . spirit [of absolutism]."
Comparisons of human with animal societies will give us
precious clues to "the first germs of the social relations" and to
the borderlines between the human and the animal. Yet
comparisons within the human species are even more central to
sociology. The chief method here "consists in a comparison of the
different co-existing states of human society on the various parts
of the earth's surface—these states being completely independent
of each other.
Although all three conventional methods of science must
be used in sociology, it relies above all on a fourth one, the
historical method. "The historical comparison of the consecutive
states of humanity is not only the chief scientific device of the
new political philosophy ... it constitutes the substratum of the
science, in whatever is essential to it." Historical comparisons
throughout the time in which humanity has evolved are at the very

core of sociological inquiry. Sociology is nothing if it is not

informed by a sense of historical evolution (Coser 1971).
According to Comte 'the universe is empirical (without
spiritual force), operates according to law-like principles, and that
humans can discover those laws and use them to understand,
control, and predict the forces that influence their lives. On the
one hand fatalism puts a spiritual force at the center of existence;
positivism puts humanity at the center of existence. Thus, it is
positive in a humanistic sense. Positivism, then, is a philosophy
that confines itself to sense data, denies any spiritual forces or
metaphysical considerations, and emphasizes the ability of the
human being to affect their own fate generally through science.
According to Comte, society is broken into two distinct
spheres in his ‘positivist’ theory of society, on the one hand,
‘social statics’ (order) and, on the other, ‘social dynamics’
(progress):
1. Social statics: a concept of social order, stability, and
integration.
2. Social dynamics: a concept of social change,
fragmentation and progress.
Social statics studies society at rest in a fixed space. Social
dynamics studies the laws of motion as things change over time.
This follows a similar division in biology between fixed anatomy
and changes in physiology. Statics, or ‘social anatomy’, and
dynamics, or ‘social physiology’, may be divided for purposes of
scientific analysis but in practice they are always inseparable.
Social statics are those ‘laws of harmony of human society’,
involving the core institutions of the family, the state and,
ultimately, humanity (or at least the ‘white race’ as Comte, 1998:
263, put it). Statics refer to the essential capacities of all types of
societies – forms of social organization, intellectual culture,

material production and moral norms. Statics are therefore more
basic than dynamics. Social dynamics refers to the necessary
progress of society from more simple to more complex forms of
social organization through the successive stages of conquest,
trade and production. There can be no laws of social development
without movement.
2.2.4. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27,
1820. He was not schooled in the arts and humanities, but rather
in technical and utilitarian matters. Spencer never went to a
conventional school but was taught at home by his father and
uncle. He went to some small private schools but only for short
periods, according to his autobiography, his training in
mathematics was the best. In spite of not receiving a systematic
training in other subjects like natural sciences, literature, history,
he wrote outstanding treatises on biology and psychology.
At a young age Spencer started working as an Engineer in the
railroad engineering field.
In 1837 he began work as a civil engineer for a railway,
an occupation he held until 1846. During this period, Spencer
continued to study on his own and began to publish scientific and
political works. In 1848 Spencer was appointed an editor of The
Economist, and his intellectual ideas began to solidify. By 1850,
he had completed his first major work, Social Statics. During the
writing of this work, Spencer first began to experience insomnia,
and over the years his mental and physical problems mounted. He
was to suffer a series of nervous breakdowns throughout the rest
of his life.

In 1853 Spencer received an inheritance that allowed him

to quit his job and live for the rest of his life as a gentleman
scholar. He never earned a university degree or held an academic
position. As he grew more isolated, and physical and mental
illness mounted, Spencer’s productivity as a scholar increased.
Eventually, Spencer began to achieve not only fame within
England but also an international reputation. As Richard
Hofstadter put it: “In the three decades after the Civil War it was
impossible to be active in any field of intellectual work without
mastering Spencer” (1959:33).
2.2.5. Organic analogy and Social Darwinism

Herbert Spencer contributed several key ideas to the field
of sociology. As a contemporary of Auguste Comte, he too was
trying to establish sociology as the science of society. Spencer
had come into contact with Comte’s ideas but he did not accept
them. Instead, he brought about a shift in the study of society. His
sociology is based on the evolutionary doctrine and the organic
analogy.
The Social Statics (1850), The Study of Sociology (1873),
and Principles of Sociology (1876-96) are three major works of
Herbert Spencer. He was influenced by the idea of Darwin and
his evolutionary theory. Spencer believed that throughout all
times there actually has been social evolution from a simple,
uniform or homogeneous structure to a complex, multiform or
heterogeneous one. Spencer has been influenced deeply by
Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species (1859). It had
brought a revolutionary change in the understanding of how life
evolved on earth from a simple unicellular organism to
multicellular complex organisms like, human beings themselves.

Although Spencer wrote several books on sociology, he

did not give a formal definition of the discipline. According to
him, the social process is unique and so sociology as a science
must explain the present state of society by explaining the initial
stages of evolution and applying to them the laws of evolution.
Thus, the evolutionary doctrine is central to his thesis. After
explaining this doctrine, we will explain the meaning and
significance of organic analogy. You will also learn about
Spencer’s classification of societies with respect to their place in
social evolution.
Spencer had to find a way of reconciling his
thoroughgoing individualism with his organicist approach. In this
he differed sharply from Comte, who was basically anti-
individualistic in his general philosophy and developed an
organicist theory in which the individual was conceived as firmly
subordinated to society. Spencer, in contrast, not only conceived
of the origins of society in individualistic and utilitarian terms,
but saw society as a vehicle for the enhancement of the purposes
of individuals.
According to Spencer, men had originally banded
together because it was advantageous for them to do so. "Living
together arose because, on the average, it proved more
advantageous to each than living apart." And once society had
come into being, it was perpetuated because, "maintenance of
combination [of individuals] is maintenance of conditions . . .
more satisfactory [to] living than the combined persons would
otherwise have." In line with his individualistic perspective, he
saw the quality of a society as depending to a large extent on the
quality of the individuals who formed it.
"There is no way of coming at a true theory of society, but
by inquiry into the nature of its component individuals. , . . Every

phenomenon exhibited by an aggregation of men originates in

some quality of man himself." Spencer held as a general principle
that "the properties of the units determine the properties of the
aggregate," In spite of these individualistic underpinnings of his
philosophy, Spencer developed an overall system in which the
organicist analogy is pursued with even more rigor than in
Comte's work. The ingenious way Spencer attempted to
overcome the basic incompatibility between individualism and
organicism is best described in his own words. After having
shown the similarity between social and biological organisms, he
turned to show how they were unlike each other. A biological
organism is encased in a skin, but a society is bound together by
the medium of language.
Spencer believed that all inorganic, organic, and
superorganic (societal) phenomena undergo evolution and
devolution, or dissolution. That is, phenomena undergo a process
of evolution whereby matter becomes integrated and motion
tends to dissipate. Phenomena also undergo a process of
devolution in which motion increases and matter moves toward
disintegration. Having deduced these general principles of
evolution and dissolution from his overarching principles,
Spencer then turned to specific areas in order to show that his
theory of evolution (and devolution) holds inductively, that is,
that “all orders do exhibit a progressive integration of Matter and
concomitant loss of Motion” (1902/1958:308).
The combination of induction and deduction led Spencer
to his “final” evolutionary formula: Evolution is an integration of
matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the
matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a
definite, coherent, heterogeneity; and during which the retained
motion undergoes a parallel transformation. (Spencer,
1902/1958:394) Let us decompose this general perspective and
examine each of the major elements of Spencer’s evolutionary

theory.
First, evolution involves progressive change from a less
coherent to a more coherent form; in other words, it involves
increasing integration. Second, accompanying increasing
integration is the movement from homogeneity to more and more
heterogeneity; in other words, evolution involves increasing
differentiation. Third, there is a movement from confusion to
order, from indeterminacy to determined order, “an increase in
the distinctness with which these parts are marked off from one
another” (Spencer, 1902/1958:361)
In other words, evolution involves movement from the
indefinite to the definite. Thus, the three key elements of evolution
are increasing integration, heterogeneity, and definiteness. More
specifically, Spencer was concerned with these elements and his
general theory of evolution as they apply to both structures and
functions. At the most general level, Spencer associated structures
with “matter” and saw them growing more integrated,
heterogeneous, and definite. Functions are linked to “retained
motion,” and they, too, are seen as growing increasingly
integrated, heterogeneous, and definite. We will have occasion to
deal with Spencer’s more concrete thoughts on the evolution of
functions and structures in his work on society.
One of the important contributions of Herbert Spencer
was developing an analogy between the social system and
biological organisms. On the basis of this developed a complex
threefold scheme for categorizing social systems based on
whether they displayed complex or simple structures and whether
they were essentially stable or unstable. Firstly, a ‘‘simple’’
system is undifferentiated by sections, groups, or tribal
formations. Secondly, a ‘‘compound’’ system amounts to an

amalgamation of communities with a rudimentary hierarchy and

division of labor. Thirdly, ‘‘doubly compound’’ systems are more
complex still and united under one organized authority (Spencer
1971).
It was Herbert Spencer who used the organismic analogy
to create an explicit form of functional analysis. Drawing upon
materials from his monumental The Principles of Biology (1864–
1867), Spencer’s The Principles of Sociology (1874–1896) is
filled with analogies between organisms and society as well as
between ecological processes (variation, competition, and
selection) and societal evolution (which he saw as driven by war).
Spencer did not see society as an actual organism; rather, he
conceptualized ‘‘superorganic systems’’ (organization of
organisms) as revealing certain similarities in their ‘‘principles of
arrangement’’ to biological organisms (1874–1896, pp. 451–
462).
In so doing, he introduced the notion of ‘‘functional
requisites’’ or ‘‘needs,’’ thereby creating functionalism. For
Spencer, there were three basic requisites of superorganic
systems: (1) the need to secure and circulate resources, (2) the
need to produce usable substances, and (3) the need to regulate,
control, and administer system activities (1874–1896, p. 477).
Thus, any pattern of social organization reveals these three
classes of functional requisites, and the goal of sociological
analysis is to see how these needs are met in empirical social
systems.
To conclude, Herbert Spencer’s theory is more powerful,
and his work has more contemporary significance, than that of the
other significant figure in the “prehistory” of sociological theory,
Auguste Comte. Their theories have some similarities (e.g.,
positivism) but far more differences (e.g., Comte’s faith in a

positivist religion and Spencer’s opposition to any centralized

system of control). Spencer offered a series of general principles
from which he deduced an evolutionary theory: increasing
integration, heterogeneity, and definiteness of both structures and
functions. Indeed, sociology, in Spencer’s work, is the study of
the evolution of societies. Although Spencer sought to legitimize
sociology as a science, he also felt that sociology is linked to, and
should draw upon, other sciences such as biology (especially the
idea of survival of the fittest) and psychology (especially the
importance of sentiments). In part from his concern with
psychology, Spencer developed his methodological-individualist
approach to the study of society.
Spencer addressed a number of the methodological
difficulties confronting sociology as a science. He was especially
concerned with various biases the sociologist must overcome—
educational, patriotic, class, political, and theological. In seeking
to exclude these biases, Spencer articulated a “value-free”
position for sociology. In much of his substantive work, Spencer
employed the comparative-historical method. The evolution of
society occupies a central place in Spencer’s sociology.
In his analysis of societal evolution, Spencer employed
the three general aspects of evolution mentioned previously—
increasing integration (increasing size and coalescence of masses
of people), heterogeneity, and definiteness (here, clearly
demarcated institutions)—as well as a fourth aspect—the
increasing coherence of social groups. In his evolutionary social
theory
2.2.6. The Evolution of Societies or Type of Society
Spencer sought to build two classificatory systems of society
related to his thesis of social evolution. The first thesis states that

in the process of social evolution societies move from simple to

various levels of compound on the basis of their degree of
composition. Spencer traced, among other things, the movement
from simple to compounded societies and from militant to
industrial societies
According to Spencer the aggregate of some simple societies
gives rise to compound societies, the aggregate of some
compound societies gives rise to doubly compound societies. The
aggregate of some doubly compound societies gives rise to trebly
compound societies According to Spencer simple societies
consist of families, a compound societies consist of families
unified into clans, doubly compound societies consist of clans
unified into tribes and the trebly compound societies, such as our
own, have tribes brought together forming nations or states The
second classificatory system is based on construction of types
which may not exist in actual reality but which would help in
analysing and comparing different societies. Here a different type
of evolution is conceived of, from (i) military to, (ii) industrial
societies.
1. The Militant Society
The Militant society is a type in which predominant organisation
is offensive and defensive military action. Such society has the
following characteristics.
 Human relationships in such societies are marked by
compulsory cooperation.
 There exists a highly centralised pattern of authority and
social control.
 A set of myths and beliefs reaffirm the hierarchical nature
of society.
 Life is marked by rigorous discipline and a close identity

between public and private life.
2. The Industrial Society

The Industrial society is one in which military activity and
organisation is peripheral to society. The greater part of society
concentrates on human production and welfare. The
characteristics of such a society are that these societies are marked
by
 voluntary cooperation,
 firm recognition of people’s personal rights,
 separation of the economic realm from political control of
the government and
 growth of free associations and institutions.
Herbert Spencer was aware that societies need not fit into either
of the systems totally. They served the purpose of models to aid
classification. These are some of the central ideas of Herbert
Spencer.
Spencer also articulated a series of ethical and political ideals.
Consistent with his methodological individualism, Spencer
argued that people must be free to exercise their abilities; they
must have liberty. The only role for the state is the protection of
individual liberty. Such a laissez-faire political perspective fits
well with Spencer’s ideas on evolution and survival of the fittest.
Given his perspective on the gradual evolution of society,
Spencer also rejected the idea of any radical solution (e.g.,
communism) to society’s problems.

