FOUNDATIONS OF

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
(SOC1C01)

STUDY MATERIAL

I SEMESTER
CORE COURSE

MA SOCIOLOGY
(2019 Admission onwards)

UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT
SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION
CALICUT UNIVERSITY P.O.,
MALAPPURAM - 673 635, KERALA

190351
SOC1C01 - FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

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 SOC1C01 - FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT

STUDY MATERIAL
FIRST SEMESTER

MA SOCIOLOGY
(2019 ADMISSION ONWARDS)
CORE COURSE
SOC1C01 : FOUNDATIONS OF
SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Prepared by:
Sri. JAWHAR C.T.
Assistant Professor on Contract
(Sociology)
School of Distance Education
University of Calicut

Scrutinized by:
Dr. C. MAHESH
Assistant Professor
P.G. Department of Sociology
The Zamorin's Guruvayurappan College, Calicut
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CONTENTS

Objectives

Traces out the history of sociology

Introduces the ideas of the pioneering
sociological thinkers
Recognises the relevance of the classical
theory in contemporary societies.

MODULE 1 8 - 112
THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
1.1 Intellectual and Social forces in the
development of Sociological Theory:
Renaissance, Enlightenment, French
Revolution, Industrial Revolution
1.2 Early Social Philosophers: Montesquieu,
Condorcet, Saint Simone
1.3 Auguste Comte: Positivism, Herbert
Spencer: Organic Analogy
1.4 Emile Durkheim: Social Fact, Division of
Labour, Suicide, Elementary forms of
Religious life

MODULE 2 113 - 151

KARL MARX
2.1 Karl Marx: Dialectical and Historical
Materialism
2.2 Class and Class conflict

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2.3 Theory of Alienation, Commodity

Fetishism
2.4 Theory of Social Change

MODULE 3 152 - 191

MAX WEBER
3.1 Verstehen, Social Action, Ideal Type
3.2 Theory of Power and Authority,
Bureaucracy
3.3 Rationality and Modernity- Rationalisation
3.4 The Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism

MODULE 4 192 - 221

GEORG SIMMEL
4.1 Formal Sociology, Sociation and
Group formation
4.2 Relationships and Social types
4.3 Philosophy of Money
4.4 Modernity - Metropolis

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Preface

This book is an introductory reading for the 1st semester

MA Sociology students. In 2020 the Board of Studies in
Sociology initiated the revision of the existing curriculum for
MA Degree Programme. This new initiative emphasized on the
broadening the scope of academic practices inSociology by
including recent trends in the course. In this course we have
four theory papers starting from classical sociological theories
to more recent developments in social theory. Each semester
have a sociological theory paper which helps us to get a
panoramic view of the subject.
This paper, Foundations of Sociological Theory is an
intellectual history of classical sociology and it will map the
development of Sociology as an independent discipline. As we
know, classical thinking is a library's worth of material with lot
of historical contexts, individual theorist and their
contributions. Here we are developing a theory textbook with
relatively short chapter for each theorist. Theoretical thinking
is a difficult kind of thinking and most difficult one as well.
So, preparing a text book kind of reading is difficult academic
exercise, especially in a short period. Hence, I used different
sources to understand and write the theoretical concepts and
perspective of classical thinkers.

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MODULE 1
THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
Chapter Outline

1.1 Intellectual and Social forces in the development of

Sociological Theory: Renaissance, Enlightenment,
French Revolution, Industrial Revolution
1.2 Early Social Philosophers: Montesquieu, Condorcet,
Saint Simone
1.3 Auguste Comte: Positivism, Herbert Spencer:
Organic Analogy

Objectives of this Module

This module deals with the emergence of sociology in
Europe and the contribution of early founding fathers for the
discipline. The objective of this unit is to
Outline the intellectual and social background to the
emergence and development of sociological theory.
Describe the social conditions prevailing in Europe
from the fourteenth to approximately eighteenth
century.

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Analyses the how Renaissance, Enlightenment, French

and the Industrial Revolution contributed to the
development of modern Europe and subsequently for
the emergence of Sociological theories.
Understand the contribution of Early Social
Philosophers such as Montesquieu, Condorcet, Saint
Simone
Examine the contributions of Auguste Comte to the
understanding of Positivism and Herbert Spencer to the
social evolutionism and organic analogy.
1. Introduction
In this module we will discuss the origins of
sociological theory in Europe in the 18th and 19th century. This
chapter is divided in to four parts which locate the historical
and intellectual context in which sociology as a discipline
emerged. In the first part, we will trace the relationship
between the emergence of sociology and the social and
intellectual conditions of eighteenth and nineteenth century
Europe. As a discipline sociology emerged first in Europe as a
response to the social and intellectual climate prevailing in
Europe of that time.
A proper understanding of this linkage will help us to
understand the ideas of the early works of sociologists. In the
first part we will analyze four important intellectual and social
forces in the development of sociological theory, such as
renaissance, enlightenment, French Revolution and industrial
revolution. This unit describes the social, cultural, political and
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economic conditions of Europe before the emergence of

sociology background to the emergence of sociology
especially from about fourteenth century to the eighteenth
century.
In the second part we will discuss the contributions of
different early social thinkers starting from Montesquieu,
Condorcet, Saint Simone. Before the French, Industrial
Commercial and the Scientific Revolutions in Europe these
three thinkers laid foundation for sociological theories and
critical analysis of the social and cultural thoughts. In the third
part of this paper we will looks at the contribution and ideas of
the founding fathers like Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and
Emile Durkheim. In this part we focus on the contribution of
these thinkers from a methodological point of views. In the
final part we will focus on the contribution of Durkheim such
as social fact, division of labour, suicide, elementary forms of
religious life.
2. Classical Sociological Theory
In sociology, classical social theory can be dated from
the contributions of Auguste Comte in the first half of the 19th
century and ended around 1920s with the emergence Talcott
Parsons as an important figure in American sociology. Of
course, the major classical social theorists didn’t just have a
brainwave one day which then made them famous for all
eternity. They all enjoyed intellectual precursors, whose legacy
they built on through critique, revision and innovation. As we
know, all sociological concepts have a history. Some concepts

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can be traced back to Ancient Greek philosophy, some to early

religious thinking.
The classical social theorists were influenced by the
scientific revolution that the West passed through in the shape
of figures like Copernicus (1473– 1543), Galileo (1564–1642),
Issac Newton (1642–1727) and Charles Darwin (1809–1882).
This intellectual ferment flowed into the movement known as
‘the Enlightenment’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. From Edinburgh to Paris, Berlin to Naples,
Amsterdam to Philadelphia, social and political thinkers tried
to put reason in charge over irrational beliefs and superstitions.
In sociological theory the ‘Classical' theory refers to
the writings from ‘the canon’ of Comte, Spencer, Marx,
Weber, Durkheim and Simmel. Different scholars chose the
contributions of different theorists in the canon of the classical
social theory because of the different reasons. In 1920s
America the canon included Simmel and Durkheim, but not
Weber or Marx. Durkheim’s place in the canon was assured by
a conservative interpretation of his theory of moral solidarity
as a normal function of an organic social order. Weber was
taken up in the 1930s because he provided an alternative
explanation of capitalism in terms of ethical values against
Marx’s explanation in terms of crude material conditions.
As well as making a profound contribution to social
theory, Weber’s canonization was, in part, ideologically
inspired against what were seen by ruling elites as the
dangerous doctrines of Marxism. Marx was excluded from the

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canon at that time because his name was closely associated

with a revolutionary movement that threatened the vested
interests of capitalist society. Marx only joined ‘the canon’ of
classical social theorists after the revolts of the 1960s.
Here we are not going back to the early historic times
of the Greeks or Romans or even to the middle ages to trace
the history of sociological thoughts. This is not because people
in those historical epochs did not have sociologically relevant
ideas, but because they did not investment much time to the
study of society that is relevant to modern sociology. And
none of the thinkers associated with those eras thought of
themselves as sociologists or social theories. It is only in the
early 18th onwards we begin to find thinkers who can be
clearly identified as sociologists. This course will analyse the
theories of classical sociological thinkers during and after 18th
century and in this module we begin by examining the main
social and intellectual forces that shaped their ideas.
Here the term classical sociological theory is used to
refer primarily to the writings of Auguste Comte (1798–1857),
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Emile
Durkheim (1858–1917), Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Max
Weber (1864–1920). They produced ideas that constitute the
canon or body of conceptual knowledge that all sociologists
are expected to know. Their writings produced what
sociologists acknowledge as the classic or foundational texts in
sociology. Hence, in this first paper on Foundations of
Sociological Theory we focus on the contributions of Comte,
Spencer, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel.

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3. Intellectual and Social Forces

In this paper we will looks at the contemporary
relevance of classical sociological theory. The theorists whose
works we will discuss in this paper are vital in two ways: first,
because they helped chart the course of the discipline of
sociology from its inception until the present time. Second,
because their concepts and theories still permeate
contemporary concerns. Sociologists still seek to explain such
critical issues as the nature of capitalism, the basis of social
solidarity or cohesion, the role of authority in social life, the
benefits and dangers posed by modern bureaucracies, the
dynamics of gender and racial oppression, and the nature of the
“self,” to name but a few. Classical sociological theory
provides a pivotal conceptual base with which to explore
today’s world.
In this module we will looks at the historical origin of
sociological theory. The aim this chapter is to describe
different historical events which should help in putting the
later detailed discussions of theorists and theories in a larger
context. As we proceeds through the later chapters, it will help
us to return to this module and place the discussions in their
context. It is very difficult to establish the precise date in when
sociological theory began. People have been thinking about,
and developing theories of, social life since early in history.
Thus, this module will trace the emergence of
sociology and sociological theory by analyzing the intellectual
conditions of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. As we

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know, modern sociology emerged first in Europe. Modern

sociology emerged as a response to the social and intellectual
climate prevailing in Europe in eighteenth and nineteenth
century.
A proper understanding of this historical context will
help us to appreciate the ideas of the early sociologists and
their contributions to the emergence of sociology as a
discipline. So, to understand the emergence of sociology in
Europe we need to appreciate the relationship between social
condition and the emergence of social ideas. There is always a
connection between the social conditions of a period and the
ideas, which arise and are dominant in that period.
4. Early History and Contribution of Ibn-Khaldun
As we know, long before the fourteenth century, Plato
(ca. 428–ca. 347 bc), Aristotle (384–22 bc), and Thucydides
(ca. 460–ca. 400 bc) wrote about the nature of war, the origins
of the family and the state, and the relationship between
religion and the government—topics that have since become
central to sociology. Aristotle, for example, emphasized that
human beings were naturally political animals—zoonpolitikon.
He sought to identify the essence that made a stone a stone or a
society a society. For that matter, well before Aristotle’s time,
Confucius (551–479 bc) developed a theory for understanding
Chinese society. Akin to Aristotle, Confucius maintained that
government is the center of people’s lives and that all other
considerations derive from it. According to Confucius, a good

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government must be concerned with three things: sufficient

food, a sufficient army, and the confidence of the people.
The central figures at the heart of classical sociological
theory all sought to explain the extraordinary economic,
political, and social transformations taking place in Europe in
the late nineteenth century. Yet, concerns about the nature of
social bonds and how these bonds can be maintained in the
face of extant social change existed long before the eighteenth
century and in many places, not only in Western Europe.
Indeed, in the late fourteenth century, Abdel Rahman Ibn-
Khaldun (1332–1406), born in Tunis, Tunisia, in North Africa,
thought and wrote extensively on subjects that have much in
common with contemporary sociology.
Before going the detailed analysis of the historical
context in which sociological thought emerged we have to look
at the biographic sketch and major contributions of Ibn-
Khaldun. As we know there is a tendency to think of sociology
as exclusively a comparatively modern, European and Western
phenomenon. But in reality, scholars were developing
sociological ideas and theories long ago in different parts of
the world. Abdel Rahman Ibn-Khaldun was one among them.
Ibn-Khaldun was born in Tunis, North Africa, on May
27, 1332. He was schooled in the Quran, mathematics, and
history. In his lifetime, he served a variety of sultans in Tunis,
Morocco, Spain, and Algeria as ambassador, chamberlain, and
member of the scholars’ council. He also spent two years in
prison in Morocco for his belief that state rulers were not

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divine leaders. After approximately two decades of political

activity, Ibn-Khaldun returned to North Africa, where he
undertook an intensive five-year period of study and writing.
Works produced during this period increased his fame and led
to a lectureship at the center of Islamic study, Al-Azhar
Mosque University in Cairo. In his well-attended lectures on
society and sociology, Ibn-Khaldun stressed the importance of
linking sociological thought and historical observation.
By the time he died in 1406, Ibn-Khaldun had
produced a corpus of work that had many ideas in common
with contemporary sociology. He was committed to the
scientific study of society, empirical research, and the search
for causes of social phenomena. He devoted considerable
attention to various social institutions (for example, politics,
economy) and their interrelationships. He was interested in
comparing primitive and modern societies. Ibn-Khaldun did
not have a dramatic impact on classical sociology, but as
scholars in general, and Islamic scholars in particular,
rediscover his work, he may come to be seen as being of
greater historical significance (Ritzer: 2011).
Specifically, Khaldun’s goal was to explain the
historical process of the rise and fall of civilization in terms of
a pattern of recurring conflicts between tough nomadic desert
tribes and sedentary-type societies with their love of luxuries
and pleasure. He believed that the advanced civilizations that
develop in densely settled communities are accompanied by a
more centralized political authority system and by the gradual
erosion of social cohesion within the population. As a result

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such societies become vulnerable to conquest by tough and

highly disciplined nomadic peoples from the unsettled desert.
Eventually, however, the hardy conquerors succumb to
the temptations of the soft and refined lifestyle of the people
they had conquered, and so the cycle is eventually repeated.
Although this cyclical theory was based on Khaldun’s
observations of social trends in the Arabian desert, his goal
was to develop a general model of the dynamics of society and
the process of large-scale social change. His insights were
neglected by European and American social theorists,
however, perhaps partly because of the growing dominance of
Western Europe over the Arab world in succeeding centuries
(Johnson; 2008).
5. Intellectual Developments and the Emergence of
Sociological Theory
In the following part we will discuss different social
intellectual factors that played a central role in shaping
sociological theory. As we know intellectual developments
cannot be separated from social changes. The renaissance and
enlightenment played an important role in providing
intellectual basis for the development of modern Europe. Let
us look at the role of this two intellectual development in the
development of critical thinking in Europe and the subsequent
development of sociological theories.
5.1. The Enlightenment
As we discussed, the roots of the ideas developed by
the early sociologists are grounded in the social conditions that
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prevailed in Europe. This period of change in European society

embodies the spirit of new awakening in the eighteenth
century. As we know many of the seeds for what would
become sociology were first planted during the Enlightenment,
a period of remarkable intellectual development that originated
in Europe during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. The development of civil society (open spaces of
debate relatively free from government control) and the
quickening pace of the modern world enabled a newly
emerging mass of literate citizens to think about the economic,
political, and cultural conditions that shaped society.
As a result, a number of long-standing ideas and beliefs
about social life were turned upside down. The Enlightenment,
however, was not so much a fixed set of ideas as it was a new
attitude, a new method of thought. One of the most important
aspects of this new attitude was an emphasis on reason, which
demanded the questioning and reexamination of received ideas
and values regarding the physical world, human nature, and
their relationship to God. The Enlightenment Period marked a
radical change from the traditional thinking of feudal Europe.
It introduced the new way of thinking and looking at reality.
Individuals started questioning each and every aspect of life
and nothing was considered sacrosanct - from the church to the
state to the authority of the monarch and so on.
Broadly, Enlightenment is not an historical period, but
a process of social, psychological or spiritual development,
unbound to time or place. Immanuel Kant defines
“enlightenment” as humankind’s release from its self-incurred

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immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own

understanding without the guidance of another.” So, it
emphasized on the ideas, such as the belief that both nature
and society can be studied scientifically, that human beings are
essentially rational and that a society built on rational
principles will make human beings realize their infinite
potentials, can be traced in the development of science and
commerce in Europe.
The new outlook developed as a result of the
Commercial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution and
crystalised during the French and the Industrial Revolutions
gave birth to sociology as a discipline. To understand the
social changes that were taking place in European society, we
will first look at the kind of society that existed in traditional
Europe, i.e. prior to the Enlightenment period.
The Enlightenment was a period of remarkable
intellectual development and change in social, political and
philosophical thoughts. It is the view of many observers that
the Enlightenment constitutes a critical development in terms
of the later evolution of sociology. During the time of
enlightenment a number of long-standing ideas and beliefs—
many of which related to social life—were overthrown and
replaced. The Enlightenment was characterized by the belief
that people could comprehend and control the universe by
means of reason and empirical research. The view was that
because the physical world was dominated by natural laws, it
was likely that the social world was too dominated and

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controlled by social law. Thus it was up to the philosopher to

discover these social laws by using reason and research.
The idea of Enlightenment is conceived as having its
primary origin in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th
centuries. The rise of the new science progressively
undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the
cosmos, but also the set of presuppositions that had served to
constrain and guide philosophical inquiry in the earlier times.
The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the
natural world promotes philosophy from a handmaiden of
theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an
independent force with the power and authority to challenge
the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and
practice, on the basis of its own principles.
Another important dimension of Enlightenment is its
political involvement and undertakings. The era is marked by
three political revolutions, which together lay the basis for
modern, republican, constitutional democracies: The English
Revolution (1688), the American Revolution (1775–83), and
the French Revolution (1789–99). The success at explaining
and understanding the natural world encourages the
Enlightenment project of re-making the social/political world,
in accord with the models we allegedly find in our reason.
Enlightenment philosophers find that the existing social and
political orders do not withstand critical scrutiny.
Existing political and social authority is shrouded in
religious myth and mystery and founded on obscure traditions.

