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Chapter 4: Introducing Western Sociologists

Imagine a weaver in an English village around the year 1800. He works at a handloom in his own home. He decides when to start, when to rest, and what to make. He knows the man who buys his cloth, and he knows every family in his village. His father wove cloth in the same room, in much the same way.

Within one generation, that life ends. A machine in a distant town can now spin thread faster than any village hand. The cloth he weaves cannot be sold at a price he can live on. So he walks to the town, and takes work in a factory. There he does one small task, again and again, for twelve hours a day, beside strangers whose names he will never learn. A manager decides when he begins and when he stops. He is paid in wages, he is free to leave — and yet he controls almost nothing about his own working day.

Multiply that weaver by millions, across Europe, in less than a hundred years. Villages emptied. Cities swelled. Old certainties about God, king and custom were questioned.

Out of this upheaval came a new question, and then a new subject. Not “why is this man unhappy?”, but “what has happened to society itself?” Three thinkers — Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber — each answered that question differently. This chapter is about their answers.

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.1 – The transition from village handloom to industrial factory.

NoteCuriosity Corner

Q1. Why did a subject called sociology appear in nineteenth-century Europe, and not somewhere else, or some other time? Q2. The factory worker in the story is legally free and is paid for his work. Why, then, did Marx call such a worker “alienated”? Q3. People who share the same hardship do not always struggle together. According to Marx, what has to happen inside their heads before they do? Q4. Durkheim insisted that society is a real thing that can be studied scientifically. How can you study something you cannot see, touch or photograph? Q5. Weber said a sociologist must “feel with” the people she studies, yet remain neutral about their beliefs. Is that even possible?

By the end of this chapter you will be able to answer each of these questions.

4.1 The Context of Sociology

Sociology is sometimes called the child of the “age of revolution”. The phrase is worth pausing over. It tells you that sociology did not appear because someone one morning decided that society would make an interesting subject. It appeared because society itself had changed so violently that the old ways of explaining it no longer worked.

Sociology was born in nineteenth-century Western Europe. In the three centuries before that, a series of revolutionary changes had decisively altered the way people lived — how they worked, what they believed, who ruled them, and where they made their homes. Three of these changes prepared the ground for the new subject: the Enlightenment, or the scientific revolution; the French Revolution; and the Industrial Revolution.

These processes did not stop at Europe’s borders. They transformed European society, and then transformed the rest of the world as it came into contact with Europe. Colonial rule carried European institutions, European technology and European ideas into Asia and Africa, so the questions raised in a London factory town eventually reached a Bengal village too.

The thinkers this chapter introduces

In this chapter you will meet the key ideas of three sociological thinkers: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. They belong to what is called the classical tradition of sociology — the founding body of work on which the subject was built.

Their ideas and insights have remained relevant even in our own time. That does not mean they were right about everything. All three have been sharply criticised, and their theories have undergone major modifications since. You are not being asked to accept them; you are being asked to understand them and to weigh them.

But there is a reason for beginning with their world before beginning with their ideas. Ideas about society are themselves shaped by social conditions. A thinker asks the questions his times force upon him. So we begin with a few words about the context in which sociology emerged.

The three processes

The modern era in Europe, and the conditions of modernity that we now take completely for granted, were brought about by three major processes.

The first was the Enlightenment, or the dawning of the “age of reason”. The second was the quest for political sovereignty, which found its clearest expression in the French Revolution. The third was the system of mass manufacture set in motion by the Industrial Revolution.

You have already studied these three processes at length in Chapter 1 of Introducing Sociology, where they were discussed as historical events. Here our purpose is narrower. We will look only at some of the intellectual consequences of these momentous changes — at what they did to the way human beings thought about their own social world.

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.2 – The three processes that led to the emergence of sociology.

Go back to the discussion of the coming of the modern age in Europe in Chapter 1 of Introducing Sociology. Make a short list, in your own words, of the kinds of changes each of the three processes was associated with — changes in ideas, changes in politics, changes in work. Keep the list beside you as you read this chapter; you will find that Marx, Durkheim and Weber are each responding to items on it.

4.1.1 The Enlightenment

During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Western Europe saw the emergence of radically new ways of thinking about the world. These new philosophies came to be referred to as “The Enlightenment”.

Their central move was to place the human being at the centre of the universe, and rational thought at the centre of the human being. What made a person a person, on this view, was the capacity to reason.

This capacity did something powerful. The ability to think rationally and critically transformed the individual human being into both the producer and the user of all knowledge — into what was called the “knowing subject”. Knowledge was no longer something handed down by scripture or authority. It was something a thinking person could produce for herself.

If society is made by human beings, it follows that society can be understood by human beings. Being the handiwork of humans, society was amenable to rational analysis and therefore comprehensible to other humans. That single sentence is the seed of every social science, sociology included.

But for reason to become the defining feature of the human world, something had to be pushed aside. Nature, religion and the divine acts of gods had occupied the central position in earlier ways of understanding the world; they now had to be displaced from it. Events were to be explained by causes that human beings could investigate, not by fate or divine will.

The Enlightenment was thus made possible by, and in turn helped to develop, certain attitudes of mind that we today call secular, scientific and humanistic. Secular here means “of this world” — explaining worldly things by worldly causes.

NoteDefinition

The Enlightenment: a period in eighteenth-century Europe when philosophers rejected the supremacy of religious doctrines, established reason as the means to truth, and treated the human being as the sole bearer of reason.

The dark side of reason

There is an uncomfortable side to this new confidence, and NCERT does not hide it. If reason is what makes a human being fully human, then whoever is judged not to reason is judged not fully human.

That is exactly the conclusion many Enlightenment thinkers drew. Only persons who could think and reason were considered fully human. Those who could not remained, in their eyes, deficient as human beings, and were considered not fully evolved humans — as in the case of the peoples of what they called “primitive” societies, or “savages”.

Notice who was doing the judging. These labels were applied by European writers, using European standards of what counted as reason, to societies they barely knew and often ruled. The categories are rejected today, and no sociologist uses them as descriptions of any people. They survive in your textbook only in quotation marks, as evidence of how the thinkers of that age thought.

the harm in labelling To call a community “primitive” is not simply to describe it inaccurately. It is to place it lower on a ladder, and a ladder invites a claim: that those below need to be ruled, corrected or civilised by those above. Labels of this kind did real work in history — they helped justify colonial domination. This is why sociologists are trained to be careful about the words they use for a community, and to ask always: who invented this word, and whose interest does it serve?

Q. If the Enlightenment produced such a hierarchy of peoples, why does sociology still trace its origins to it?

A. Because sociology inherited its method from the Enlightenment, not its prejudice. The idea that society is made by humans and can therefore be studied rationally is what made a science of society thinkable at all. Sociology has since turned that same rational scrutiny back on the Enlightenment’s own hierarchy — and found it wanting.

4.1.2 The French Revolution

The French Revolution of 1789 announced the arrival of political sovereignty — the right to be the final authority over oneself — at two levels at once: the level of individuals, and the level of nation-states.

The Declaration of Human Rights asserted the equality of all citizens. In doing so it questioned the legitimacy of privileges inherited by birth. Before the Revolution, France was dominated by religious and feudal institutions; the Revolution signalled the emancipation of the individual from their oppressive rule.

From serf to citizen

To see what this meant on the ground, you have to know what a feudal society looked like. Land was owned by members of the aristocracy — noble families whose position came from birth. The peasants who worked that land were mostly serfs, that is, bonded labourers tied to the estate they worked on. They could not simply leave.

The Revolution freed the peasants of these bonds. The numerous taxes they had been paying to the feudal lords and to the church were cancelled.

In their place stood a new figure: the citizen. As free citizens of the republic, sovereign individuals were invested with rights, and were equal before the law and before the other institutions of the state. Equality before the law does not mean everyone becomes equally rich; it means the law does not ask who your father was.

The public and the private

A second, quieter change followed. The state now had to respect the privacy of the autonomous individual. Its laws could not intrude upon the domestic life of the people.

A separation was thus built between the public realm of the state and a private realm of the household. New ideas developed about what properly belonged to each sphere. Religion and the family became more “private” matters; education, and especially schooling, became more “public”.

This division is so familiar to you that it may seem natural. It is not. It is a historical achievement, and much of modern sociology — on the family, on religion, on gender — is an argument about where the line between public and private should fall.

The nation-state itself was also redefined in this period, as a sovereign entity with a centralised government ruling a defined territory. And the ideals of the French Revolution — liberty, equality and fraternity — became the watchwords of the modern state.

sovereignty of the individual vs sovereignty of the nation-state Both ideas arrive together in 1789, but they are not the same. The sovereignty of the individual means each citizen is the final authority over her own beliefs and private life. The sovereignty of the nation-state means the state, and no outside power, is the final authority within its territory.

4.1.3 The Industrial Revolution

The foundations of modern industry were laid by the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It had two major aspects, and both matter.

The first was the systematic application of science and technology to industrial production — in particular, the invention of new machines and the harnessing of new sources of power. The second, less obvious but just as important, was that the industrial revolution evolved new ways of organising labour and markets, on a scale larger than anything in the past.

Machines, power and the factory

New machines such as the Spinning Jenny, which greatly increased the productivity of the textile industry, and new methods of obtaining power, such as the various versions of the steam engine, facilitated the production process. Together they gave rise to the factory system and to the mass manufacture of goods.

Goods were now produced on a gigantic scale, and not for the neighbouring village. They were produced for distant markets across the world. The raw materials used in their production were likewise obtained from all over the world — cotton from one continent, dyes from another.

Modern large-scale industry thus became a worldwide phenomenon from the start. A machine in Manchester was connected to a field in India, and both were connected to a market somewhere else again.

Q. Why is the second aspect — the new organisation of labour and markets — as important as the machines?

A. Because a machine on its own changes only how a thing is made. Organising thousands of workers under one roof, on fixed hours, under a manager, for a market they will never see, changes how people live, where they live, and whom they depend on. It is the organisation, not the machinery, that reshapes society — and society is what sociology studies.

What the factory did to social life

These changes in the production system also resulted in major changes in social life.

The factories were set up in urban areas. They were manned by workers who had been uprooted from the rural areas and had come to the cities in search of work. Low wages at the factory meant that men, women and even children had to work long hours in hazardous circumstances simply to eke out a living.

Modern industry enabled the urban to dominate over the rural. Cities and towns became the dominant forms of human settlement, housing large and unequal populations in small, densely populated urban areas.

Look closely at the word “unequal”. The rich and powerful lived in the cities — but so did the working classes, who lived in slums amidst poverty and squalor. For the first time, extreme wealth and extreme want were packed into the same few square kilometres, visible to each other every day.

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.3 – A nineteenth-century European industrial city.

Why the state needed a new kind of knowledge

A city like this cannot be left to run itself. Modern forms of governance developed in response, with the state assuming control of health, sanitation, crime control and general “development”.

But you cannot control what you have not counted. To manage a city’s health the state needs to know who dies, of what, and where. To manage crime it needs to know where crime is concentrated. This created a demand for new kinds of knowledge about the population.

The social sciences, and sociology in particular, emerged partly as a response to this need. The subject was not invented in a study; it grew out of a practical problem.

This is why the growth of official statistics matters so much to the early history of sociology. The scientific information generated by the state in order to monitor and maintain the health of its “social body” — records of births, deaths, disease, crime, occupation — became the raw material on which reflection about society could begin. Sociological theory was, in a real sense, the result of this self-reflection by an industrial society upon itself.

Sociology as the science of industrial society

From the outset, sociological thought was concerned with the scientific analysis of developments in industrial society. This has prompted observers to argue that sociology was the “science of the new industrial society”.