1.3. Conclusion
In the first part of this module we studied how social
conditions contributed for the development of social thought. We
have also learnt how different changes taking place in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century in Europe bothered social
thinkers. Sociology thus grew essentially as a product of the
reflections of the great thinkers reflecting on society. We
discussed sociologically significant themes of the French and the
Industrial Revolutions.
In the second part of this module we discussed the ideas of the
early thinkers and founding fathers of sociology and contributions
of these ideas to development of sociology. It also discussed
social and political context in which Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
formed his theoretical and intellectual basis. As the founding
father of sociology we also discussed the central ideas of Comte,
such as the law of the three stages (the theological state, the
metaphysical stage, and the positive stage), the hierarchy of the
sciences, the static and dynamic sociology.
Herbert Spencer and his contributions towards the discipline
sociology was also mentioned in this module. He is considered to
be the second founding father of sociology. We focused on his
central ideas, such as the evolutionary doctrine, the organic
analogy and finally the evolution of societies, firstly in terms of
composition from simple to compound and so on and then in
terms of transition from military to industrial societies

MODULE II:
EMILE DURKHEIM
2.1 Social Fact, Collective Conscience
2.2 Social Solidarity, Division of Labour
2.3 Theory of Suicide, Sacred and Profane
1. Introduction
This module discusses the contribution of Durkheim for the

classical sociological theories. Emile Durkheim, often referred to
as the founder of sociology, was born April 15, 1858 in Epinal,
France. Appointed to the first professorship of sociology in the
world, he worked tirelessly over three decades as a lecturer and
writer to establish sociology as a distinct discipline with its own
unique theoretical and methodological foundation. After an
illustrious career, first in Bordeaux and then after 1902in Paris at
the Sorbonne, Durkheim died in November 1917.
Durkheim legitimized sociology in France, and his work
ultimately became a dominant force in the development of
sociology in general and of sociological theory in particular. His
work was informed by the disorders produced by the general
social changes discussed earlier in this chapter, as well as by

others (such as industrial strikes, disruption of the ruling class,
church-state discord, the rise of political anti-Semitism) more
specific to the France of Durkheim’s time. In fact, most of his
work was devoted to the study of social order. His view was that
social disorders are not a necessary part of the modern world and
could be reduced by social reforms.
2. Social Fact
The concept of social fact was defined by the French
sociologist E ´ mile Durkheim, in his book on the Rules of
Sociological Method (1982), as ways of feeling, thinking, and
acting external to and exercising constraint over the individual.
Durkheim’s emphasis on social facts was part of his critique of
psychological theories of human behavior and society. In his
book, The Rules of Sociological Method, published in 1895,
Durkheim (1950: 3) is concerned with the second task and calls
social facts the subject matter of sociology. Durkheim (1950)
defines social facts as “ways of acting, thinking and feeling,
external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion
by reason of which they control him”. To Durkheim society is a
reality suigeneris. He considered society as sui generis. It is
always present and has no point of origin. Society comes into
being by the association of individuals.
Hence society represents a specific reality which has its
own characteristics. This unique reality of society is separate
from other realities studied by physical or biological sciences.
Further, societal reality is apart from individuals and is over and
above them. Thus the reality of society must be the subject matter
of sociology. A scientific understanding of any social
phenomenon must emerge from the ‘collective’ or associational
characteristics manifest in the social structure of a society. While

working towards this end, Durkheim developed and made use of

a variety of sociological concepts. Collective representations are
one of the leading concepts to be found in the social thought of
Durkheim. Before learning about ‘collective representations’ it is
necessary that you understand what Durkheim meant by ‘social
facts’.
For Durkheim, sociology was the “science of
civilization”. He thus embarked on the analysis of what he called
social facts, that is, all those external and collective ways in which
society shapes, structures, and constrains our behavior. Durkheim
states: “A social fact is any way of acting … [that is] capable of
exerting over the individual an external constraint; or which is
general over the whole of a given society, whilst having an
existence of its own, independent of its individual
manifestations”. Social facts – “the beliefs, tendencies, and
practices of the group taken collectively” – are what sociologists
study (and not individual psychological facts or physical or
biological facts, though these may impinge on social facts).
Durkheim based his scientific vision of sociology on the
fundamental principle, i.e., the objective reality of social facts.
Social fact is that way of acting, thinking or feeling etc., which is
more or less general in a given society. Durkheim treated social
facts as things. They are real and exist independent of the
individual’s will or desire. They are external to individuals and
are capable of exerting constraint upon them. In other words they
are coercive in nature. Further social facts exist in their own right.
They are independent of individual manifestations. The true
nature of social facts lies in the collective or associational
characteristics inherent in society. Legal codes and customs,
moral rules, religious beliefs and practices, language etc. are all
social facts.

As we discussed, Durkheim developed a distinctive

conception of the subject matter of sociology and then tested it in
an empirical study. In The Rules of Sociological Method
(1895/1982), Durkheim argued that it is the special task of
sociology to study what he called social lfacts (Nielsen, 2005a,
2007a). He conceived of social facts as forces (Takla and Pope,
1985) and structures that are external to, and coercive of, the
individual. The study of these large-scale structures and forces—
for example, institutionalized law and shared moral beliefs—and
their impact on people became the concern of many later
sociological theorists (Parsons, for example). In Suicide
(1897/1951), Durkheim reasoned that if he could link such an
individual behavior as suicide to social causes (social facts), he
would have made a persuasive case for the importance of the
discipline of sociology.
But Durkheim did not examine why individual A or B
committed suicide; rather, he was interested in the causes of
differences in suicide rates among groups, regions, countries, and
different categories of people (for example, married and single).
His basic argument was that it was the nature of, and changes in,
social facts that led to differences in suicide rates. For example, a
war or an economic depression would create a collective mood of
depression that would in turn lead to increases in suicide rates.
Durkheim developed a distinctive view of sociology and sought
to demonstrate its usefulness in a scientific study of suicide.
In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895/1982),
Durkheim differentiated between two types of social facts—
material and nonmaterial. Although he dealt with both in the
course of his work, his main focus was on nonmaterial social
facts (for example, culture, social institutions) rather than
material social facts (for example, bureaucracy, law). This
concern for nonmaterial social facts was already clear in his
earliest major work, The Division of Labor in Society

(1893/1964). His focus there was a comparative analysis of what
held society together in the primitive and modern cases. He
concluded that earlier societies were held together primarily by
nonmaterial social facts, specifically, a strongly held common
morality, or what he called a strong collective conscience.
However, because of the complexities of modern society, there
had been a decline in the strength of the collective conscience.
The primary bond in the modern world was an intricate
division of labor, which tied people to others in dependency
relationships. However, Durkheim felt that the modern division
of labor brought with it several “pathologies”; it was, in other
words, an inadequate method of holding society together. Given
his conservative sociology, Durkheim did not feel that revolution
was needed to solve these problems. Rather, he suggested a
variety of reforms that could “patch up” the modern system and
keep it functioning. Although he recognized that there was no
going back to the age when a powerful collective conscience
predominated, he did feel that the common morality could be
strengthened in modern society and that people thereby could
cope better with the pathologies that they were experiencing.
According to Durkheim, social facts are collective
phenomena and, as such, make up the distinctive subject matter
of sociology. Social facts can be embodied in social institutions,
such as religions, political forms, kinship structures, or legal
codes. There are also more diffuse social facts; for example, mass
behavior of crowds and the collective trends identifiable in
statistical rates of social phenomena such as suicide and crime.
Institutions are an especially central concern of sociology as a
social science.

Durkheim insisted that social facts should be treated as

things. They are realities in their own right, with their own laws
of organization, apart from the ways these facts might appear to
the individual’s consciousness. Durkheim thought that sociology
would have no distinctive subject matter if society itself did not
exist as an objective reality. Thus, sociology and psychology
represent independent levels of analysis.
3. 1. Types of Social Facts

Durkheim saw social facts as lying along a continuum. First, on
one extreme are structural or morphological social phenomena.
They make up the substratum of collective life. By this he meant
the number and nature of elementary parts of which society is
composed, the way in which the morphological constituents are
arranged and the degree to which they are fused together. In this
category of social facts are included the distribution of population
over the surface of the territory, the forms of dwellings, nature of
communication system etc.
Secondly, there are institutionalized forms of social facts.
They are more or less general and widely spread in society. They
represent the collective nature of the society as a whole. Under
this category fall legal and moral rules, religious dogma and
established beliefs and practices prevalent in a society.
Thirdly, there are social facts, which are not
institutionalised. Such social facts have not yet acquired
crystallized forms. They lie beyond the institutionalised norms of
society. Also this category of social facts has not attained a total
objective and independent existence comparable to the
institutionalised ones. Also their externality to and ascendancy
over and above individuals is not yet complete. These social facts
have been termed as social currents. Forexample, sporadic

currents of opinion generated in specific situations; enthusiasm

generated in a crowd; transitory outbreaks in an assembly of
people; sense of indignity or pity aroused by specific incidents,
etc.
All the above mentioned social facts form a continuum
and constitute social milieu of society. Further Durkheim made
an important distinction in terms of normal and pathological
social facts. A social fact is normal when it is generally
encountered in a society of a certain type at a certain phase in its
evolution. Every deviation from this standard is a pathological
fact. For example, some degree of crime is inevitable in any
society. Hence according to Durkheim crime to that extent is a
normal fact. However, an extraordinary increase in the rate of
crime is pathological. A general weakening in the moral
condemnation of crime and certain type of economic crisis
leading to anarchy in society are other examples of pathological
facts.
3. 2. Main Characteristics of Social Facts
In Durkheim’s view sociology as an objective science must
conform to the model of the other sciences. It posed two
requirements: first the ‘subject’ of sociology must be specific.
And it must be distinguished from the ‘subjects’ of all other
sciences. Secondly the ‘subject’ of sociology mustbe such as to
be observed and explained. Similar to the way in which facts are
observed and explained in other sciences. For Durkheim this
‘subject’of sociology is the social fact, and that social facts must
be regarded as ‘things’.
The main characteristics of social facts are (i) externality,
(ii) constraint,(iii) independence, and (iv) generality. Social facts,
according to Durkheim, exist outside individual consciences.

Their existence is external to the individuals. For example,

domestic ,civic or contractual obligations are defined externally
to the individual in laws and customs. Religious beliefs and
practices exist outside and prior to the individual. An individual
takes birth in a society and leaves it afterbirth death, however
social facts are already given in society and remain in existence
irrespective of birth or death of an individual. For example
language continues to function independently of any single
individual.
The other characteristic of social fact is that it exercises a
constraint on individuals. Social fact is recognized because it
forces itself on the individual. For example, the institutions of
law, education, beliefs etc. are already given to everyone from
without. They are commanding and obligatory for all. There is
constraint, when in a crowd, a feeling or thinking imposes itself
on everyone. Such a phenomenon is typically social because its
basis, its subject is the group as a whole and not one individual
inparticular. A social fact is that which has more or less a general
occurrence in a society. Also it is independent of the personal
features of individuals or universal attributes of human nature.
Examples are the beliefs, feelings and practices of the group taken
collectively. In sum, the social fact is specific. It is born of the
association of individuals. It represents a collective content of
social group or society. It differs in kind from what occurs in
individual consciousness. Social facts can be subjected to
categorisation and classification. Above all social facts form the
subject matter of the science of sociology
In his classic study Suicide, Durkheim introduced the
sociological use of statistics, demonstrating that different suicide
rates could be explained on the basis of differential patterns of
social connectedness when they could not be explained on the
basis of individual psychology. For instance, individual
characteristics do not explain why older men commit more

suicide, but their unmarried – unconnected – status does. In
addition to introducing the use of statistics, Durkheim also used
various qualitative and archival methods, particularly in his
research on law and religion.
4. Division of Labour
Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society, his doctoral
dissertation and his first major work, was published in 1893. He
held that as volume and density of population increases in a given
area there is an increase in interaction and struggle for survival.
Social differentiation is practiced in modern societies to
overcome this struggle for survival between individuals.
The individuals are more dependent on one another for
specialized functions and this leads to social cohesion and
increase in individual autonomy. In modern societies there is an
increase of individualism but there is also a need to maintain
social solidarity. In his writings, Durkheim explained how
individuals relate to one another and to society by the social
bonds. His doctoral dissertation on Division of Labour in Society
focused on the concept of ‘social solidarity’. He was influenced
by Rousseau’s thinking that social solidarity is neither dependent
on politics nor economy.
Durkheim held that solidarity can be expressed in two
distinct ways which are ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’. In small
societies with mechanical solidarity, individual autonomy is
lowest and society is characterized by likeness of beliefs. There
is no specialization of tasks and very little division of labour.
Collective conscience pervades amongst all individuals in the
group. The links bonding the individual to the social whole is
intense and there is perfect social integration. In such a society

the institution of religion is dominant and an individual’s place in

society is determined by kinship. There is a system of penal law
which punishes crimes violently so as to reaffirm the core beliefs
and values. This law is repressive and severely punishes the
offence.
On the other hand, in societies with organic solidarity there
is greater division of labour and individuals are dependent on one
another for specialized tasks rather than on society as a whole. Such
societies are dense and cover a large geographical area. The political,
legal and economic institutions are more specialized and the force of
the collective conscience over the individuals is weakened. There
are greater individual differences between individuals and the
integration of individuals when the social whole is weakened.
Restitutive law is operative and aims at restoring the wrongs to their
original state.
While the foregoing theorists contributed substantially to

the understanding of the division oflabor, Emile Durkheim’s The
Division of Labor in Society (1893) stands as the classic
sociological statement of the causes and consequences of the
historical shift from ‘‘mechanical solidarity’’ to ‘‘organic
solidarity.’’ The former is found in smaller, less-advanced
societies where families and villages are mostly self-sufficient,
independent, and united by similarities. The latter is found in
larger, urbanized societies where specialization creates
interdependence among social units.
Following Spencer’s lead, Durkheim noted that the
specialization of functions always accompanies the growth of a
society; he also observed that increasing population density—the
urbanization of society that accompanies modernization—greatly
increases the opportunities for further increases in the division of
labor. It should be noted that the shift to a modern division of
labor could not have occurred without a preexisting solidarity; in
his chapter on ‘‘organic and contractual solidarity’’ he departed

from Spencer’s utilitarian explanation of social cohesion, and
noted that the advanced division of labor can occur only among
members of an existing society, where individuals and groups are
united by pre-existing similarities (of language, religion, etc.).
A sense of trust, obligation, and interdependencies
essential for any large group in which there are many diverse
roles; indirect exchanges occur; and individuals form smaller sub
groupings based on occupational specialization. All of these
changes create high levels of interdependence, but within
creasing specialization, and different world views develop, along
with different interests, values, and belief systems. This is the
problem Durkheim saw in the shift from mechanical to organic
solidarity; he feared the ‘‘anomie’’ or lack of cohesion that might
result from a multiplicity of views, languages, and religions
within a society (as in the France of his times, and even more so
today).
Durkheim was also concerned with the problems of
inequality in modern industrial society. He noted how the
‘‘pathological form of the division of labor’’ posed a threat to the
full development of social solidarity (Giddens 1971). Although
many simplistic analyses of Durkheim’s approach suggest
otherwise, he dealt at length with the problems of ‘‘the class war’’
and the need for justice and fraternity.
As we mentioned, in The Division of Labor in Society
(1893) he examined the transformation of societies from
mechanical to organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity was based
on a strong collective consciousness and organized around
segmental groups, primarily extended kinship structures. The
result was a society based on the similarity among its individual
members and social units.