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The criticism of existing institutions is supplemented with the

positive work of constructing in theory the model of
institutions as they ought to be. We owe to this period the basic
model of government founded upon the consent of the
governed; the articulation of the political ideals of freedom and
equality and the theory of their institutional realization; the
articulation of a list of basic individual human rights to be
respected and realized by any legitimate political system; the
articulation and promotion of toleration of religious diversity
as a virtue to be respected in a well ordered society; the
conception of the basic political powers as organized in a
system of checks and balances; and other now-familiar features
of western democracies. Long lasting
However, for all the enduring accomplishments of
Enlightenment political philosophy, it is not clear that human
reason proves powerful enough to put a concrete, positive
authoritative ideal in place of the objects of its criticism. As in
the epistemological domain, reason shows its power more
convincingly in criticizing authorities than in establishing
them. Here too the question of the limits of reason is one of the
main philosophical legacies of the period. These limits are
arguably vividly illustrated by the course of the French
Revolution.
The explicit ideals of the French Revolution are the
Enlightenment ideals of individual freedom and equality; but,
as the revolutionaries attempt to devise rational, secular
institutions to put in place of those they have violently
overthrown, eventually they have recourse to violence and

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terror in order to control and govern the people. The

devolution of the French Revolution into the Reign of Terror is
perceived by many as proving the emptiness and hypocrisy of
Enlightenment reason, and is one of the main factors which
account for the end of the Enlightenment as an historical
period.
The political revolutions of the Enlightenment,
especially the French and the American, were informed and
guided to a significant extent by prior political philosophy in
the period. Though Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1651),
defends the absolute power of the political sovereign, and is to
that extent opposed to the revolutionaries and reformers in
England, this work is a founding work of Enlightenment
political theory. Hobbes’ work originates the modern social
contract theory, which incorporates Enlightenment conceptions
of the relation of the individual to the state.
According to Hobbes's social contract model, political
authority is grounded in an agreement (often understood as
ideal, rather than real) among individuals, each of whom aims
in this agreement to advance his rational self-interest by
establishing a common political authority over all. Thus,
according to the general contract model (though this is more
clear in later contract theorists such as Locke and Rousseau
than in Hobbes himself), political authority is grounded not in
conquest, natural or divinely instituted hierarchy, or in obscure
myths and traditions, but rather in the rational consent of the
governed. In initiating this model, Hobbes takes a naturalistic,
scientific approach to the question of how political society

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ought to be organized (against the background of a clear-eyed,

unsentimental conception of human nature), and thus
decisively influences the Enlightenment process of
secularization and rationalization in political and social
philosophy.
The Enlightenment was characterized by the belief that
people could comprehend and control the universe by means of
reason and empirical research. The view was that because the
physical world was dominated by natural laws, it was likely
that the social world was too. Thus it was up to the
philosopher, using reason and research, to discover these social
laws. Once they understood how the social world worked, the
Enlightenment thinkers had a practical goal—the creation of a
“better,” more rational world.
The Enlightenment philosophers emphasized on reason
and rejected the beliefs in traditional authority. When these
thinkers examined traditional values and institutions, they
often found them to be irrational—that is, contrary to human
nature and inhibitive of human growth and development. The
mission of the practical and change-oriented philosophers of
the Enlightenment was to overcome these irrational systems.
The theorists who were most directly and positively influenced
by Enlightenment thinking were Alexis de Tocqueville and
Karl Marx, although the latter formed his early theoretical
ideas in Germany.
5.2. Renaissance Period
The renaissance played an important role in the

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emergence of social thought in the fourteenth to sixteenth

century Europe. As we know it is one of the most interesting
periods of European history. According to historians it began
in Italy about 1350 and in the rest of Europe after 1450 and
that it lasted until about 1620. It was a historical era with
distinctive themes in learning, politics, literature, art, religion,
social life, and music. In the late fourteenth and the early
fifteenth centuries Italian intellectuals used the
term rinascità which means 'rebirth or renaissance' to describe
their own age as one in which learning, literature, and the arts
were reborn. They saw the ancient world of Rome and Greece,
whose literature, learning, and politics they admired, as an age
of high achievement. But in their view, hundreds of years of
cultural darkness followed because much of the learning and
literature of the ancient world had been lost.
The significance of this development is that Europe
produced a “scientific revolution” in the Renaissance period of
fourteenth to sixteenth century A.D. The impact of the
scientific revolution was crucial not just in changing material
life, but also people’s ideas about Nature and Society. During
this time different ideas and morels where emerged in
European society. The idea of humanism was the defining
intellectual movement of the Renaissance. It was based on the
belief that the literary, scientific, and philosophical works of
ancient Greece and Rome provided the best guides for learning
and living. And humanists believed that the New Testament
and early Christian authors offered the best spiritual advice.

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The Humanistic ideas helped to develop critical attitude

toward received values, individuals, and institutions, especially
those that did not live up to their own principles. The
humanists' study of ancient Rome and Greece gave them the
chronological perspective and intellectual tools to analyze,
criticize, and change their own world. Humanists especially
questioned the institutions and values inherited from the
Middle Ages. They found fault with medieval art, government,
philosophy, and approaches to religion. Once the humanist
habit of critical appraisal developed, many turned sharp eyes
on their own times. And eventually they turned their critical
gaze on the learning of the ancient world and rejected parts of
it.
One of the important dimensions of the Renaissance is
that it produced an extraordinary amount of art, and the role of
the artist differed from that in the Middle Ages. The
Renaissance had a passion for art. Commissions came from
kings, popes, princes, nobles, and lowborn mercenary captains.
Leaders commissioned portraits of themselves, of scenes of
their accomplishments, such as successful battles, and of
illustrious ancestors. Cities wanted their council halls
decorated with huge murals, frescoes, and tapestries depicting
great civic moments. Monasteries commissioned artists to
paint frescoes in cells and refectories that would inspire monks
to greater devotion. And civic, dynastic, and religious leaders
hired architects to erect buildings at enormous expense to
beautify the city or to serve as semipublic residences for
leaders. Such art was designed to celebrate and impress. A

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remarkable feature of Renaissance art was the heightened

interaction between patron and artist.
5.3. Development of Science and Intellectual Environment
Along with the development of renaissance 5th century
Europe witnessed the emergence of science and technology.
Scientific thought had itself only begun to emerge in the
fifteenth century through the efforts of astronomers and
scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Bacon.
Copernicus’s discovery in the early sixteenth century that the
Earth orbited the sun directly contradicted the literal
understanding of the Bible, which placed the Earth at the
center of the universe. With his inventive improvement to the
telescope, Galileo confirmed Copernicus’s heliocentric view
the following century. Galileo’s contemporary, Sir Francis
Bacon, developed an experimental, inductive approach to
analyzing the natural world for which he has come to be
known as the “father of the scientific method.”
In advocating the triumph of reasoned investigation
over faith, these early scientists and the Enlightenment
intellectuals who followed in their footsteps rebuked existing
knowledge as fraught with prejudice and mindless tradition.
Not surprisingly, such views were dangerous because they
challenged the authority of religious beliefs and those charged
with advancing them. Indeed, Galileo was convicted of heresy
by the Catholic Church, had his work banned, and spent the
last ten years of his life under house arrest for advocating a
heliocentric view of the universe.

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Enlightenment thinkers and scientists viewed the

universe as a mechanical system composed of matter in motion
that obeyed natural laws that could be uncovered by means of
methodical observation and empirical research. Thus, when
Newton developed his theory of gravity, a giant leap forward
in the development of mathematics and physics, he was
offering proof of God’s existence. For Newton, only the
intelligence of a divine power could have ordered the universe
so perfectly around the sun as to prevent the planets from
colliding under forces of gravity.
Similarly, Rene Descartes was convinced that reason
and mathematics could provide certainty of God whose
existence could be demonstrated rationally, much like a
geometric proof. Faith and reason for these individuals were
not irreconcilable. The heresy committed by the Enlightenment
thinkers was their attempt to solve the mystery of God’s design
of the natural world through the methodical, empirical
discovery of eternal laws. Miracles were for the ignorant and
superstitious.
Thus, the rise of science and empiricism ushered in by
the Enlightenment would give birth to sociology in the mid-
nineteenth century. The central idea behind the emerging
discipline was that society could be the subject of scientific
examination in the same manner as biological organisms or the
physical properties of material objects. Indeed, the French
intellectual Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who coined the term
“sociology” in 1839, also used the term “social physics” to
refer to this new discipline and his organic conceptualization

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of society. The term “social physics” reflects the

Enlightenment view that the discipline of sociology parallels
other natural sciences. Comte argued that, like natural
scientists, sociologists should uncover, rationally and
scientifically, the laws of the social world.
5.4. French Revolution
As we mentioned the energy created and expressed by
the Enlightenment thinkers contributes to the growing wave of
social unrest in France in the eighteenth century. The social
unrest comes to a head in the violent political upheaval which
sweeps away the traditionally and hierarchically structured of
French society such as the monarchy, the privileges of the
nobility and the political power of the Catholic Church. The
French revolutionaries tried to establish a new reason-based
order instituting the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and
equality.
The emergence of sociological theories can be traced to
that period of European history, which saw such tremendous
social, political and economic changes as embodied in
different revolutions. The long series of political revolutions
that were accompanied with the French Revolution in 1789
and carried over through the nineteenth century was the most
immediate factor in the rise of sociological theorizing. The
impact of these revolutions on many societies was enormous,
and many positive changes resulted.
The French Revolution, which erupted in 1789 marked
a turning point in the history of human struggle for freedom

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and equality. It put an end to the age of feudalism and ushered

in a new order of society. An outline of this revolution will
explain to you the kind of turmoil that occurred in Europe.
This revolution brought about far reaching changes in not only
French society but in societies throughout Europe. Even
countries in other continents such as, India, were influenced by
the ideas generated during this revolution. Ideas like liberty,
fraternity and equality, which now form a part of the preamble
to the Constitution of India, owe their origin to the French
Revolution. Let us first examine some of the major aspects of
this revolution.
The French society was divided into feudal ‘estates’.
The structure of the feudal French society comprised the
‘Three Estates’. Estates are defined as a system of stratification
found in feudal European societies whereby one section or
estate is distinguished from the other in terms of status,
privileges and restrictions accorded to that estate.
• The First Estate consisted of the clergy, which was
stratified into higher clergy, such as the cardinal, the
archbishops, the bishops and the abbots. They lived a
life xxof luxury and gave very little attention to
religion. In fact, some of them preferred the life of
politics to religion. They spent much of their time in
wasteful activities like drinking, gambling, etc. In
comparison to the higher clergy, the lower parish
priests were over worked and poverty-stricken.

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• The Second Estate consisted of the nobility. There

were two kinds of nobles, the nobles of the sword and
the nobles of the robe. The nobles of the sword were
big landlords. They were the protectors of the people in
principle but in reality they led a life of a parasite,
living off the hard work of the peasants. They led the
life of pomp and show and were nothing more than
‘high born wastrels’; that is, they spent extravagantly
and did not work themselves. They can be compared to
the erstwhile zamindars in India. The nobles of the robe
were nobles not by birth by title. They were the
magistrates and judges. Among these nobles, some
were very progressive and liberal as they had moved in
their positions from common citizens who belonged to
the third estate.
• The Third Estate comprised the rest of the society and
included the peasants, the merchants, the artisans, and
others. There was a vast difference between the
condition of the peasants and that of the clergy and the
nobility. The peasants worked day and night but were
overloaded with so many taxes that they lived a hand to
mouth existence. They produced the food on which the
whole society depended. Yet they could barely survive
due to failure of any kind of protection from the
government. The King, in order to maintain the good
will of the other two estates, the clergy and the nobility,
continued to exploit the poor. The poor peasants had no

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power against him. While the clergy and the nobility

kept on pampering and flattering the King.
As compared to the peasants, the condition of the
middle classes, also known as the bourgeoisie comprising the
merchants, bankers, lawyers, manufacturers, etc. was much
better. These classes too belonged to the third estate. But the
poverty of the state, which led to a price rise during 1720-
1789, instead of adversely affecting them, helped them. They
derived profit from this rise and the fact that French trade had
improved enormously also helped the commercial classes to a
great extent. Thus, this class was rich and secure. But it had no
social prestige as compared with the high prestige of the
members of the first and the second estates.
In spite of controlling trade, industries, banking etc. the
bourgeoisie had no power to influence the court or
administration. The other two estates looked them down upon
and the King paid very little attention to them. Thus, gaining
political power became a necessity for them. The clergy and
the nobility both constituted only two per cent of the
population but they owned about 35 per cent of the land. The
peasants who formed 80 per cent of the population owned only
30 per cent of the land. The first two estates paid almost no
taxes to the government. The peasantry, on the other hand, was
burdened with taxes of various kinds. It paid taxes to the
Church, the feudal lord, taxed in the form of income tax, poll
tax, and land tax to the state. Thus, you can see how much
burdened and poverty stricken the peasants had become at this
time. They were virtually carrying the burden of the first two

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estates on their shoulders. On top of it all the prices had

generally risen by about 65 per cent during the period, 1720-
1789.
Let us look at the chronological event that took place
during the French Revolution. As we know in France there was
a parliamentary body called the Estates-General in which all
the three estates were represented but which had met last in
1614. It was in 1778 that the King, Louis XVI, was forced to
impose a tax on everyone irrespective of his or her social
status. The French government had become bankrupt due to
the extravagance of the King, as well as, the help that they had
given to the Americans in their War of Independence. This
imposition of tax led the rich nobles and the clergy to demand
a meeting of the Estate-General, which they felt, was the only
body, which could levy tax. The Estate-General met on May 5,
178, but in this meeting, unlike the earlier practice, the
representatives of the third estate wanted all the estates to meet
and vote as one assembly. But the first two estates did not
agree to this.
The refusal of the first two Estates to meet with the
third Estate as a single body led to the formation of the
National Assembly. The meeting of the National Assembly led
by middle class leaders and some liberal minded nobles was
met with stiff resistance. On 20th June 1789 when a meeting
was to be held in the Hall at Versailles near Paris, the members
found that it was closed and guarded by the King’s men.
Therefore, the National Assembly members led by their leader
Bailey went to the next building which was an indoor tennis

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court. It was here that they took an Oath to draw a new

constitution for France. This Oath, which marks the beginning
of the French Revolution, is popularly known as the Oath of
the Tennis Court.
On July 14th, 1789 took place one of the most
important events of the French Revolution. It was the storming
of the Bastille, an ancient royal prison that stood as a symbol
of oppression. On this date the mobs of Paris, led by some
middle class leaders, broke open this prison and set its inmates
free. The causes for this event were the shortage of food, on
the one hand, and the dismissal of a very popular minister
called Necker, on the other. The mobs of Paris rebelled against
the ruling class, especially the King. This day is celebrated in
France as its Independence Day.
Declaration of Rights of Man by the Constituent
Assembly, (1789-1791), comprising the members of the third
estate and some liberal minded members of the other two
estates, guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of religion,
and freedom from arbitrary punishments.
It abolished the special rights and privileges of the
clergy and the nobility. The King was no longer to rule by
Divine Right and several important social and economic
changes were brought about. According to this declaration ‘all
men were born and remains equal before law. They have a
right to choose their government and to resist oppression.
Personal liberty becomes a right given to all
individuals. Thus, the ideas of liberty and equality put an end

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to the age of serfdom, despotism and hereditary privileges

found in the old feudal society. In 1791 the king tried to escape
from France but was recognised at the frontier and brought
back. Since then he become a virtual prisoner. In Paris, the
new Legislative Assembly (1791-1792) was formed. It
comprised two very radical groups, namely the Girondin and
the Jacobin. These groups considered the king a traitor and
were in favour of establishing a Republic. The King, Louis
XVI, was beheaded in public on 21st January 1793 after being
proved guilty of treason. The Queen was also beheaded later in
the same year. France was declared a Republic.
A period referred to as “Reign of Terror” took place in
France when several of the nobles, priests, some of the
revolutionaries themselves were guillotined i.e. beheaded. This
period lasted for three years. Establishment of the Directorate
took place in 1795. It lasted for four years till a young artillery
officer from Corsica, a neighbouring island, overthrew the
Directorate in 1799. He was Napoleon Bonaparte. He made
himself the new Director and provided a much sought after
stable government to the people of France. Thus the French
Revolution ended with the overthrow of the Directorate by
Napoleon.
You would have by now developed a rough idea of
what the French Revolution was and how significant its role
has been in the history of human civilisation. It changed the
political structure of European society and replaced the age of
feudalism by heralding the arrival of democracy. There were
many significant themes, which arose due to the impact of this

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Revolution, which have been the focus of interest of the early

sociologists. These significant themes included the
transformation of property, the social disorder, caused by the
change in the political structure and its impact on the economic
structure. A new class of power holders emerged – the
bourgeoisie. In order to understand more about these themes,
we need to learn the details of the Industrial Revolution.
So, the long series of political revolutions that were
ushered in by the French Revolution in 1789 and carried over
through the nineteenth century was the most immediate factor
in the rise of sociological theorizing. The impact of these
revolutions on many societies was enormous, and many
positive changes resulted. However, what attracted the
attention of many early theorists was not the positive
consequences but the negative effects of such changes. These
writers were particularly disturbed by the resulting chaos and
disorder, especially in France. They were united in a desire to
restore order to society.
Some of the more extreme thinkers of this period
literally wanted a return to the peaceful and relatively orderly
days of the Middle Ages. The more sophisticated thinkers
recognized that social change had made such a return
impossible. Thus they sought instead to find new bases of
order in societies that had been overturned by the political
revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This
interest in the issue of social order was one of the major
concerns of classical sociological theorists, especially Comte
and Durkheim.