There is a deeper point here about method. Empirically informed scientific discussion about trends in social behaviour only became possible with the advent of modern industrial society — because only then did anyone systematically collect the numbers such discussion needs. Before that, one could speculate about society; one could not measure it.

Q1. Why did a subject called sociology appear in nineteenth-century Europe, and not somewhere else, or some other time?

A. Because three things came together there and then. The Enlightenment supplied the conviction that society is made by humans and can therefore be analysed rationally. The French Revolution supplied a new object to be explained — the free, equal, sovereign individual, and the modern state built around him. The Industrial Revolution supplied both the crisis and the data: a society of factories, crowded cities and visible inequality that badly needed explaining, and a state that had begun counting its population in order to govern it. Sociology is the child of that particular age of revolution.

4.2 Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818–1883) Born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, in the Rhineland province of Prussia in Germany, the son of a prosperous liberal lawyer. 1834–36: Studied law at the University of Bonn and then at the University of Berlin, where he was much influenced by the Young Hegelians. 1841: Completed his doctoral thesis in philosophy from the University of Jena. 1843: Married Jenny von Westphalen and moved to Paris. 1844: Met Friedrich Engels in Paris, who became a lifelong friend. 1847: Invited by the International Working Men’s Association to prepare a document spelling out its aims and objectives. It was written jointly by Marx and Engels and published as the Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1849: Exiled to England, and lived there till his death. 1852: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte published. 1859: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy published. 1867: Capital, Vol. I, published. 1881: Death of Jenny von Westphalen. 1883: Marx dies, and is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery.

A thinker in exile

Karl Marx was from Germany, but he spent most of his intellectually productive years in exile in Britain. That was not by choice. His radical political views led him to be exiled from Germany, from France and from Austria in turn.

Though Marx had studied philosophy, he was not a philosopher. He was a social thinker who advocated an end to oppression and exploitation, and who believed that scientific socialism would achieve this goal.

To that end he engaged in a critical analysis of capitalist society. His purpose in studying capitalism — the economic system in which factories, land and capital are privately owned and goods are produced for profit — was to expose its weaknesses and to bring about its downfall. He was not a neutral observer, and never pretended to be one.

Marx argued that human society had progressed through different stages. These were: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Capitalism was the latest phase of human advancement — but Marx believed it would in its turn give way to socialism.

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.4 – Marx’s stages of human society.

Alienation in capitalist society

Capitalist society, Marx said, was marked by an ever-intensifying process of alienation. The word is worth slowing down over, because in everyday speech it only means feeling lonely, and Marx meant something much more precise: being separated from, or made a stranger to, something that ought to belong to you.

Alienation, in his account, operates at several levels at once.

First, modern capitalist society is one where human beings are more alienated from nature than ever before. The factory worker no longer sees the field, the forest or the season; raw material simply arrives.

Second, human beings are alienated from each other. Capitalism individualises previously collective forms of social organisation, and relationships become more and more market-mediated — that is, they run through buying and selling rather than through custom, kinship or community.

Third, the large mass of working people is alienated from the fruits of its labour, because workers do not own the products they produce. The cloth the weaver makes belongs to the mill.

Moreover, workers have no control over the work process itself. In the days when skilled craftsmen controlled their own labour, a weaver decided how and when he worked. Today the content of the factory worker’s working day is decided by the management.

Finally, as the combined result of all these alienations, human beings are also alienated from themselves. They struggle to make their lives meaningful in a system where they are, at the same time, more free than before and yet more alienated and less in control of their own lives.

NoteDefinition

Alienation: a process in capitalist society by which human beings are separated and distanced from — made strangers to — nature, other human beings, their work and its product, and their own nature or self.

what alienation looks like A young woman from a small town takes a job in a garment unit in a large city. Her single task, eight hours a day, is to attach the left sleeve of a shirt. She never sees a finished shirt, never learns who will wear it, and cannot change the order or pace of her work; a supervisor sets both. She is paid on time and can resign whenever she wishes. Nothing here is illegal, and nothing here is cruel. Yet she is separated from the product she makes, from the process by which it is made, and from any sense that the work expresses her. That separation is what Marx means by alienation.

Q. If the worker is free to leave, and is paid for her work, how can she be said to be exploited or alienated?

A. Marx’s point is that legal freedom and social power are different things. The worker is free in law, but she owns no means of production, so she must sell her labour to someone who does, on terms she does not set. Freedom to choose between employers is not the same as control over one’s working life. Alienation describes the loss of that control, not the loss of legal rights.

Q2. The factory worker in the story is legally free and is paid for his work. Why, then, did Marx call such a worker “alienated”?

A. Because for Marx, alienation is not about wages or legal status but about separation. The worker is separated from nature, from other people (whose relations with him now run through the market), from the product he makes and does not own, from the work process, which management controls, and finally from himself, because work that expresses nothing of him cannot make his life meaningful. All of that can be true of a man who is perfectly free to walk out of the gate.

Why capitalism was still, for Marx, a step forward

Here is where students most often misread Marx. He detested capitalism — and he still called it progress.

Even though it was an exploitative and oppressive system, Marx believed that capitalism was nevertheless a necessary and progressive stage of human history. It was necessary because it created the preconditions for an egalitarian future free from both exploitation and poverty: large-scale production, immense wealth, and a huge working class concentrated in cities.

Capitalist society, he argued, would be transformed by its own victims. The working class would unite, collectively bring about a revolution to overthrow it, and establish a free and equal socialist society.

If that was the destination, the route had to be studied carefully. In order to understand the working of capitalism, Marx undertook an elaborate study of its political, social and especially its economic aspects.

The mode of production

Marx’s conception of the economy was built on the notion of a mode of production. This stood for a broad system of production associated with an epoch, or historical period.

Primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism were all modes of production. At this general level, the mode of production defines an entire way of life characteristic of an era — not merely how goods are made, but how people live, marry, worship and rule.

NoteDefinition

Mode of production: a system of material production which persists over a long period of time. Each mode of production is distinguished by its means of production (for example, technology and the forms in which production is organised) and by its relations of production (for example, slavery, serfdom, wage labour).

The building: base and superstructure

At a more specific level, we can think of the mode of production as being something like a building. A building consists of a foundation, or base, and a superstructure — something erected on top of the base.

The base, or economic base, is primarily economic. It includes the productive forces and the production relations.

Productive forces refer to all the means or factors of production: land, labour, technology, and sources of energy such as electricity, coal and petroleum.

Production relations refer to all the economic relationships and forms of labour organisation involved in production. They are also property relations — relationships based on the ownership or control of the means of production.

productive forces vs production relations | Feature | Productive forces | Production relations | |—|—|—| | What they are | The means or factors used to produce | The relationships between people in production | | Examples | Land, labour, technology, coal, electricity | Slavery, serfdom, wage labour; ownership of a factory | | Question they answer | With what is production carried on? | On what terms, and between whom? | | Link to property | Not in themselves property relations | Are also property relations — who owns the means of production |

Take primitive communism as an example. There the productive forces consisted mostly of nature — forests, land, animals — along with very rudimentary forms of technology such as simple stone tools and hunting weapons. The production relations were based on community property, since individual private property did not yet exist, and included the tribal forms of hunting or gathering which were the prevalent forms of labour organisation.

The economic base thus consists of productive forces together with relations of production.

What rests on the base

On this base rested all the social, cultural and political institutions of society. Institutions like religion, art, law and literature, and the different forms of beliefs and ideas that go with them, were all part of the superstructure built on top of the base.

Marx argued that people’s ideas and beliefs originated from the economic system of which they were part. How human beings earned their livelihood determined how they thought. Material life shaped ideas; ideas did not shape material life.

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.5 – Marx’s base and superstructure model.

do ideas shape society, or does society shape ideas? View 1: The dominant view in Marx’s own time held that human beings were free to think whatever they wanted, and that ideas shaped the world — a new belief, a new philosophy, a new religion could remake a society from above. View 2: Marx argued the reverse. What people believe is not free-floating; it grows out of the economic system they live in. Change how people earn their bread, and in time you change what they think is natural, sacred and just. What both agree on: that ideas and material conditions are tightly connected — the dispute is over which way the arrow of causation mainly runs.

the materialist conception of society Proposed by: Karl Marx (1818–1883), writing chiefly in the mid-nineteenth century. Core idea: Every society rests on an economic base — its productive forces and production relations. The social, cultural and political institutions of that society form a superstructure erected on this base, and are shaped by it. History moves as one mode of production gives way to another. Key terms: mode of production, productive forces, production relations, means of production, economic base, superstructure, alienation. Evidence: The transformation Marx himself witnessed — as the feudal agricultural system broke down and industrial capitalism replaced it, law, religion, family life and politics in Europe were all remade around the new economy. Limitation: Critics argue that the model gives too little independent force to ideas, religion and culture, which can shape economic life rather than merely reflect it. You will see Max Weber press exactly this objection later in the chapter.

From economy to change

Marx placed great emphasis on economic structures and processes because he believed that they formed the foundations of every social system throughout human history.

His interest, though, was never purely academic. If we understand how the economy works, and how it has been changing in the past, he argued, we can learn how to change society in the future.

But how can such change be brought about? Marx’s answer was a single phrase, and it is the subject of the next section: through class struggle.

4.3 Class Struggle

How Marx decides who belongs together

Human beings can be sorted into groups in many ways. You could sort them by religion, by language, by nationality, by the region they come from. For Marx, none of these was the most important method.

The most important method of classifying people into social groups, he argued, was with reference to the production process. What matters most about a person is where she stands in the making of society’s wealth: whether she owns the means of production, or must work for someone who does.

People who occupy the same position in the social production process will, Marx said, eventually form a class. By virtue of their common location in the production process and in property relations, they share the same interests and objectives — even though they may not recognise this immediately.

That last clause is easy to skim past, and it is the whole hinge of Marx’s argument. A class can exist without knowing that it exists. We will return to this in a moment.

NoteDefinition

Class (in Marx’s sense): a group of people who occupy the same position in the process of production and in property relations, and who therefore share common interests, whether or not they are yet aware of it.

How classes are made

Classes are not fixed categories handed down by nature. They are formed through historical processes.

Those historical processes are in turn shaped by two things: transformations in the conditions and forces of production, and the conflicts that break out between classes that already exist.

As the mode of production changes — that is, as the production technology and the social relations of production change — conflicts develop between different classes, and these conflicts result in struggles.

The making of the working class

Take the clearest example, the one Marx watched happen. The capitalist mode of production creates the working class: a new urban, property-less group, brought into being by the destruction of the feudal agricultural system.

Serfs and small peasants were thrown off their lands and deprived of their earlier sources of livelihood. Having nothing to live on, they congregated in the cities looking for ways to survive.

They did not, however, drift peacefully into the factories. The pressure of the laws and the police forced them to work in the newly built factories. The point is worth stating plainly: the making of a working class was not simply an economic event, it was also a legal and political one.

Thus a large new social group was created, consisting of property-less people who were forced to work for their living. It is this shared location within the production process — not shared religion, region or language — that makes workers into a class.

the bourgeoisie vs the working class under capitalism | Feature | Bourgeoisie (capitalists) | Working class | |—|—|—| | Ownership of the means of production | Own all of them — investible capital, factories and machinery, land | Own none; lost whatever they had, or had access to, in the past | | Source of livelihood | Profit from what is produced | Wages received in exchange for labour | | Position in the production process | Set the terms on which production happens | Must accept the terms on which production happens | | Basic compulsion | None; may invest or not | Must sell their labour in order to survive, because they have nothing else |

Class struggle as the motor of history

Marx was a proponent of class struggle. He believed that class struggle was the major driving force of change in society.