Organic solidarity was rooted in mutual interdependence

of activities in the division of labor, where the collective
consciousness became less strong and, thus, there appeared a
greater individuation of thought and conduct. The cause of the
change from mechanical to organic solidarity was found in social
morphology; in particular, an increase in the overall population
volume, an increase in society’s material density (i.e., the number
of people in a given territory), and an increased moral or dynamic
density (i.e., communication and interaction among groups).
5. Mechanical Solidarity and Organic Solidarity

Durkheim, as we have seen, identifies two opposing social types.
The first— pre-modern society—is characterized by an
undifferentiated social structure, a strong collective
consciousness, a homogeneous population, and a legal code
consisting primarily of penal laws with repressive sanctions. The
second— modern society—is characterized by a highly
differentiated social structure, a weak collective consciousness, a
heterogeneous population, and a legal code consisting primarily
of cooperative laws with restitutive sanctions.
This dichotomy goes even deeper. The process of social
evolution, Durkheim insists, is simultaneously a process of
“moral evolution.” The contrast between these two social types
extends to the moral rules and bonds of social solidarity
characteristic of each. This is the crux of Durkheim’s argument.
Pre-modern and modern society differ in the glue that holds them
together, “mechanical solidarity” for the first and “organic
solidarity” for the second. In the pre-modern era, social solidarity
derives from people’s resemblances.
Individuals form a cohesive community because they live
similar lives and think similar thoughts. The collective

consciousness is the fundamental basis of this type of social

solidarity. When individuals threaten this sacred order, when they
deviate from shared values, beliefs, and practices, they face the
wrath of a punitive penal system. The strength of the collective
consciousness and the continuity of society are ultimately
dependent on the coercive power of repressive sanctions. This
kind of solidarity, which Durkheim calls “mechanical,” requires
the complete suppression of individuality. Where mechanical
solidarity prevails, the individual “does not belong to himself; he
is literally a thing at the disposal of society.” The moral order of
the pre-modern world is strong “only if the individual is weak.”
Mechanical Organic
solidarity solidarity
Basis of solidarity Resemblances Differences
Nature of society Pre-industrial Industrial
Substratum Segmental Organized
Population Low volume High volume
Moral and physical Low High

density
Interdependence Low High
Social bonds Weak Strong
Law Repressive Restitutive

As the above table shows, in mechanical solidarity

individuals are strongly attracted to each other through what
Durkheim calls ‘resemblance’. An integral solidarity based on a
similarity and a common identity reaches its highest stage through
the conscience collective which exercises a strong centripetal pull
on individual members. Personal identity and collective identity
become fused: ‘From this results a solidarity sui generis, which,
born of resemblances, directly links the individual to society’
(Durkheim, 1933).
This is found in highly cohesive, relatively small-scale
societies based on kinship relations and cooperation. Typically
reaching for naturalistic analogies, Durkheim compares
mechanical solidarity to the molecules of inorganic bodies that
have no independent existence of their own. We call it
[mechanical solidarity] only by analogy to the cohesion which
unites the elements of an inanimate body, as opposed to that
which makes a unity out of the elements of a living body. What
justifies the term is that the link which thus unites the individual
to society is wholly analogous to that which attaches a thing to a
person. The individual conscience considered in this light, is a
simple dependent upon the collective type and follows all of its
movements, as the possessed object follows that of its owner.
(Durkheim, 1933)
In extreme cases of mechanical solidarity the individual
personality is completely submerged by an undifferentiated
homogeneous social mass. Any infringement of mechanical
solidarity is met with brutally repressive sanctions. This type of
solidarity is expressed in a large number of repressive laws
against any violation of the collective will. Mechanical solidarity
is ‘positive’, direct, unconditional and unmediated. It produces
inner unity through collective feelings of inclusion and belonging.
Durkheim gives the example of the Iroquois tribes of North
America as an almost ‘pure’ example of a people who live

without specialized functions or privileged hierarchies or private
property in a sort of early communism. The individual is wholly
absorbed by the clan (Durkheim, 1933).
The same basic clan structure is repeated across ‘a
segmental society’, defined by strong similarities: For segmental
organization to be possible, the segments must resemble one
another; without that they would not be united. And they must
differ; without this, they would lose themselves in each other and
be effaced (Durkheim, 1933). In some cases they form a simple
linear series of contiguous groups like families or villages. In
others cases, several clans form a definite and distinctly new
union, like a tribe or a confederation. Mechanical solidarity is
most sharply defined when the conscience collective is expressed
through the medium of a defined focal point of family or kin, ‘a
community of blood’.
Durkheim tried to avoid idealizing early societies and
noted the existence of despotic forms of mechanical solidarity
under the unilateral centralized power invested in a chief or
master. In societies where the main form of solidarity is ‘organic’
individuals are engaged in specialized functions in an advanced
division of labour. Here individuals cohere precisely because of
their difference or dissimilarity from each other. Durkheim names
this solidarity ‘organic’ from another analogy drawn from nature.
Each organ, in effect, has it special physiognomy, its autonomy.
And, moreover, the unity of the organism is as great as the
individuation of the parts is more marked. On one side, the more
labour is socially divided, the more dependent individuals
become on society. On the other side, the more labour is socially
divided, the more uniquely personal and specialized it becomes.

Social heterogeneity expresses the development of

peculiar, unique personalities. Compared to the almost total
control exercised over individuals by mechanical solidarity, the
organic variant allows for greater individual autonomy,
spontaneity and enterprise. Social obligations are not quite so
repressive and limiting. Individuals are linked by particular
functions, primarily occupation, rather than by kinship structures.
Functional integration of occupational specialization displaces
and opposes alternative traditional sources of integration such as
heredity.
Integration based on specialized function strengthens
personal conscience at the expense of the conscience collective.
Occupational structure assumes a more central place for
coordinating social cohesion. Occupational morality is not
subject to the same harsh punishments as breaches of public
morality. Restitutive law becomes more widespread than
repressive law. Occupational functions depend upon cooperation
and compromise rather than coercion and repression.
Consequently, even where society relies most completely
upon the division of labour, it does not become a jumble of
juxtaposed atoms, between which it can establish only external,
transient contacts. Rather the members are united by ties which
extend deeper and far beyond the short moments during which the
exchange is made. Each of the functions that they exercise is, in
a fixedway, dependent upon others, and with them forms a
solidary system.(Durkheim, 1933)Spontaneous cooperation in
the advanced division of labour is intrinsically moral in nature. A
new ‘moral or dynamic density’ emerges from the growing size
of population, urban living and improved communications.

6. Suicide
On Suicide, Durkheim continued his quest to legitimate the
discipline of sociology and establish its scientific credentials. The
topic of suicide, which on the surface would seem to be anything
but a social phenomenon, presented him with a challenging
opportunity to further substantiate the existence of a realm of
distinctly social facts and to apply and illustrate the
methodological principles set forth in The Rules.
With Suicide he also resumed his exploration of key
themes from earlier writings, including the problem of social
solidarity and the relationship between the individual and society.
Beyond all this, however, Durkheim had an even more far-
reaching agenda. The study of suicide, he promised, would also
serve a more practical purpose. It would shed light on “the causes
of the general contemporary maladjustment being undergone by
European societies” and suggest “remedies which may relieve it.”
As with crime or any other form of deviance, Durkheim
explains, a certain amount of suicide is to be expected in any
society. While such “normal” cases are tragic for those affected,
they do not constitute a social problem properly speaking. The
rate of suicide throughout much of Europe in the nineteenth
century was on the rise, however, reaching levels that could only
imply the existence of a “pathological state.”
Along with many of his contemporaries, Durkheim
looked upon the high incidence of suicide as yet another symptom
of social dissolution, a product of the wrenching changes
occurring with the emergence and rapid development of industrial
society. “What we see in the rising tide of voluntary deaths is . . .
a state of crisis and upheaval which cannot continue without
danger.” Durkheim took up the study of suicide to demonstrate

not only the explanatory value of sociology, but its diagnostic and
practical value as well.
In Suicide (1897) Durkheim studied suicide rates as
measurable manifestations of prior social facts. He argued that
suicide rates were correlated with differing social circumstances
and created a theory of four social causes of suicide, two of them
endemic to modern society. Egoistic suicide emerged from a lack
of integration of the individual into social groups, especially the
family, the religious group, and the political community. Since
familial, religious, and political ties were weakening in modern
society, egoism was the most frequent contemporary cause of
suicide. He suggested that the reintegration of the individual into
society might be performed by strengthening the role of
occupational or professional groups.
Anomic suicide resulted from the failure of another class
of social facts, namely social norms, to regulate the individual’s
desires. It occurred especially during fluctuating economic
circumstances, but could emerge in any setting where the
individual’s existing standards of conduct and expectations were
radically disrupted. Durkheim emphasized that such social causes
operated independently from the individual incidence of suicide
and represented a level ofsocial facts which could be understood
only through a new science of sociology.
Suicide in traditional and modern societies would
therefore have to be understood in entirely different terms – for
Durkheim, more proof that suicide was a function of social
relations. This approach differs from that of many contemporary
sociologists who use statistics to measure and predict the behavior
of individuals as effected by their orientations toward social
goals, values, and sanctions. The focus on individuals and their
relationship to social factors runs counter to the method

Durkheim proposed: demonstrating the impact of social facts,

assessing solidarity mechanisms, and measuring the group level
effects of beliefs and values.
As Ritzer explained, Durkheim’s theory of suicide can be

seen more clearly if we examine the relation between the types of
suicide and his two underlying social facts—integration
andregulation. Integration refers to the strength of the attachment
thatwe have to society. Regulation refers to the degree of external
constraint on people.For Durkheim, the two social currents are
continuous variables, and suiciderates go up when either of these
currents is too low or too high. We therefore have four types of
suicide. If integration is high, Durkheim callsthat type of suicide
altruistic. Low integration results in an increase in
egoisticsuicides. Fatalistic suicide is associated with high
regulation, and anomic suicidewith low regulation.

 Egoistic Suicide: High rates of egoistic suicide are likely

to be found in societies or groupsin which the individual
is not well integrated into the larger social unit. This lack
ofintegration leads to a feeling that the individual is not
part of society, but this alsomeans that society is not part
of the individual. Durkheim believed that the best partsof
a human being—our morality, values, and sense of
purpose—come from society.An integrated society
provides us with these things, as well as a general feeling
ofmoral support to get us through the daily small
indignities and trivial disappointments.Without this, we
are liable to commit suicide at the smallest frustration.
 Altruistic Suicide: The second type of suicide discussed

by Durkheim is altruistic suicide. Whereas egoistic
suicide is more likely to occur when social integration is
too weak, altruistic suicide is more likely to occur when
“social integration is too strong”. The individual is
literally forced into committing suicide. When integration
is low, people will commit suicide because they have no
greater good to sustain them. When integration is high,
they commit suicide in the name of that greater good.
 Anomic Suicide: The third major form of suicide

discussed by Durkheim is anomic suicide, which is more
likely to occur when the regulative powers of society are
disrupted. Such disruptions are likely to leave individuals
dissatisfied because there is little control over their
passions, which are free to run wild in an insatiable race
for gratification. Rates of anomic suicide are likely to rise
whether the nature of the disruption is positive (for
example, an economic boom) or negative (an economic
depression). Either type of disruption renders the
collectivity temporarily incapable of exercising its
authority over individuals. Such changes put people in

new situations in which the old norms no longer apply but
new ones have yet to develop.
 Fatalistic Suicide: There is a little-mentioned fourth type

of suicide—fatalisticSuicide. Whereas anomic suicide is
more likely to occur in situations in which regulation is
too weak, fatalistic suicide is more likely to occur when
regulation is excessive. Durkheim described those who
are more likely to commit fatalistic suicide as “persons
with futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently
choked by oppressive discipline.”
Durkheim concludes his study of suicide with an examination
of what reforms could be undertaken to prevent it. Most attempts
to prevent suicide have failed because it has been seen as an
individual problem. For Durkheim, attempts to directly convince
individuals not to commit suicide are futile, since its real causes
are in society.
7. Elementary forms of Religious life

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life was published in
1912. Durkheim was interested in the study of religion as early as
1902 because he regarded as a major institution in society. Also
most of the articles in his sociological journal, L Année
Sociologique focused on the subject of religion. In The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life he wanted to explore the
elements or the constituents of religion which make religious life
possible. He turned towards primitive religion and took an
evolutionary approach by assuming that by studying the basic
structure of primitive religion the constituents of religion in
general could be understood. He propounded a scientific study of

religion based on observation and exploration. He defined

religion as
“a religion is a unified system of beliefs and
practices relative to sacred things, that is to say,
things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions –
beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a
single moral community called a church”. (2001:
46)
For Durkheim, religion helped people make sense of the
world and religion personifies the society. He held that religion is
made up of beliefs and rituals. Beliefs for Durkheim were the
ideas that were focused towards the sacred. Rituals on the other
hand were the actions that were directed towards the sacred. He
held that universally the religious worldview is divided into two
domains that is the sacred and the profane. A thing, belief or act
is sacred because it is believed to be sacred by the society.
7.1 Totemism
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim
(2001) wanted to understand how moral authority produces social
solidarity by examining what he thought was its simplest or most
elementary form: ‘totemism’. A totem is ‘a symbol, a material
expression of something else’ (2001: 154). On the totem can be
inscribed as any emblem or blazon considered sacred, usually
animals or plants. Totemism is the name given to the visible
sacred object that social groups worship. It is the tangible
expression of ‘god’ and, at the same time, the symbol of a
particular society. It is a moral force given material form.
For Durkheim, totemism is the original form of all
subsequent religious life and, by extension, collective life in
general. Social life is only made possible by a vast organization
of collective representations. The collective only becomes self-

conscious of its own existence by fixing on some material object.
Objects and society facilitate each other. The totem both
expresses collective life and helps to create it (Durkheim, 2001:
175). The totem’s ‘real essence’ is that it is only the material form
taken by an immaterial substance or unseen energy of a
permanent, anonymous and impersonal social force (2001: 140–
41). Totemism outlives individuals and lends the social group a
sense of eternal existence.
Totemism could not merely superimpose onto reality an
unreal world of monstrous aberrations and ‘inexplicable
hallucinations’. The scared object – the totem – is merely a focal
point for collective identity and social structure. Religious
exaltation is real exaltation about the moral authority of society.
Totems are misrecognized only to the extent that the symbol
seems to be an autonomous force. In reality, the god of the clan is
really the clan itself, ‘but transfigured and imagined in the
physical form of the plant or animal species that serve as totems’
(2001: 154).
8.2 The Sacred and the Profane
According to Durkheim (2001) all religious belief
systems, from the most basic to the most complex, fundamentally
divide the world into two mutually exclusive spheres: the sacred
and the profane. The sacred represents the ideal that society sets
for itself in contrast to the profane world of private egos and
mundane interests. Any object might be considered sacred – a
tree, a rock, a house, an animal, human hair, ashes and so on – as
might any words, phrases or gestures carried out by a specially
consecrated person. The sacred can be ‘superimposed’ on a wide
range of objects. Since nothing is inherently ‘sacred’ this quality
must be acquired from somewhere else.