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5.5. Industrial Revolution

As a result of enlightenment, 18th century Europeans
witnessed to a major scientific, technological, and social
movement that reshaped work, wealth, and environments
across the globe. The Industrial Revolution is the rapid
increase in the use of machines powered by inanimate forms of
energy (such as waterfalls, steam engines powered by coal, or
electricity) that began in England in the later part of the
eighteenth century. Over the 150-year period, the Industrial
Revolution changed power generation, transportation, and
communication. It also generated important breakthroughs in
pure science, as physicists, chemists, and biologists developed
theoretical explanations for technologies often already in use.
Industrial Revolution was the result of the
accumulation of technological information in agrarian societies
of western Europe in the centuries that preceded the
revolution. Among these were innovations in shipbuilding and
navigation that made possible transoceanic travel and the
discovery of the New World. This event would contribute to
increase trade activity, especially in the North Atlantic area,
and infuse the European economy with large quantities of gold
and silver. The resulting inflation favored the ascent of
commercial classes relative to the landed aristocracy, and
motivated the latter to try improving productivity of their land,
spurring great progress in agricultural production.
Another specific technological innovation was the mid
fifteenth century invention of the printing press, which favored

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the spread of literacy and information in general and perhaps

the rise of the rationalism associated with the Enlightenment.
The printing press also facilitated the success of the Protestant
Reformation, which was premised on direct access to sacred
texts by believers.
The Industrial Revolution replaced ancient energy
sources—human and animal labor, wind, fire, and water—with
new systems of power, initially the use of coal to run steam
engines that were massively more powerful than hundreds of
human workers. In 1765 Scotsman James Watt, building on the
earlier work of Thomas Newcomen and others, developed the
first efficient steam engine. Among its earliest applications
was steam-powered machinery for turning wool, cotton, and
flax into finished textiles, a process previously done almost
entirely by hand. This transformation of work from a home-
based system to centralized factories relying on complex
machinery was the central element of the Industrial
Revolution.
Britain’s newly automated spinning and weaving
machinery quickly pushed the island nation into the forefront
of economic production and soon set off efforts by competing
nations, including the new United States, to equal Britain’s
industrial achievements. Bribes paid to British mechanics and
industrial espionage was among the tactics used. In 1793, with
the invaluable assistance of British immigrant and skilled
textile machinist Samuel Slater, a limited but successful textile
factory opened in Rhode Island.

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In the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, water

wheels competed with the new steam engine. But as the
reliability of steam power increased and its sitting flexibility
became obvious, energy-dense coal became Europe’s and,
later, North America’s major industrial fuel source. At the U.S.
centennial celebration in Philadelphia in 1876, George H.
Corliss’s steam engine, the largest in the world, was both a
major attraction and sole power source for the entire
exhibition. Within 40 years, steam engines would be largely
replaced by electrical devices, although the electrical power
these new machines used would, in most cases, still be
generated by burning coal.
Some of the earliest experiments with static electricity
were done by American Benjamin Franklin, whose 1751
article, “Experiments and Observations on Electricity,” made
him a Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society. By 1753 Franklin had
developed the protective lightning rod. Between the 1780s and
1800 Italian scientists Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta
would discover electrical current and how to produce
electricity chemically through the medium of the battery.
In 1831 Englishman Michael Faraday’s discovery of
electromagnetism, scientifically refined by James Clerk
Maxwell, paved the way for practical uses of electrical power.
George Westinghouse, who first gained fame in 1873 as the
inventor of air brakes for trains, soon thereafter became fellow
U.S. inventor Thomas A. Edison’s chief rival for the
implementation of commercial electric power. Westinghouse’s
alternating current, developed for him by Nikola Tesla, became

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the standard. Edison, inventor of the incandescent light bulb

and many other devices powered by electricity, lost his bid for
direct current but nevertheless profited mightily.
As the Industrial Revolution spread, the need to
provide fuel and raw materials to new factories and ship their
finished products helped set off a transportation revolution in
many industrializing nations. Efforts were made in Britain and
elsewhere to improve road surfaces to facilitate safer passage
for wheeled vehicles, at first drawn by horses or other draft
animals. In 1819 Scotsman John Macadam developed a
crushed stone surface, significantly smoothing roadways. The
United States began building a National Road, starting in
Baltimore after the War of 1812, but regional squabbles and
high costs meant that, after 44 years, the road project ended 65
miles short of its projected St. Louis terminus. Similarly,
imperial powers in Africa, Muhammad Aliin Egypt, and the
Ottoman Empire in western Asia all financed projects to
enlarge ports and build roads and railroads to facilitate the
transport of cash crops and raw materials.
In 1757 and 1764 two canals built in England made it
easier to move coal to emerging factories. Other European
nations and the United States soon joined in the canal-building
boom. In 1825 New York State’s Erie Canal, a water route
connecting New York City to the Great Lakes and beyond,
became one of the most successful projects in what would
prove to be the brief golden age of canal transport. The major
transport successes of the early 19th century were steam-
powered ships and railroads.

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In 1807 on the Hudson River Robert Fulton

demonstrated a new kind of water-going vessel, powered by an
English steam engine. Its success led to steamboats on most
large U.S. rivers and the Great Lakes. In 1800 Englishman
Richard Trevithick devised a much smaller, high-pressure
steam engine ideal for railroad transportation. Locomotives
were used for industrial freight hauling in Britain for some
years before the first public passenger line between Liverpool
and Manchester opened in 1830.
A worldwide frenzy of railroad construction ensued.
With their dedicated trackage and modular assembly, railroads,
powered by coal-fired steam engines, were well suited to
hauling huge loads of both goods and people. Major increases
in the fabrication and use of iron and steel provided the sinews
of the Industrial Revolution, especially the building of rail
tracks. Developed in Britain, the Bessemer steel process was
widely adopted in the United States and helped steel magnate,
Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish-born immigrant, become one of
the world’s wealthiest men.
The late 19th century saw the first examples of
transport based on internal combustion engines—the
automobile, bus, and truck. Although the Swiss inventor
Nicholas Cugnot is credited with making such a device as
early as 1769, European experiments that led to workable
internal combustion engines began in the 1860s. The Germans
Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach, and Carl Benz produced
workable prototypes in the 1880s, while France’s Peugeot firm
began to perfect auto design in 1890. In 1897 the German

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Rudolf Diesel produced a new type of engine that now bears

his name. By the end of the century Americans, too, were
making cars, notably the 1893 Duryea. Ransom Olds’s first
Michigan auto factory opened in 1899, but the United States
lagged behind European engineering by a decade.
Instantaneous communications were essential to the
business and technical needs of the Industrial Revolution.
Weather events, wars, and other crises could easily disrupt,
even derail, factory production. Charles Wheatstone’s early
telegraph of 1837, systematized and improved in 1844 by
Samuel F. B. Morse, made it possible to circulate information
much faster than mail systems. By 1866 telegraph signals
could be reliably sent and received across the Atlantic; by the
end of the century, much of the world had access to telegraph
communication. The Canadian Alexander Graham Bell
displayed his telephone at the 1876 U.S. Centennial
Exposition; within a few years it became an important business
tool. In 1899 the Italian Guglielmo Marconi sent his first radio
signal across the English Channel. Both telephone and radio
later made the telegraph obsolete.
Western science developed dramatically during the
heyday of the Industrial Revolution, sparked by “untutored”
mechanical geniuses like Thomas Edison, as well as growing
cadres of university-trained scientists and engineers. Major
breakthroughs in chemistry in the later 1700s included
Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier’s and Englishman Joseph
Priestley’s identification of oxygen and other atmospheric
components, and Russian Dmitry Mendeleyev’s development

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in 1869 of a systematic table of chemical elements. In physics,

discoveries in thermodynamics were spearheaded by such
theorists as William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who postulated a
temperature of absolute zero at which all motion would cease.
Thermodynamics provided theoretical underpinnings
for methods of creating and preserving cold conditions. By the
1870s refrigerated train cars were in wide use, preserving and
enhancing food products traveling from farms to distant urban
areas. Some important innovations in biological science,
especially as applied to health and medicine, included Swede
Carolus Linnaeus’s (Carl von Linne’s) 1753 classification of
biological organisms, a system still in use today. The discovery
of anesthetic agents such as ether and chloroform in the 1830s
and 1840s soon radically improved outcomes of painful and
invasive surgeries. In 1896 Xrays were first used to diagnose
human ailments.
But the two most spectacular breakthroughs in this
period would be evolutionary theory and the germ theory of
disease. Made public in 1858, evolution was an explanation of
the diversity and complexity of living organisms, reached
almost simultaneously by two English naturalists, Charles
Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Both men had relied
heavily on the early 19th-century geologic and fossil findings
of Charles Lyell. In 1859 Darwin published On the Origin of
Species in which he postulated natural selection as the
mechanism that allowed some species to survive while others
disappeared. His direct challenge to most religious
explanations for the development of human life, evolution, was

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labeled blasphemous and, outside scientific circles, remains

embroiled in controversy to this day. In the 1870s biologists
Louis Pasteur of France and Robert Koch of Germany proved
that microorganisms—germs—were responsible for most
human, animal, and plant diseases. This rethinking of disease
transmission revolutionized medical practice and gave new
credibility to the emerging practice of sanitation.
Although the Industrial Revolution took place mostly
in the West and helped it dominate other sections of the globe
in the years between 1750 and 1900, it would be a mistake to
see this burst of technological and scientific growth as an
unchallenged success. From its inception, the new factory
system was strongly criticized for making humans
interchangeable and also forcing them to adapt to ever-faster
and more complex machines.
Opposition by a group of early challengers, the
Luddites, reached its peak in England in 1812 when highly
skilled workers, concentrated in the woolen industry, smashed
installations of new machinery destined to implement the new
factory system of production. By 1867 in their work Das
Kapital, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, both Germanborn,
had developed a broad critique of the Industrial Revolution and
the laissez-faire capitalism that underpinned it. Engels was
particularly qualified to evaluate the factory system; his father
was an owner of a textile factory in Manchester, England.
A result of the Industrial Revolution less often
mentioned during its 19th-century zenith was massive

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pollution created by industrial processes based on the

unfettered burning of coal, soon to be supplemented with the
combustion of petroleum products. It is no wonder that U.S.
writer Edward Bellamy, in his 1887 utopian best seller and
critique of industrialism, Looking Backward: 2000–1887,
recalled 1887 Boston as squalid and “malodorous,” and
reeking of “fetid air” compared to the shiny, bright, and clean
Boston of a postindustrial future.
As a result of different developments we witness a
short time and a long time consequences of Industrial
Revolution. Labor demand associated with the rise of factories
exacerbated the influx of rural population to towns and cities.
In the mid 1700s only 15 percent of the population of England
lived in towns of 10,000 or more; this proportion increased to a
quarter by 1800 and one half by 1840. Immediate
consequences of rapid urbanization were crowding, pollution,
disease, poverty, crime, and other social ills.
On another level, Industrialization has transformed the
predominant types of economic activity carried out by the
population of industrial societies. The proportion of the labor
force employed in the primary sector (extractive activities such
as agriculture and mining) dwindled in most Industrial
societies from an overwhelming majority in 1750 to less than 5
percent by the close of the twentieth century. The secondary
sector (manufacturing industries) rose to approximately a third
of the labor force, reaching a maximum early in the second
half of the twentieth century before declining in later decades.

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It is employment in the tertiary sector (services, or the

production of intangible goods) that rose steadily throughout
the course of industrialization, up to some three quarters of the
labor force in many industrial societies today. These trends in
the nature of work activities have radically changed the daily
life and worldviews of members of industrial societies
(Nielsen, Francois: 2007).
6. Early Social Philosophers: Montesquieu, Condorcet,
Saint Simone
5.1. Montesquieu
Montesquieu was one of the great political
philosophers of the Enlightenment. He was born in France in
1689. Montesquieu’s early life occurred at a time of significant
governmental change. England had declared itself a
constitutional monarchy in the wake of its Glorious Revolution
(1688-89), and had joined with Scotland in the Union of 1707
to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. In France, the long-
reigning Louis XIV died in 1715, and was succeeded by five
year-old Louis XV. He became a counselor of the Bordeaux
Parliament in 1714. A year later, he married Jeanne de
Lartigue, a Protestant, who bore him three children.
These national transformations had a great impact on
Montesquieu, who would refer to them repeatedly in his work.
Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of law to devote
himself to study and writing. Besides writing works on society
and politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number of years
through Europe, including Austria and Hungary, spending a

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year in Italy and 18 months in England, where he became a

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

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political systems: republican, monarchical, and despotic. As he

defines them, republican political systems vary depending on
how broadly they extend citizenship rights—those that extend
citizenship relatively broadly are termed democratic republics,
while those that restrict citizenship more narrowly are termed
aristocratic republics. The distinction between monarchy and
despotism hinges on whether or not a fixed set of laws exists
that can restrain the authority of the ruler. If so, the regime
counts as a monarchy. If not, it counts as despotism.

Montesquieu argues that the executive, legislative, and

judicial functions of government (the so-called tripartite
system) should be assigned to different bodies, so that attempts
by one branch of government to infringe on political liberty
might be restrained by the other branches (checks and
balances). Montesquieu described the various forms of
distribution of political power among a legislature, an
executive, and a judiciary. Montesquieu's approach was to
present and defend a form of government whose powers were
not excessively centralized in a single monarch or similar ruler
(a form known then as "aristocracy").

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In every government there are three sorts of power:

the legislative; the executive in respect to things
dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in
regard to matters that depend on the civil law. By
virtue of the first, the prince or magistrate enacts
temporary or perpetual laws, and amends or abrogates
those that have been already enacted. By the second,
he makes peace or war, sends or receives embassies,
establishes the public security, and provides against
invasions. By the third, he punishes criminals, or
determines the disputes that arise between
individuals. The latter we shall call the judiciary
power, and the other, simply, the executive power of
the state ( The Spirit of the Laws).
According to him, separation of powers requires a
different source of legitimization, or a different act of
legitimization from the same source, for each of the separate
powers. If the legislative branch appoints the executive and
judicial powers, as Montesquieu indicated, there will be no
separation or division of its powers, since the power to appoint
carries with it the power to revoke.
The executive power ought to be in the hands of
a monarch, because this branch of government,
having need of dispatch, is better administered
by one than by many: on the other hand,
whatever depends on the legislative power is
oftentimes better regulated by many than by a
single person. But if there were no monarch, and

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the executive power should be committed to a

certain number of persons selected from the
legislative body, there would be an end then of
liberty; by reason the two powers would be
united, as the same persons would sometimes
possess, and would be always able to possess, a
share in both.
Montesquieu actually specified that the independence
of the judiciary has to be real, and not merely apparent. The
judiciary was generally seen as the most important of the three
powers, independent and unchecked. Through this
Montesquieu produced his own analysis and assigned to each
form of government an animating principle: the republic, based
on virtue; the monarchy, based on honour; and despotism,
based on fear. His definitions show that this classification rests
not on the location of political power but on the government’s
manner of conducting policy; it involves a historical and not a
narrow descriptive approach.
To sum up, Montesquieu made a significant impact on
the intellectual history of the 18th century and played important
role in the development of social and political thought. The
first of these is his classification of governments, a subject that
was de rigueur for a political theorist. Abandoning the classical
divisions of his predecessors into monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy. The second of his most-noted arguments, the
theory of the separation of powers, is treated differently.
Dividing political authority into the legislative, executive, and
judicial powers, he asserted that, in the state that most

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effectively promotes liberty, these three powers must be

confided to different individuals or bodies, acting
independently. And finally, in his most-celebrated doctrines he
tried to the political influence of climate. Basing himself on
doctrines met in his reading, on the experience of his travels,
and on experiments—admittedly somewhat naive—conducted
at Bordeaux, he stressed the effect of climate, primarily
thinking of heat and cold, on the physical frame of the
individual, and, as a consequence, on the intellectual outlook
of society.
5.2 Condorcet
Marquisde Condorcet was a well known French
philosopher of the Enlightenment and advocate of educational
reform and women’s rights. He born in September 17, 1743,
Ribemont, France. He was one of the proponent of human
rights. He shifted his attention from mathematics into public
service, with the aim of applying to social and political affairs
a scientific model that he termed a “social arithmetic”.
Through educational and constitutional reforms, he hoped to
create a liberal, rational and democratic polity. He was one of
the major Revolutionary formulators of the ideas of progress,
or the indefinite perfectibility of humankind.
As a Feminist, abolitionist, and a democratic
republican Condorcet stood for justice, morality, and human
rights. He publicly addressed the woman question and argued
vociferously for the humanity and rights of enslaved Africans,
and proposed the abolition of slavery in France's overseas