He set out this view, together with Engels, in The Communist Manifesto — a work that was not only an analysis but also a programme of action. Its opening lines declare, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”.

Marx and Engels then traced the course of human history and described how the nature of the class struggle varied in different historical epochs. As society evolved from the primitive to the modern through distinct phases, each phase was characterised by a particular kind of conflict between an oppressor class and an oppressed class.

They listed the pairs: the free man and the slave in the ancient world, the patrician and the plebeian, the lord and the serf under feudalism, the guild master and the journeyman in the medieval towns. The names change from epoch to epoch. The relationship — oppressor above, oppressed below, locked in a fight that is sometimes hidden and sometimes open, but never stops — does not.

How were these pairs identified? The major opposing classes of each stage were identified from the contradictions of the production process itself. In capitalism, the two are the bourgeoisie and the working class, and the contradiction is that one owns everything needed to produce while the other owns nothing but the capacity to work.

Q. Why does Marx call the relation between classes a “contradiction” rather than simply a disagreement?

A. Because a disagreement is about opinions, and could be settled by persuasion. A contradiction is built into the structure itself: the profit of the owner and the wages of the worker are drawn from the same pool, so what benefits one takes from the other. No amount of goodwill dissolves that. It can only be resolved by changing the structure.

Why opposed classes do not always fight

Here Marx’s argument becomes more careful than his reputation suggests.

Even when two classes are objectively opposed to each other, they do not automatically engage in conflict. Shared hardship is not the same thing as shared struggle.

For conflict to occur, the classes must become subjectively conscious of their class interests and identities — and therefore also conscious of their rivals’ interests and identities. A worker must come to see that her problem is not her bad luck but her position, and that thousands of others share it.

It is only after this kind of class consciousness is developed, through political mobilisation, that class conflicts occur. Consciousness does not descend from the sky; it is built through organisation, argument and action.

Such conflicts can lead to the overthrow of a dominant or ruling class, or a coalition of classes, by the classes that were previously dominated or subordinated. This is what is called a revolution.

NoteDefinition

Revolution: the overthrow of a dominant or ruling class (or coalition of classes) by the classes that were previously subordinated to it.

Fig. 4.6

Fig. 4.6 – Marx’s path from economic change to revolution.

class conflict vs class consciousness Class consciousness is the awareness that comes first: a class recognising its own interests and its rivals’. Class conflict is what may follow from that awareness. Without consciousness, two classes can be opposed for generations and never fight.

Q3. People who share the same hardship do not always struggle together. According to Marx, what has to happen inside their heads before they do?

A. They must acquire class consciousness — a subjective awareness of their shared position, their common interests, and the identity and interests of the class opposed to them. This awareness is not automatic. It is developed through political mobilisation. Until it exists, a class exists in fact but not in action, and the conflict remains hidden.

Why the economy is not the whole story

In Marx’s theory, economic processes created contradictions, and those contradictions in turn generated class conflict.

But — and this qualification matters — economic processes did not automatically lead to revolution. Social and political processes were also needed to bring about a total transformation of society. A crisis in the economy is an opportunity, not a guarantee.

The work of ideology

The presence of ideology is one reason why the relationship between economic and socio-political processes becomes complicated.

In every epoch, Marx argued, the ruling classes promote a dominant ideology — a way of seeing the world that tends to justify the domination of the ruling class and the existing social order. It does not announce itself as propaganda. It appears as plain common sense.

Consider how it works. A dominant ideology may encourage people living in poverty to believe that they are poor not because they are exploited by the rich, but because of “fate”, or because of bad deeds in a previous life. If poverty is explained by destiny, then nobody is responsible for it, and nothing needs to change. That, on Marx’s argument, is precisely the work the belief is doing.

NoteDefinition

Dominant ideology: the way of seeing the world promoted by the ruling class of an epoch, which makes the existing social order and the ruling class’s domination of it appear natural, deserved or inevitable.

Yet dominant ideologies are not always successful. They can be challenged by alternative worldviews or by rival ideologies. People are not simply containers for the ideas of their rulers.

And because consciousness spreads unevenly among classes, how a class will act in a particular historical situation cannot be pre-determined. Some sections of a class may see their position clearly while others do not.

Hence, according to Marx, economic processes generally tend to generate class conflicts — but whether those conflicts erupt, and what they achieve, also depends on political and social conditions. Given favourable conditions, class conflicts culminate in revolutions.

class struggle Proposed by: Karl Marx (1818–1883), with Friedrich Engels, chiefly in the mid-nineteenth century. Core idea: People who share the same position in the production process form a class with common interests. As the mode of production changes, opposed classes come into conflict; once a class becomes conscious of its interests and is politically mobilised, that conflict can culminate in revolution. Class struggle is therefore the driving force of historical change. Key terms: class, bourgeoisie, working class, class consciousness, class struggle, revolution, ideology, dominant ideology. Evidence: The formation of an urban, property-less working class in nineteenth-century Europe out of dispossessed serfs and small peasants, and the political movements that class went on to build. Limitation: Critics point out that people mobilise around religion, nation, language, caste and region at least as readily as around class — loyalties that Marx expected class position to override. He himself allowed that consciousness spreads unevenly and that outcomes cannot be pre-determined.

does class explain Indian society by itself? Marx held that class position matters more than religion, language or nationality. India is a hard test of that claim. Two agricultural labourers in the same village may share an identical class position and still not eat together, marry across, or organise together, because caste divides them. Equally, a wealthy landowner and a landless labourer may share a caste and vote together. Indian sociologists have generally concluded not that Marx was simply wrong, but that class in India works through caste, region and religion rather than around them. You will see this question return in later chapters.

Your class at school is also called a “class”. Does the group formed by you and your classmates form a class in the Marxian sense? Give arguments for and against. Then think through these cases, and write one sentence of reasoning for each: (a) Do factory workers and agricultural workers belong to the same class? (b) Do workers and managers in the same factory belong to the same class? (c) Does a rich industrialist in the city who owns no agricultural land belong to the same class as a landless agricultural labourer in a village? (d) A landlord owns a great deal of land; a small peasant owns a small plot. They live in the same village and are both landowners. Are they in the same class? In each case, ask what interests these people actually have in common, and what position they occupy in the production process. That, and not their address or their income alone, is Marx’s test.

4.4 Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) Born on 15 April 1858 in Epinal, in the Lorraine region of France, on the German border. He came from an orthodox Jewish family; his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all rabbis, that is, Jewish priests. Emile too was initially sent to a school for training rabbis. 1876: Enters the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris to study philosophy. 1887: Appointed lecturer in social sciences and education at the University of Bordeaux. 1893: Publishes Division of Labour in Society, his doctoral dissertation. 1895: Publishes Rules of Sociological Method. 1897: Founds Anee Sociologique, the first social science journal in France, and publishes his famous study, Suicide. 1902: Joins the University of Paris as the Chair of Education. In 1913 the Chair was renamed Education and Sociology. 1912: Publishes The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 1917: Dies at the age of 59, heartbroken by the death of his son, Andre, in World War I.

The first professor of sociology

Emile Durkheim may be considered the founder of sociology as a formal discipline. The reason is precise rather than sentimental: he was the first person to become a Professor of Sociology, in Paris, in 1913. Before him, people wrote sociology; after him, universities taught it.

His own path to that chair was an unusual one. Born into an orthodox Jewish family, Durkheim was sent for his early education to a rabbinical school — a Jewish religious school — because his family expected him to become a priest, as his father and grandfather had been.

He did not. By the time he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1876, he had broken with his religious orientation and declared himself an agnostic — someone who holds that we cannot know whether God exists.

Yet the break was not total, and this is the interesting part. His moral upbringing had an enduring influence on his sociological thinking. Having grown up inside a community held together by a strict code of conduct, he never lost the conviction that codes of this kind are what hold any society together.

Moral codes — the shared rules about what one ought and ought not to do — were, in his view, the key characteristics of a society. They determined the behaviour patterns of individuals.

Coming from a religious family, Durkheim also cherished the idea of developing a secular understanding of religion: an account of religion that explains it by its social functions rather than by the truth of its doctrines. It was in his last book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, that he was finally able to fulfil this wish.

Society as a moral community

For Durkheim, society was a social fact — something real, existing as a moral community over and above the individual. Not merely a crowd of persons, but a thing in its own right, with a life that outlasts any of them.

NoteDefinition

Social fact: an aspect of social reality relating to collective patterns of behaviour and belief, which is not created by individuals but exerts pressure on them and influences their behaviour.

What made this community real was the ties that bound people into groups. These ties, or social solidarities, were crucial to the very existence of society.

Solidarities are not just warm feelings. They exert pressure on individuals to conform to the norms and expectations of the group. Think of how much of your own behaviour — how you dress at a wedding, how you address a teacher, when you fall silent — is decided for you by expectations you never agreed to and cannot easily break.

This pressure constrains the individual’s behaviour pattern, limiting variation within a small range. Out of all the things a person could conceivably do in a given situation, only a few are socially thinkable.

Why constraint makes a science possible

Now follow the chain of reasoning, because it is the argument that made sociology a science.

If choice in social action is constricted, then behaviour becomes patterned. And if behaviour is patterned, it can be predicted.

Run the argument backwards and you get a method. By observing behaviour patterns, it becomes possible to identify the norms, codes and social solidarities which govern them.

This is Durkheim’s answer to the deepest objection facing his new subject. Ideas, norms and values are “invisible” things; you cannot photograph a norm. But their existence can be empirically verified — not by looking at them directly, but by studying the patterns of social behaviour of people as they relate to each other in a society.

Fig. 4.7

Fig. 4.7 – Durkheim’s method for observing social facts.

Q. If we can only see individuals behaving, how do we know we have discovered something about society and not just about those individuals?

A. Because of regularity. If a hundred unconnected people, with different personalities and different reasons, nevertheless behave in the same way in the same situation, then what they share is not psychology but a rule — a rule that existed before any of them and will outlive all of them. The pattern is the evidence; the social fact is what explains the pattern.

Moral facts, and the making of a science

For Durkheim, the social was to be found in the codes of conduct imposed on individuals by collective agreement. And these codes are not locked away in law books. They are evident in the practices of everyday life — in how you greet, eat, mourn and marry.

The scientific understanding of society that Durkheim sought to develop rested on the recognition of moral facts. He insisted that “moral facts are phenomena like others” — that is, they are as much a part of the observable world as a chemical reaction is.

His reasoning was straightforward. Moral facts consist of rules of action, and those rules can be recognised by certain distinctive characteristics. If they can be recognised, they can be observed. If they can be observed, they can be described, and classified — and finally, laws can be sought that explain them.

NoteDefinition

Moral facts: the rules of action, recognisable by distinctive characteristics, through which a society’s moral codes appear — and which can therefore be observed, described, classified and explained, like any other phenomena.

studying moral codes vs preaching morality Durkheim studies moral codes; he does not deliver moral sermons. His question is never “is this rule good?” but “what social conditions produce this rule, and what does it hold together?”

Morality without a universal standard

One consequence of this position deserves attention, because students often find it startling.

Moral codes, for Durkheim, were manifestations of particular social conditions. Different social conditions therefore throw up different moral codes.

It follows that the morality appropriate for one society was inappropriate for another. There is no single moral rulebook against which all societies can be marked.

And here Durkheim turns that thought into a tool. If moral codes are produced by social conditions, then the prevailing social conditions of a society can be deduced from its moral codes. Tell me what a society forbids, and I will tell you what it fears for.