In religion everything can be assigned to a class of sacred

things radically divided from a class of profane things. Religious
belief structures the world into the pure and impure, holy and
sacrilegious, divine and diabolical, consecration and
contamination. Durkheim takes this as the starting point for
understanding how all human groups are based on a radical
duality that assigns dignity, privilege or distinction to one thing,
not given by palpable experience, over other things that are based
in more practical and mundane activities of everyday life. When
things are considered sacred they are arranged into a unified
system.
Conclusion
In this module we started our discussion with social and
intellectual context in which Durkheim developed his conception
of sociology as an independent scientific discipline with its
distinct subject matter. His life and works are regarded as a
sustained effort at laying the legitimate base of sociology as a
discipline. He identified sociology as a study of social facts and
developed rules for their observation and explanation. In his
studies on sociological methods he explain different aspects of
social facts. He demonstrated the nature of these studies through
the study of division of labour in different types of solidarities, of
suicide-rates in different types of societies, and the study of
Religion in a single type.
In this module we discussed Durkheim’s three major
works. First work was The Division of Labor in Society, in which
he argued that the collective conscience of societies with
mechanical solidarity had been replaced by a new organic
solidarity based on mutual interdependence in a society organized
by a division of labor. He investigated the difference between
mechanical and organic solidarity through an analysis of their

different legal systems. He argued that mechanical solidarity is

associated with repressive laws while organic solidarity is
associated with legal systems based on restitution.
In the second one Durkheim studied suicide. He looked at
different aspects of suicide and its social causes and
consequences. Durkheim differentiated among four types of
suicide—egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic—and showed
how each is affected by different changes in social currents. The
study of suicide was taken by Durkheim and his supporters as
evidence that sociology has a legitimate place in the social
sciences. After all, it was argued, if sociology could explain so
individualistic an act as suicide, it certainly could be used to
explain other, less individual aspects of social life.
In his last major work, The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life, Durkheim focused on another aspect of culture:
religion. In his analysis of primitive religion, Durkheim sought to
show the roots of religion in the social structure of society. It is
society that defines certain things as sacred and others as profane.
Durkheim demonstrated the social sources of religion in his
analysis of primitive totemism and its roots in the social structure
of the clan. Durkheim concluded that religion and society are one
and the same, two manifestations of the same general process.

MODULE III
KARL MARX
3.1 Economic Determinism, Dialectical Materialism,

Historical Materialism
3.2 Class and Class Struggle
3.3 Theory of Social Change
1. Introduction
In the previous module we discussed the development of

modern sociological theories in the 18th and 19th century Europe.
We also discussed the context in which sociology emerged in
Europe and learnt about the impact of the Industrial Revolution
on its founders. In this module we will deal with one of the
founders, namely, Karl Marx. Though he focused on economic
analysis of the 19th century Europe and capitalist development,
his idea was full of sociological insights.
We start with the concept of historical materialism, which
is the scientific core of Marx’s sociological thought. Therefore, it
is necessary to situate historical materialism within the overall
context of Marx’s work and his contributions to sociological
theory. With this background we will discuss about the notion of
class as used by Karl Marx. To understand class and its meaning,
we have to study in detail about the constitution of a class and
different criteria to call any collectivity a class. And we will look
at how and why classes come into conflict with each other. We
will understand the impact of these class conflicts on the history
of development of society.
In the last part we will discuss two key concepts in
Marxian sociology, namely, alienation and commodity
fetishism. And we will looks at how these two concepts will help
us to understand modern capitalist system. In the final session the
concept of social change is also discussed. Marx identified class
conflict and class straggle as a way forward for social change.
Historically, Marx identified different stages of social evolution
according to the mode of production.
2. Karl Marx: Biographic Sketch
Marx was born into a middle class household, the oldest
male of six surviving children. His parents had Jewish origins, but
converted to Protestantism in response to Prussian anti Semitism.
Marx was exposed to Enlightenment thought and socialist ideas
in his teenage years. He had born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, one
of the oldest cities in Germany, to Heinrich and Henrietta Marx.
Both parents came from a long line of rabbis. His father was the
first in his family to receive a secular education (he could recite
numerous passages from Enlightenment thinkers)—Heinrich was
a lawyer who allowed himself to be baptized Protestant in order
to avoid anti-Semitism; a move that was not entirely successful.
As a university student, he joined the Berlin Doctors Club,
a group of left wing intellectuals who embraced Hegel’s
philosophical vision of humanity, making itself historically
through its own labor. They opposed right wing Hegelians, who
stressed his theory of the state and justified the Prussian regime.
Left Hegelians wanted to complete philosophy’s break with
religion and fashion an approach that favored progressive change.

Marx finished his doctoral dissertation in 1841, but did not

complete the second thesis required to enter German academe.
After left Hegelian Bruno Bauer lost his academic position for
political reasons, Marx knew, especially given his Jewish roots,
that this door was closed to him. He decided to try journalism. In
1842 Marx wrote for the progressive Rheinische Zeitung and
soon became its editor.
Politically, Marx’s childhood and youth fell in that period
of European history when the reactionary powers (favoring
monarchical political order) were attempting to eradicate from
post Napoleonic Europe all traces of the French Revolution.
There was, at the same time, a liberal movement (favoring
autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of
political and civil liberties) in Germany that was making itself
felt. The movement was given impetus by the Revolution in
France. In the late 1830s a further step toward radical criticism
for extreme changes in existing socio-political conditions was
made by the young Hegelians (a group of people following the
philosophy of Hegel). This was the group with which Marx
became formally associated when he was studying law and
philosophy at the University of Berlin.
Because of his political affiliations, Marx was denied a
university position by the government. Marx turned to writing
and editing, but had to battle government censorship continually.
In 1843, Marx moved to Paris with his new wife, Jenny von
Westphalen. In Paris, he read the works of reformist thinkers who
had been suppressed in Germany and began his association with
Friedrich Engels. During his time in Paris, Marx wrote several
documents that were intended for self clarification (they were
never published in his lifetime) but have since become important
Marxian texts (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
and The German Ideology, which was finished in Brussels).
Over the next several years, Marx moved from Brussels,

back to Paris, and then to Germany. Much of his movement was
associated with revolutions that broke out in Paris and Germany
in 1848. That year also marks the publication of The Communist
Manifesto. Finally, in 1849, Marx moved to London, where he
remained. He spent the early years of the 1850s writing several
historical and political pamphlets. In 1852, Marx began his
studies at the British Museum. There he would sit daily from
10am to 7pm, studying the reports of factory inspectors and other
documents that described the abuses of early capitalism. This
research formed the basis of Das Kapital, his largest work. During
this time, three of his children died of malnutrition.
Although he was the youngest member of the young
Hegelians, Karl Marx inspired their confidence, respect and even
admiration. They saw in him a ‘new Hegel’ or rather a powerful
anti-Hegelian. Among other influences the intensive study of
B.deSpinoza(1632-1677) and A. Hume(1711-1776) helped Marx
to develop a positive conception of democracy. It went far beyond
the notions held at the time by radical in Germany. The radicals
consisted of a political group associated with views, practices and
policies of extreme change.
The workers' movements were quiet after 1848, until the
founding of the First International. Founded by French and
British labor leaders at the opening of the London Exhibition of
Modern Industry, the union soon had members from most
industrialized countries. Its goal was to replace capitalism with
collective ownership. Marx spent the next decade of his life
working with the International. The movement continued to gain
strength worldwide until the Paris Commune of 1871. The
Commune was the first worker revolution and government. Three
months after its formation, Paris was attacked by the French
government. Thirty thousand unarmed workers were massacred.
Marx continued to study but never produced another major

writing. His wife died in 1881 and his remaining daughter a year
later. Marx died in his home on March 14, 1883.
3. Marx as Sociologist
Marx was not a sociologist and did not consider himself
sociologist. Although his work is too broad to be encompassed by
the term sociology, there are many sociological insights which to
be found in Marx’s entire works. But for the majority of early
sociologists, his work was a negative force, something against
which to shape their sociology. Until very recently, sociological
theory, especially in America, has been characterized by either
hostility to or ignorance of Marxian theory.
The basic reason for this rejection of Marx was ideological.
Many of the early sociological theorists were inheritors of the
conservative reaction to the disruptions of the Enlightenment and
the French Revolution. Marx’s radical ideas and the radical social
changes he foretold and sought to bring to life were clearly feared
and hated by such thinkers. Marx was dismissedas an ideologist.
It was argued that he was not a serious sociological theorist.
However, ideology per se could not have been the real reason for
the rejection of Marx, because the work of Comte, Durkheim, and
other conservative thinkers also was heavily ideological. It was
the nature of the ideology, not the existence of ideology as such,
that put off many sociological theorists. They were ready and
eager to buy conservative ideology wrapped in a cloak of
sociological theory, but not the radical ideology offered by Marx
and his followers.
1. There were, of course, other reasons why Marx was not
accepted by many early theorists. He seemed to be more an
economist than a sociologist. Although the early sociologists

would certainly admit the importance of the economy, they

would also argue that it was only one of a number of
components of social life.
2. Another reason for the early rejection of Marx was the nature
of his interests. Whereas the early sociologists were reacting
to the disorder created by the Enlightenment, the French
Revolution, and later the Industrial Revolution, Marx was not
upset by these disorders—or by disorder in general. Rather,
what interested and concerned Marx most was the
oppressiveness of the capitalist system that was emerging out
of the Industrial Revolution. Marx wanted to develop a theory
that explained this oppressiveness and that would help
overthrow that system. Marx’s interest was in revolution,
which stood in contrast to the conservative concern for reform
and orderly change.
3. Another difference worth noting is the difference in
philosophical roots between Marxian and conservative
sociological theory. Most of the conservative theorists were
heavily influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
Among other things, this led them to think in linear, cause-
and-effect terms. That is, they tended to argue that a change
in A (say, the change in ideas during the Enlightenment) leads
to a change in B (say, the political changes of the French
Revolution). In contrast, Marx was most heavily influenced,
as we have seen, by Hegel, who thought in dialectical rather
than cause-and-effect terms. Among other things, the dialectic
attunes us to the ongoing reciprocal effects of social forces.
Thus, a dialectician would reconceptualize the example
discussed above as a continual, ongoing interplay of ideas and
politics.

4. Karl Marx: Dialectical and Historical Materialism

In this section we discuss the historical materialism
which is the scientific core of Marx’s sociological thought.
Therefore, it is necessary to situate historical materialism
within the overall context of Marx’s work and his
contributions to sociological theory.The unit deals first with
the brief background of the philosophical and theoretical
origins of historical materialism in the context of its
intellectual and social milieu. Then we go on to a discussion
of certain basic assumptions upon which the theory of
historical materialism is built. This is followed by an
exposition of the theory of historical materialism and Marx’s
reasons for refuting economic determinism. Finally, the unit
lists certain important contributions of historical materialism
to sociological theory.
‘Historical materialism’, the name given to the methodological
approach developed by Marx, recognizes the essentially social
character of life. Its central postulates can be stated succinctly.
‘Materialism’ refers to the following premises:
 social being determines consciousness
 human beings necessarily act collectively in society to
establish the means of their own physical and social
reproduction
 physical and social reproduction are mutually dependent
on each other
 in the course of its reproduction societies develop
distinctive structures of cooperation and competition
known as modes of production

 beyond a minimal level of subsistence societies divide

into antagonistic classes.
‘Historical’ refers to additional premises:
 there is a tendency for the productive forces of society to
grow over time
 human beings make their own history within pre-given
social conditions
 societies develop inner contradictions which are resolved
either by revolutionary transformation or social
implosion.
In Marx's time, there were two important ways of
understanding the issue of reality: idealism and materialism.
Idealism posits that reality only exists in our idea of it. While
there may indeed be a material world that exists in and of itself,
that world exists for humans only as it appears. The world around
us is perceived through the senses, but this sense data is structured
by innate cognitive categories. Thus, what appears to humans is
not the world itself but our idea of it. On the other hand,
materialism argues that all reality may be reduced to physical
properties. In materialism, our ideas about the world are simple
reflections; those ideas are structured by the innate physical
characteristics of the universe.
Hegel was an idealist and argued that material objects
(like a chair or a rock) truly and completely only exist in our
concept of them. But Hegel took idealism to another level, using
it to argue for the existence of God (the ultimate concept); he
argued that the ideal took priority over the material world.
According to Hegel, human history is a dialectical unfolding of

the Truth that reality consists of ideas and that the material world
is nothing more than shadow.
For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even
transforms into an independent subject, under the
name of ‘the Idea’, is the creator of the real
world, and the real world is only the external
appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is
true: the ideal is nothing but the material world
reflected in the mind of man, and translated into
forms of thought.
Dialectic contains different elements that are naturally
antagonistic to one another; Hegel called them the thesis and
antithesis. The dialectic is like an argument or a dialog between
elements that are locked together (The word dialectic comes from
the Greek word dialektikos, meaning discourse or discussion.).
For example, to understand "good," you must at the same time
understand "bad." To comprehend one, you must understand the
other: good and bad are locked in a continual dialog. Hegel argued
that these kinds of conflicts would resolve themselves into a new
element or synthesis, which in turn sets up a new dialectic: every
synthesis contains a thesis that by definition has conflicting
elements.
Marx liked the historical process implied in Hegel's
dialectic, but he disagreed with its ideational base. Marx, as we
have seen, argues that human beings are unique because they
creatively produce materials to fill their own material needs.
Since the defining feature of humanity is production, not ideas
and concepts, then Hegel's notion of idealism is false, and the
dialectic is oriented around material production and not ideas—
the material dialectic. Thus, the dynamics of the historical
dialectic are to be found in the economic system, with each

economic system inherently containing antagonistic elements. As

the antagonistic elements work themselves out, they form a new
economic system.
In The German Ideology Marx presents the most detailed
account of the theory of history. In it, Marx set out to reformulate
the work of the eminent German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel.
In contrast to previous philosophers who focused on explaining
the roots of stability in the physical and social worlds (i.e., why
things seemingly stayed the same), Hegel saw change as the
motor of history. For Hegel, change was driven by a dialectical
process in which a given state of being or idea contains within it
the seeds of an opposing state of being or opposing idea. The
resolution of the conflict produces yet a new state of being or idea.
This synthesis, in turn, forms the basis of a new contradiction,
thus continuing the process of change.
On the other hand, Marx breaks decisively from Hegel by
insisting that it is material existence, not consciousness, that fuels
historical change and the inevitable march toward freedom. Thus,
Marx sought to take Hegel’s idealism, which had the evolution of
history “standing on its head,” and “turn it right side up” in order
to discover the real basis of the progression of human societies.
Theoretically, this inversion is of utmost significance because it
reflects a shift from a non-rationalist to a rationalist theoretical
orientation.
The German Ideology is a pivotal writing because it offers
the fullest treatment of Marx’s materialist conception of history.
It is in Marx’s theory of historical materialism that we find one of
his most important philosophical contributions, namely his
conviction that ideas or interests have no existence independent
of physical reality. In numerous passages, you will see Marx’s
rejection of Hegel’s notion that ideas determine experience in

favor of the materialist view that experience determines ideas. For

instance, Marx asserts, “Consciousness can never be anything
else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their
actual life-process” (Marx and Engels 1846/1978:154). And
again, “Life is not determined by consciousness, but
consciousness by life” (ibid.:155). In short, Marx argues that the
essence of individuals, what they truly are and how they see the
world, is determined by their material, economic conditions—
“both with what they produce and with how they produce”—in
which they live out their very existence (ibid.:150).
In ‘Preface’ to A contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1959) Marx said that the actual basis of society is its
economic structure. For Marx economic structure of society is
made of its relations of production. The legal and political
superstructure of society is based on relations of production.
Marx says that relations of production reflect the stage of
society’s force of means of production. Thus, the term such as
relations of production, forces of means of production and
superstructure carry special connotations in Marxist thought. His
contention is that the process of socio-political and intellectual
life in general is conditioned by the mode of production of
material life.
On the basis of this logic, Marx tries to constructs his
entire view of history. He says that new developments of
productive forces of society come in conflict with existing
relations of production. When people become conscious of the
state of conflict, they wish to bring an end to it. This period of
history is called by Marx the period of social revolution. The
revolution brings about resolution of conflict. It means that new
forces of production take roots and give rise to new relations of
production. Thus, you can see that for Marx, it is the growth of
new productive forces which outlines the course of human
history. The productive forces are the powers society uses to

produce material conditions of life. For Marx, human history is
an account of development and consequences of new forces of
material production. This is the reason why his view of history is
given the name of historical materialism. In a nutshell, this is the
theory of historical materialism.
In brief, we can say that Marx’s theory of historical
materialism states that all objects, whether living or inanimate,
are subject to continuous change. The rate of this change is
determined by the laws of dialectics. In other words, there are
forces which bring about the change. You can call it the stage of
antithesis. The actual nature of change, i.e., the stage of synthesis,
will be, according to Marx, determined by the interaction of these
two types of forces. Before explaining in some detail further
connections which Marx makes to elaborate this theory, it is
necessary to point out that different schools of Marxism provide
differing explanations of this theory. We are here confined to a
kind of standard version in our rendering of historical
materialism. We should keep in mind that materialistic
conception of history is not a rough and ready formulation for
explaining different forms of social organisation.
To sum up, historical materialist perspective takes
economic power as the prime dimension of social stratification
and holds that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the
history of class struggles. The main classes in the societies Engels
and Marx studied most intensively were the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. More particularly, classical historical materialism
postulated several trends supposedly characteristic of any society
with private ownership of the means of production, such as
machines and factories (capital goods) and free markets for
capital, labor, and consumption goods.