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colonies. In his Reflections on Black Slavery published in

1781, he developed his insights on the abolitionist movement
in France and in early 1788 he became the president of newly
created Society of the Friends of Blacks.
In the first of his 1791 writings on public instruction in
the The Public Man's Library, he emphasized a cooperative
model of education. And he advocated for a secular state;
considering that since religious views are a matter of one's
conscience of which one is the sole legitimate judge, “it is
evident that the expense of maintaining such worship should
be voluntarily borne by those who believe in it” As early as
1774, undoubtedly under the sway of his initial meeting with
the illustrious Voltaire in 1770, he addressed the problem of
religious intolerance in an anonymous work that was
frequently attributed to Voltaire himself. However, most
significant, were the evolution of his political views, from
support of a reformed, constitutional monarchy to defense of a
democratic republic, from defense of a property-based
franchise to universal suffrage.
As an Enlightenment thinker Condorcet sought to
extend the empire of reason to social affairs. He advocated
economic freedom, religious toleration, legal and educational
reform, the abolition of slavery, and—unusually for his time—
equal rights for women, including woman suffrage. He
rejected the almost-universal prejudice, even among
“enlightened” thinkers, that women were intellectually inferior
to men, regarding it as an illegitimate excuse for excluding
women from public life as well as from many forms of

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education. Condorcet's most extensive arguments on women's

rights appear in two essays. The first was authored in 1787,
prior to the Revolution; the second, published in 1790 in
the Journal of the Society of 1789, was composed in the
context of a debate over the appropriate constitutional
arrangements for the new French nation. In his 1791 Memoirs
on Public Instruction, he demands that public education be
open to women and men, and that women not be excluded
from any curriculum, including science.
The rights of men stem exclusively from the
fact that they are sentient beings, capable of
acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon
them. Since women have the same qualities, they
necessarily also have the same rights. Either no
member of the human race has any true rights, or
else they all have the same ones; and anyone who
votes against the rights of another, whatever his
religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his
own.
Above quote is from his essay On the Admission of
Women to the Rights of Citizenship published in 1790. In this
essay he argued that the widely shared assumption that the
natural rights of men are based on their capacities for reason
and moral action logically implies that women possess the
very same rights.
5. 3 Saint Simone
Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), French social

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philosopher and reformer, is a controversial figure in modern

social thought, who—without writing a single enduring
work—had a crucial role in the early nineteenth-century
developments of industrial socialism, positivism, sociology,
political economics, and the philosophy of history. He believed
that the problems of his society could be best solved by
reorganising economic production. This will deprive the class
of property owners from their means of production and thus
they will lose their economic freedom which was an important
value of his time.
If you recall the main ideas about the French
Revolution, you will remember that the feudal French society
was divided into three estates, the first being the clergy, second
the nobility and the third, the commoners. The first two estates
between themselves owned the major portion of the landed
property as well as wealth and status. It is this social and
economic structure that Saint-Simon wanted to reorganise.
Saint-Simon’s main significance for the social sciences
is threefold. He was one of the first to grasp the revolutionary
implications of “industrialization” (a word he himself coined)
for traditional institutions and morality and to conceptualize
the industrial system as a distinctive type. He was also among
the earliest to advocate a naturalistic science of society as a
rational guide to social reconstruction. But he is most
important as provisional formulator of an “evolutionary
organicist” theory, whose influence is reflected in social
evolutionary doctrines as diverse as those of Herbert Spencer,
Lester Ward, and Karl Marx.

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He directly inaugurated the “positivist organicist”

school—most notably represented by Comte and Emile
Durkheim—which for a century thereafter was to vie with
utilitarianism, Marxism, and Hegelian historicism for
theoretical predominance in the social sciences (Martindale
1960, part 2). Through Durkheim, his organicist concept
of social order carries over into contemporary “functionalism”
in anthropology and sociology.
In a joint publication Plan of the Scientific Operations
Necessary for the Reorganising of Society, (1822) Saint-Simon
and Comte wrote aboutthe law of three stages through which
each branch of knowledge must pass. They said that the object
of social physics, the positive science of society later renamed
as ‘sociology’, is to discover the natural and immutable laws of
progress. These laws are as important to the science of society
as the laws of gravity, discovered by Newton, are to the natural
sciences. The intellectual alliance between Saint-Simon and
Auguste Comte did not last long and in fact ended in a bitter
quarrel.
The most interesting aspect of Saint-Simon was his
significance to the development of both conservative (like
Comte’s) and radical Marxian theory. On the conservative
side, Saint-Simon wanted to preserve society as it was, but he
did not seek a return to life as it had been in the Middle Ages,
as did Bonald and Maistre. In addition, he was a positivist
(Durkheim, 1928/1962:142), which meant that he believed that
the study of social phenomena should employ the same
scientific techniques that were used in the natural sciences.

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On the radical side, Saint-Simon saw the need for

socialist reforms, especially the centralized planning of the
economic system. But Saint-Simon did not go nearly as far as
Marx did later. Although he, like Marx, saw the capitalists
superseding the feudal nobility, he felt it inconceivable that the
working class would come to replace the capitalists. Many of
Saint-Simon’s ideas are found in Comte’s work, but Comte
developed them in a more systematic fashion. These three
classical enlightenment scholars developed systematic
philosophical and social accounts on different issues related
with state, law, politics and religions.
7. Founding Fathers: Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer
and Emile Durkheim
In the previous sections we looked at how different
social, political and economic conditions affect the
development of sociological theorizing. And we understood
that certain changes taking place in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century in Europe bothered social thinkers. Just as
natural scientists sought to explain the mysteries of life and
nature, sociologists sought to explain the complexities of social
life. A science of society was founded. Thus, Sociology as a
discipline emerged as a product of the reflections of the great
thinkers reflecting on society they are live in. To begin with
the very beginning we shall start with Auguste Comte (1798-
1857), commonly regarded as the founder of Sociology. It was
he who coined the name ‘sociology’. He was a French man.
Next, we will discuss the second founding father of sociology,
Spencer (1820-1903), who was a British. In this part we will

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discuss about the ideas of the founding fathers of sociology

and contributions of these ideas to development of modern
sociology.
6.1. Auguste Comte: Positivism
Before going to Auguste Comte's theoretical
contributions to Sociology we will have a shot biographical
sketch. It will help us to locate him in a socio-political context
in which he born and brought up. He had born in Montpelier,
France, on January 19, 1798. His parents were middle class,
and his father eventually rose to the position of official local
agent for the tax collector. Although a precocious student,
Comte never received a college-level degree. He and his whole
class were dismissed from the Ecole Polytechnique for their
rebelliousness and their political ideas.
This expulsion had an adverse effect on Comte’s
academic career. In 1817 he became secretary to Claude Henri
Saint-Simon, a philosopher forty years Comte’s senior. They
worked closely together for several years. Saint-Simon helped
Comte to develop an orientation towards philosophical
thinking. Thus, with Saint-Simon, he developed several major
ideas. However, their partnership was short lived and they
ended up quarreling with each other. Later Auguste Comte
published some of his lecture notes in, Cours de Philosophie
Positive.
Comte is known as father of sociology and he was the
first to use the term sociology. He had an enormous influence
on later sociological theorists (especially Herbert Spencer and

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Emile Durkheim). And he believed that the study of sociology

should be scientific, just as many classical theorists did and
most contemporary sociologists do. Comte was greatly
disturbed by the anarchy that pervaded French society and was
critical of those thinkers who had spawned both the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
He developed his scientific view, “positivism,” or
“positive philosophy,” to combat what he considered to be the
negative and destructive philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Comte was in line with, and influenced by, the French
counterrevolutionary Catholics (especially Bonald and
Maistre). However, his work can be set apart from theirs on at
least two grounds. First, he did not think it possible to returnto
the Middle Ages; advances in science and industry made that
impossible. Second, he developed a much more sophisticated
theoretical system than his predecessors, one that was adequate
to shape a good portion of early sociology.
Comte developed social physics, or what in 1839 he
called sociology. The use of the term social physics made it
clear that Comte sought to model sociology after the “hard
sciences.” This new science, which in his view would
ultimately become the dominant science, was to be concerned
with both social statics (existing social structures) and social
dynamics (social change). Although both involved the search
for laws of social life, he felt that social dynamics was more
important than social statics. This focus on change reflected
his interest in social reform, particularly reform of the ills
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created by the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.

Comte did not urge revolutionary change, because he felt the
natural evolution of society would make things better. Reforms
were needed only to assist the process a bit.
Comte's major work The Positive Philosophy included
his arguments for a science of society detailing its areas of
focus, methodological approach, and applied use. In early
remarks he called that science social physics, but then
switched to sociology, a term he had previously used in private
correspondence. He modified and expanded on his conception
of sociology in numerous later writings, the most important of
which is the System of Positive Polity.
One of the important pillars of positive philosophy, the
law of the classification of the sciences, has withstood the test
of time much better than the law of the three stages. Of the
various classifications that have been proposed, it is Comte’s
that is still the most popular today. This classification, too,
structures the Course, which examines each of the six
fundamental sciences—mathematics, astronomy, physics,
chemistry, biology, sociology—in turn. It provides a way to do
justice to the diversity of the sciences without thereby losing
sight of their unity. This classification also makes Comte the
founder of the philosophy of science in the modern sense.

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For Comte sociology is to be based on empirical

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

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

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6.1.1 The Law of the Three Stages

In his early works Auguste Comte tried to discover the
successive stages through which human race had evolved. In
his study he began from the state of human race, not much
superior to the great apes, to the state at which he found the
civilised society of Europe. In this study he applied scientific
methods of comparison and arrived at The Law of Human
Progress or The Law of three Stages. Auguste Comte in his
book Systeme de politique positive noted;
Each of our leading conceptions—each branch of
our knowledge, passes successively through three
different theoretical conditions: the Theological or
ficticious; the Metaphysical or abstract; and the
Scientific or positive. ... In the theological state, the
human mind, seeking the essential nature of beings,
the first and final causes (the origin and purpose) of
all effects . . . supposes all phenomena to be
produced by the immediate action of supernatural
beings. In the metaphysical state . . . the mind
supposes . . . abstract forces, veritable entities (that
is, personified abstractions) . . . capable of
producing all phenomena. ... In the final, the
positive state, the mind has given over the vain
search after Absolute notions, the origin and
destination of the universe, and the causes of
phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their
laws—that is, their invariable relations of
succession and resemblance.

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According to him, knowledge originates as theological,

becomes metaphysical, and culminates as positive (or
scientific). Theological explanations ascribe events to actions
of supernatural agencies. Metaphysical explanation assumes
that outcomes reflect underlying essences. And positive
explanation, according to Comte, relies solely on the objective
observation of relationships. The three stages of the evolution
of human thought are
1. Theological Stage: In the theological stage, the
mind explains phenomena by ascribing them to beings
or forces comparable to human beings. In this stage,
human being attempts to discover the first and the final
causes (the origin and purpose) of all effects. Thus,
human mind at this level supposes that all phenomena
are produced by the immediate action of supernatural
beings. For example, some tribes believed that diseases
like small pox, cholera were the expressions of God’s
anger.
2. Metaphysical Stage: In the metaphysical stage,
the mind explains phenomenon by invoking abstract
entities like ‘nature’. These abstract entities are
personified abstractions. Human beings pursue
meaning and explanation of the world in term of
‘essences’, ‘ideals’, ‘forms’, i.e. in short, in a
conception of some ultimate reality, such as God.
3. Positive Stage: In the positive stage human
beings cease to look for ‘original sources’ or final

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causes because these can be neither checked against

facts norutilised to serve our needs. Human mind at this
stage applies itself to the study of their laws, i.e. their
invariable relations of succession and resemblance.
Human beings seek to establish laws which link facts
and which govern social life (Coser 1971).
In this ‘The Law of Three Stages’ of knowledge we can
see three types of knowledge such as, first, theological or
fictitious knowledge, second, metaphysical or abstract
knowledge and, third, scientific or positive knowledge (Comte,
1998: 71). Knowledge begins by trying to explain things on the
basis of supernatural phenomena (theology). This is then
challenged by the negative critique of philosophy
(metaphysics). Finally, the entire process culminates in
positive science.

Intellectual stages correspond to three stages of social

organization from a warrior-military society (theological), a
professional-commercial society (metaphysical), to a human-
industrial society (science). This ‘Law’ is seen as an inevitable
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series of evolutionary stages that every (Western) society is

fated to pass through as it progresses from the childhood of the
family unit to the adolescence of the state before reaching
maturity by covering the whole of humanity. The bellow table
illustrates Comte’s three stages of theoretical knowledge.

Form of Social
Social basis Organization
knowledge type
1 Theological The family Military Warrior
2 Metaphysical The state Commercial Lawyer
Positive Society/Races/
3 Industrial Scientist
science Humanity

On the basis of the scientific stage Comte developed

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

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The second scientific method of investigation,

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

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Historical comparisons throughout the time in which humanity

has evolved are at the very core of sociological inquiry.
Sociology is nothing if it is not informed by a sense of
historical evolution (Coser 1971).
According to Comte 'the universe is empirical (without
spiritual force), operates according to law-like principles, and
that humans can discover those laws and use them to
understand, control, and predict the forces that influence their
lives. On the one hand fatalism puts a spiritual force at the
center of existence; positivism puts humanity at the center of
existence. Thus, it is positive in a humanistic sense. Positivism,
then, is a philosophy that confines itself to sense data, denies
any spiritual forces or metaphysical considerations, and
emphasizes the ability of the human being to affect their own
fate generally through science.
According to Comte, society is broken into two distinct
spheres in his ‘positivist’ theory of society, on the one hand,
‘social statics’ (order) and, on the other, ‘social dynamics’
(progress):
1. Social statics: a concept of social order, stability,
and integration.
2. Social dynamics: a concept of social change,
fragmentation and progress.
Social statics studies society at rest in a fixed space.
Social dynamics studies the laws of motion as things change
over time. This follows a similar division in biology between
fixed anatomy and changes in physiology. Statics, or ‘social
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anatomy’, and dynamics, or ‘social physiology’, may be

divided for purposes of scientific analysis but in practice they
are always inseparable. Social statics are those ‘laws of
harmony of human society’, involving the core institutions of
the family, the state and, ultimately, humanity (or at least the
‘white race’ as Comte, 1998: 263, put it). Statics refer to the
essential capacities of all types of societies – forms of social
organization, intellectual culture, material production and
moral norms. Statics are therefore more basic than dynamics.
Social dynamics refers to the necessary progress of society
from more simple to more complex forms of social
organization through the successive stages of conquest, trade
and production. There can be no laws of social development
without movement.
7. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April
27, 1820. He was not schooled in the arts and humanities, but
rather in technical and utilitarian matters. Spencer never went
to a conventional school but was taught at home by his father
and uncle. He went to some small private schools but only for
short periods, according to his autobiography, his training in
mathematics was the best. In spite of not receiving a
systematic training in other subjects like natural sciences,
literature, history, he wrote outstanding treatises on biology
and psychology.
At a young age Spencer started working as an Engineer
in the railroad engineering field.

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In 1837 he began work as a civil engineer for a railway,

an occupation he held until 1846. During this period, Spencer
continued to study on his own and began to publish scientific
and political works. In 1848 Spencer was appointed an editor
of The Economist, and his intellectual ideas began to solidify.
By 1850, he had completed his first major work, Social Statics.
During the writing of this work, Spencer first began to
experience insomnia, and over the years his mental and
physical problems mounted. He was to suffer a series of
nervous breakdowns throughout the rest of his life.
In 1853 Spencer received an inheritance that allowed
him to quit his job and live for the rest of his life as a
gentleman scholar. He never earned a university degree or held
an academic position. As he grew more isolated, and physical
and mental illness mounted, Spencer’s productivity as a
scholar increased. Eventually, Spencer began to achieve not
only fame within England but also an international reputation.
As Richard Hofstadter put it: “In the three decades after the
Civil War it was impossible to be active in any field of
intellectual work without mastering Spencer” (1959:33).
Herbert Spencer contributed several key ideas to the
field of sociology. As a contemporary of Auguste Comte, he
too was trying to establish sociology as the science of society.
Spencer had come into contact with Comte’s ideas but he did
not accept them. Instead, he brought about a shift in the study
of society. His sociology is based on the evolutionary doctrine
and the organic analogy.