This move made sociology akin to the natural sciences: it gave the subject observable data, a method of inference, and the ambition of arriving at general laws. It was entirely in keeping with Durkheim’s larger objective — to establish sociology as a rigorous scientific discipline.

4.5 Durkheim’s Vision of Sociology

Durkheim’s vision of sociology as a new scientific discipline was characterised by two defining features. The first concerns what sociology studies; the second concerns how it studies it. Take them one at a time.

The first feature: a distinct subject matter

The first feature was that the subject matter of sociology — the study of social facts — was different from that of the other sciences.

Sociology concerned itself exclusively with what Durkheim called the emergent level: the level of complex collective life at which social phenomena can emerge. These phenomena — social institutions such as religion or the family, and social values such as friendship or patriotism — were only possible in a complex whole that was larger than, and different from, its constituent parts.

The word “emergent” is doing precise work. Something is emergent when it appears only once the parts are combined, and cannot be found in any part on its own.

The cricket team argument

Durkheim’s illustration is one you can test for yourself. A cricket or football team is composed entirely of individuals — and yet a team becomes something other than, and much more than, just a collection of eleven persons.

The team has a reputation, a style of play, a history, a set of rivalries. None of these belongs to any one player. They exist at the level of the team, and they persist even as players retire and new ones arrive.

Social entities such as teams, political parties, street gangs, religious communities and nations therefore belong to a different level of reality from the level of individuals. It is this emergent level that sociology studies.

Fig. 4.8

Fig. 4.8 – Durkheim’s concept of the emergent level.

Q. If a team is nothing but eleven players, how can it be “more” than them?

A. Because the relations between the players are real too, and the relations are not one of the players. Change the eleven names and the team survives; remove the relations and there is no team, only eleven people standing in a field. Sociology studies what exists in the relations — which is why it is not simply psychology done many times over.

The second feature: an empirical discipline

The second defining feature of Durkheim’s vision was that sociology, like most of the natural sciences, was to be an empirical discipline — one that rests on evidence gathered by observation.

This was actually a difficult claim to make, and Durkheim knew it. Social phenomena are by their very nature abstract.

We cannot “see” a collective entity like the Jain community, or the Bengali, Malayalam or Marathi speaking community, or the Nepalese or Egyptian national communities. At least, we cannot see them in the same straightforward way that we can see a tree, or a boy, or a cloud.

The difficulty does not disappear even when the social phenomenon is small. Take a family, or a theatre group. We can directly see only the individuals who make up the collectivity. The collectivity itself is never in front of our eyes.

How he solved it

One of Durkheim’s most significant achievements is his demonstration that sociology — a discipline dealing with abstract entities like social facts — could nevertheless be a science founded on observable, empirically verifiable evidence.

His solution was the one you met in the previous section, now applied at full scale. Although not directly observable, social facts were indirectly observable through patterns of behaviour.

The most famous example of his use of a new kind of empirical data is in his study, Suicide.

Emile Durkheim — Suicide (1897) Question: Suicide seems the most private and individual of acts. Why, then, does the rate of suicide in a community stay roughly steady year after year, even though the individuals who die are different people each time? Method: Instead of examining individual cases, Durkheim worked with aggregated figures — the average rate of suicide across hundreds of thousands of individuals in a community, drawn from the kind of official records that modern states had begun to keep. Finding: Each individual case of suicide was specific to that individual and his or her circumstances. But the rate, aggregated across a whole community, was stable and characteristic of that community. It was not an individual matter at all. It was a social fact. Meaning: This established that social facts can be observed through social behaviour, and especially through aggregated patterns of social behaviour. It gave sociology a method. Its limitation is one that later sociologists have pressed hard: official records of suicide are themselves produced by officials, whose classifications may vary from place to place — so the “data” may partly reflect the recording practices rather than the deaths.

Q4. Durkheim insisted that society is a real thing that can be studied scientifically. How can you study something you cannot see, touch or photograph?

A. By studying its effects. You cannot see a norm, but you can see thousands of people obeying it. You cannot see a community, but you can count the regularities in how its members behave. Durkheim’s demonstration was that social facts, although not directly observable, become indirectly observable through patterns of behaviour — above all through patterns aggregated across large numbers, as in his study of suicide rates. The pattern is visible; the social fact is what explains it.

What, then, is a social fact?

Having seen how social facts are found, we can now state exactly what they are.

Social facts are like things. That is the first and strangest thing Durkheim says about them: they are to be treated as objects, not as ideas in someone’s head.

They are external to the individual, but they constrain the individual’s behaviour. Institutions such as law, education and religion constitute social facts. You did not make the law, the school system or the religion you were born into; they were there before you, and they press upon you.

Social facts are collective representations which emerge from the association of people. They are not particular to a person, but are of a general nature, and independent of the individual. Beliefs, feelings and collective practices are examples.

4.5.1 Division of Labour in Society

In his first book, Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim demonstrated his method of analysis by using it on a large question: how has society evolved from the primitive to the modern?

His answer classified a society by the nature of the social solidarity that existed in it. A primitive society was organised according to mechanical solidarity; modern society was based on organic solidarity.

Notice what he has done. Solidarity — an invisible, moral tie — is being used as the observable basis of a classification. This is the method of the previous section, put to work.

Mechanical solidarity

Mechanical solidarity is founded on the similarity of its individual members, and is found in societies with small populations.

It typically involves a collection of different self-sufficient groups, where each person within a particular group is engaged in similar activities or functions. People are bound together because they are alike, and because they know one another personally.

NoteDefinition

Mechanical solidarity: the social cohesion of small, simple societies, founded on the similarity of their members and on personal relationships between them.

Because the ties between people rest on similarity and on personal relationships, such societies are not very tolerant of differences. Any violation of the norms of the community attracts harsh punishment.

In other words, societies based on mechanical solidarity have repressive law — law designed to prevent deviation from community norms by punishing it severely. The individual and the community were so tightly integrated that it was feared any violation of the codes of conduct could result in the disintegration of the community itself.

That fear is the key to understanding the harshness. Punishment here is not calculation; it is a community defending its own existence.

Organic solidarity

Organic solidarity characterises modern society, and is based on the heterogeneity — the diversity — of its members.

It is found in societies with large populations, where most social relationships necessarily have to be impersonal. You cannot personally know the farmer who grew your rice, the driver who brought it to the city, or the clerk who processes your school records.

Such a society is based on institutions. Each of its constituent groups or units is not self-sufficient, but dependent on other units and groups for its survival. Interdependence is the essence of organic solidarity.

NoteDefinition

Organic solidarity: the social cohesion of large, complex modern societies, founded not on similarity but on the interdependence of members and groups who perform different and specialised functions.

The word “organic” is borrowed from the body. A heart and a lung are not alike; they hold together precisely because each does something the other cannot.

Organic solidarity therefore celebrates individuals. It allows for their need to be different from each other, and recognises their multiple roles and their organic ties.

The law changes accordingly. The laws of modern society are restitutive in nature rather than repressive. This means that in modern societies, the law aims to repair or correct the wrong that is done by a criminal act. By contrast, in primitive societies the law sought to punish wrongdoers, and enforced a sort of collective revenge for their acts.

The place of the individual changes too. In modern society the individual was given some autonomy, whereas in primitive societies the individual was totally submerged in the collectivity.

mechanical solidarity vs organic solidarity | Feature | Mechanical solidarity | Organic solidarity | |—|—|—| | Type of society | Primitive; small population | Modern; large population | | Basis of the tie | Similarity between members | Heterogeneity and interdependence between members | | Nature of relationships | Personal | Largely impersonal | | Groups within it | Self-sufficient groups doing similar work | Specialised units dependent on one another | | Attitude to difference | Not very tolerant of difference | Celebrates difference and multiple roles | | Type of law | Repressive — punishes, and enforces collective revenge | Restitutive — repairs or corrects the wrong done | | Place of the individual | Totally submerged in the collectivity | Given some autonomy |

the two forms of social solidarity Proposed by: Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), in Division of Labour in Society. Core idea: Societies can be classified by the kind of solidarity that holds them together. Small, simple societies cohere through the likeness of their members (mechanical solidarity); large, complex societies cohere through the interdependence of members who do different things (organic solidarity). As the division of labour deepens, one gives way to the other. Key terms: social solidarity, mechanical solidarity, organic solidarity, repressive law, restitutive law, division of labour. Evidence: The observable difference in legal systems — punitive and collective in small communities, corrective and individualised in modern states — used as a visible index of an invisible moral tie. Limitation: The sharp contrast between “primitive” and “modern” society is an ideal-typical one; real societies mix both kinds of solidarity, and modern societies continue to punish as well as repair. Critics also object that the scheme sees interdependence where there may be domination.

Groups, associations and many identities

There is a further characteristic of modern societies that follows from all this.

In them, individuals with similar goals come together voluntarily to form groups and associations — a reading club, a trade union, a residents’ welfare body, a coaching-class batch.

Because these are groups oriented towards specific goals, they remain distinct from each other, and do not seek to take over the entire life of their members. A cricket club does not tell you whom to marry.

Consequently, individuals have many different identities in different contexts. This enables an individual to emerge from the shadow of the community and to establish a distinct identity in terms of the functions she performs and the roles she plays.

Meanwhile, since all individuals have to depend on others for the fulfilment of basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter and education, the intensity of their interaction with others increases. Modern life is not more solitary; it is more crowded with strangers.

That is precisely why impersonal rules and regulations are required to govern social relations in such societies. Personalised relations can no longer be maintained across a large population, so trust must be carried by rules instead of by acquaintance.

What the book established

The Division of Labour in Society provides a good preview of Durkheim’s enduring concerns.

His effort to create a new scientific discipline, with a distinct subject that can be empirically validated, is clearly manifested in the way he discusses the different types of social solidarity as social facts. Solidarity is not preached about; it is classified, and evidenced.

His objective and secular analysis of the social ties that underlie different types of society laid the foundation of sociology as the new science of society.

what does the modern division of labour do to society? View 1 (Durkheim): It binds people together. As work becomes specialised, no group can survive alone; interdependence deepens, and out of that dependence grows a new and stronger moral tie — organic solidarity. Modern law, which repairs rather than avenges, is the evidence. View 2 (Marx): It sets people against each other. The same specialisation that makes people interdependent also separates the worker from the product, the process and herself, and divides society into a class that owns and a class that must sell its labour. Interdependence between unequals is not solidarity; it is dependence. What both agree on: that as society evolves, the social organisation of production grows more complex, the division of labour becomes more detailed, and unavoidable interdependencies arise between social groups. They disagree about what those interdependencies feel like from below.

Work through the disagreement above rather than choosing a side too quickly. (a) Can you think of situations where people from different class backgrounds, with conflicting interests, nevertheless join together to form a group or a collectivity? What would that show about Marx’s account? What could be said in reply, in Marx’s defence? (b) Durkheim believed modern society gives the individual more freedom to be different. Yet mass communication, especially television, has tended to standardise popular fashion in clothes and music, so that young people in different countries, states and regions are more likely than ever to be listening to the same songs and wearing the same clothes. Does this make Durkheim wrong? Set out the arguments on both sides. Remember that sociology is not like mathematics, where there is usually one right answer. In anything to do with society, there may be several right answers, or an answer may be right in one context and wrong in another, or partly right and partly wrong. The social world is complex, and it changes from time to time and from place to place. That is exactly why you must learn to think carefully about why a particular answer is right or wrong in a particular context.