According to the ‘‘general law of capitalist

accumulation,’’ the longer the capitalist mode of production
prevails, the more capital will have accumulated, leading to both
higher profits for capital owners (the bourgeoisie) and to
worsening living conditions for the people who live by their labor
(the proletariat). Although recognizing in the early phases of the
capitalist mode of production the presence of small and large
proprietors as well as skilled and unskilled workers, the
persistence of the capitalist mode of production would lead to a
disappearance of the middle classes.
Small proprietors would become less common, as they
lose out in the fierce competition from large proprietors. Workers
skilled in using their hand tools would also become less common
as proprietors replace them with cheaper unskilled workers
operating machines. In addition, since the persistence of the
capitalist mode of production is accompanied by ever deeper
economic downturns, wages tend to fall while the percentage of
unemployed workers rises.
5. Class and Class conflict
Marx’s sociology is, in fact, Sociology of the class struggle. This
means one has to understand the Marxian concept of class in order
to appreciate Marxian philosophy and thought. Marx has used the
term social class throughout his works but explained it only in a
fragmented form. The clearest passages on the concept of class
structure can be found in the third volume of his famous work,
Capital (1894). Under the title of ‘Social Classes’ Marx
distinguished three classes, related to the three sources of income:
(a) owners of simple labour power or labourers whose
main source of income is labour;

(b) owners of capital or capitalists whose main source of

income is profit or surplus value;
(c) land owners whose main source of income is ground
rent.
In this way the class structure of modern capitalist society
is composed of three major classes viz., salaried labourers or
workers, capitalists and landowners. At a broader level, society
could be divided into two major classes i.e. the ‘haves’ (owners
of land and / or capital) often called as bourgeoisie and the ‘have-
nots’ (those who own nothing but their own labour power), often
called as proletariats. Marx has tried to even give a concrete
definition of social class. According to him ‘a social class
occupies a fixed place in the process of production’.
Marx and Engels famously set out the historical relation of
classes early in The Communist Manifesto where they declared:
The history of all hitherto existing society is
the history of class struggles. Freeman and
slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master and journeyman, in a word,
oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden now open fight, a
fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society, or in
the common ruin of the contending classes.
(1998: 34–35)
In fact, none of these earlier modes of production were
overthrown by the exploited class. It was not peasants that
overthrew feudalism but the new, emerging ‘middling sorts’ of
the capitalist class. Previous societies were divided hierarchically
into complex gradations of rank, somewhat obscuring the division

into fundamental classes: ‘In ancient Rome we have patricians,
knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords,
vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serf; in almost
all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations’ (Marx and
Engels, 1998: 35).
Modern society, Marx and Engels claim, simplifies class

antagonisms, splitting society into ‘two great hostile camps’:
bourgeois and proletarians. Engels later added a footnote to
define what he took these terms to mean:
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern
capitalists, owners of the means of social
production and employers of wage labour. By
proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers
who, in having no means of production of their
own, are reduced to selling their labour power in
order to live. (Marx and Engels, 1998: 34)
Marx and Engels praise the bourgeois class for its
revolutionary achievements: the overthrow of feudalism, the
creation of a world market, technological dynamism, the ending
of religious superstitions, urbanization, stimulating the creation
of a world literature, all marvellous ‘wonders far surpassing
Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothiccathedrals’
(1998: 38).In the process, capital organizes the proletariat into a
class as ‘the conditions of life are more and more equalized, in
proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and
nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level’ (1998:
45). This is a process known as ‘proletarianization’.

Increasingly, the lower strata of the middle class –

shopkeepers, tradespeople and peasants – fall into the class of
wage labourersas they are put out of business by the power of
larger capitals. The proletariat develops just so long as it increases
the amount of capital accumulated by the bourgeoisie. Wage
labour is reduced to the status of acommodity, possessing only its
labour power for sale, interchangeable with other commodities.
Labour is alienated, a mere ‘appendage of the machine’, which
controls the pace and skill of labour.
For Marx, class division and conflict between classes exist in
all societies. Industrial society consists mainly of two conflicting
classes: the bourgeoisie, owners of the means of production (the
resources – land, factories, capital, and equipment – needed for
the production and distribution of material goods); and the
proletariat, who work for the owners of productive property. The
owning class controls key economic, political, and ideological
institutions, placing it inevitably in opposition to non owners as it
seeks to protect its power and economic interests. ‘‘Class
struggle’’ is the contest between opposing classes and it is
through the dynamic forces that result from class awareness of
conflicting interests that societal change is generated.
In terms of class conflict, or potential class conflict, Marx
distinguished between a ‘‘class in itself ’’ and a ‘‘class for itself.’’
The former comprises a social grouping whose constituents share
the same relationship to the forces of production. However, for
Marx, a social grouping only fully becomes a class when it forms
a ‘‘class for itself.’’ At this stage, its members have achieved class
consciousness and solidarity – a full awareness of their true
situation of exploitation and oppression. Members of a class
subsequently develop a common identity, recognize their shared
interest, and unite, so creating class cohesion and ultimately
taking recourse to revolutionary violence.
6. Theory of Alienation and Commodity Fetishism

Theories of alienation start with the writings of Marx, who
identified the capacity for self-directed creative activity as the
core distinction between humans and animals. If people cannot
express their species being (their creativity), they are reduced to
the status of animals or machines. In the essay “Alienated
Labour” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844), Marx
examines the condition of alienation or estrangement. For Marx,
alienation is inherent in capitalism, because the process of
production and the results of our labor confront us as a
dominating power. It stems not from religiously rooted errors of
consciousness, as Hegel argued, but from the material conditions
in which we apply our essential productive capacities.
Marx argued that, under capitalism, workers lose control
over their work and, as a consequence, are alienated in at least
four ways.
1. They are alienated from the products of their labor.
They no longer determine what is to be made or
what use will be made of it. Work is reduced to
being a means to an end – a means to acquire
money to buy the material necessities of life.
2. Workers are alienated from the process of work.
Someone else controls the pace, pattern, tools, and
techniques of their work.
3. Because workers are separated from their activity,
they become alienated from themselves. Non
alienated work, in contrast, entails the same
enthusiastic absorption and self realization as
hobbies and leisure pursuits.

4. Alienated labor is an isolated endeavor, not part of

a collectively planned effort to meet a group need.
Consequently, workers are alienated from others as well
as from themselves. Marx argued that these four aspects of
alienation reach their peak under industrial capitalism and that
alienated work, which is inherently dissatisfying, would naturally
produce in workers a desire to change the existing system.
Alienation, in Marx’s view, thus plays a crucial role in leading to
social revolution to change society toward a non alienated future.
7. Commodity Fetishism
In Marx's pioneering critique of capitalism, he brought the
commodity to the fore as a unit of analysis in the study of
capitalist social relations. In his works, Marx refined the meaning
of the term, suggesting that commodities were not simply objects
that fulfilled needs, but that their seeming simpleutility served to
mask the social and material relations that brought them into
existence –particularly the human labor necessary to produce
them. For Marx, commodities had a ‘‘dual nature,’’ which was
comprised of their utility(or use value) and their value in the
market (or exchange value).
Although a commodity was useful to the person who
bought it because it satisfied some need, it was also useful to the
person who sold it because its sale yielded value in excess of the
cost of the labor and materials necessary to produce it, either in
the form of other commodities or in money. Marx’s refinement of
the term was in response to the work of economists such as Adam
Smith and David Ricardo, who treated commodities as if their
value were strictly further facilitate the introduction of the notion
of commodity fetishism into social theory. At the end of the
nineteenth century, even as the role of fetishism in the evolution

of human social life was called into question, the centrality of

capitalism and commodity exchange in the social organization of
the Americas and Europe captured the attention of an emerging
sociological discipline.
The rapid rise and rationalization of industrial
development framed Max Weber’s discussion of the relationship
of (Christian) religious orientation and capitalist accumulation,
and the attendant availability of a wider range of consumer goods
informed Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of the role of the
commodity in bourgeois status hierarchies. What had been for
Marx a sarcastic metaphor for the misapprehension of social
relations as natural became increasingly a sincere heuristic for
examining the role of commodities in the organization of daily
social life: like its archaic precursor, the commodity fetish
mediated between abstract economic forces and the actions of
individuals.
8. Theory of Social Change
In Marx's analysis of the history of human society he identified
four modes of productions and he mapped social change in the
history according to the mode of productions may exist within
any particular society at a given point in time. But in all forms
of society there is one determinate kind of production which
assigns rank and influence to all the others. Here we shall
discuss each of the four modes of production, identified by
Marx.
1. Asiatic Mode of Production: The concept of Asiatic
mode of production refers to a specific original mode of
production. This is distinct from the ancient slave mode
of production or the feudal mode of production. The
Asiatic mode of production is characteristic of primitive

communities in which ownership of land is communal.

These communities are still partly organised on the basis
of kinship relations. State power, which expresses the real
or imaginary unity of these communities, controls the use
of essential economic resources, and directly appropriates
part of the labour and production of the community.
2. Ancient Mode of Production: It refers to the forms
which precede capitalist production. In some of these
terms slavery is seen as the foundation of the productive
system. The relation of masters to slaves is considered as
the very essence of slavery. In this system of production
the master has the right of ownership over the slave and
appropriates the products of the slave’s labour. The slave
is not allowed to reproduce. If we restrict ourselves to
agricultural slavery, exploitation operates according to the
following modalities: the slaves work the master’s land
and receive their subsistence in return. The master’s profit
is constituted by the difference between what the slaves
produce and what they consume. But what is usually
forgotten is that beyond this, the slaves are deprived of
their own means of reproduction. The reproduction of
slavery depends on the capacity of the society to acquire
new slaves, that is, on an apparatus which is not directly
linked to the capacities of demographic reproduction of
the enslaving population. The rate of accumulation
depends on the number of slaves acquired, and not
directly on their productivity.
3. Feudal Mode of Production: Marx and Engels writing
about feudalism tended to focus on the transition between
the feudal and the capitalist modes of production. They
were concerned with the ‘existence form’ of labour and
the manner in which the products of labour were
appropriated by ruling classes. Just as capitalists exploited

the workers or the ‘proletariat’, so did the feudal lords
exploit their tenants or ‘serfs’. Capitalists grabbed surplus
value and feudal lords appropriated land rent from their
serfs.
4. Capitalist Mode of Production: Capitalism refers to a
mode of production in which capital is the dominant
means of production. Capital can be in various forms. It
can take the form of money or credit for the purchase of
labour power and materials of production. It can be money
or credit for buying physical machinery. In capitalist
mode of production, the private ownership of capital in its
various forms is in the hands of a class of capitalists. The
ownership by capitalists is to the exclusion of the mass of
the population.
In the German Ideology (1845-6), both Marx and Engels
outlined their scheme of history. Here, the main idea was that
based on a mode of production there was a succession of
historical phases. Change from one phase to the next was viewed
by them as a state of revolution brought about by conflicts
between old institutions and new productive forces. It was only
later on that both Marx and Engels devoted more time and studied
English, French and American revolutions. They named them as
bourgeois revolutions. Marx’s hypothesis of bourgeois revolution
has given us a perspective to look at social changes in Europe and
America. But more than this, it has stimulated further research by
scholars on this subject.
Secondly, Marx spoke of another kind of revolution. It
pertained to communism. Marx viewed communism as a sequel
to capitalism. Communism, according to Marx, would wipe out
all class divisions and therefore would allow for a fresh start with

moral and social transformation. This was the vision both Marx
and Engels carried in their minds for future society. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century, we find that their vision has
not come true and communism has not had its sway around the
world. All the same Marx’s ideas have influenced the nature of
growth of capitalism. Tempered with socialist ideas it is now
beginning to acquire a human face.
Marx’s concept of socialist revolution presupposes an era of
shift from capitalism to socialism. He explained bourgeois
revolution as a defeat of the aristocracy. This defeat came at the
end of a long period of growth of capitalism. The overthrow of
the bourgeoisie is, on the other hand, only the first phase of the
revolutionary change from capitalism to socialism. According to
Marx the socialistic phase of revolution would not be without
classes, occupational division of labour and market economy etc.
It is only in the higher phase of revolution there would be
distribution of goods to each according to his needs. This would
be the phase of communism. Thus, change to communism was
perceived by Marx as a series of steps to completely revolutionise
the entire mode of production.
In fact, Marx conceived intensification of class antagonism in
capitalism, because the new forces of production do not
correspond to the relations of production. There will be increasing
gap between the levels of distribution of gains between the two
classes. This shall leave the have-nots extremely alienated and
conscious of their class interests. The new forces of production in
capitalism are capable of mass production and will dump heaps
of prosperity at the feet of bourgeoisie without helping the lot of
proletariat, who would continue to suffer from misery and
poverty. This shall accentuate the class consciousness and hasten
the maturation of the conditions for socialist revolution. The
socialist revolution according to Marx would be qualitatively
different from all the revolutions of the past as it would for the
first time, after the beginning of history of inequality and
exploitation, usher in a stage of classless society with a hope for
all members of society.
9. Conclusion
This module we started with a biographical sketch of Marx and
why he considered as an important figure in the history of
sociological thought. Then we looked at the concept of historical
materialism as a materialist interpretation of social, cultural and
political phenomena. It propounds that social institutions and
related values are determined by the mode of production
processes rather than ideas in the explanation of history.
However, the word ‘determined’, in the Marxian sense, refers to
determination in the last analysis and should not be taken in an
absolute sense.
According to Marx historical materialism is a dialectical
theory of human progress. It regards history as the development
of human beings’ efforts to master the forces of nature and, hence,
of production. Since all production is carried out within social
organisation, history is the succession of changes in social
system, the development of human relations gearedto productive
activity (mode of production) in which the economic system
forms the base and all other relationships, institutions, activities,
and idea systems are “superstructural”.
Marx had rejected the strong emphasis of the determining
influence of cultural ideas as reflected in German historicism. For
him, the development of sociology required an analysis of how
the actual material and social conditions of people’s lives
influenced their consciousness and behavior aswell as their
opportunities to develop their full human potential. With his focus

on the economic class structure, he saw class divisions in modern

society deepening as a result of the advancing centralization of
the means of production and capitalists’ expanding levels of
exploitation of workers in their efforts to increase their profits.
Although the capitalist system was subject to periodic crises, their
resolution should not be expected to end the process of
exploitation and class conflict until the capitalist system is
eventually overthrown through revolutionary struggle.