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The Social Statics (1850), The Study of Sociology

(1873), and Principles of Sociology (1876-96) are three major
works of Herbert Spencer. He was influenced by the idea of
Darwin and his evolutionary theory. Spencer believed that
throughout all times there actually has been social evolution
from a simple, uniform or homogeneous structure to a
complex, multiform or heterogeneous one. Spencer has been
influenced deeply by Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of
Species (1859). It had brought a revolutionary change in the
understanding of how life evolved on earth from a simple
unicellular organism to multicellular complex organisms like,
human beings themselves.
Although Spencer wrote several books on sociology, he
did not give a formal definition of the discipline. According to
him, the social process is unique and so sociology as a science
must explain the present state of society by explaining the
initial stages of evolution and applying to them the laws of
evolution. Thus, the evolutionary doctrine is central to his
thesis. After explaining this doctrine, we will explain the
meaning and significance of organic analogy. You will also
learn about Spencer’s classification of societies according to
their place in social evolution.
Spencer had to find a way of reconciling his
thoroughgoing individualism with his organicist approach. In
this he differed sharply from Comte, who, it will be
remembered, was basically anti-individualistic in his general
philosophy and developed an organicist theory in which the
individual was conceived as firmly subordinated to society.

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Spencer, in contrast, not only conceived of the origins of

society in individualistic and utilitarian terms, but saw society
as a vehicle for the enhancement of the purposes of
individuals.
According to Spencer, men had originally banded
together because it was advantageous for them to do so.
"Living together arose because, on the average, it proved more
advantageous to each than living apart." And once society had
come into being, it was perpetuated because, "maintenance of
combination [of individuals] is maintenance of conditions . . .
more satisfactory [to] living than the combined persons would
otherwise have." In line with his individualistic perspective,
he saw the quality of a society as depending to a large extent
on the quality of the individuals who formed it.
"There is no way of coming at a true theory of society,
but by inquiry into the nature of its component individuals. , . .
Every phenomenon exhibited by an aggregation of men
originates in some quality of man himself." Spencer held as a
general principle that "the properties of the units determine the
properties of the aggregate," In spite of these individualistic
underpinnings of his philosophy, Spencer developed an overall
system in which the organicist analogy is pursued with even
more rigor than in Comte's work. The ingenious way Spencer
attempted to overcome the basic incompatibility between
individualism and organicism is best described in his own
words. After having shown the similarity between social and
biological organisms, he turned to show how they were unlike

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each other. A biological organism is encased in a skin, but a

society is bound together by the medium of language.
Spencer believed that all inorganic, organic, and
superorganic (societal) phenomena undergo evolution and
devolution, or dissolution. That is, phenomena undergo a
process of evolution whereby matter becomes integrated and
motion tends to dissipate. Phenomena also undergo a process
of devolution in which motion increases and matter moves
toward disintegration. Having deduced these general principles
of evolution and dissolution from his overarching principles,
Spencer then turned to specific areas in order to show that his
theory of evolution (and devolution) holds inductively, that is,
that “all orders do exhibit a progressive integration of Matter
and concomitant loss of Motion” (1902/1958:308).
The combination of induction and deduction led
Spencer to his “final” evolutionary formula: Evolution is an
integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion;
during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent
homogeneity to a definite, coherent, heterogeneity; and during
which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.
(Spencer, 1902/1958:394) Let us decompose this general
perspective and examine each of the major elements of
Spencer’s evolutionary theory.
First, evolution involves progressive change from a less
coherent to a more coherent form; in other words, it involves
increasing integration. Second, accompanying increasing
integration is the movement from homogeneity to more and

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more heterogeneity; in other words, evolution involves

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

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are more complex still and united under one organized

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

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sociological theory, Auguste Comte. Their theories have some

similarities (e.g., positivism) but far more differences (e.g.,
Comte’s faith in a positivist religion and Spencer’s opposition
to any centralized system of control). Spencer offered a series
of general principles from which he deduced an evolutionary
theory: increasing integration, heterogeneity, and definiteness
of both structures and functions. Indeed, sociology, in
Spencer’s work, is the study of the evolution of societies.
Although Spencer sought to legitimize sociology as a science,
he also felt that sociology is linked to, and should draw upon,
other sciences such as biology (especially the idea of survival
of the fittest) and psychology (especially the importance of
sentiments). In part from his concern with psychology,
Spencer developed his methodological-individualist approach
to the study of society.
Spencer addressed a number of the methodological
difficulties confronting sociology as a science. He was
especially concerned with various biases the sociologist must
overcome—educational, patriotic, class, political, and
theological. In seeking to exclude these biases, Spencer
articulated a “value-free” position for sociology. In much of
his substantive work, Spencer employed the comparative-
historical method. The evolution of society occupies a central
place in Spencer’s sociology.
In his analysis of societal evolution, Spencer employed
the three general aspects of evolution mentioned previously—
increasing integration (increasing size and coalescence of
masses of people), heterogeneity, and definiteness (here,

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clearly demarcated institutions)—as well as a fourth aspect—

the increasing coherence of social groups. In his evolutionary
social theory, Spencer traced, among other things, the
movement from simple to compounded societies and from
militant to industrial societies.
Spencer also articulated a series of ethical and political
ideals. Consistent with his methodological individualism,
Spencer argued that people must be free to exercise their
abilities; they must have liberty. The only role for the state is
the protection of individual liberty. Such a laissez-faire
political perspective fits well with Spencer’s ideas on
evolution and survival of the fittest. Given his perspective on
the gradual evolution of society, Spencer also rejected the idea
of any radical solution (e.g., communism) to society’s
problems.
8. Conclusion
In the first part of this module we studied how social
conditions contributed for the development of social thought.
We have learnt how different changes taking place in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century in Europe bothered social
thinkers. Sociology thus grew essentially as a product of the
reflections of the great thinkers reflecting on society. We
discussed about the sociologically significant themes of the
French and the Industrial Revolutions. Finally, you read about
the intellectual development such as enlightenment,
renaissances and scientific revolutions.

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In the second part of this module we will discussed

about the ideas of the early thinkers and founding fathers of
sociology and contributions of these ideas to development of
sociology. In this part we studied about social and political
context in which Auguste Comte (1798-1857) formed his
theoretical and intellectual basis. As the founding father of
sociology we discussed the central ideas of Comte, such as the
law of the three stages (the theological state, the metaphysical
stage, and the positive stage), the hierarchy of the sciences, the
static and dynamic sociology.
And we also discussed about the contributions of
Harbert Spencer and the social and intellectual environment in
which he developed his theoretical perspectives. He is
considered to be the second founding father of sociology. We
focused on his central ideas, such as the evolutionary doctrine,
the organic analogy and finally the evolution of societies,
firstly in terms of composition from simple to compound and
so on; and then in terms of transition from military to industrial
societies.
KEY WORDS
Counter-Enlightenment: A conservative reaction to the
Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century that was wary of
the unabashed embrace of rationality, technology, and progress
and that focused on the importance of non-rational factors
(such as tradition) rather than reason.
Enlightenment: A period of remarkable intellectual
development that occurred in Europe during the late

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seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that emphasized

reason. It refers to that period in European history, which
embodies the spirit of the French philosophers of the
eighteenth century. During this period a belief developed that
both nature and society can be studied scientifically. Human
reason and the ideas of progress developed.
Estate The system of stratification followed in medieval
European society of around 17th-18th century, in which
society was divided into different social groups having a
different set of laws and social status for each
Evolution The process of slow changes through a long period
of time in which life forms have developed from simple
unicellular beings, such as amoeba, to complex multicellular
beings, such as human beings.
Feudal: A system of tenure in agricultural areas whereby a
vassal or serf served the landlord to whom the land belonged.
In return the landlord allowed the serf to till his land and live
on his land
Industrial Revolution: The revolution that occurred in
England in the eighteenth century that applied power-driven
machinery to manufacturing.
Law of Natural Selection It is a part of Charles Darwin’s
theory of evolution. Herbert Spencer too has talked about this
law of natural selection in social evolution. It means that in the
struggle for survival in both the physical world, as well as, the
social world there exists an automatic process of selection.

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Only those who are the fittest or best suited to their physical or
social environment survive and those who are weak die.
Metaphysical Metaphysics literally means that branch of
philosophy which investigates the first principles of nature and
thought. For Comte it is a stage of development of mind in
which the mind explains phenomenon by invoking abstract
entities or forces like “nature”. In this stage human beings
explain the meaning of the world in terms of “essences”,
“ideas”, etc.
Positive Positive literally means anything in the affirmative.
For Comte it is the last stage of the development of mind. Here
the search for ‘original sources’ ‘final ends’ about existence of
human beings stops. Instead human beings start observing
phenomena and establishing regular links which exist between
these phenomena. Thus, in the positive stage human beings
search for social laws which link facts and which govern social
life.
Static Any mass or object or force which is at an equilibrium,
i.e. which does not move. In society it corresponds to the
notion of the structure of society.
Theological Theology is the study of religion. For Comte it is
the first stage of development of mind. In this stage mind
explains phenomenon by ascribing them to beings or forces
comparable to human beings. Here explanations take the form
of myths concerning spirits and supernatural beings.
Theory: A system of generalized statements or propositions
about phenomena.
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Reference
• Comte, A. (1998) Auguste Comte and Positivism: The
Essential Writings. G. Lenzer, (ed.), New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.
• Allan, Kenneth (2005) Explorations in Classical
Sociological Theory - Seeing the Social World, Pine Forge
Press, Thousand Oaks.
• Bok, Hilary, (2018 ), "Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-
Louis de Secondat", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
• Bourdeau, Michel, ( 2020) "Auguste Comte", The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
• Coser, Lewis A. (1971). Masters of Sociology Thought
Ideas in Historical and Social Context. Second Edition,
Harcourt Brace Jovonovich, Inc.: New York.
• Edgar F. Borgatta and Rhonda J. V. Montgomery (2000)
Encyclopedia of Sociology, New York
• Hubert, Rene, (1963). Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences.
Vol. 1-IV, pp. 151-152. 15th printing. The MacMillan Co.:
New York.
• Ritzer, George (ed) (2007) Blackwell encyclopedia of
sociology, Blackwell Publishing, Main Street, Malden.
• Ritzer, George and Stepnisky, Jeffrey (2018) Classical
Sociological Theory, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks,
California.
• Indira Gandhi National Open University Course Material.
(2005). Sociological Thought, New Delhi: IGNOU.
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 SOC1C01 - FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Emile Durkheim
Chapter Outline

1. Social Fact
2. Division of Labour
3. Suicide
4. Elementary forms of Religious life

Objective of this Module

Describe social and biographical details of Émile
Durkheim and outline important ideas and
perspectives developed by him.
Defining and classify social facts
Understanding the relationship between mechanical
solidarity and organic solidarity and examine its
specific social structure
Examine the concept of Division of Labour in
traditional and modern societies
Understand Suicide and its sociological relevance
Examine the Durkheimian perspective on religion
and understand elementary forms of religious life
1. Introduction
In this section we will discuss about the contribution of
Durkheim for the classical sociological theories. Emile
Durkheim, often referred to as the founder of sociology, was

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born April 15, 1858 in Epinal, France. Appointed to the first

professorship of sociology in the world, he worked tirelessly
over three decades as a lecturer and writer to establish
sociology as a distinct discipline with its own unique
theoretical and methodological foundation. After an illustrious
career, first in Bordeaux and then after 1902 in Paris at the
Sorbonne, Durkheim died in November 1917.
Durkheim legitimized sociology in France, and his
work ultimately became a dominant force in the development
of sociology in general and of sociological theory in particular.
His work was informed by the disorders produced by the
general social changes discussed earlier in this chapter, as well
as by others (such as industrial strikes, disruption of the ruling
class, church-state discord, the rise of political anti-Semitism)
more specific to the France of Durkheim’s time. In fact, most
of his work was devoted to the study of social order. His view
was that social disorders are not a necessary part of the modern
world and could be reduced by social reforms.
2. Social Fact
The concept of social fact was defined by the French
sociologist E ´ mile Durkheim, in his book on the Rules of
Sociological Method (1982), as ways of feeling, thinking, and
acting external to and exercising constraint over the individual.
Durkheim’s emphasis on social facts was part of his critique of
psychological theories of human behavior and society. In his
book, The Rules of Sociological Method, published in 1895,
Durkheim (1950: 3) is concerned with the second task and

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calls social facts the subject matter of sociology. Durkheim

(1950) defines social facts as “ways of acting, thinking and
feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power
of coercion by reason of which they control him”. To
Durkheim society is a reality suigeneris. He considered society
as sui generis. It is always present and has no point of origin.
Society comes into being by the association of individuals.
Hence society represents a specific reality which has its
own characteristics. This unique reality of society is separate
from other realities studied by physical or biological sciences.
Further, societal reality is apart from individuals and is over
and above them. Thus the reality of society must be the subject
matter of sociology. A scientific understanding of any social
phenomenon must emerge from the ‘collective’ or
associational characteristics manifest in the social structure of
a society. While working towards this end, Durkheim
developed and made use of a variety of sociological concepts.
Collective representations are one of the leading concepts to be
found in the social thought of Durkheim. Before learning about
‘collective representations’ it is necessary that you understand
what Durkheim meant by ‘social facts’.
For Durkheim, sociology was the “science of
civilization”. He thus embarked on the analysis of what he
called social facts, that is, all those external and collective
ways in which society shapes, structures, and constrains our
behavior. Durkheim states: “A social fact is any way of acting
… [that is] capable of exerting over the individual an external
constraint; or which is general over the whole of a given

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society, whilst having an existence of its own, independent of

its individual manifestations”. Social facts – “the beliefs,
tendencies, and practices of the group taken collectively” – are
what sociologists study (and not individual psychological facts
or physical or biological facts, though these may impinge on
social facts).
Durkheim based his scientific vision of sociology on
the fundamental principle, i.e., the objective reality of social
facts. Social fact is that way of acting, thinking or feeling etc.,
which is more or less general in a given society. Durkheim
treated social facts as things. They are real and exist
independent of the individual’s will or desire. They are
external to individuals and are capable of exerting constraint
upon them. In other words they are coercive in nature. Further
social facts exist in their own right. They are independent of
individual manifestations. The true nature of social facts lies in
the collective or associational characteristics inherent in
society. Legal codes and customs, moral rules, religious beliefs
and practices, language etc. are all social facts.
As we discussed, Durkheim developed a distinctive
conception of the subject matter of sociology and then tested it
in an empirical study. In The Rules of Sociological Method
(1895/1982), Durkheim argued that it is the special task of
sociology to study what he called social facts (Nielsen, 2005a,
2007a). He conceived of social facts as forces (Takla and Pope,
1985) and structures that are external to, and coercive of, the
individual. The study of these large-scale structures and
forces—for example, institutionalized law and shared moral

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beliefs—and their impact on people became the concern of

many later sociological theorists (Parsons, for example). In
Suicide (1897/1951), Durkheim reasoned that if he could link
such an individual behavior as suicide to social causes (social
facts), he would have made a persuasive case for the
importance of the discipline of sociology.
But Durkheim did not examine why individual A or B
committed suicide; rather, he was interested in the causes of
differences in suicide rates among groups, regions, countries,
and different categories of people (for example, married and
single). His basic argument was that it was the nature of, and
changes in, social facts that led to differences in suicide rates.
For example, a war or an economic depression would create a
collective mood of depression that would in turn lead to
increases in suicide rates. More will be said on this subject in
Chapter 3, but the key point is that Durkheim developed a
distinctive view of sociology and sought to demonstrate its
usefulness in a scientific study of suicide.
In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895/1982),
Durkheim differentiated between two types of social facts—
material and nonmaterial. Although he dealt with both in the
course of his work, his main focus was on nonmaterial social
facts (for example, culture, social institutions) rather than
material social facts (for example, bureaucracy, law). This
concern for nonmaterial social facts was already clear in his
earliest major work, The Division of Labor in Society
(1893/1964). His focus there was a comparative analysis of
what held society together in the primitive and modern cases.

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He concluded that earlier societies were held together

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

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concern of sociology as a social science.

Durkheim insisted that social facts should be treated as
things. They are realities in their own right, with their own
laws of organization, apart from the ways these facts might
appear to the individual’s consciousness. Durkheim thought
that sociology would have no distinctive subject matter if
society itself did not exist as an objective reality. Thus,
sociology and psychology represent independent levels of
analysis.
3. 1. Types of Social Facts
Durkheim saw social facts as lying along a continuum.
First, on one extreme are structural or morphological social
phenomena. They make up the substratum of collective life.
By this he meant the number and nature of elementary parts of
which society is composed, the way in which the
morphological constituents are arranged and the degree to
which they are fused together. In this category of social facts
are included the distribution of population over the surface of
the territory, the forms of dwellings, nature of communication
system etc.
Secondly, there are institutionalized forms of social
facts. They are more or less general and widely spread in
society. They represent the collective nature of the society as a
whole. Under this category fall legal and moral rules, religious
dogma and established beliefs and practices prevalent in a
society.
Thirdly, there are social facts, which are not
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institutionalised. Such social facts have not yet acquired

crystallized forms. They lie beyond the institutionalised norms
of society. Also this category of social facts has not attained a
total objective and independent existence comparable to the
institutionalised ones. Also their externality to and ascendancy
over and above individuals is not yet complete. These social
facts have been termed as social currents. For example,
sporadic currents of opinion generated in specific situations;
enthusiasm generated in a crowd; transitory outbreaks in an
assembly of people; sense of indignity or pity aroused by
specific incidents, etc.
All the above mentioned social facts form a continuum
and constitute social milieu of society. Further Durkheim made
an important distinction in terms of normal and pathological
social facts. A social fact is normal when it is generally
encountered in a society of a certain type at a certain phase in
its evolution. Every deviation from this standard is a
pathological fact. For example, some degree of crime is
inevitable in any society. Hence according to Durkheim crime
to that extent is a normal fact. However, an extraordinary
increase in the rate of crime is pathological. A general
weakening in the moral condemnation of crime and certain
type of economic crisis leading to anarchy in society are other
examples of pathological facts.
3. 2. Main Characteristics of Social Facts
In Durkheim’s view sociology as an objective science
must conform to the model of the other sciences. It posed two

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requirements: first the ‘subject’ of sociology must be specific.