4.6 Max Weber and Interpretive Sociology

Max Weber (1864–1920) Born on 21 April 1864 in Erfurt, Germany, into a Prussian family. His father was a magistrate and a politician, an ardent monarchist and a follower of Bismarck. His mother came from a distinguished liberal family from Heidelberg. 1882: Went to Heidelberg to study law. 1884 onwards: Studied at the universities of Gottingen and Berlin. 1889: Submitted his doctoral dissertation, A Contribution to the History of Medieval Business Organisations. 1891: Submitted his habilitation thesis — the thesis that entitled him to teach — on Roman Agrarian History and the Significance for Public and Private Law. 1893: Married Marianne Schnitger. 1894–96: Appointed Professor of Economics, first at Freiburg and then at Heidelberg. 1897–1901: Falls seriously ill and is unable to work; travels to Rome. 1901: Resumes scholarly work. 1903: Becomes Associate Editor of the journal Archives for Social Science and Social Welfare. 1904: Travels to the USA. Publishes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1918: Takes up a specially created chair in Sociology at Vienna. 1919: Appointed Professor of Economics at the University of Munich. 1920: Weber dies. Almost all of the major works that made him famous were translated and published in book form only after his death. These include The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946), Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949), The Religion of India (1958) and Economy and Society (3 vols, 1968).

The range of Weber’s work

Max Weber was one of the leading German social thinkers of his time. Despite long periods of physical and mental ill health, he left behind a rich legacy of sociological writing.

He wrote extensively on many subjects, but his work has a centre of gravity. He focused on developing an interpretive sociology of social action, and of power and domination.

A second major concern ran alongside it: the process of rationalisation in modern society — the steady spread of calculation, rules and efficiency into more and more areas of life — and the relationship of the various religions of the world with this process.

What kind of science can a science of society be?

Weber argued that the overall objective of the social sciences was to develop an “interpretive understanding of social action”.

That single phrase sets him apart from Durkheim, and it is worth seeing why. The natural sciences aim to discover objective “laws of nature” governing the physical world. A stone does not have a reason for falling; it simply falls, and the law of gravity is a complete account of it.

Human beings are not stones. The central concern of the social sciences is social action, and human actions necessarily involve subjective meanings — the meaning the person herself attaches to what she is doing. A raised hand may be a greeting, a bid at an auction, a vote or a threat, and nothing in the physics of the raised hand will tell you which.

It follows that the methods of enquiry of social science also had to be different from the methods of natural science. You cannot explain an action without recovering its meaning.

For Weber, “social action” included all human behaviour that was meaningful — that is, action to which actors attached a meaning. A cough is behaviour; a cough intended as a warning is social action.

NoteDefinition

Social action: all human behaviour that is meaningful — action to which the actor attaches a subjective meaning, and which is therefore oriented towards others.

Empathetic understanding

If meanings are what must be explained, then the sociologist’s task in studying social action is to recover the meanings attributed by the actor.

To accomplish this, the sociologist had to put herself in the actor’s place, and imagine what these meanings were, or could have been. Sociology, on Weber’s account, was thus a systematic form of empathetic understanding.

The word “empathetic” is chosen with care. It is an understanding based not on “feeling for” — which is sympathy — but on “feeling with”, which is empathy.

sympathy vs empathy Sympathy is feeling for someone — pity, concern, fellow-feeling from outside their situation. Empathy is feeling with them — imaginatively entering their situation to grasp what it means to them. Weber’s method requires the second and does not require the first: a sociologist may empathise with a moneylender without feeling sorry for him.

The empathetic understanding that sociologists derive from this exercise is what enables them to access the subjective meanings and motivations of social actors.

Weber wrote in German, and the German word he used for this kind of interpretive understanding was verstehen, meaning simply “to understand”. You will meet the term again if you read further in sociology, where “verstehen sociology” is often used as a name for Weber’s whole approach. (Beyond the syllabus — for interest only.)

Objectivity about subjective things

Weber was among the first to discuss the special and complex kind of “objectivity” that the social sciences had to cultivate.

Here is the problem in a sentence. The social world is founded on subjective human meanings, values, feelings, prejudices and ideals. In studying this world, the social sciences inevitably have to deal with these subjective meanings — and yet the study itself must be objective.

In order to capture these meanings and describe them accurately, social scientists had to constantly practise empathetic understanding, putting themselves imaginatively in the place of the people whose actions they were studying. But this investigation had to be done objectively, even though it was concerned with subjective matters.

Empathetic understanding therefore required the sociologist to faithfully record the subjective meanings and motivations of social actors, without allowing her own personal beliefs and opinions to influence the process in any way.

Sociologists, in short, were meant to describe, not judge, the subjective feelings of others. Weber called this kind of objectivity value neutrality.

NoteDefinition

Value neutrality: the discipline of neutrally recording the subjective values of the people one studies, without being affected by one’s own feelings or opinions about those values.

Weber did not pretend this was easy. He recognised that it was very difficult to do, because social scientists were themselves members of society, and always had their own subjective beliefs and prejudices. A researcher does not stop being a citizen, a believer or a neighbour when she opens her notebook.

His answer was not a trick but a demand. Sociologists had to practise great self-discipline — to exercise an “iron will”, as he puts it — in order to remain value neutral when describing the values and worldviews of others.

value neutrality at work A student of sociology attends a village fair where a healer is treating patients with charms and chants. She herself believes firmly that only medicine cures. Her task, however, is not to record that the practice is unscientific. It is to record what the healer thinks he is doing, what the patients believe is happening, and why the practice commands trust in that setting. She writes down their meanings faithfully, and keeps her verdict out of her notebook. That discipline — describing without judging — is value neutrality.

the researcher’s own position Value neutrality is not an invitation to pretend the researcher has no beliefs. It is the opposite: it asks her to know exactly what her beliefs are, so that she can prevent them from silently rewriting what she hears. This matters most when the sociologist studies a community she does not belong to, and whose practices she may privately disapprove of. Recording those practices honestly, in the community’s own terms, is a duty owed both to the people studied and to the truth.

Q. If sociologists must never judge, does that mean every practice is equally acceptable?

A. No. Value neutrality is a rule about the method of description, not a claim that all values are equally good. The sociologist’s job at the desk is to record what a practice means to those who follow it. What a citizen concludes afterwards, in the light of the law and of ethics, is a separate matter — and Weber, who was himself politically active, would have insisted on the distinction.

Q5. Weber said a sociologist must “feel with” the people she studies, yet remain neutral about their beliefs. Is that even possible?

A. Weber thought it was possible, but only with great difficulty. Empathetic understanding requires entering another’s world imaginatively in order to recover the meaning her action holds for her. Value neutrality requires recording that meaning without letting one’s own opinions colour it. The two work together: you cannot record a meaning faithfully unless you first grasp it, and you cannot grasp it if you have already judged it. Weber admitted that social scientists carry their own beliefs and prejudices, and that this makes neutrality hard — which is why he demanded an “iron will” rather than promising an easy method.

interpretive sociology Proposed by: Max Weber (1864–1920), writing at the turn of the twentieth century. Core idea: The social sciences are unlike the natural sciences, because their subject matter — social action — carries subjective meaning. Sociology must therefore recover the meanings actors attach to their actions, through empathetic understanding, while recording those meanings with the objectivity Weber called value neutrality. Key terms: social action, interpretive understanding, empathetic understanding, value neutrality, ideal type. Evidence: The simple fact that identical outward behaviour — a raised hand, a fast, a gift — can be entirely different actions depending on what the actor means by it, so that behaviour alone never explains conduct. Limitation: Critics ask how anyone can verify that a sociologist has correctly recovered another person’s meaning; two researchers may empathise their way to two different conclusions. Others doubt that complete value neutrality is achievable at all, since even the choice of what to study reflects a value.

The ideal type

Apart from empathetic understanding, Weber suggested another methodological tool for doing sociology: the ideal type.

An ideal type is a logically consistent model of a social phenomenon that highlights its most significant characteristics. It is built by the sociologist, deliberately, in order to think with.

NoteDefinition

Ideal type: a logically consistent model of a social phenomenon, constructed to highlight the phenomenon’s most significant characteristics, and intended as an aid to analysis rather than as an exact reproduction of reality.

Being a conceptual tool designed to help analysis, an ideal type is not meant to be an exact reproduction of reality. This is the point students most often miss, so state it plainly: an ideal type may exaggerate some features of a phenomenon that are considered analytically important, and may ignore or downplay others.

Obviously an ideal type should correspond to reality in a broad sense — an ideal type of the village that resembles no village would be useless. But its main job is to assist analysis by bringing out the important features and connections of the social phenomenon being studied.

Hence the test of an ideal type is unusual. An ideal type is to be judged by how helpful it is for analysis and understanding, not by how accurate or detailed a description it provides.

an “ideal type” vs an ideal An ideal in ordinary speech is something desirable — a goal worth pursuing. An ideal type in Weber’s sense carries no approval whatever: one can construct an ideal type of corruption, or of a dictatorship. “Ideal” here means “made in the mind as a pure model”, not “excellent”.

Fig. 4.9

Fig. 4.9 – Weber’s method of interpretive sociology.

The ideal type at work: religion and capitalism

Weber put the ideal type to work on one of the largest questions he asked: what is the relationship between the ethics of the “world religions” and the rationalisation of the social world in different civilisations?

It was in this context that Weber suggested that the ethics of certain Protestant sects within Christianity had a deep influence on the development of capitalism in Europe.

the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism Proposed by: Max Weber (1864–1920), in a work published in 1904. Core idea: The ethical outlook cultivated by certain Protestant sects — disciplined work, thrift, the avoidance of display, the treating of worldly labour as a calling — encouraged habits of saving and reinvestment, and so had a deep influence on the development of capitalism in Europe. Key terms: rationalisation, the ethics of world religions, ideal type. Evidence: Weber constructed ideal types of the Protestant ethic and of the spirit of capitalism, and traced the correspondence between them across European history. Limitation: The argument is a claim about influence, not about a single cause, and it has been much debated ever since — capitalism developed in places where these sects were absent, and other historians give greater weight to trade, colonial wealth and state policy. Note also that it directly challenges Marx, for here an idea shapes an economy rather than the other way round.

The three types of authority

Weber again used the ideal type to illustrate the three types of authority — legitimate power, power that those subject to it accept as rightful — that he defined as traditional, charismatic and rational-legal.

The source of traditional authority was custom and precedence. It is obeyed because it has always been obeyed: the elder of a lineage, the hereditary head of a household.

Charismatic authority derived from divine sources, or from what is called the “gift of grace”. It is obeyed because of the extraordinary personal qualities that followers see in a particular individual.

Rational-legal authority was based on the legal demarcation of authority. It is obeyed not because of who the person is, but because of the office she holds and the rules that define what that office may do.

It is rational-legal authority that prevailed in modern times. And it was epitomised — shown in its purest form — in the bureaucracy, which is the subject of the next section.

traditional vs charismatic vs rational-legal authority | Feature | Traditional | Charismatic | Rational-legal | |—|—|—|—| | Source of legitimacy | Custom and precedence | Divine sources, or the “gift of grace” | Legal demarcation of authority | | Why people obey | It has always been so | Faith in the extraordinary qualities of the person | The rules say so, and the rules are accepted | | Attached to | Inherited status | A particular individual | An office, not an occupant | | Where it prevails | Older, custom-governed societies | Any period; it appears wherever a compelling leader gathers followers | Modern societies | | Purest expression | The hereditary chief or elder | The prophet, the saint, the founder of a movement | The bureaucracy |

4.7 Bureaucracy

What kind of thing is a bureaucracy?