MODULE IV
MAX WEBER
4.1 Social Action-Types of Action, Ideal type, Verstehen

Method
4.2 Power and Authority: Types of Authority, Bureaucracy
4.3 Religion and Economy- Protestant Ethics and Spirit of

Capitalism
1. Introduction
In this module we will look at the contribution of Max Weber

to the development of classical sociological theory. We will start
with a brief biographical sketch of Weber’s life and times. It will
help us to understand intellectual ideas and perspectives that
influenced his thought. This module is divided in to four parts.
First part discusses three important concepts developed by Weber
as a part of methodological inquiry in to the social world. These
three concepts are Verstehen, Social Action and Ideal Type.
Though this concepts we will discuss how Weber conceptualized
Sociology as a mode of inquiry distinct from the natural sciences,
with a distinctive subject matter concerning the meanings
attributed by social actors to their actions in a specific historical
context.

In the second part of the chapter we will analyse some of

Weber’s important contributions in understanding power and
authority. We will start with a brief discussion of the sociological
concepts of power and authority with special reference to Weber
understands of the terms. And we discuss the three types of
authorities Weber identifies such as traditional charismatic and
rational-legal authority. And we will focus on bureaucracy though
which the rational-legal authority is exercised in modern time.
In the third part of this module we will discuss one of the
central themes in his work, namely, the idea of rationality and the
process of rationalisation. The process of rationalization is a
concept that touches almost all of Weber’s work. This part of this
module is divided into three sections. In the first section, you will
get a brief description of the meanings of the terms ‘rationality’
and ‘rationalisation’. The second section will highlight how
Weber used the concept of rationality in his work. The issues
taken up will be Protestantism, capitalism, bureaucracy and types
of rationality.
In the last section of this module we will look at the
relation between religious ethics and economic behavior. It
examines the inter-relationship between religious beliefs and
economic activity. And explain what Weber meant by the “spirit
of capitalism” and contrasts it with “traditionalism”. We then
discuss certain aspects of the “Protestant ethic” which according
to Weber, contributed to the development of capitalism in the
West. This unit further clarifies the relationship between religious
beliefs and economic activity by describing three of Weber’s
‘comparative religious studies’, namely those of Confucianism in
China, Judaism in ancient West Asia and Hinduism in India.

2. Biographical Sketch
Max Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany, in 1864. He was
the eldest of eight children born to Max Weber Sr. and Helene
Fallenstein Weber, although only six survived to adulthood. Max
Jr. was a sickly child. When he was four years old, he became
seriously ill with meningitis. Though he eventually recovered,
throughout the rest of his life he suffered the physical and
emotional after-effects of the disease, most apparently anxiety
and nervous tension. From an early age, books were central in
Weber’s life. He read whatever he could get his hands on,
including Kant, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Goethe, and
Schopenhauer, and he wrote two historical essays before his 14th
birthday.
In 1882, at 18 years old, Weber took his final high school
examinations. Weber went to the University of Heidelberg for
three semesters and then completed one year of military service
in Strasbourg. When his service ended, he enrolled at the
University of Berlin and, for the next eight years, lived at his
parents’ home. Upon passing his first examination in law in 1886,
Weber began work as a full-time legal apprentice. While working
as a junior barrister, he earned a PhD in economic and legal
history in 1889. He then took a position as lecturer at the
University of Berlin. Weber followed in his father’s footsteps by
becoming a lawyer and joining the same organizations that his
father had at the University of Heidelberg. Like his father, he was
active in government affairs as well.
In 1893, at the age of 29, Weber married Marianne
Schnitger, a distant cousin, and finally left his childhood home.
Today, Marianne Weber is recognized as an important feminist,
intellectual, and sociologist in her own right. She was a popular
public speaker on social and sexual ethics and wrote many books

and articles. Her most influential works, Marriage and

Motherhood in the Development of Law (1907) and Women and
Love (1935), examined feminist issues and the reform of
marriage. However, Marianne is known best as the intellectual
partner of her husband. She and Max made a conscious effort to
establish an egalitarian relationship, and they worked together on
intellectual projects. Interestingly, Marianne referred to Max as
her “companion” and implied that theirs was an unconsummated
marriage. Despite her own intellectual accomplishments,
Marianne’s 700-page treatise, Max Weber: A Biography, first
published in 1926, has received the most attention, serving as the
central source of biographical information on her husband.
In 1894, Max Weber joined the faculty at Freiburg
University as a full professor of economics. Shortly thereafter, in
1896, Weber accepted a position as chair of economics at the
University of Heidelberg, where he first began his academic
career. In 1904, Weber traveled to the United States and began to
formulate the argument of what would be his most celebrated
work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber
1904–5/1958). After returning to Europe, Weber resumed his
intellectual activity. He met with the brilliant thinkers of his day,
including Werner Sombart, Paul Hensel, Ferdinand Tönnies,
Ernst Troeltsch, and Georg Simmel.
He helped establish the Heidelberg Academy of the
Sciences in 1909 and the Sociological Society in 1910 (Marianne
Weber 1926/1975:425). However, Weber was still plagued by
compulsive anxiety. In 1918, he helped draft the constitution of
the Weimar Republic while giving his first university lectures in
19 years at the University of Vienna. He suffered tremendously,
however, and turned down an offer for a permanent post (Weber
1958:23). In 1920, at the age of 56, Max Weber died of
pneumonia.
3. Verstehen, Social Action, and Ideal Type

In this part we will discuss about three central ideas that
defined Weber's work in the discipline of sociology. In the first
part on Max Weber we will deal with three concepts such as
Verstehen, Social Action and Ideal Type. These three concepts
focus on Max Weber’s concern with methodology of social
sciences. These three concepts give a perspective and a
background to analyse the major theoretical formulations and
empirical context developed by Max Weber. So, a clear
understanding of these ideas is necessary in dealing with Weber’s
substantive and theoretical ideas. Weber was opposed to pure
abstract theorizing. Instead, his theoretical ideas are embedded in
his empirical, usually historical, research. Weber’s methodology
shaped his research, and the combination of the two lies at the
base of his theoretical orientation.
3.1 Verstehen
Verstehen is a German word usually translated as
‘‘understanding,’’ the concept of verstehen has become part of a
critique of positivist approaches to the social sciences. Associated
with the sociology of Max Weber, verstehen derives from the
hermeneutic critique of positivism that emerged in German
universities in the 1880s and 1890s that gave rise to a dispute over
method in the social sciences. Weber felt that sociologists had an
advantage over natural scientists. That advantage resided in the
sociologist’s ability to understand social phenomena, whereas the
natural scientist could not gain a similar understanding of the
behavior of an atom or a chemical compound. Weber’s special
use of the term verstehen in his historical research is one of his
best-known and most controversial contributions to the
methodology of contemporary sociology.

Verstehen refers to understanding the meaning of action from

the actor’s point of view. It is entering into the shoes of the other,
and adopting this research stance requires treating the actor as a
subject, rather than an object of one’s observations. It also implies
that unlike objects in the natural world, human actors are not
simply the product of causal forces. Individuals are seen to create
the world by organizing their own understanding of it and giving
it meaning.
Weber defined sociology as “a science which attempts the
interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to
arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects” (Weber
1947:88). In casting “interpretive understanding,” or Verstehen,
as the principal objective, Weber’s vision of sociology offers a
distinctive counter to those who sought to base the young
discipline on the effort to uncover universal laws applicable to all
societies. Weber’s view of the task of sociology combines his
emphasis on Verstehen (interpretive understanding) with his view
of social action: for Weber the task of the sociologist is to
understand the meanings individuals assign to the contexts in
which they are acting and to determine the effects that such
meanings have on their conduct and the world.
One of the most systematic uses of this method by Weber is
in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism where he
supplements structural and economic accounts of the origin of
capitalism in Europe with empathetic reconstruction of the
worldview of verstehen seventeenth century Calvinist and other
Protestant groups. He argues that Calvinist belief in
predestination, which precluded achieving salvation through
good works, provoked ‘‘an unprecedented inner loneliness’’ and
search for signs of salvation. Through attempting to resolve this
paradox the theological quest for evidence of divine grace was
transposed into the worldly but ascetic pursuit of capital
accumulation, success in which was interpreted by Calvinists as

signaling divine selection.
What above example illustrates is that only through
empathetic reconstruction of actors’ meanings is it possible to
explain critical events like the growth of capitalism. At the same
time Weber categorically rejected the idea that verstehen
involved simply intuition, sympathetic participation, or empathy.
To him, verstehen involved doing systematic and rigorous
research rather than simply getting a “feeling” for a text or social
phenomenon. In other words, for Weber, verstehen was a rational
procedure of study.
In his methodology, Weber emphasizes understanding of the
subjective meanings of the actions to the actors by
contextualizing it in some way. It is important to note that when
Weber talks about meaning in this context, he has in mind the
motivations of the actor. These motives may be intellectual in the
sense that the actor has an observable and rational motive for his
or her actions in terms of means and ends; or they may be
emotional in the sense that the behavior may be understood in
terms of being motivated by some underlying feeling like anger.
3.2 Social Action
According to Max Weber, “Sociology is a science which attempts
the interpretative understanding of social action in order thereby
to arrive at a causal explanation of its cause and effects”. He
differentiated between action and purely reactive behavior. The
concept of behavior is reserved, then as now, for automatic
behavior that involves no thought processes. A stimulus is
presented and behavior occurs, with little intervening between
stimulus and response. Such behavior was not of interest in
Weber’s sociology. He was concerned with action that clearly

involved the intervention of thought processes (and the resulting

meaningful action) between the occurrence of a stimulus and the
ultimate response. In another word, action was said to occur when
individuals attached subjective meanings to their action. To
Weber, the task of sociological analysis involved “the
interpretation of action in terms of its subjective meaning”
(Weber, 1921/1978). Here we can point out the following
important elements of social action
 Social action includes all human behaviour.
 Social action attaches a subjective meaning to it.
 The acting individual or individuals take into account
the behavior of others.
 Social action is oriented in its course.
Hence the construction of a pure type of social action helps the
sociologists as an ideal type “which has the merit of clear
understandability and lack of ambiguity’” (Weber 1964).Weber
has talked about four types of social actions. These are
i) Zweckrational or rational action with reference to
goals,
ii) Wertrational or rational action with reference to
values,
iii) traditional action and
iv) affective action.
These are classified according to their modes of orientation.
Rational action with reference to goals is classified in terms of the
conditions or means for the successful attainment of the actor’s
own rationally chosen ends. Rational action with reference to

value is classified in terms of rational orientation to an absolute
value, that is, action which is directed to overriding ideals of duty,
honour or devotion to a cause.
Traditional action type is classified as one which is under
the influence of long practice, customs and habits. Affective
action is classified in terms of affectual orientation, especially
emotional, determined by the specific states of feeling of the
actor. Since reality presents a mixture of the four pure types of
action, for our analysis and understanding we separate them
analytically into pure or ideal types. For instance, the use of
rational ideal types can help in measuring irrational deviation and
we can understand particular empirical action by interpreting as
to which of the four types of action it most closely approximates.
3.3 Ideal Type
Ideal type is another methodological and conceptual innovation
of Weber. This methodological contribution helped Weber to get
a wide recognizion in contemporary sociology. An ideal type is
an analytical or conceptual construct that highlights certain
specific features of people’s orientations and actions for purposes
of analysis and comparison. According to Weber ideal type is a
mental construct, like a model, for the scrutiny and systematic
characterisation of a concrete situation. Indeed, he used ideal type
as a methodological tool to understand and analyse social reality.
“The ideal typical concept will develop our skill in
imputation in research. It is not a description of reality but it aims
to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description”.
In other words, ideal types are concepts formulated on the basis
of facts collected carefully and analytically for empirical
research. In this sense, ideal types are constructs or concepts

which are used as methodological devices or tools in our

understanding and analysis of any social problem.
Weber believed it was the responsibility of sociologists to
develop conceptual tools, which could be used later by historians
and sociologists. The most important such conceptual tool was
the ideal type. Between 1903 and 1908 Weber published several
so called ‘‘methodological’’ essays in which he addressed a wide
range of questions concerning the goals, subject matter, and
methods of the social sciences. The most famous of these essays
was ‘‘‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,’’
published in 1904 as Weber was assuming the co editorship of the
influential journal. He sketched his vision of the social sciences
as grounded in cognitive interests that are in part historical and in
part theoretical, and as seeking relevance to questions of value
and contemporary social policy. Weber’s extended discussion of
concept formation focused on his notion of ‘‘ideal type’’
concepts.
Ideal types are conceptual instruments that seek to
represent the most relevant aspects of a given object (e.g., ‘‘city,’’
‘‘patriarchy,’’ ‘‘capitalism’’) for purposes of social scientific
inquiry. They are formed as deliberate constructs through a
process of selection, abstraction, and idealization. Ideal type
concepts aim to be useful rather than descriptive, for they are not
intended to represent actual phenomena. Weber maintained that
they were in fact indispensable for purposes of inquiry and clear
exposition. Moreover, ideal types are well suited to a vision of
social science concerned with representing the cultural
significance and value oriented aspects of social phenomena
within the context of historically oriented causal inquiries.
For example, Weber distinguished four “ideal types” of
social action, reflecting differences in underlying subjective