And it must be distinguished from the ‘subjects’ of all other
sciences. Secondly the ‘subject’ of sociology must be such as
to be observed and explained. Similar to the way in which
facts are observed and explained in other sciences. For
Durkheim this ‘subject’ of sociology is the social fact, and that
social facts must be regarded as ‘things’.
The main characteristics of social facts are (i)
externality, (ii) constraint, (iii) independence, and (iv)
generality. Social facts, according to Durkheim, exist outside
individual consciences. Their existence is external to the
individuals. For example, domestic or civic or contractual
obligations are defined externally to the individual in laws and
customs. Religious beliefs and practices exist outside and prior
to the individual. An individual takes birth in a society and
leaves it afterbirth death, however social facts are already
given in society and remain in existence irrespective of birth or
death of an individual. For example language continues to
function independently of any single individual.
The other characteristic of social fact is that it exercises
a constraint on individuals. Social fact is recognized because it
forces itself on the individual. For example, the institutions of
law, education, beliefs etc. are already given to everyone from
without. They are commanding and obligatory for all. There is
constraint, when in a crowd, a feeling or thinking imposes
itself on everyone. Such a phenomenon is typically social
because its basis, its subject is the group as a whole and not
one individual in particular. A social fact is that which has

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more or less a general occurrence in a society. Also it is

independent of the personal features of individuals or universal
attributes of human nature. Examples are the beliefs, feelings
and practices of the group taken collectively. In sum, the social
fact is specific. It is born of the association of individuals. It
represents a collective content of social group or society. It
differs in kind from what occurs in individual consciousness.
Social facts can be subjected to categorisation and
classification. Above all social facts form the subject matter of
the science of sociology
In his classic study Suicide, Durkheim introduced the
sociological use of statistics, demonstrating that different
suicide rates could be explained on the basis of differential
patterns of social connectedness when they could not be
explained on the basis of individual psychology. For instance,
individual characteristics do not explain why older men
commit more suicide, but their unmarried – unconnected –
status does. In addition to introducing the use of statistics,
Durkheim also used various qualitative and archival methods,
particularly in his research on law and religion.
Durkheim’s method, whether statistical or qualitative,
focused on the character of forms of association and on the
consequences of those associations for the health of the social
individual and/or group. By contrast, statistics in contemporary
sociology are generally used to measure relationships between
the demographic character of individual actions and various
institutional constraints (values, goals, sanctions). This has
been the predominant sociological method since the 1940s and

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is often equated with ‘‘macro’’ sociological concerns. It is,

however, a later interpretation of Durkheim’s method,
influenced by structuralism and not entirely consistent with his
own approach. Durkheim used statistics as indicators of social
facts. For Durkheim, social facts in a modern differentiated
society consist of forms and patterns of association, not beliefs
and values. What matters are the ways in which members of
various groups are associated with one another, not their
orientation toward valued courses of action, which had been
important in earlier social forms. Where statistics such as
suicide rates provide indicators of these associations, they may
be of use to sociologists.
Durkheim’s approach did not correlate individual
characteristics with value oriented behavior, however. He used
statistics to indicate the strength and character of various forms
of association. For instance, if the forms of association in a
group were very weak, then people in the group could be
expected to have a greater number of moral and psychological
problems. If the forms of association in a group were too
strong, then people could be expected to sacrifice themselves
for the group whenever necessary. The tricky part is specifying
the ideal forms of association. Durkheim argued that this
varies across societies.
4. Division of Labour
Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society,
his doctoral dissertation and his first major work, was
published in 1893. According to Durkheime division of labour

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is a social phenomenon and merits social explanation. He held

that as volume and density of population increases in a given
area there is an increase in interaction and struggle for
survival. Social differentiation is practised in modern societies
to overcome this struggle for survival between individuals.
The individuals are more dependent on one another for
specialized functions and this leads to social cohesion and
increase in individual autonomy. In modern societies there is
an increase of individualism but there is also a need to
maintain social solidarity. In his writings, Durkheim explained
how individuals relate to one another and to society by the
social bonds. His doctoral dissertation on Division of Labour
in Society focused on the concept of ‘social solidarity’. He was
influenced by Rousseau’s thinking that social solidarity is
neither dependent on politics nor economy.
Durkheim held that solidarity can be expressed in two
distinct ways which are ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’. In small
societies with mechanical solidarity, individual autonomy is
lowest and society is characterized by likeness of beliefs.
There is no specialization of tasks and very little division of
labour. Collective conscience pervades amongst all individuals
in the group. The links bonding the individual to the social
whole is intense and there is perfect social integration. In such
a society the institution of religion is dominant and an
individual’s place in society is determined by kinship. There is
a system of penal law which punishes crimes violently so as to
reaffirm the core beliefs and values. This law is repressive and
severely punishes the offence.

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On the other hand, in societies with organic solidarity

there is greater division of labour and individuals are
dependent on one another for specialized tasks rather than on
society as a whole. Such societies are dense and cover a large
geographical area. The political, legal and economic
institutions are more specialized and the force of the collective
conscience over the individuals is weakened. There are greater
individual differences between individuals and the integration
of individuals when the social whole is weakened. Restitutive
law is operative and aims at restoring the wrongs to their
original state.
While the foregoing theorists contributed substantially
to the understanding of the division of labor, Emile
Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society (1893) stands as
the classic sociological statement of the causes and
consequences of the historical shift from ‘‘mechanical
solidarity’’ to ‘‘organic solidarity.’’ The former is found in
smaller, less-advanced societies where families and villages
are mostly self-sufficient, independent, and united by
similarities. The latter is found in larger, urbanized societies
where specialization creates interdependence among social
units.
Following Spencer’s lead, Durkheim noted that the
specialization of functions always accompanies the growth of a
society; he also observed that increasing population density—
the urbanization of society that accompanies modernization—
greatly increases the opportunities for further increases in the
division of labor. It should be noted that the shift to a modern

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division of labor could not have occurred without a preexisting

solidarity; in his chapter on ‘‘organic and contractual
solidarity’’ he departed from Spencer’s utilitarian explanation
of social cohesion, and noted that the advanced division of
labor can occur only among members of an existing society,
where individuals and groups are united by preexisting
similarities (of language, religion, etc.).
A sense of trust, obligation, and interdependencies
essential for any large group in which there are many diverse
roles; indirect exchanges occur; and individuals form smaller
sub groupings based on occupational specialization. All of
these changes create high levels of interdependence, but within
creasing specialization, and different world views develop,
along with different interests, values, and belief systems. This
is the problem Durkheim saw in the shift from mechanical to
organic solidarity; he feared the ‘‘anomie’’ or lack of cohesion
that might result from a multiplicity of views, languages, and
religions within a society (as in the France of his times, and
even more so today).
The problems of inequality in modern industrial society
were not lost on Durkheim, either; he noted how the
‘‘pathological form of the division of labor’’ posed a threat to
the full development of social solidarity (Giddens 1971).
Although many simplistic analyses of Durkheim’s approach
suggest otherwise, he dealt at length with the problems of ‘‘the
class war’’ and the need for justice and fraternity.

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As we mentioned, in The Division of Labor in Society

(1893) he examined the transformation of societies from
mechanical to organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity was
based on a strong collective consciousness and organized
around segmental groups, primarily extended kinship
structures. The result was a society based on the similarity
among its individual members and social units.
Organic solidarity was rooted in mutual
interdependence of activities in the division of labor, where the
collective consciousness became less strong and, thus, there
appeared a greater individuation of thought and conduct. The
cause of the change from mechanical to organic solidarity was
found in social morphology; in particular, an increase in the
overall population volume, an increase in society’s material
density (i.e., the number of people in a given territory), and an
increased moral or dynamic density (i.e., communication and
interaction among groups).
5. Mechanical Solidarity and Organic Solidarity
Durkheim, as we have seen, identifies two opposing
social types. The first— pre-modern society—is characterized
by an undifferentiated social structure, a strong collective
consciousness, a homogeneous population, and a legal code
consisting primarily of penal laws with repressive sanctions.
The second— modern society—is characterized by a highly
differentiated social structure, a weak collective consciousness,
a heterogeneous population, and a legal code consisting
primarily of cooperative laws with restitutive sanctions.

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This dichotomy goes even deeper. The process of

social evolution, Durkheim insists, is simultaneously a process
of “moral evolution.” The contrast between these two social
types extends to the moral rules and bonds of social solidarity
characteristic of each. This is the crux of Durkheim’s
argument. Pre-modern and modern society differ in the glue
that holds them together, “mechanical solidarity” for the first
and “organic solidarity” for the second. In the pre-modern era,
social solidarity derives from people’s resemblances.
Individuals form a cohesive community because they
live similar lives and think similar thoughts. The collective
consciousness is the fundamental basis of this type of social
solidarity. When individuals threaten this sacred order, when
they deviate from shared values, beliefs, and practices, they
face the wrath of a punitive penal system. The strength of the
collective consciousness and the continuity of society are
ultimately dependent on the coercive power of repressive
sanctions. This kind of solidarity, which Durkheim calls
“mechanical,” requires the complete suppression of
individuality. Where mechanical solidarity prevails, the
individual “does not belong to himself; he is literally a thing at
the disposal of society.” The moral order of the pre-modern
world is strong “only if the individual is weak.”

Mechanical Organic
solidarity solidarity
Basis of solidarity Resemblances Differences
Nature of society Pre-industrial Industrial

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Substratum Segmental Organized

Population Low volume High volume
Moral and physical Low High
density

Interdependence Low High

Social bonds Weak Strong
Law Repressive Restitutive

As the above table shows, in mechanical solidarity

individuals are strongly attracted to each other through what
Durkheim calls ‘resemblance’. An integral solidarity based on
a similarity and a common identity reaches its highest stage
through the conscience collective which exercises a strong
centripetal pull on individual members. Personal identity and
collective identity become fused: ‘From this results a solidarity
sui generis, which, born of resemblances, directly links the
individual to society’ (Durkheim, 1933).
This is found in highly cohesive, relatively small-scale
societies based on kinship relations and cooperation. Typically
reaching for naturalistic analogies, Durkheim compares
mechanical solidarity to the molecules of inorganic bodies that
have no independent existence of their own. We call it
[mechanical solidarity] only by analogy to the cohesion which
unites the elements of an inanimate body, as opposed to that
which makes a unity out of the elements of a living body.
What justifies the term is that the link which thus unites the

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individual to society is wholly analogous to that which attaches

a thing to a person. The individual conscience considered in
this light, is a simple dependent upon the collective type and
follows all of its movements, as the possessed object follows
that of its owner. (Durkheim, 1933)
In extreme cases of mechanical solidarity the individual
personality is completely submerged by an undifferentiated
homogeneous social mass. Any infringement of mechanical
solidarity is met with brutally repressive sanctions. This type
of solidarity is expressed in a large number of repressive laws
against any violation of the collective will. Mechanical
solidarity is ‘positive’, direct, unconditional and unmediated. It
produces inner unity through collective feelings of inclusion
and belonging. Durkheim gives the example of the Iroquois
tribes of North America as an almost ‘pure’ example of a
people who live without specialized functions or privileged
hierarchies or private property in a sort of early communism.
The individual is wholly absorbed by the clan (Durkheim,
1933).
The same basic clan structure is repeated across ‘a
segmental society’, defined by strong similarities: For
segmental organization to be possible, the segments must
resemble one another; without that they would not be united.
And they must differ; without this, they would lose themselves
in each other and be effaced (Durkheim, 1933). In some cases
they form a simple linear series of contiguous groups like
families or villages. In others cases, several clans form a
definite and distinctly new union, like a tribe or a

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confederation. Mechanical solidarity is most sharply defined

when the conscience collective is expressed through the
medium of a defined focal point of family or kin, ‘a
community of blood’.
Durkheim tried to avoid idealizing early societies and
noted the existence of despotic forms of mechanical solidarity
under the unilateral centralized power invested in a chief or
master. In societies where the main form of solidarity is
‘organic’ individuals are engaged in specialized functions in an
advanced division of labour. Here individuals cohere precisely
because of their difference or dissimilarity from each other.
Durkheim names this solidarity ‘organic’ from another analogy
drawn from nature. Each organ, in effect, has it special
physiognomy, its autonomy. And, moreover, the unity of the
organism is as great as the individuation of the parts is more
marked. On one side, the more labour is socially divided, the
more dependent individuals become on society. On the other
side, the more labour is socially divided, the more uniquely
personal and specialized it becomes.
Social heterogeneity expresses the development of
peculiar, unique personalities. Compared to the almost total
control exercised over individuals by mechanical solidarity,
the organic variant allows for greater individual autonomy,
spontaneity and enterprise. Social obligations are not quite so
repressive and limiting. Individuals are linked by particular
functions, primarily occupation, rather than by kinship
structures. Functional integration of occupational

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specialization displaces and opposes alternative traditional

sources of integration such as heredity.
Integration based on specialized function strengthens
personal conscience at the expense of the conscience
collective. Occupational structure assumes a more central place
for coordinating social cohesion. Occupational morality is not
subject to the same harsh punishments as breaches of public
morality. Recitative law becomes more widespread than
repressive law. Occupational functions depend upon
cooperation and compromise rather than coercion and
repression.
Consequently, even where society relies most
completely upon the division of labour, it does not become a
jumble of juxtaposed atoms, between which it can establish
only external, transient contacts. Rather the members are
united by ties which extend deeper and far beyond the short
moments during which the exchange is made. Each of the
functions that they exercise is, in a fixed way, dependent upon
others, and with them forms a solidary system.(Durkheim,
1933)Spontaneous cooperation in the advanced division of
labour is intrinsically moral in nature. A new ‘moral or
dynamic density’ emerges from the growing size of
population, urban living and improved communications.
6. Suicide
On Suicide, Durkheim continued his quest to legitimate
the discipline of sociology and establish its scientific
credentials. The topic of suicide, which on the surface would

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seem to be anything but a social phenomenon, presented him

with a challenging opportunity to further substantiate the
existence of a realm of distinctly social facts and to apply and
illustrate the methodological principles set forth in The Rules.
With Suicide he also resumed his exploration of key
themes from earlier writings, including the problem of social
solidarity and the relationship between the individual and
society. Beyond all this, however, Durkheim had an even more
far-reaching agenda. The study of suicide, he promised, would
also serve a more practical purpose. It would shed light on “the
causes of the general contemporary maladjustment being
undergone by European societies” and suggest “remedies
which may relieve it.”
As with crime or any other form of deviance,
Durkheim explains, a certain amount of suicide is to be
expected in any society. While such “normal” cases are tragic
for those affected, they do not constitute a social problem
properly speaking. The rate of suicide throughout much of
Europe in the nineteenth century was on the rise, however,
reaching levels that could only imply the existence of a
“pathological state.”
Along with many of his contemporaries, Durkheim
looked upon the high incidence of suicide as yet another
symptom of social dissolution, a product of the wrenching
changes occurring with the emergence and rapid development
of industrial society. “What we see in the rising tide of
voluntary deaths is . . . a state of crisis and upheaval which

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cannot continue without danger.” Durkheim took up the study

of suicide to demonstrate not only the explanatory value of
sociology, but its diagnostic and practical value as well.
In Suicide (1897) Durkheim studied suicide rates as
measurable manifestations of prior social facts. He argued that
suicide rates were correlated with differing social
circumstances and created a theory of four social causes of
suicide, two of them endemic to modern society. Egoistic
suicide emerged from a lack of integration of the individual
into social groups, especially the family, the religious group,
and the political community. Since familial, religious, and
political ties were weakening in modern society, egoism was
the most frequent contemporary cause of suicide. He suggested
that the reintegration of the individual into society might be
performed by strengthening the role of occupational or
professional groups.
Anomic suicide resulted from the failure of another
class of social facts, namely social norms, to regulate the
individual’s desires. It occurred especially during fluctuating
economic circumstances, but could emerge in any setting
where the individual’s existing standards of conduct and
expectations were radically disrupted. Durkheim emphasized
that such social causes operated independently from the
individual incidence of suicide and represented a level of
social facts which could be understood only through a new
science of sociology.
Suicide in traditional and modern societies would

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therefore have to be understood in entirely different terms – for

Durkheim, more proof that suicide was a function of social
relations. This approach differs from that of many
contemporary sociologists who use statistics to measure and
predict the behavior of individuals as effected by their
orientations toward social goals, values, and sanctions. The
focus on individuals and their relationship to social factors
runs counter to the method Durkheim proposed: demonstrating
the impact of social facts, assessing solidarity mechanisms,
and measuring the group level effects of beliefs and values.