Bureaucracy was a mode of organisation premised on the separation of the public from the domestic world. That separation, which you first met as an achievement of the French Revolution, now becomes the organising principle of an institution.

What does the separation mean in practice? It means that behaviour in the public domain was regulated by explicit rules and regulations — written down, known in advance, and applying to everyone alike. How an official behaves at home is his own affair; how he behaves at his desk is not.

Moreover, as a public institution, bureaucracy restricted the power of officials in regard to their responsibilities. It did not provide absolute power to them.

That last sentence deserves emphasis, because it runs against the everyday use of the word. In ordinary speech, “bureaucracy” suggests officials with too much power and too little sense. In Weber’s analysis, the bureaucracy is precisely the device by which an official’s power is limited — fenced in by rules that say exactly what he may and may not do.

NoteDefinition

Bureaucracy: a mode of organisation, resting on the separation of the public from the domestic world, in which conduct in the public domain is regulated by explicit rules and regulations, and in which the power of officials is restricted to their defined responsibilities rather than being absolute.

Recall where this section comes from. Weber identified three types of authority, and said that rational-legal authority — authority grounded in the legal demarcation of powers — is what prevails in modern times. Bureaucracy is where that type of authority is seen in its purest form.

The five features of bureaucratic authority

Bureaucratic authority is characterised by these features:

  1. Functioning of Officials;
  2. Hierarchical Ordering of Positions;
  3. Reliance on Written Document;
  4. Office Management; and
  5. Conduct in Office.

Each of them is a way of keeping power inside its box. Read them with that question in mind: what exactly does this feature prevent?

(i) Functioning of Officials

Within the bureaucracy, officials have fixed areas of “official jurisdiction”, governed by rules, laws and administrative regulations. An official’s authority stops at the boundary of his jurisdiction, and he cannot decide matters that lie outside it.

The regular activities of the bureaucratic organisation are distributed in a fixed way, as official duties. Nothing is left to be settled by whoever happens to be nearest.

Commands are issued by higher authorities for implementation by subordinates in a stable way. But the responsibilities of officials are strictly delimited by the authority available to them — a superior may command only what the rules allow him to command.

Because duties have to be fulfilled on a regular basis, only those who have the requisite qualifications to perform them are employed. Recruitment rests on qualification, not on birth or favour.

Finally — and this is the feature that most sharply distinguishes a bureaucracy from a royal court — official positions in a bureaucracy are independent of the incumbent. They continue beyond the tenure of any occupant.

NoteDefinition

Office: in the context of bureaucracy, a public post or position of impersonal and formal authority with specified powers and responsibilities. The office has a separate existence, independent of the person appointed to it.

“office” as a post vs “office” as a place In Weber’s sense an office is a position — a bundle of powers and duties that outlives whoever holds it. In everyday speech the same word means a building or room: the post office, the panchayat office, the Prime Minister’s office, your mother’s or father’s office. Sociology means the first.

the office outlives the officer A block development officer is transferred in the middle of a scheme. Her successor takes charge the following week, opens the same files, is bound by the same rules, and answers the same applicants. The applicants do not have to begin again, and they do not have to learn the new officer’s personal preferences, because the powers of the post are written down and unchanged. The person has gone; the office has not. That independence of the office from its occupant is what makes rational-legal authority impersonal — and it is what a hereditary chiefship or a charismatic leadership can never offer.

(ii) Hierarchical Ordering of Positions

Authority and office are placed on a graded hierarchy, in which higher officials supervise the lower ones.

The purpose is not merely command. A hierarchy allows scope of appeal to a higher official in case of dissatisfaction with the decisions of lower officials. If a clerk refuses your application, there is someone above the clerk who can be asked to look again.

Fig. 4.10

Fig. 4.10 – Hierarchical ordering of positions in a bureaucracy.

Q. Weber says bureaucracy restricts the power of officials. Yet we usually complain that officials have too much power. How can both be true?

A. Both are true, of different things. The rules restrict what any individual official may decide on his own — he cannot exceed his jurisdiction, and his decision can be appealed. But the organisation as a whole, precisely because it is efficient, well-recorded and unbroken by any one person’s departure, becomes very powerful indeed. Weber’s point is about the official; our complaint is usually about the machine.

(iii) Reliance on Written Document

The management of a bureaucratic organisation is carried out on the basis of written documents — the files — which are preserved as records.

Writing does something that memory cannot. It creates cumulation in the decision-making of the “bureau”, or office: each decision is recorded, and later decisions are taken in the light of the earlier ones. A bureaucracy therefore remembers, even after everyone who took the original decision has gone.

The file is also part of the public domain, which is separate from the private life of the officials. It can, in principle, be produced, checked and questioned.

(iv) Office Management

Since office management is a specialised and modern activity, it requires trained and skilled personnel to conduct operations. Running an office is itself a competence to be learnt, not something anyone can be expected to do simply because he is senior or respected.

(v) Conduct in Office

Official activity demands the full-time attention of officials, irrespective of the delimited hours they spend in the office. Hence an official’s conduct in office is governed by exhaustive rules and regulations.

These rules separate the official’s public conduct from her behaviour in the private domain. What she may accept, whom she may favour, what she may say in her official capacity — all this is prescribed, and none of it depends on her private friendships.

And because these rules and regulations have legal recognition, officials can be held accountable. A rule that is merely a custom can be quietly ignored; a rule that is law cannot.

bureaucracy Proposed by: Max Weber (1864–1920), as an ideal type of modern political authority. Core idea: Bureaucracy is the purest expression of rational-legal authority. It separates the public from the domestic, distributes work as fixed official duties within defined jurisdictions, arranges offices in a graded hierarchy that permits appeal, runs on written records, employs trained personnel, and binds official conduct by legally recognised rules — so that power belongs to the office and not to the person. Key terms: bureaucracy, office, official jurisdiction, rational-legal authority, hierarchy, accountability. Evidence: The modern state administration, in which a citizen’s application is decided by rules and files rather than by the personal will of whoever receives it, and in which an unfavourable decision can be appealed to a higher post. Limitation: Remember that this is an ideal type, and is to be judged by its usefulness for analysis, not by its accuracy as a description. Real bureaucracies fall short of it — rules can become ends in themselves, files can move slowly, and impersonality can shade into indifference towards the very people the office exists to serve.

What Weber’s account demonstrated

Weber’s characterisation of bureaucracy as a modern form of political authority demonstrated something about the position of the individual within it.

An individual actor was, on the one hand, recognised for her skills and training — she is appointed because she is qualified, not because of who her family is. On the other hand, she was given responsibilities together with the requisite authority to implement them, so that the job carries the powers needed to do it.

And the legal delimitation of tasks and authority did two things at once. It constrained unbridled power, and it made officials accountable to their clients, because the work was carried out in the public domain where it could be seen and questioned.

That is the modern world Marx, Durkheim and Weber were each trying to explain — a world of factories and classes, of new solidarities and impersonal rules, of files, offices and rights. They disagreed profoundly about what held it together and where it was going. Learning to hold their three answers side by side, and to weigh them, is what it means to begin thinking sociologically.

To what extent do you think the following groups or activities involve the exercise of bureaucratic authority in Weber’s sense? (a) your class; (b) your school; (c) a football team; (d) a panchayat samiti in a village; (e) a fan association for a popular film star; (f) a group of regular commuters on a train or bus route; (g) a joint family; (h) a village community; (i) the crew of a ship; (j) an audience watching a film in a cinema hall. Test each one against the five features: Are there fixed jurisdictions? Is there a graded hierarchy with a right of appeal? Are there written records? Are the personnel trained for the task? Is conduct governed by rules that can be enforced? Then decide which of these you would be willing to call “bureaucratic”. Discuss reasons both for and against, and listen carefully to those who disagree with you — in sociology, the reasons matter more than the verdict.