orientations. These include two types of rational action

(instrumental versus value-oriented rationality) and two types of
non-rationalaction (traditional and affective). Instrumental
rationality involves conscious deliberation and explicit choice
with regard to both ends and means; that is, a choice is
consciously made from among alternative ends (or goals) and
then the appropriate means are selected to achieve the end that
has been chosen.
Value- oriented rationality, in contrast, involves a
subjective commitment to an end or goal that is not compared to
alternative ends but instead is regarded as ultimate. For such
actions the individual's rational choices are limited to selecting
the appropriate means. In contrast to these types of rational action
involving conscious deliberation and choice, traditional action is
followed simply because it is consistent with well-established
patterns or is habitual. Affective action expresses feelings or
emotions (or affect) without conscious deliberation. All four of
these are ideal types, of course; in real life, individuals’ actions
may reflect varying mixtures.
According to Weber conceived them, ideal types were
hypothetical and a reference not to something that is normatively
ideal but to an ideational type, which serves as a mental model
that can be widely shared and used because analysts agree that it
captures some essential features of a phenomenon. The ideal type
does not correspond to reality but seeks to condense essential
features of it in the model so that one can better recognize its real
characteristics when it is met. It is not an embodiment of one side
or aspect but the synthetic ideational representation of complex
phenomena from reality.
For instance, Weber’s analysis took emergent terms and
ideas that were current in actual bureaucracies at the time that he

was writing and used them as the basis for theoretical construction
of an ideal type of bureaucracy. They were a reconstruction of
ordinary language in use into the ideal type. Now a certain
normative slippage occurs in this process, because he is using
ordinary language terms, as defined by members of organizations,
to describe what it is that these members do. The members were
those of the Prussian and German bureaucracies of the state and
military. They were bounded by a ferociously strong sense of duty
and conformance. From the conceptual and empirical usages
scholars identified some important characteristics of ideal types.
They are,
 Ideal types are not general or average types. That is,
they are not defined by the characteristics common to
all phenomena or objects of study. They are
formulated on the basis of certain typical traits, which
are essential to the construction of an ideal type
concept.
 Ideal types are not a presentation of total reality or
they do not explain everything. They exhibit partial
conception of the whole.
 Ideal types are neither a description of any definite
concept of reality, nor a hypothesis, but they can aid
both in description and explanation. Ideal types are
different in scope and usage from descriptive
concepts.
 In this sense we can say that ideal types are also
related to the analytic conception of causality, though
not, in deterministic terms.
 They also help in reaching to general propositions and
in comparative analysis.
 Ideal types serve to guide empirical research, and are

used in systematisation of data on historical and social
reality.
Weber used ideal types in three distinctive ways. Indeed, his
three kinds of ideal types are distinguished by three levels of
abstraction. The first kind of ideal types are rooted in the
historical particularities namely, Western city, the Protestant
ethics etc. In reality, this kind of ideal types refer to the
phenomena that appear only in the specific historical periods and
in particular cultural areas. The second kind relates to the abstract
elements of social reality, for example, the concepts of
bureaucracy or feudalism. These elements of social reality are
found in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. The third
kind of ideal type relates to the reconstruction of a particular kind
of behaviour (Coser 1977). In another word,Weber offered
several varieties of ideal types:
1. Historical ideal types. These relate to phenomena
found in some particular historical epoch (e.g.,
the modern capitalistic marketplace).
2. General sociological ideal types. These relate to
phenomena that cut across a number of historical
periods and societies (e.g., bureaucracy).
3. Action ideal types. These are pure types of action
based on the motivations of the actor (e.g.,
affectual action).
4. Structural ideal types. These are forms taken by
the causes and consequences of social action
(e.g., traditional domination).

To sum up, according to Weber an ideal-type is not. First,

as a logical construct the ideal type does not describe empirical
reality. Rather, it clarifies our conceptual understanding of what
to look for in empirical data. Second, the ideal-type does not
directly provide a hypothesis about reality. As a regulative
principle it indirectly helps social scientists to construct research
questions and hypotheses about social reality. Third, as a one-
sided exaggeration the ideal-type does not provide an account of
some ‘average’ level of social reality.
4. Theory of Power and Authority, Bureaucracy

4.1 Power
For Max Weber, power is an aspect of social relationships. It
refers to the possibility of imposing one’s will upon the behaviour
of another person. Power is present in social interaction and
creates situations of inequality since the one who has power
imposes it on others. The impact of power varies from situation
to situation. On the one hand, it depends on the capacity of the
powerful individual to exercise power. On the other hand it
depends upon the extent to which it is opposed or resisted by the
others. Weber says that power can be exercised in all walks of
life. It is not restricted to a battlefield or to politics. It is to be
observed in the market place, on a lecture platform, at a social
gathering, in sports, scientific discussions and even through
charity. Weber discusses two contrasting sources of power. These
are as follows:
1. Power which is derived from a constellation of
interests that develop in a formally free market. For
example, a group of producers of sugar controls
supply of their production in the market to maximise
their profit.

2. An established system of authority that allocates the

right to command and the duty to obey. For example,
in the army, a jawan is obliged to obey the command
of his officer. The officer derives his power through
an established system of authority.
As you have seen in the last point, any discussion of power
leads us to think about its legitimacy. It is legitimacy, which
according to Weber constitutes the core point of authority. Let us
now examine the concept of authority.
4. 2 Authority
Authority is another important concept developed by
Weber. Weber used the German word “Herrschaft”, to expline
dominance or authorities exercised in society. Different scholars
translated this word in different ways such as ‘authority’, others
as ‘domination’ or ‘command’. Herrschaft is a situation in which
a ‘Herr’ or master dominates or commands others. Raymond
Aron (1967) defines Herrschaft as the master’s ability to obtain
the obedience of those who theoretically owe it to him. As we
saw, power refers to the ability or capacity to control another.
Authority refers to legitimised power. It means that the master has
the right to command and can expect to be obeyed. For a system
of authority to exist the following elements must be present:
1. An individual ruler/master or a group of
rulers/masters.
2. An individual/group that is ruled.
3. The will of the ruler to influence the conduct of the
ruled which may be expressed through commands.

4. Evidence of the influence of the rulers in terms of

compliance or obedience shown by the ruled.
5. Direct or indirect evidence which shows that the ruled
have internalised and accepted the fact that the ruler’s
commands must be obeyed.
We see that authority implies a reciprocal relationship
between the rulers and the ruled. The rulers believe that they have
the legitimate right to exercise their authority. On the other hand,
the ruled accept this power and comply with it, reinforcing its
legitimacy. According to Weber, there are three systems of
legitimation, each with its corresponding norms, which justify the
power to command. It is these systems of legitimation which are
designated as the following types of authority.
1. Traditional authority
2. Charismatic authority
3. Rational-legal authority
Traditional Authority: This system of legitimation flows from
traditional action. In other words, it is based on customary law
and the sanctity of ancient traditions. It is based on the belief that
a certain authority is to be respected because it has existed since
time immemorial.In traditional authority, rulers enjoy personal
authority by virtue of their inherited status. Their commands are
in accordance with customs and they also possess the right to
extract compliance from the ruled. Often, they abuse their power.
The persons who obey them are ‘subjects’ in the fullest sense of
the term. They obey their master out of personal loyalty or a pious
regard for his time-honored status.

Briefly, traditional authority derives its legitimacy from

longstanding traditions, which enable some to command and
compel others to obey. It is hereditary authority and does not
require written rules. The ‘masters’ exercise their authority with
the help of loyal relatives and friends. Weber considers this kind
of authority as irrational. It is therefore rarely found in modern
developed societies.
Charismatic Authority: Charisma means an extraordinary
quality possessed by some individuals. This gives such people
unique powers to capture the fancy and devotion of ordinary
people. Charismatic authority is based on extraordinary devotion
to an individual and to the way of life preached by this person.
The legitimacy of such authority rests upon the belief in the
supernatural or magical powers of the person. The charismatic
leader ‘proves’ his/her power through miracles, military and other
victories or the dramatic prosperity of the disciples. As long as
charismatic leaders continue to ‘prove’ their miraculous powers
in the eyes of their disciples, their authority stays intact. You may
have realised that the type of social action that charismatic
authority is related to is affective action. The disciples are in a
highly charged emotional state as a result of the teachings and
appeal of the charismatic leaders. They worship their hero.
Rational-legal Authority: The term refers to a system of
authority, which are both, rational and legal. It is vested in a
regular administrative staff who operate in accordance with
certain written rules and laws. Those who exercise authority are
appointed to do soon the basis of their achieved qualifications,
which are prescribed and codified. Those in authority consider it
a profession and are paid a salary. Thus, it is a rational system. It
is legal because it is in accordance with the laws of the land which
people recognise and feel obliged to obey. The people
acknowledge and respect the legality of both, the ordinance and
rules as well as the positions or titles of those who implement the

rules. Rational-legal authority is a typical feature of modern
society. It is the reflection of the process of rationalisation.
Remember that Weber considers rationalisation as the key feature
of western civilisation. It is, according to Weber, a specific
product of human thought and deliberation. By now you have
clearly grasped the connection between rational-legal authority
and rational action for obtaining goals.
4. Bureaucracy
According to Weber bureaucracy represents the pure ideal-type
of legal-rational authority and it is a defining feature of
modernity. Bureaucracy is organized on a hierarchical and
rational basis. Individuals and departments are coordinated
through explicit rules and procedures, records and files, functions
and positions, a transparent line of command, and entry
qualifications. It represents the most efficient exercise of power
in conditions of complex and large-scale populations. In its most
perfected form, bureaucracy organizes the permanent staff of the
modern state.
He studied bureaucracy in detail and constructed an ideal
type which contained the most prominent characteristics of
bureaucracy. He identified six major characteristics of the ideal
type bureaucracy:
1. Official duties and functions are performed by
accredited staff.
2. Offices are structured into a hierarchy of command
and supervision from higher authority to lower
functions.

3. ‘The bureau’ or modern office is based on an

accumulation of written documents and files, kept
completely separate from private property.
4. Specialized office functions require personnel to
acquire expert qualifications and training.
5. ‘The bureau’ demands that the official is fully
dedicated to working conscientiously at full capacity.
6. General office rules are comprehensive, stable and
must be learned as the special technical competence
of the official.
According to Weber being a bureaucrat is a ‘vocation’.
This involves a demanding set of prescribed duties and training
and an unswerving, methodical and impersonal loyalty to ‘the
office’ in return for ‘a secure existence’. Higher grades of
officialdom demand ‘social esteem’ for their expertise in
bureaucratic matters and qualifications. Unlike elected officials
who are appointed or promoted ‘from below’, pure bureaucrats
are appointed ‘from above’ by a superior authority. A legal right
to ‘tenure for life’ allows them to discharge their duties free from
personal interference and in strict accord with the rules. This
independence is enhanced by a regular, albeit relatively modest,
salary and pension. They also follow a fixed career structure that
allows them to move up the hierarchy through examinations and
qualifications.
Class, Status and Party
Weber’s concepts and contributions to stratification
theory expanded and refined Marxian understandings of
advanced industrial society. Like Marx, Weber believed that
economic stratification produces social classes: ‘‘We may speak
of a class when (1) a number of people have in common a specific

causal component of their life chances, insofar as (2) this
component is represented exclusively by economic interests in
the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and (3) is
represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor
markets.’’ Weber defines class as a situation where:
1. a large number of men have in common a specific
causal factor influencing their chances in life, insofar
as
2. this factor has to do only with the possession of
economic goods and the interests involved in earning
a living, and furthermore
3. the conditions of the market in commodities or labour.
Class situation depends on the probability of individuals using
skills and resources to acquire goods, a position and ‘inner
satisfaction’ under ‘pure’ competitive market conditions. In turn
this always depends on the prior ownership and non-ownership of
property.
But Weber suggested that classes could form in any
market situation, and he argued that other forms of social
stratification could occur independently of economics.Weber’s
was a three dimensional model of stratification consisting of,
(1) social classes that are objectively formed social
groupings having an economic base;
(2) parties which are associations that arise through
actions oriented towardthe acquisition of social
power;

(3) statusgroups delineated in terms of social

estimationsof honor or esteem.
In Weberian terms a class is more than apopulation
segment that shares a particular economic position relative to the
means of production. Classes reflect ‘‘communities of interest’’
and social prestige as well as economic position. Class members
share lifestyles, preferences, and outlooks as a consequence of
socialization, educational credentials, and the prestige of
occupational and other power positions they hold, which also
serve to cloak the economic class interests that lie beneath. This
status ideology eases the way for class members to monopolize
and maintain the prestige, power, and financial gain of higher
socioeconomic positions, as only persons who seem like ‘‘the
right kind’’ are allowed into preferred positions(Collins 1985).
In contrast to class, status does normally refer to
communities; status groups are ordinarily communities, albeit
rather amorphous ones. “Status situation” is defined by Weber as
“every typical component of the life of men that is determined by
a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor”. As a
general rule, status is associated with a style of life. (Status relates
to consumption of goods produced, whereas class relates to
economic production.) Those at the top of the status hierarchy
have a different lifestyle than do those at the bottom.
In this case, lifestyle, or status, is related to class situation.
But class and status are not necessarily linked to one another:
“Money and an entrepreneurial position are not in themselves
status qualifications, although they may lead to them; and the lack
of property is not in itself a status disqualification, although this
may be a reason for it”. There is a complex set of relationships
between class and status, and it is made even more complicated
when we add the dimension of party.

While classes exist in the economic order and status

groups in the social order, parties can be found in the political
order. To Weber, parties “are always structures struggling for
domination”. Thus, parties are the most organized elements of
Weber’s stratification system. Weber thinks of parties very
broadly as including not only those that exist in the state but also
those that may exist in a social club. Parties usually, but not
always, represent class or status groups. Whatever they represent,
parties are oriented to the attainment of power.
3.3 Rationality and Modernity- Rationalisation

According to Weber, the contemporary world is characterized by
rationality. Max Weber believed that the key to understand
modern society is to be found in its rational features and
rationalising forces. For him, the modern Western world is
characterised by rationality. As a result of this, human activity is
marked by methodical calculation. Quantification, predictability
and regularity become important. Individuals rely more on logic,
reasonand calculation than on supernatural beliefs.
Weber argues that one of the prime forces bringing about
modernity is the process of rationalization. He uses the word
rationalization in at least three different ways: He uses it to talk
about means-ends calculation, in which rationality is individual
and specific. Rational action is action based on the most efficient
means to achieve a given end. Secondly, Weber uses the term to
talk about bureaucracies. The bureaucratic form is a method of
organizing human behavior across time and space. Initially we
used kinship to organize our behaviors, using the ideas of
extended family, lineages, clans, moieties, and so forth. But as the
contours of society changed, so did our method of organizing.
Bureaucracy is a more rational form of organization than the
traditional and emotive kinship system.