As Ritzer () explained, Durkheim’s theory of suicide

can be seen more clearly if we examine the relation between

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the types of suicide and his two underlying social facts—

integration andregulation. Integration refers to the strength of
the attachment thatwe have to society. Regulation refers to the
degree of external constraint on [Link] Durkheim, the two
social currents are continuous variables, and suiciderates go up
when either of these currents is too low or too high. We
thereforehave four types of suicide. If integration is high,
Durkheim callsthat type of suicide altruistic. Low integration
results in an increase in egoisticsuicides. Fatalistic suicide is
associated with high regulation, and anomic suicidewith low
regulation.
• Egoistic Suicide: High rates of egoistic suicide are
likely to be found in societies or groups in which the
individual is not well integrated into the larger social
unit. This lack of integration leads to a feeling that the
individual is not part of society, but this also means that
society is not part of the individual. Durkheim believed
that the best parts of a human being—our morality,
values, and sense of purpose—come from society. An
integrated society provides us with these things, as well
as a general feeling of moral support to get us through
the daily small indignities and trivial disappointments.
Without this, we are liable to commit suicide at the
smallest frustration.
• Altruistic Suicide: The second type of suicide
discussed by Durkheim is altruistic suicide. Whereas
egoistic suicide is more likely to occur when social
integration is too weak, altruistic suicide is more likely
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to occur when “social integration is too strong”. The

individual is literally forced into committing suicide.
When integration is low, people will commit suicide
because they have no greater good to sustain them.
When integration is high, they commit suicide in the
name of that greater good.
• Anomic Suicide: The third major form of suicide
discussed by Durkheim is anomic suicide, which is
more likely to occur when the regulative powers of
society are disrupted. Such disruptions are likely to
leave individuals dissatisfied because there is little
control over their passions, which are free to run wild
in an insatiable race for gratification. Rates of anomic
suicide are likely to rise whether the nature of the
disruption is positive (for example, an economic boom)
or negative (an economic depression). Either type of
disruption renders the collectivity temporarily
incapable of exercising its authority over individuals.
Such changes put people in new situations in which the
old norms no longer apply but new ones have yet to
develop.
• Fatalistic Suicide: There is a little-mentioned fourth
type of suicide—fatalistic Suicide. Whereas anomic
suicide is more likely to occur in situations in which
regulation is too weak, fatalistic suicide is more likely
to occur when regulation is excessive. Durkheim
described those who are more likely to commit
fatalistic suicide as “persons with futures pitilessly
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blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive

discipline.”
Durkheim concludes his study of suicide with an
examination of what reforms could be undertaken to prevent it.
Most attempts to prevent suicide have failed because it has
been seen as an individual problem. For Durkheim, attempts to
directly convince individuals not to commit suicide are futile,
since its real causes are in society. Of course, the first question
to be asked is whether suicide should be prevented or whether
it counts among those social phenomena that Durkheim would
call normal because of its widespread prevalence.
This is an especially important question for Durkheim
because his theory says that suicides result from social currents
that, in a less exaggerated form, are good for society. We
would not want to stop all economic booms because they lead
to anomic suicides, nor would we stop valuing individuality
because it leads to egoistic suicide. Similarly, altruistic suicide
results from our virtuous tendency to sacrifice ourselves for the
community. The pursuit of progress, the belief in the
individual, and the spirit of sacrifice all have their place in
society, and cannot exist without generating some suicides.
7. Elementary forms of Religious life
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life was published
in 1912. Durkheim was interested in the study of religion as
early as 1902 because he regarded as a major institution in
society. Also most of the articles in his sociological journal, L
Année Sociologique focused on the subject of religion. In The

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Elementary Forms of Religious Life he wanted to explore the

elements or the constituents of religion which make religious
life possible. He turned towards primitive religion and took an
evolutionary approach by assuming that by studying the basic
structure of primitive religion the constituents of religion in
general could be understood. He propounded a scientific study
of religion based on observation and exploration. He defined
religion as
a religion is a unified system of beliefs and
practices relative to sacred things, that is to say,
things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions –
beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a
single moral community called a church. (2001: 46)
For Durkheim, religion helped people make sense of
the world and religion personifies the society. He held that
religion is made up of beliefs and rituals. Beliefs for Durkheim
were the ideas that were focused towards the sacred. Rituals on
the other hand were the actions that were directed towards the
sacred. He held that universally the religious worldview is
divided into two domains that is the sacred and the profane. A
thing, belief or act is sacred because it is believed to be sacred
by the society.
7.1 Totemism
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim
(2001) wanted to understand how moral authority produces
social solidarity by examining what he thought was its simplest
or most elementary form: ‘totemism’. A totem is ‘a symbol, a

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material expression of something else’ (2001: 154). On the

totem can be inscribed as any emblem or blazon considered
sacred, usually animals or plants. Totemism is the name given
to the visible sacred object that social groups worship. It is the
tangible expression of ‘god’ and, at the same time, the symbol
of a particular society. It is a moral force given material form.
For Durkheim, totemism is the original form of all
subsequent religious life and, by extension, collective life in
general. Social life is only made possible by a vast
organization of collective representations. The collective only
becomes self-conscious of its own existence by fixing on some
material object. Objects and society facilitate each other. The
totem both expresses collective life and helps to create it
(Durkheim, 2001: 175). The totem’s ‘real essence’ is that it is
only the material form taken by an immaterial substance or
unseen energy of a permanent, anonymous and impersonal
social force (2001: 140–41). Totemism outlives individuals
and lends the social group a sense of eternal existence.
Totemism could not merely superimpose onto reality
an unreal world of monstrous aberrations and ‘inexplicable
hallucinations’. The scared object – the totem – is merely a
focal point for collective identity and social structure.
Religious exaltation is real exaltation about the moral authority
of society. Totems are misrecognized only to the extent that
the symbol seems to be an autonomous force. In reality, the
god of the clan is really the clan itself, ‘but transfigured and
imagined in the physical form of the plant or animal species
that serve as totems’ (2001: 154).

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8.2 The Sacred and the Profane

According to Durkheim (2001) all religious belief
systems, from the most basic to the most complex,
fundamentally divide the world into two mutually exclusive
spheres: the sacred and the profane. The sacred represents the
ideal that society sets for itself in contrast to the profane world
of private egos and mundane interests. Any object might be
considered sacred – a tree, a rock, a house, an animal, human
hair, ashes and so on – as might any words, phrases or gestures
carried out by a specially consecrated person. The sacred can
be ‘superimposed’ on a wide range of objects. Since nothing is
inherently ‘sacred’ this quality must be acquired from
somewhere else.
In religion everything can be assigned to a class of
sacred things radically divided from a class of profane things.
Religious belief structures the world into the pure and impure,
holy and sacrilegious, divine and diabolical, consecration and
contamination. Durkheim takes this as the starting point for
understanding how all human groups are based on a radical
duality that assigns dignity, privilege or distinction to one
thing, not given by palpable experience, over other things that
are based in more practical and mundane activities of everyday
life. When things are considered sacred they are arranged into
a unified system.
Every homogeneous group of sacred things, or indeed
every sacred thing of any importance, constitutes a centre of
organization around which a group of beliefs and rites, a

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particular cult, gravitates. And no religion, however unified,

fails to recognise the plurality of sacred things. Even
Christianity, at least in its Catholic form, includes, in addition,
to the divine being – the Virgin, angels, saints, souls of the
dead, and so on. (Durkheim, 2001)
This same mental structure later gives rise to scientific
knowledge set apart from ordinary common sense. Because
this basic duality has survived for millennia it cannot be
illusory but must fulfill a profound human need. That need is
society. What makes a thing sacred is the collective feeling
that attaches to it. Collective life ‘awakens’ religious thought
in order for society to remake itself. Sacred objects will
disappear over time, but society will return again and again to
create sacred replacements to reaffirm its collective unity.
Conclusion
In this module we started our discussion with social
and intellectual context in which Durkheim developed his
conception of sociology as an independent scientific discipline
with its distinct subject matter. His life and works are
regarded as a sustained effort at laying the legitimate base of
sociology as a discipline. He identified sociology as a study of
social facts and developed rules for their observation and
explanation. In his studies on sociological methods he explain
different aspects of social facts. He demonstrated the nature of
these studies through the study of division of labour in
different types of solidarities, of suicide-rates in different types
of societies, and the study of Religion in a single type.

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In this module we discussed Durkheim’s three mojor

works. First work was The Division of Labor in Society, in
which he argued that the collective conscience of societies
with mechanical solidarity had been replaced by a new organic
solidarity based on mutual interdependence in a society
organized by a division of labor. He investigated the difference
between mechanical and organic solidarity through an analysis
of their different legal systems. He argued that mechanical
solidarity is associated with repressive laws while organic
solidarity is associated with legal systems based on restitution.
In the second one Durkheim studied suicide. He looked
at different aspects of suicide and its social causes and
consequences. Durkheim differentiated among four types of
suicide—egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic—and
showed how each is affected by different changes in social
currents. The study of suicide was taken by Durkheim and his
supporters as evidence that sociology has a legitimate place in
the social sciences. After all, it was argued, if sociology could
explain so individualistic an act as suicide, it certainly could be
used to explain other, less individual aspects of social life.
In his last major work, The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life, Durkheim focused on another aspect of culture:
religion. In his analysis of primitive religion, Durkheim sought
to show the roots of religion in the social structure of society.
It is society that defines certain things as sacred and others as
profane. Durkheim demonstrated the social sources of religion
in his analysis of primitive totemism and its roots in the social
structure of the clan. Durkheim concluded that religion and

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society are one and the same, two manifestations of the same
general process.
KEY CONCEPTS
Anomie: Moral disorder; lack of moral regulation.
Profane: That which is of the everyday world; mundane,
routine.
Ritual: Highly routinized act, such as taking communion.
Sacred: That which is extraordinary, set apart, above and
beyond, the everyday world.
Social Facts: Conditions and circumstances external to the
individual that, nevertheless, determine one’s course of action.
Social Solidarity: Feeling of “oneness” of a group.
Solidarity (Mechanical): Solidarity that is typified by feelings
of likeness.
Solidarity (Organic): Solidarity that is a function of
interdependence.
Symbol : Something that stands for something else.

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Reference and Further Readings

• Durkheim, E. (1947) Suicide — A Study in Sociology,
Macmillan: New York
• Durkheim, E. (1950) The Rules of Sociological Method,
The Free Press of Glencoe: New York
• Durkheim, E. (1961) The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life. Collier- Macmillan: New York
• Durkheim, E. (1964) The Division of Labour in Society,
The Free Press Glencoe: New York
• Giddens, A. (1971) Capitalism and Modern Social Theory:
An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Giddens, A. (1972) Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Giddens, A. (1978) Durkheim. Glasgow: Fontana.
• Indira Gandhi National Open University Course Material.
(2005). Sociological Thought, New Delhi: IGNOU.
• Morrison, K. (1995). Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations
of Modern Social Thought, London: Sage. Wilson.
• Nisbet, R.A. (1974) The Sociology of Emile Durkheim
Oxford University Press: New York.
• Rex, John (1961) Key Problems in Sociological Theory.
Routledge and Kegan Paul: London

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MODULE 2
KARL MARX
Chapter Outline

2.1 Karl Marx: Dialectical and Historical Materialism

2.2 Class and Class conflict
2.3 Theory of Alienation, Commodity Fetishism
2.4 Theory of Social Change

Objectives of this Module

Discuss the theory of historical materialism and outline
the contribution of historical materialism to sociology
Discuss the Marxian concepts of dialectics and social
change
Define the concept of class and discuss Marx's view of
society and social change
Describe the various criteria for class formation
Understand Marx's concept of alienation and
commodity fetishism.
Outline Marx's ideas on social change and revolution.
1. Introduction
In the previous module we looked at the development
of modern sociological theories in the 18th and 19th century
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Europe. We have looked the context in which sociology

emerged in Europe and learnt about the impact of the
Industrial Revolution on its founders. In this module we will
deal with one of the founders, namely, Karl Marx. Though he
focused on economic analysis of the 19th century Europe and
capitalist development, his idea was full of sociological
insights.
We start with the concept of historical materialism,
which is the scientific core of Marx’s sociological thought.
Therefore, it is necessary to situate historical materialism
within the overall context of Marx’s work and his
contributions to sociological theory. With this background we
will discuss about the notion of class as used by Karl Marx. To
understand class and its meaning, we have to study in detail
about the constitution of a class and different criteria to call
any collectivity a class. And we will looks at how and why
classes come into conflict with each other. We will seek to
understand the impact of these class conflicts on the history of
development of society.
In the last part we will discuss two key concepts in
Marxian sociology, namely, alienation and commodity
fetishism. And we will looks at how these two concepts will
help us to understand modern capitalist system. This final part
also looks at the concept of social change in the society. Marx
identified class conflict and class straggle as a way forward for
social change. Historically, Marx identified different stages of
social evolution according to the mode of production.

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2. Karl Marx: Biographic Sketch

Marx was born into a middle class household, the
oldest male of six surviving children. His parents had Jewish
origins, but converted to Protestantism in response to Prussian
anti Semitism. Marx was exposed to Enlightenment thought
and socialist ideas in his teenage years. He had born on May 5,
1818, in Trier, one of the oldest cities in Germany, to Heinrich
and Henrietta Marx. Both parents came from a long line of
rabbis. His father was the first in his family to receive a secular
education (he could recite numerous passages from
Enlightenment thinkers)—Heinrich was a lawyer who allowed
himself to be baptized Protestant in order to avoid anti-
Semitism; a move that was not entirely successful.
As a university student, he joined the Berlin Doctors
Club, a group of left wing intellectuals who embraced Hegel’s
philosophical vision of humanity, making itself historically
through its own labor. They opposed right wing Hegelians,
who stressed his theory of the state and justified the Prussian
regime. Left Hegelians wanted to complete philosophy’s break
with religion and fashion an approach that favored progressive
change. Marx finished his doctoral dissertation in 1841, but did
not complete the second thesis required to enter German
academe. After left Hegelian Bruno Bauer lost his academic
position for political reasons, Marx knew, especially given his
Jewish roots, that this door was closed to him. He decided to
try journalism. In 1842 Marx wrote for the progressive
Rheinische Zeitung and soon became its editor.

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Politically, Marx’s childhood and youth fell in that

period of European history when the reactionary powers
(favoring monarchical political order) were attempting to
eradicate from post Napoleonic Europe all traces of the French
Revolution. There was, at the same time, a liberal movement
(favoring autonomy of the individual and standing for the
protection of political and civil liberties) in Germany that was
making itself felt. The movement was given impetus by the
Revolution in France. In the late 1830s a further step toward
radical criticism for extreme changes in existing socio-political
conditions was made by the young Hegelians (a group of
people following the philosophy of Hegel). This was the group
with which Marx became formally associated when he was
studying law and philosophy at the University of Berlin.
Because of his political affiliations, Marx was denied a
university position by the government. Marx turned to writing
and editing, but had to battle government censorship
continually. In 1843, Marx moved to Paris with his new wife,
Jenny von Westphalen. In Paris, he read the works of reformist
thinkers who had been suppressed in Germany and began his
association with Friedrich Engels. During his time in Paris,
Marx wrote several documents that were intended for self
clarification (they were never published in his lifetime) but
have since become important Marxian texts (Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology,
which was finished in Brussels).
Over the next several years, Marx moved from
Brussels, back to Paris, and then to Germany. Much of his

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movement was associated with revolutions that broke out in

Paris and Germany in 1848. That year also marks the
publication of The Communist Manifesto. Finally, in 1849,
Marx moved to London, where he remained. He spent the
early years of the 1850s writing several historical and political
pamphlets. In 1852, Marx began his studies at the British
Museum. There he would sit daily from 10am to 7pm,
studying the reports of factory inspectors and other documents
that described the abuses of early capitalism. This research
formed the basis of Das Kapital, his largest work. During this
time, three of his children died of malnutrition.
Although he was the youngest member of the young
Hegelians, Karl Marx inspired their confidence, respect and
even admiration. They saw in him a ‘new Hegel’ or rather a
powerful anti-Hegelian. Among other influences the intensive
study of [Link](1632-1677) and A. Hume(1711-1776)
helped Marx to develop a positive conception of democracy. It
went far beyond the notions held at the time by radical in
Germany. The radicals consisted of a political group associated
with views, practices and policies of extreme change.
The workers' movements were quiet after 1848, until
the founding of the First International. Founded by French and
British labor leaders at the opening of the London Exhibition
of Modern Industry, the union soon had members from most
industrialized countries. Its goal was to replace capitalism with
collective ownership. Marx spent the next decade of his life
working with the International. The movement continued to
gain strength worldwide until the Paris Commune of 1871. The

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Commune was the first worker revolution and government.