4.8 Summary

The context of sociology (4.1)
  1. Sociology is called the child of the “age of revolution”. It was born in nineteenth-century Western Europe, after three centuries of revolutionary change had transformed how people lived — first in Europe, then in the rest of the world as it came into contact with Europe.
  2. Three processes prepared the ground: the Enlightenment (the scientific revolution), the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Together they produced the conditions of modernity.
  3. The Enlightenment (late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) placed the human being at the centre of the universe and reason at the centre of the human being. Society, being made by humans, could therefore be analysed rationally. Nature, religion and the divine were displaced from the centre of explanation, producing attitudes we call secular, scientific and humanistic.
  4. Its dark side: only those judged capable of reason were counted fully human. Peoples of so-called “primitive” societies were labelled “savages” — a judgement made by Europeans, applying European standards, to societies they often ruled. Sociology rejects these labels today.
  5. The French Revolution (1789) announced political sovereignty at two levels — the individual and the nation-state. The Declaration of Human Rights asserted the equality of all citizens and questioned privileges inherited by birth. Serfs were freed of their bonds; feudal and church taxes were cancelled; citizens became equal before the law.
  6. It also built a separation between the public realm of the state and the private realm of the household: religion and the family became more “private”, schooling more “public”. Liberty, equality and fraternity became the watchwords of the modern state.
  7. The Industrial Revolution (Britain, late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) had two aspects: the systematic application of science and technology to production (the Spinning Jenny, the steam engine), and new ways of organising labour and markets on an unprecedented scale. These produced the factory system and mass manufacture for distant world markets.
  8. Socially, it uprooted rural workers into cities, imposed long hours and low wages on men, women and children, and made the urban dominate the rural. Cities housed great wealth and great poverty side by side.
  9. To govern such cities, the state took charge of health, sanitation, crime control and “development” — and to do so it had to count and record. This demand for new knowledge is one reason the social sciences, and sociology in particular, emerged. Sociology has been called the “science of the new industrial society”.
Karl Marx (4.2)
  1. Marx (1818–1883), German, spent most of his productive years exiled in Britain. He was a social thinker, not a philosopher, who studied capitalism in order to expose and overturn it.
  2. He argued that human society had progressed through stages: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism — and that capitalism would give way to socialism.
  3. Alienation, in capitalism, operates at several levels: humans are alienated from nature; from each other, as relations become market-mediated; from the fruits of their labour, since workers do not own what they produce; from the work process, since management now decides the content of the working day; and finally from themselves.
  4. Yet Marx held capitalism to be a necessary and progressive stage, because it created the preconditions for an egalitarian future. It would be transformed by its own victims — the working class, uniting to make a revolution.
  5. The mode of production is a broad system of production associated with a historical epoch, defining an entire way of life. It is like a building: an economic base, and a superstructure erected upon it.
  6. The base consists of productive forces (land, labour, technology, sources of energy) and production relations (the economic relationships and forms of labour organisation, which are also property relations based on ownership of the means of production).
  7. The superstructure consists of religion, art, law, literature, beliefs and ideas. Marx argued that material life shapes ideas, not the other way round — a claim that went against the dominant thinking of his time.
Class struggle (4.3)
  1. For Marx the most important way of classifying people is by their position in the production process, not by religion, language or nationality. Those who share a position share interests — even if they do not yet recognise it.
  2. Classes are formed through historical processes. The capitalist mode of production created the working class: serfs and small peasants thrown off the land, driven into cities, and pressed by law and police into the new factories.
  3. In capitalism the bourgeoisie own all the means of production; the working class owns nothing and must sell its labour for wages in order to survive.
  4. Objectively opposed classes do not automatically fight. Conflict requires class consciousness — subjective awareness of one’s own class interests and of one’s rivals’ — developed through political mobilisation. Conflict may then culminate in revolution: the overthrow of a ruling class by a subordinated one.
  5. Economic processes generate contradictions, but do not by themselves produce revolutions; social and political processes are also needed.
  6. In every epoch the ruling class promotes a dominant ideology that makes its domination appear natural — for instance, by explaining poverty as fate or as the result of deeds in a previous life. But dominant ideologies can be challenged by rival ideologies, and consciousness spreads unevenly, so outcomes cannot be pre-determined.
Emile Durkheim (4.4)
  1. Durkheim (1858–1917) may be considered the founder of sociology as a formal discipline: he was the first Professor of Sociology, in Paris in 1913. Raised in an orthodox Jewish family and sent to a rabbinical school, he became an agnostic — but his moral upbringing shaped his sociology.
  2. Moral codes were, for him, the key characteristics of a society, determining individual behaviour. He sought a secular understanding of religion, achieved in his last book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
  3. Society was a social fact, existing as a moral community over and above the individual. Social solidarities — the ties binding people into groups — exert pressure on individuals to conform, constricting choice and thus producing patterned, predictable behaviour.
  4. This is what makes a science of society possible. Norms and values are invisible, but by observing patterns of behaviour we can identify the norms, codes and solidarities that govern them.
  5. Durkheim’s science rests on moral facts: rules of action that can be observed, described, classified and explained. Because moral codes are manifestations of particular social conditions, the morality of one society is inappropriate for another — and the social conditions of a society can be deduced from its moral codes.
Durkheim’s vision of sociology (4.5)
  1. Two defining features. First, a distinct subject matter: sociology studies social facts at the emergent level — the level of complex collective life, where phenomena appear that are not present in the parts. A cricket team is more than eleven individuals; so are political parties, religious communities and nations.
  2. Second, sociology was to be an empirical discipline. This was hard, because collectivities cannot be seen directly. Durkheim’s achievement was to show that social facts, though not directly observable, are indirectly observable through patterns of behaviour.
  3. His study Suicide demonstrated this. Each individual case is unique, but the average rate of suicide aggregated across a whole community is stable and characteristic of it — and is therefore a social fact.
  4. Social facts are like things: external to the individual but constraining behaviour. Law, education and religion are social facts. They are collective representations, emerging from the association of people, general in nature and independent of any individual.
  5. In Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim classified societies by the type of solidarity holding them together.
  6. Mechanical solidarity: small populations, self-sufficient groups doing similar work, ties based on similarity and personal relationships, little tolerance of difference, repressive law that punishes deviation, the individual submerged in the collectivity.
  7. Organic solidarity: large populations, heterogeneous members, impersonal relationships, specialised units dependent on one another. Interdependence is its essence. It celebrates individual difference and multiple roles, and its law is restitutive — repairing the wrong rather than avenging it.
  8. In modern societies people form voluntary associations around specific goals; these do not take over their members’ whole lives, so individuals carry many identities. Because everyone depends on others for basic needs, interaction intensifies, and impersonal rules become necessary where personal relations cannot reach.
  9. Where Durkheim saw the deepening division of labour producing solidarity, Marx saw it producing conflict. Both agreed that it produces interdependence.
Max Weber and interpretive sociology (4.6)
  1. Weber (1864–1920) developed an interpretive sociology of social action and of power and domination, and studied the rationalisation of modern society and its relationship with the world religions.
  2. The social sciences differ from the natural sciences because their subject matter — social action, meaning all behaviour to which actors attach a meaning — carries subjective meaning. Their methods must therefore differ too.
  3. The sociologist’s task is to recover the meanings the actor attaches to her action, by imaginatively putting herself in the actor’s place. This is empathetic understanding: not “feeling for” (sympathy) but “feeling with” (empathy).
  4. The investigation must nonetheless be objective. Value neutrality means faithfully recording the subjective meanings of others without letting one’s own beliefs or opinions intrude — describing, not judging. Weber admitted this is very difficult, since social scientists are themselves members of society, and demanded an “iron will”.
  5. The ideal type is a logically consistent model of a social phenomenon that highlights its most significant features. It is a tool for analysis, not an exact reproduction of reality; it may exaggerate what is analytically important and downplay the rest. It is judged by how useful it is, not by how accurate a description it gives.
  6. Using the ideal type, Weber argued that the ethics of certain Protestant sects had a deep influence on the development of capitalism in Europe — an argument that, unlike Marx’s, lets an idea shape an economy.
  7. He also used it to define three types of authority: traditional (custom and precedence), charismatic (divine sources, the “gift of grace”) and rational-legal (legal demarcation of authority). Rational-legal authority prevails in modern times and is epitomised in the bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy (4.7)
  1. Bureaucracy rests on the separation of the public from the domestic world: conduct in the public domain is regulated by explicit rules. As a public institution it restricts officials’ power rather than granting them absolute power.
  2. Its five features: (i) Functioning of Officials — fixed jurisdictions, duties distributed by rule, appointment by qualification, and offices that continue beyond any occupant; (ii) Hierarchical Ordering of Positions — a graded hierarchy in which higher officials supervise lower ones, allowing appeal; (iii) Reliance on Written Document — the files, preserved as records, giving cumulation to decision-making; (iv) Office Management — a specialised modern activity requiring trained personnel; (v) Conduct in Office — exhaustive rules that separate public conduct from private behaviour and, having legal recognition, make officials accountable.
  3. An office is a post of impersonal, formal authority with specified powers, existing independently of the person appointed to it.
  4. Weber’s account showed the individual official as both recognised for skill and training and constrained by the legal delimitation of tasks — power fenced in, and accountability owed to the public.

4.9 Key Terms

Alienation — A process in capitalist society by which human beings are separated and distanced from (or made strangers to) nature, other human beings, their work and its product, and their own nature or self.

Association — A group formed voluntarily by individuals with a similar goal, oriented to a specific purpose, and therefore not claiming the whole life of its members.

Authority — Power that those subject to it accept as legitimate; Weber distinguished three types — traditional, charismatic and rational-legal.

Bourgeoisie — In Marx’s account of capitalism, the class of capitalists who own the means of production, such as investible capital, factories, machinery and land.

Bureaucracy — A mode of organisation, resting on the separation of the public from the domestic world, in which official conduct is regulated by explicit rules and the power of officials is restricted rather than absolute.

Capitalism — The mode of production in which the means of production are privately owned and goods are produced for sale and profit by workers who sell their labour for wages.

Charismatic authority — Authority derived from divine sources or the “gift of grace”, obeyed because of the extraordinary personal qualities followers see in an individual.

Class — In Marx’s sense, a group of people who occupy the same position in the production process and in property relations, and who therefore share common interests, whether or not they yet recognise it.

Class consciousness — A class’s subjective awareness of its own interests and identity, and of those of its rivals; developed through political mobilisation, and necessary before class conflict can occur.

Class struggle — The conflict between opposed classes which, for Marx, is the major driving force of change in society.

Classical tradition — The founding body of sociological work, including that of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, on which the discipline was built.

Collective representations — Beliefs, feelings and collective practices that emerge from the association of people; general in nature and independent of any individual.

Dominant ideology — The way of seeing the world promoted by the ruling class of an epoch, which makes its domination and the existing social order appear natural, deserved or inevitable.

Economic base — In Marx’s model, the primarily economic foundation of a society, consisting of its productive forces and its production relations.

Emergent level — The level of complex collective life at which social phenomena appear that are not present in, and cannot be reduced to, the individuals who compose the collectivity; the level Durkheim said sociology studies.

Empathetic understanding — Weber’s method of grasping social action by imaginatively placing oneself in the actor’s position; an understanding based on “feeling with” (empathy) rather than “feeling for” (sympathy).

Enlightenment — A period in eighteenth-century Europe when philosophers rejected the supremacy of religious doctrines, established reason as the means to truth, and treated the human being as the sole bearer of reason.

Factory system — The system of production, arising from the Industrial Revolution, in which large numbers of workers are brought together under one roof to work with machines under managerial control.

Ideal type — A logically consistent model of a social phenomenon that highlights its most significant characteristics; a tool for analysis rather than an exact reproduction of reality.

Ideology — A way of seeing the world that shapes what people take to be natural, just or inevitable.

Industrial Revolution — The transformation of production that began in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, combining the systematic application of science and technology to production with new ways of organising labour and markets.

Mechanical solidarity — The social cohesion of small, simple societies, founded on the similarity of their members and on personal relationships; associated with repressive law.

Means of production — The factors used to produce, such as land, factories, machinery and capital; ownership or control of them defines a person’s position in production relations.

Mode of production — A system of material production which persists over a long period of time, distinguished by its means of production (technology and forms of production organisation) and its relations of production (slavery, serfdom, wage labour).

Modernity — The conditions of social life brought about in Europe by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, and now widely taken for granted.

Moral codes — The shared rules of a society about what one ought and ought not to do; for Durkheim, the key characteristics of a society and the determinants of individual behaviour.

Moral facts — Rules of action, recognisable by distinctive characteristics, which can therefore be observed, described, classified and explained like other phenomena.

Nation-state — A sovereign political entity with a centralised government ruling a defined territory.

Office — In the context of bureaucracy, a public post of impersonal and formal authority with specified powers and responsibilities, having an existence independent of the person appointed to it. (This differs from the everyday meaning of the word, which refers to an actual institution or its physical location — the post office, the panchayat office, and so on.)

Organic solidarity — The social cohesion of large, complex modern societies, founded not on similarity but on the interdependence of members and groups performing specialised functions; associated with restitutive law.

Production relations — All the economic relationships and forms of labour organisation involved in production; also property relations, based on the ownership or control of the means of production.

Productive forces — All the means or factors of production, such as land, labour, technology and sources of energy.

Rational-legal authority — Authority based on the legal demarcation of powers, obeyed because of the office a person holds and the rules defining it; the type that prevails in modern times.

Rationalisation — The spread of calculation, rules and efficiency into more and more areas of social life in modern society.

Repressive law — Law that punishes deviation from community norms harshly, enforcing a kind of collective revenge; characteristic of mechanical solidarity.

Restitutive law — Law that aims to repair or correct the wrong done by an act rather than to avenge it; characteristic of organic solidarity.

Revolution — The overthrow of a dominant or ruling class (or coalition of classes) by the classes previously subordinated to it.

Secular — Of this world; explaining worldly things by worldly causes rather than by religious or divine ones.

Serf — A bonded labourer tied to a landed estate, unable to leave it; the typical condition of the peasantry in feudal Europe before the French Revolution.

Social action — All human behaviour that is meaningful, that is, action to which the actor attaches a subjective meaning.

Social fact — Aspects of social reality related to collective patterns of behaviour and belief, which are not created by individuals but exert pressure on them and influence their behaviour.

Social solidarity — The ties that bind people into groups and exert pressure on them to conform to the group’s norms and expectations.

Sovereignty — The status of being the final authority over oneself; asserted by the French Revolution both for the individual citizen and for the nation-state.

Superstructure — In Marx’s model, the social, cultural and political institutions — religion, art, law, literature, beliefs and ideas — erected upon the economic base and shaped by it.

Traditional authority — Authority whose source is custom and precedence, obeyed because it has always been obeyed.

Value neutrality — The discipline of neutrally recording the subjective values of the people one studies, without being affected by one’s own feelings or opinions about those values; describing rather than judging.

Working class — The urban, property-less class created by the capitalist mode of production, which owns no means of production and must sell its labour for wages in order to survive.

4.10 Points to Ponder

  1. Marx argued that material life shapes ideas — that how people earn their livelihood determines how they think. Weber suggested that the ethics of certain religious sects helped shape the development of capitalism. Can both claims be partly right at the same time? What kind of evidence would help you decide which way the influence mainly runs in a particular case?