Finally, Weber uses the term rationalization in a more

general sense. One way to think about it is to see rationalization
as the opposite of enchantment. Specifically, an enchanted world
is one filled with mystery and magic. Disenchantment, then,
refers to the process of emptying the world of magical or spiritual
forces. Part of this, of course, is in the religious sense of
secularization. Peter Berger (1967) provides us with a good
definition of secularization: "By secularization we mean the
process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from
the domination of religious institutions and symbols" (p. 107).
Thus, both secularization and disenchantment refer to the
narrowing of the religious or spiritual elements of the world. If
we think about the world of magic or primitive religion, one filled
with multiple layers of energies, spirits, demons, and gods, then
in a very real way the world has been subjected to secularization
from the beginning of religion. The number of spiritual entities
has steadily declined from many, many gods to one; and the
presence of a god has been removed from immediately available
within every force (think of the gods of thunder, harvest, and so
on) to completely divorced from the physical world, existing
apart from time (eternal) and space (infinite). In our more recent
past, secularization, and demystification and rationalization, have
of course been carried further by science and capitalism.
This general process of rationalization and
demystification extends beyond the realm of religion. Because of
the prominence of bureaucracy, means-ends calculation, science,
secularization, and so forth, our world is emptier. Weber sees this
move toward rationalization as historically unavoidable; it is
above all else the defining feature of modernity. Yet it leads
inexorably to an empty society. The organizational, intellectual,
and cultural movements toward rationality have emptied the
world of emotion, mystery, tradition, and affective human ties.
We increasingly relate to our world through economic

calculation, impersonal relations, and expert knowledge. Weber
(1948) tells us that as a result of rationalization the "most sublime
values have retreated from public life" and that the spirit "which
in former times swept through the great communities like a
firebrand, welding them together" is gone (p. 155). Weber sees
this not only as a condition of the religious or political institutions
in society; he also sees the creative arts, like music and painting,
as having lost their creative spirit as well.
In Weber's work we can identify different types of
rationalities. The first type is practical rationality, which is
defined by Kalberg as “every way of life that views and judges
worldly activity in relation to the individual’s purely pragmatic
and egoistic interests” (1980:1151). People who practice practical
rationality accept given realities and merely calculate the most
expedient ways of dealing with the difficulties that they present.
This type of rationality arose with the severing of the bonds of
primitive magic, and it exists trans-civilization ally and trans-
historically; that is, it is not restricted to the modern Occident.
This type of rationality stands in opposition to anything that
threatens to transcend everyday routine. It leads people to distrust
all impractical values, either religious or secular-utopian, as well
as the theoretical rationality of the intellectuals, the type of
rationality to which we now turn.
Theoretical rationality involves a cognitive effort to
master reality through increasingly abstract concepts rather than
through action. It involves such abstract cognitive processes as
logical deduction, induction, attribution of causality, and the like.
This type of rationality was accomplished early in history by
sorcerers and ritualistic priests and later by philosophers, judges,
and scientists. Unlike practical rationality, theoretical rationality
leads the actor to transcend daily realities in a quest to understand
the world as a meaningful cosmos. Like practical rationality, it is

trans-civilizational and trans-historical.
The effect of intellectual rationality on actionis limited. In
that it involves cognitive processes, it need not affect action taken,
and it has the potential to introduce new patterns of action only
indirectly. Substantive rationality (similar to practical rationality
but unlike theoretical rationality) directly orders action into
patterns through clusters of values. Substantive rationality
involves a choice of means to ends within the context of a system
of values. One value system is no more (substantively) rational
than another. Thus, this type of rationality also exists trans-
civilizationally and trans-historically, wherever consistent value
postulates exist.
Finally, and most important from Kalberg’s point of view,
is formal rationality, which involves means–ends calculation
(Cockerham, Abel, and Luschen, 1993). But whereas in practical
rationality this calculation occurs in reference to pragmatic self-
interests, in formal rationality it occurs with reference to
“universally applied rules, laws, and regulations.” As Brubaker
puts it, “Common to the rationality of industrial capitalism,
formalistic law and bureaucratic administration is its objectified,
institutionalized, supra-individual form; in each sphere,
rationality is embodied in the social structure and confronts
individuals as something external to them” (1984:9). Weber
makes this quite clear in the specific case of bureaucratic
rationalization: Bureaucratic rationalization … revolutionizes
with technical means, in principle, as does every economic
reorganization, “from without”: It first changes the material and
social orders, and through them the people, by changing the
conditions of adaptation, and perhaps the opportunities for
adaptation, through a rational determination of means and
ends.(Weber, 1921/1978:1116)
Although all the other types of rationality are trans-

civilizational and epoch-transcending, formal rationality arose
only in the West with the coming of industrialization. The
universally applied rules, laws, and regulations that characterize
formal rationality in the West are found particularly in the
economic, legal, and scientific institutions, as well as in the
bureaucratic form of domination. Thus, we have already
encountered formal rationality in our discussion of rational-legal
authority and the bureaucracy.
3.4 The Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism

First let us look at the importance of The Protestant Ethics
and Spirit of Capitalism and the context in which Weber wrote it.
He wrote The Protestant Ethic at a pivotal period of his
intellectual career, shortly after his recovery from a depressive
illness that had incapacitated him from serious academic work for
a period of some four years. Prior to his sickness, most of Weber’s
works, although definitely presaging the themes developed in the
later phase of his life, were technical researches in economic
history, economics and jurisprudence. They include studies of
mediaeval trading law (his doctoral dissertation), the
development of Roman land-tenure, and the contemporary
socioeconomic conditions of rural workers in the eastern part of
Germany.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is
probably Weber's best-known work. It is a clear example of his
methodology. In it, he describes an ideal type of spirit of
capitalism, he performs an historical-comparative analysis to
determine how and when that kind of capitalism came to exist,
and he uses the concept of verstehen to understand the subjective
orientation and motivation of the actors.

Weber had three interrelated reasons for writing the book.

First, he wanted to counter Marx's argument concerning the rise
of capitalism—Weber characterizes Marx's historical materialism
as "naive." The second reason is very closely linked to the first:
Weber wanted to argue against brute structural force and argue
for the effect that cultural values could have on social action. The
third reason that Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic was to explain
why rational capitalism had risen in the West and nowhere else.
Capitalism had been practiced previously. But it was traditional,
not rational capitalism.
In traditional capitalism, traditional values and status
positions still held; the elite would invest but would spend as little
time and effort doing so in order to live as they were "accustomed
to live." In other words, the elite invested in capitalistic ventures
in order to maintain their lifestyle. It was, in fact, the existence of
traditional values and status positions that prevented the rise of
rational capitalism in some places. Rational capitalism, on the
other hand, is practiced to increase wealth for its own sake and is
based on utilitarian social relations.
These writings took their inspiration in some substantial
part from the so-called ‘historical school’ of economics which, in
conscious divergence from British political economy, stressed the
need to examine economic life within the context of the historical
development of culture as a whole. Weber always remained
indebted to this standpoint. But the series of works hebegan on
his return to health, and which preoccupied him for the remainder
of his career, concern a range of problems much broader in
compass than those covered in the earlier period. The Protestant
Ethic was a first fruit of these new endeavours. An appreciation
of what Weber sought to achieve in the book demands at least an
elementary grasp of two aspects of the circumstances in which it
was produced: the intellectual climate within which he wrote, and
the connections between the work itself and the massive

programme of study that he set himself in the second phase of his
career.
In this earliest stage of his research Weber was interested
in ascertaining the contribution made by a set of religious beliefs
and practices to the development of the specific form of modern
(‘‘rational’’) capitalism as found in Western Europe and the US.
What marked this modern form of capitalism as new was
especially the emphasis on the systematic organization of work
done by laborers hired on a formally free market, and enterprises
devoted to the pursuit of increasing profit without the constraints
of traditionalism. Here as elsewhere in his work
Weber recognized that there had been other prior forms of
capitalism in Europe as well as non western capitalistic forms and
practices. Likewise, he acknowledged that the rise of capitalism
as a specific economic system in modern Europe had many
causes, both material and cultural. His central problem here was,
first and primarily, to explain the rise, not of capitalism as a
system, but of the peculiar ‘‘spirit’’ (ethos, mentality) of this new
economic system, and second, to show how this new ethos made
specific contributions to the intensive growth of modern
capitalism in its most crucial stages, especially in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Hence, the problems he addressed were
complex, yet circumscribed, as were his hypotheses, lines of
argument, interpretations of evidence, and conclusions. This is
not to say that his arguments were free of ambiguities, nor that
the evidence he marshaled was completely convincing.
What was the new ‘‘spirit’’ of capitalism that Weber took
as the object of his inquiry? He described it as an ethic, albeit a
secular one, lacking immediate religious foundation or reference,
yet prescribing as a moral duty the pursuit of earning more and

more money as an end in itself. Whether as an entrepreneur,

independent craftsman, or laborer, an individual is obliged to
make the acquisition of money from their occupation the center
of their life.
At the same time, the individual is also duty bound not to
pursue wealth in order to spend money for the enjoyment of
luxury or leisure. The acquisition of wealth is its own reward.
Waste of time or money is admonished; frugality, reinvestment,
and credit worthiness are virtues. Although the historical origins
of this distinctly modern frame of mind are unclear, Weber
believed that this new positive moral outlook on the acquisition
of money had emerged in America and Western Europe by the
eighteenth century. One of the surprising claims is that Weber’s
spirit of capitalism grew and flourished largely independently of
the system of capitalism itself.
Weber acknowledges that Benjamin Franklin, though a
great exemplar of the new spirit, did not fit the model of the
modern capitalist, nor was capitalism very advanced in its
development in Franklin’s America. This fact of the independent
origin of the capitalist spirit, however, served Weber’s view that
it was not an ideology springing from the economic system that
was its rationale, as Marxism might have posited. However, if the
modern spirit of capitalism was not a product of the form or
system of capitalism, the question becomes all the more urgent:
Whatwere the sources of this new attitude toward the acquisition
of wealth, an attitude that became, as Weber put it, a leading
principle of capitalism?
In his search for the historical origins of capitalism’s
modern spirit, Weber took as his point of departure the
contemporary controversies over the respective orientations of
Roman Catholics and Protestants toward capitalistic economic

activities. In this context it had been noted as a matter of empirical

fact that Protestants were more likely than Catholics to be
involved in the more innovative and technically skilled types of
capitalistic activity and at the same time were more likely to
pursue the patterns of training and education appropriate for such
work. Likewise, they tended to be more prosperous than their
more tradition bound Catholic counterparts. The attempts to
explain these differences were the stuff of wide rangingif
unproductive controversies at the time Weber himself began to
take up the questions.
As Weber probed the possible sources of the differences
he found them to lie in the early history of Protestantism. First,
Luther and Lutheranism made key contributions, particularly in
advancing the idea that worldly economic activities in pursuit of
a livelihood were worthy ‘‘vocations,’’ thereby providing
enterprise and work with moral sanction. This, Weber reasoned,
provided the impetus for individuals to devote themselves to
worldly economic activity to a greater extent than in
circumstances where tradition had dictated that work was either
morally neutral or even evil, albeit necessary for economic
sustenance.
Second, Calvin and Calvinism provided additional,
crucial incentives to work unstintingly in one’s economic
vocation. Here, Weber’s line of argument about the connections
between religious beliefs and economic activities becomes
intricate and turn son the paradox of unintended consequences.
Weber’s central problem was to explain why capitalism
first arose in the West and not in other parts of the world. Core
features of capitalism, ‘the impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain,
of money, of the greatest possible amount of money’, had been
around for a long time and in many places. ‘Unlimited greed’

cannot be the defining feature. In fact the opposite may be the

case: ‘Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at
least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse’ (1930: 17).
Something else lay behind the ‘peculiar rationalism of
Western culture’. ‘Capitalism’, according to Weber, existed in
other societies like China, India, Babylon, in the classical world
and in the Middle Ages. But in each case the road to economic
rationalism was barred. By what? ‘Magical and religious forces’
obstructed the development of rational capitalism according to
Weber. They lacked a guiding idea, an ‘ethos’ or a ‘spirit’
favourable to rational capitalism. Crucially, only in the West did
‘the rational capitalist organization of (formally) free labour’
appear (1930: 21). Free labour is decisive for Weber: ‘Exact
calculation – the basis of everything else – is only possible on a
basis of free labour’ (1930: 22).

References
1. Adams, Bert and R.A. Sydie. 2001. Sociological Theory.
Thousand Oaks,C.A.: Pine ForgePress.
2. Collins, Randall. 1986 c. Weberian Social Theory.
Cambridge: University Press.
3. Coser, Lewis. 1977, Masters of Sociological Thought,
2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace& Jovanovich.
4. Delaney, Tim. 2008, Contemporary Social Theory,
Investigation and Application. New York Prentice Hall.
5. Good, Erich. 1988. Sociology, 2nd Edition. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
6. Ritzer, George. 1985. ‘The Rise of Micro Sociological
Theory’. Sociological Theory. Boston: McGraw Hill.
7. Ritzer, George. 2000d. Sociological Theory. 5th ed.
Boston: McGraw Hill.
8. Ritzer, George. 2000c.Modern Sociological Theory. 5th
ed. Boston: McGraw Hill.
9. Ritzer, George. 2003. Contemporary Sociological
Theory and its Classical Roots. Boston: Mc Graw Hill.
10. Turner, Jonathan. H. 2003. The Structure of Sociological
Theory. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
11. Zeitlin, Irving.M,1969, Ideology and the Development of
Sociological Theory, Prentice Hall of India Pvt. Ltd

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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY:

CORE COURSE (SGY3 B03)

2 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

MODULE I : FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGICAL

1.1 Emergence of Social thought: Contributions of

1.2 Auguste Comte: Positivism, Hierarchy of Sciences, Law

I.3 Herbert Spencer: Organic analogy, Social Darwinism,

MODULE II: EMILE DURKHEIM

2.1 Social Fact, Collective Conscience

MODULE III: KARL MARX

3.1 Economic Determinism, Dialectical Materialism,

3 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

MODULE IV: MAX WEBER

4.1 Social Action-Types of Action, Ideal type, Verstehen

4 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT

1.1 Emergence of Social thought: Contributions of

This module discus the foundations of social thought in

important social conditions that were of the utmost significance

6 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

A proper understanding of this historical context will help

7 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

the hardy conquerors succumb to the temptations of the soft and

1.2. Contributions of Rousseau- The Social Contract

8 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

9 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

These national transformations had a great impact on

10 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu defines three main

1.3.1. Separation of Powers:

11 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

be restrained by the other branches (checks and

12 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

divisions of his predecessors into monarchy, aristocracy,

1.4. Saint Simone: Positive Philosophy

13 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

and status. It is this social and economic structure that Saint-

14 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

The most interesting aspect of Saint-Simon was his

15 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

Ecole Polytechnique for their rebelliousness and their political

16 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

Comte developed social physics, or what in 1839 he called

17 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

classification also makes Comte the founder of the philosophy of

For Comte sociology is to be based on empirical

18 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

Comte used positivism in two ways. In the first version

19 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

2.2.3. The Law of the Three Stages

20 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

in term of ‘essences’, ‘ideals’, ‘forms’, i.e. in short, in a

21 Sociological Theory: An Introduction

Intellectual stages correspond to three stages of social

Form of Social basis Organization Social

1 Theological The family Military Warrior

2 Metaphysical The state Commercial Lawyer

3 Positive Society/ Industrial Scientist

Comte emphasized on the development of positivist