  2. Durkheim held that organic solidarity gives individuals more room to be different from one another. Yet young people across countries, states and regions increasingly listen to the same songs and wear the same clothes. Is such standardisation the opposite of individuality — or is it what individuality looks like in a large, impersonal society?

  3. If a class can share the same objective interests and still not know it, then somebody must first tell it what those interests are. Who is entitled to do that, and how would we ever know if they had got it wrong?

  4. Weber says the rules of a bureaucracy restrict what any single official may do. Yet a well-run bureaucracy can be more powerful than any individual ruler ever was. What does this suggest about where power actually resides in a modern society?

  5. Value neutrality asks the sociologist to record other people’s values without judging them. Can you think of a practice that a sociologist should refuse to describe neutrally? If you can, what happens to Weber’s method — and if you cannot, what happens to the sociologist as a citizen?

  6. The Enlightenment made reason the mark of the fully human, and then used that very standard to rank some peoples below others. Can a way of thinking be genuinely liberating and genuinely dangerous at the same time? What should sociology do with such an inheritance?

  7. Marx, Durkheim and Weber were all writing about nineteenth-century Europe. What does an Indian student gain by studying them — and what might she miss if she reads Indian society only through their categories?

4.11 NCERT Questions

  1. Why is the Enlightenment important for the development of sociology?

  2. How was the Industrial Revolution responsible for giving rise to sociology?

  3. What are the various components of a mode of production?

  4. Why do classes come into conflict, according to Marx?

  5. What are social facts? How do we recognise them?

  6. What is the difference between ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity?

  7. Show, with examples, how moral codes are indicators of social solidarity.

  8. What are the basic features of bureaucracy?

  9. What is special or different about the kind of objectivity needed in social science?

  10. Can you identify any ideas or theories which have led to the formation of social movements in India in recent times?

  11. Try to find out what Marx and Weber wrote about India.

  12. Can you think of reasons why we should study the work of thinkers who died long ago? What could be some reasons not to study them?

4.12 Objective Questions

  1. Sociology is sometimes described as the child of the “age of revolution”. Which three revolutions are meant?
    1. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution
    2. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Industrial Revolution
    3. The Enlightenment, the Green Revolution and the French Revolution
    4. The Industrial Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Enlightenment [1 mark]
  2. Which of the following was NOT part of the economic base in Marx’s model?
    1. Land and technology
    2. Sources of energy such as coal and petroleum
    3. Religion, art and law
    4. The relationships based on ownership of the means of production [1 mark]
  3. According to Marx, a revolution occurs when —
    1. the ruling class voluntarily surrenders its property
    2. a subordinated class, having developed class consciousness, overthrows the dominant class
    3. the economy collapses, automatically and by itself
    4. the dominant ideology becomes more persuasive than its rivals [1 mark]
  4. Durkheim’s study of suicide is famous in sociology chiefly because it —
    1. explained why each individual took his or her own life
    2. showed that the aggregated rate of suicide in a community is a social fact
    3. proved that suicide has no social causes at all
    4. established that suicide rates cannot be measured [1 mark]
  5. Restitutive law is characteristic of —
    1. mechanical solidarity
    2. organic solidarity
    3. charismatic authority
    4. primitive communism [1 mark]
  6. An ideal type, in Weber’s sense, is to be judged by —
    1. how accurately and completely it describes reality
    2. how morally desirable the phenomenon it models is
    3. how useful it is for analysis and understanding
    4. how many exceptions to it can be found [1 mark]
  7. Which of the following is NOT one of the five features of bureaucratic authority listed by Weber?
    1. Hierarchical Ordering of Positions
    2. Reliance on Written Document
    3. Inheritance of Office
    4. Conduct in Office [1 mark]
  8. Assertion (A): In societies based on mechanical solidarity, any violation of community norms attracts harsh punishment. Reason (R): In such societies the individual and the community are so tightly integrated that a violation of the codes of conduct is feared to threaten the community’s very existence.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  9. Assertion (A): For Marx, two classes that are objectively opposed to each other will automatically come into conflict. Reason (R): Class conflict requires class consciousness, which is developed through political mobilisation.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  10. Assertion (A): Weber held that the methods of the social sciences must differ from those of the natural sciences. Reason (R): Social action carries subjective meaning, which the sociologist must recover, whereas the objects of the natural sciences attach no meaning to what they do.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  11. Match the thinker in Column I with the concept in Column II.
Column I Column II
a. Karl Marx i. Ideal type
b. Emile Durkheim ii. Alienation
c. Max Weber iii. Organic solidarity

[1 mark]

  1. Match the work in Column I with its author in Column II.
Column I Column II
a. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life i. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
b. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ii. Emile Durkheim
c. The Communist Manifesto iii. Max Weber

[1 mark]

  1. Match the type of authority in Column I with its source in Column II.
Column I Column II
a. Traditional authority i. Legal demarcation of authority
b. Charismatic authority ii. Custom and precedence
c. Rational-legal authority iii. Divine sources, or the “gift of grace”

[1 mark]

  1. Fill in the blank: The ties that bind people into groups and exert pressure on them to conform to the group’s norms were called ______________ by Durkheim. [1 mark]

  2. Fill in the blank: In Marx’s model, the institutions of religion, art, law and literature form the ______________ , which rests upon the economic base. [1 mark]

  3. Fill in the blank: Weber called the objectivity required of a sociologist — recording others’ values without being affected by one’s own opinions about them — ______________ . [1 mark]

  4. True or False: According to Marx, capitalism was a purely destructive stage of history with nothing progressive about it. [1 mark]

  5. True or False: In Weber’s sense, an office continues to exist independently of the person appointed to it. [1 mark]

  6. True or False: Durkheim argued that social facts, being abstract, cannot be studied empirically. [1 mark]

  7. True or False: Empathy, in Weber’s usage, means “feeling for” another person, while sympathy means “feeling with” them. [1 mark]

4.13 Check Your Concepts

  1. Define a social fact in Durkheim’s sense, and give one example. [2 marks]

  2. What is meant by a mode of production? Name any two modes of production Marx identified. [2 marks]

  3. State two features of the Enlightenment as a way of thinking about the world. [2 marks]

  4. What is class consciousness? Why is it necessary for class conflict? [2 marks]

  5. Define an ideal type. State one thing it is not meant to be. [2 marks]

  6. Name the three types of authority defined by Weber, and state the source of each. [2 marks]

  7. What is meant by an “office” in the context of bureaucracy? [2 marks]

  8. Name any two changes in social life that followed from the setting up of factories in urban areas. [2 marks]

  9. Distinguish between productive forces and production relations, with one example of each. [4 marks]

  10. Differentiate between mechanical and organic solidarity on any four points. [4 marks]

  11. Explain, with an example, the difference between sympathy and empathy, and say why Weber’s method requires the second and not the first. [4 marks]

  12. “An ideal type is not an ideal.” Explain this statement with reference to Weber’s methodology. [4 marks]

  13. Why did the French Revolution matter for the way modern people think about the individual? Answer with reference to sovereignty, equality before the law, and the separation of the public and the private. [4 marks]

  14. Marx argued that a dominant ideology tends to justify the existing social order. Explain this with an example, and say why he nevertheless held that dominant ideologies do not always succeed. [4 marks]

  15. Explain any four features of bureaucratic authority. In each case, state what that feature prevents an official from doing. [4 marks]

  16. Why is a cricket team, in Durkheim’s argument, more than a collection of eleven persons? Use this example to explain what he meant by the “emergent” level. [4 marks]

  17. Explain Marx’s concept of alienation in full. Describe the several levels at which it operates in capitalist society, and state one criticism that can be made of the concept. [6 marks]

  18. Explain how Durkheim demonstrated that sociology could be an empirical science even though social facts cannot be directly seen. Refer to his study of suicide in your answer, and mention one limitation of his method. [6 marks]

  19. Marx and Durkheim both saw the division of labour deepen in modern society, but drew opposite conclusions from it. Compare the two positions, state what they agree on, and evaluate which account you find more persuasive, giving reasons. [6 marks]

  20. “Sociology emerged as the science of the new industrial society.” Discuss the causes and consequences of the Industrial Revolution that made a new science of society both possible and necessary. [6 marks]

  21. Explain Weber’s idea of interpretive sociology. In your answer, discuss social action, empathetic understanding and value neutrality, and explain why Weber admitted that value neutrality is very difficult to achieve. [6 marks]

  22. “Marx held that material life shapes ideas; Weber suggested that a religious ethic influenced the rise of capitalism.” How far do you agree that these two claims cannot both be correct? Argue your case with reference to what each thinker actually claimed. [6 marks]

  23. Marx believed that class position matters more than religion, language or nationality in explaining how people act. Evaluate this claim with Indian examples. [6 marks]

4.14 Passage-Based Questions

  1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

A woman joins a large bakery on the edge of a city. Her work is to place the same cardboard tray on a moving belt, once every few seconds, through the whole of her shift. She never learns which shops the biscuits go to. The speed of the belt is set by a supervisor she rarely meets, and the order of tasks was decided long before she arrived. She is paid on the first of every month and may resign whenever she wishes. On the bus home, she says that she cannot think of a single thing in the day that was hers.

a. Identify the concept from this chapter that the passage illustrates, and name the thinker associated with it. [1 mark]
b. Explain any two levels at which this concept is operating in the passage. [2 marks]
c. The woman is legally free and is paid regularly. Explain why this does not settle the question. [3 marks]

[6 marks]

  1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

In a small hill settlement, disputes are settled by an assembly of elders. Almost everyone farms, and everyone knows everyone. When a young man is found to have broken a long-standing rule about the use of common grazing land, the assembly imposes a heavy penalty and requires a public apology, though the actual loss to the village is small. An officer visiting from the district town is puzzled: in the town, she says, such a matter would end with the man paying compensation for the grass, and nothing more.

a. Name the type of social solidarity found in the settlement and the type found in the district town. [1 mark]
b. Identify the two kinds of law at work in the passage, and explain the difference between them. [2 marks]
c. Why does the settlement punish so heavily for so small a loss? Answer using Durkheim's argument about the relationship between the individual and the community. [3 marks]

[6 marks]

  1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

A student is sent to observe how a municipal ward office handles complaints about water supply. She notices that every complaint is entered in a register and given a number; that the clerk can accept the complaint but cannot decide it; that a supervisor above him decides, and that a resident who is dissatisfied may take the matter to a still higher officer. The clerk is transferred during her study. His successor opens the same register, applies the same rules, and the complaints already filed move on without being begun again.

a. Which type of authority, in Weber's classification, is being exercised in this ward office? [1 mark]
b. Identify any two features of bureaucratic authority visible in the passage, and point to the line in the passage that shows each. [2 marks]
c. Explain what the transfer of the clerk demonstrates about the relationship between an office and its occupant. [3 marks]

[6 marks]

  1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

A researcher spends three months in a weekly market, studying how buyers decide whom to trust. She herself thinks that bargaining is a waste of everyone’s time. In her notebook, however, she records what the traders say bargaining means to them: that it is how a stranger becomes a customer, that a price accepted too quickly is thought to hide a defect, and that a long negotiation is a sign of respect rather than of suspicion. She writes down these meanings exactly as they are given to her, and keeps her own view out of the record.

a. Name the two elements of Weber's method that the researcher is practising. [1 mark]
b. Explain how she is able to enter the traders' world without agreeing with them. [2 marks]
c. Weber said that this kind of objectivity requires an "iron will". Using the passage, explain why he thought it so difficult, and state one criticism that has been made of the idea. [3 marks]

[6 marks]