Three months after its formation, Paris was attacked by the
French government. Thirty thousand unarmed workers were
massacred. Marx continued to study but never produced
another major writing. His wife died in 1881 and his remaining
daughter a year later. Marx died in his home on March 14,
1883.
3. Marx as Sociologist
Marx was not a sociologist and did not consider
himself one. Although his work is too broad to be
encompassed by the term sociology, there is a sociological
theory to be found in Marx’s work. From the beginning, there
were those who were heavily influenced by Marx, and there
has been a continuous strand of Marxian sociology, primarily
in Europe. But for the majority of early sociologists, his work
was a negative force, something against which to shape their
sociology. Until very recently, sociological theory, especially
in America, has been characterized by either hostility to or
ignorance of Marxian theory.
The basic reason for this rejection of Marx was
ideological. Many of the early sociological theorists were
inheritors of the conservative reaction to the disruptions of the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Marx’s radical
ideas and the radical social changes he foretold and sought to
bring to life were clearly feared and hated by such thinkers.
Marx was dismissed as an ideologist. It was argued that he was
not a serious sociological theorist. However, ideology per se

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could not have been the real reason for the rejection of Marx,
because the work of Comte, Durkheim, and other conservative
thinkers also was heavily ideological. It was the nature of the
ideology, not the existence of ideology as such, that put off
many sociological theorists. They were ready and eager to buy
conservative ideology wrapped in a cloak of sociological
theory, but not the radical ideology offered by Marx and his
followers.
1. There were, of course, other reasons why Marx was not
accepted by many early theorists. He seemed to be
more an economist than a sociologist. Although the
early sociologists would certainly admit the importance
of the economy, they would also argue that it was only
one of a number of components of social life.
2. Another reason for the early rejection of Marx was the
nature of his interests. Whereas the early sociologists
were reacting to the disorder created by the
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and later the
Industrial Revolution, Marx was not upset by these
disorders—or by disorder in general. Rather, what
interested and concerned Marx most was the
oppressiveness of the capitalist system that was
emerging out of the Industrial Revolution. Marx
wanted to develop a theory that explained this
oppressiveness and that would help overthrow that
system. Marx’s interest was in revolution, which stood
in contrast to the conservative concern for reform and
orderly change.

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3. Another difference worth noting is the difference in

philosophical roots between Marxian and conservative
sociological theory. Most of the conservative theorists
were heavily influenced by the philosophy of
Immanuel Kant. Among other things, this led them to
think in linear, cause-and-effect terms. That is, they
tended to argue that a change in A (say, the change in
ideas during the Enlightenment) leads to a change in B
(say, the political changes of the French Revolution). In
contrast, Marx was most heavily influenced, as we
have seen, by Hegel, who thought in dialectical rather
than cause-and-effect terms. Among other things, the
dialectic attunes us to the ongoing reciprocal effects of
social forces. Thus, a dialectician would
reconceptualize the example discussed above as a
continual, ongoing interplay of ideas and politics.
4. Karl Marx: Dialectical and Historical Materialism
In this section we will discuss about historical
materialism which is the scientific core of Marx’s sociological
thought. Therefore, it is necessary to situate historical
materialism within the overall context of Marx’s work and his
contributions to sociological theory. For this purpose the unit
deals first with the brief background of the philosophical and
theoretical origins of historical materialism in the context of its
intellectual and social milieu. Then we go on to a discussion of
certain basic assumptions upon which the theory of historical
materialism is built. This is followed by an exposition of the
theory of historical materialism and Marx’s reasons for

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refuting economic determinism. Finally, the unit lists certain

important contributions of historical materialism to
sociological theory. A proper understanding of the above
sections will help you to study the coming units related to
other aspects of Marx’s thought.
‘Historical materialism’, the name given to the
methodological approach developed by Marx, recognizes the
essentially social character of life. Its central postulates can be
stated succinctly.
‘Materialism’ refers to the following premises:
 social being determines consciousness
 human beings necessarily act collectively in society to
establish the means of their own physical and social
reproduction
 physical and social reproduction are mutually
dependent on each other
 in the course of its reproduction societies develop
distinctive structures of cooperation and competition
known as modes of production
 beyond a minimal level of subsistence societies divide
into antagonistic classes.
‘Historical’ refers to additional premises:
 there is a tendency for the productive forces of society
to grow over time
 human beings make their own history within pre-given
social conditions

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 societies develop inner contradictions which are

resolved either by revolutionary transformation or
social implosion.
In Marx's time, there were two important ways of
understanding the issue of reality: idealism and materialism.
Idealism posits that reality only exists in our idea of it. While
there may indeed be a material world that exists in and of
itself, that world exists for humans only as it appears. The
world around us is perceived through the senses, but this sense
data is structured by innate cognitive categories. Thus, what
appears to humans is not the world itself but our idea of it. On
the other hand, materialism argues that all reality may be
reduced to physical properties. In materialism, our ideas about
the world are simple reflections; those ideas are structured by
the innate physical characteristics of the universe.
Marx feels that both of these extremes do not correctly
consider humans as social animals. He proposes another way
of understanding reality and consciousness; he terms this way
of thinking naturalism, or humanism. Marx rejects brute
materialism out of hand, but he has to consider idealism more
carefully. One of idealism's strongest supporters, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, died just four years prior to Marx
enrolling at the University of Bonn, and at the time, Hegel still
held a significant place in the thinking of German philosophers
( in fact, Hegel is still a powerful figure in philosophy).
Hegel was an idealist and argued that material objects
(like a chair or a rock) truly and completely only exist in our

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concept of them. But Hegel took idealism to another level,

using it to argue for the existence of God (the ultimate
concept); he argued that the ideal took priority over the
material world. According to Hegel, human history is a
dialectical unfolding of the Truth that reality consists of ideas
and that the material world is nothing more than shadow.
For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he
even transforms into an independent subject,
under the name of ‘the Idea’, is the creator of
the real world, and the real world is only the
external appearance of the idea. With me the
reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the
material world reflected in the mind of man,
and translated into forms of thought.
Dialectic contains different elements that are naturally
antagonistic to one another; Hegel called them the thesis and
antithesis. The dialectic is like an argument or a dialog
between elements that are locked together (The word dialectic
comes from the Greek word dialektikos, meaning discourse or
discussion.). For example, to understand "good," you must at
the same time understand "bad." To comprehend one, you
must understand the other: good and bad are locked in a
continual dialog. Hegel argued that these kinds of conflicts
would resolve themselves into a new element or synthesis,
which in turn sets up a new dialectic: every synthesis contains
a thesis that by definition has conflicting elements.

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Marx liked the historical process implied in Hegel's

dialectic, but he disagreed with its ideational base. Marx, as we
have seen, argues that human beings are unique because they
creatively produce materials to fill their own material needs.
Since the defining feature of humanity is production, not ideas
and concepts, then Hegel's notion of idealism is false, and the
dialectic is oriented around material production and not
ideas—the material dialectic. Thus, the dynamics of the
historical dialectic are to be found in the economic system,
with each economic system inherently containing antagonistic
elements. As the antagonistic elements work themselves out,
they form a new economic system.
In The German Ideology Marx presents the most
detailed account of the theory of history. In it, Marx set out to

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reformulate the work of the eminent German philosopher

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

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experience determines ideas. For instance, Marx asserts,

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

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revolution brings about resolution of conflict. It means that

new forces of production take roots and give rise to new
relations of production. Thus, you can see that for Marx, it is
the growth of new productive forces which outlines the course
of human history. The productive forces are the powers society
uses to produce material conditions of life. For Marx, human
history is an account of development and consequences of new
forces of material production. This is the reason why his view
of history is given the name of historical materialism. In a
nutshell, this is the theory of historical materialism.
In brief, we can say that Marx’s theory of historical
materialism states that all objects, whether living or inanimate,
are subject to continuous change. The rate of this change is
determined by the laws of dialectics. In other words, there are
forces which bring about the change. You can call it the stage
of antithesis. The actual nature of change, i.e., the stage of
synthesis, will be, according to Marx, determined by the
interaction of these two types of forces. Before explaining in
some detail further connections which Marx makes to
elaborate this theory, it is necessary to point out that different
schools of Marxism provide differing explanations of this
theory. We are here confined to a kind of standard version in
our rendering of historical materialism. We should keep in
mind that materialistic conception of history is not a rough and
ready formulation for explaining different forms of social
organisation.
To sum up, historical materialist perspective takes
economic power as the prime dimension of social stratification

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and holds that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the
history of class struggles. The main classes in the societies
Engels and Marx studied most intensively were the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. More particularly, classical
historical materialism postulated several trends supposedly
characteristic of any society with private ownership of the
means of production, such as machines and factories (capital
goods) and free markets for capital, labor, and consumption
goods.
According to the ‘‘general law of capitalist
accumulation,’’ the longer the capitalist mode of production
prevails, the more capital will have accumulated, leading to
both higher profits for capital owners (the bourgeoisie) and to
worsening living conditions for the people who live by their
labor (the proletariat). Although recognizing in the early
phases of the capitalist mode of production the presence of
small and large proprietors as well as skilled and unskilled
workers, the persistence of the capitalist mode of production
would lead to a disappearance of the middle classes.
Small proprietors would become less common, as they
lose out in the fierce competition from large proprietors.
Workers skilled in using their hand tools would also become
less common as proprietors replace them with cheaper
unskilled workers operating machines. In addition, since the
persistence of the capitalist mode of production is
accompanied by ever deeper economic downturns, wages tend
to fall while the percentage of unemployed workers rises.

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5. Class and Class conflict

Marx’s sociology is, in fact, Sociology of the class
struggle. This means one has to understand the Marxian
concept of class in order to appreciate Marxian philosophy and
thought. Marx has used the term social class throughout his
works but explained it only in a fragmented form. The clearest
passages on the concept of class structure can be found in the
third volume of his famous work, Capital (1894). Under the
title of ‘Social Classes’ Marx distinguished three classes,
related to the three sources of income:
(a) owners of simple labour power or labourers whose
main source of income is labour;
(b) owners of capital or capitalists whose main source of
income is profit or surplus value;
(c) land owners whose main source of income is ground
rent.
In this way the class structure of modern capitalist
society is composed of three major classes viz., salaried
labourers or workers, capitalists and landowners. At a broader
level, society could be divided into two major classes i.e. the
‘haves’ (owners of land and / or capital) often called as
bourgeoisie and the ‘have-nots’ (those who own nothing but
their own labour power), often called as proletariats. Marx has
tried to even give a concrete definition of social class.
According to him ‘a social class occupies a fixed place in the
process of production’.
Marx and Engels famously set out the historical relation
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of classes early in The Communist Manifesto where they

declared:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles. Freeman and slave,
patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and
oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one
another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden
now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either
in a revolutionary reconstitution of society, or in
the common ruin of the contending classes. (1998:
34–35)
In fact, none of these earlier modes of production were
overthrown by the exploited class. It was not peasants that
overthrew feudalism but the new, emerging ‘middling sorts’ of
the capitalist class. Previous societies were divided
hierarchically into complex gradations of rank, somewhat
obscuring the division into fundamental classes: ‘In ancient
Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the
Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,
apprentices, serf; in almost all of these classes, again,
subordinate gradations’ (Marx and Engels, 1998: 35). In the
The German Ideology Marx and Engels wrote,
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the
ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling
material force of society, is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force. The class which has the

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means of material production at its disposal, has

control at the same time over the means of mental
production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the
ideas of those who lack the means of mental
production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are
nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relationships, the dominant
material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of
the relationships which make the one class the
ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.
The individuals composing the ruling class possess
among other things consciousness, and therefore
think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and
determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is
self-evident that they do this in its whole range,
hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as
producers of ideas, and regulate the production and
distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their
ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For
instance, in an age and in a country where royal
power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie are contending
for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is
shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers
proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as
an “eternal law.”
Modern society, Marx and Engels claim, simplifies
class antagonisms, splitting society into ‘two great hostile
camps’: bourgeois and proletarians. Engels later added a

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footnote to define what he took these terms to mean:

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern
capitalists, owners of the means of social production
and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the
class of modern wage labourers who, in having no
means of production of their own, are reduced to
selling their labour power in order to live. (Marx
and Engels, 1998: 34)
Marx and Engels praise the bourgeois class for its
revolutionary achievements: the overthrow of feudalism, the
creation of a world market, technological dynamism, the
ending of religious superstitions, urbanization, stimulating the
creation of a world literature, all marvellous ‘wonders far
surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic
cathedrals’ (1998: 38).In the process, capital organizes the
proletariat into a class as ‘the conditions of life are more and
more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all
distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to
the same low level’ (1998: 45). This is a process known as
‘proletarianization’.
Increasingly, the lower strata of the middle class –
shopkeepers, tradespeople and peasants – fall into the class of
wage labourersas they are put out of business by the power of
larger capitals. The proletariat develops just so long as it
increases the amount of capital accumulated by the
bourgeoisie. Wage labour is reduced to the status of a
commodity, possessing only its labour power for sale,

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interchangeable with other commodities. Labour is alienated, a

mere ‘appendage of the machine’, which controls the pace and
skill of labour.
For Marx, class division and conflict between classes
exist in all societies. Industrial society consists mainly of two
conflicting classes: the bourgeoisie, owners of the means of
production (the resources – land, factories, capital, and
equipment – needed for the production and distribution of
material goods); and the proletariat, who work for the owners
of productive property. The owning class controls key
economic, political, and ideological institutions, placing it
inevitably in opposition to non owners as it seeks to protect its
power and economic interests. ‘‘Class struggle’’ is the contest
between opposing classes and it is through the dynamic forces
that result from class awareness of conflicting interests that
societal change is generated.
In terms of class conflict, or potential class conflict,
Marx distinguished between a ‘‘class in itself ’’ and a ‘‘class
for itself.’’ The former comprises a social grouping whose
constituents share the same relationship to the forces of
production. However, for Marx, a social grouping only fully
becomes a class when it forms a ‘‘class for itself.’’ At this
stage, its members have achieved class consciousness and
solidarity – a full awareness of their true situation of
exploitation and oppression. Members of a class subsequently
develop a common identity, recognize their shared interest,
and unite, so creating class cohesion and ultimately taking
recourse to revolutionary violence.

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6. Theory of Alienation and Commodity Fetishism

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

enthusiastic absorption and self realization as
hobbies and leisure pursuits.
4. Alienated labor is an isolated endeavor, not part of
a collectively planned effort to meet a group need.
Consequently, workers are alienated from others as
well as from themselves. Marx argued that these four aspects
of alienation reach their peak under industrial capitalism and
that alienated work, which is inherently dissatisfying, would
naturally produce in workers a desire to change the existing
system. Alienation, in Marx’s view, thus plays a crucial role
in leading to social revolution to change society toward a non
alienated future.
The study of alienation has probably inspired more
writing and research in the social sciences than any other
single topic. Today, the core of that research has moved away
from the social philosophical approach of Marx, based on
projecting a future that could be, and towards more empirical
study of the causes and consequences of alienation within the
world of work as it actually exists. Although less weeping than
Marx’s original vision, this approach has produced insights
that are largely consistent with his views. The contemporary
approach substitutes measures of job satisfaction for Marx’s
more expansive conception of alienation. Related concepts
include job commitment, effort bargaining, and, conversely,
resistance. In the political sphere voting behavior and a sense
of political efficacy have emerged as central empirical

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indicators of underlying alienation from society’s power

structures.
The intellectual movement from a social philosophy of
alienation to a social science of alienation has produced a
wealth of research on the causes of job satisfaction and related
empirical measures of political and social disengagement.
Autonomy to decide on the details of one’s own work tasks
and freedom from oppressive supervision have been identified
as among the most important determinants of experiencing
satisfaction and meaning in one’s work. Other determinants of
job satisfaction include both positive foundations for self
realization, such as perceptions of justice at work and
supportive coworkers, and corrosive factors, such as large
organizational size, bureaucracy, and control of local
operations by remote corporate entities.
The absence of work can also generate a sense of
alienation because one has no useful role in society. High
levels of unemployment have been empirically linked with
increased depression, higher rates of illness, and even suicide.
Globalization has contributed to job loss for many workers
who are displaced by workers elsewhere in the world who
either have access to better technology or are willing to accept
lower pay. In the political sphere alienation arises from a sense
of estrangement from political power.
Such estrangement arises because political institutions
have become increasingly distant in large complex societies,
but also, importantly, because effective channels of

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participation have been blocked for many people or simply do

not exist. The role of individual and corporate wealth as
determinants of political influence has led many people to a
lack of confidence and trust that the political institutions of
society either represent their interests or are open to their
participation. Political alienation appears to be on the increase.
In western nations, particularly in the United States, the
proportion of people who bother to vote has fallen to a historic
low.
In the 1960s in the United States about three quarters of
the population felt that the government was run for the benefit
of all. Today, this number has fallen to roughly one quarter.
Even for those who have good jobs and some opportunity to
exercise political power, overwork and the experience of
feeling chronically rushed and pulled in multiple directions
have become increasingly common sources of disaffection.
Such stresses can lead to feelings of alienation and separation
from one’s life. In spite of widespread overwork, however,
surveys indicate that many people prefer work activities over
family and leisure activities, further contributing to overwork
even in the face of work that may be less than fulfilling.
It appears that at least some work in modern society
may compete well with alternative activities in the private
spheres of life. If people prefer work to family and leisure,
does this imply that alienation from work has ended? Or does
it simply suggest that the roles of community and family are
fading as these assume a smaller and smaller place in people’s
lives? These changes, if true, present a challenge to traditional

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alienation theory as it struggles to understand the increasingly

diverse experience of life in modern society.
Theories of alienation, as scientific explorations of the
causes of job satisfaction and political behavior, serve a pivotal
function in moving us beyond workplace and societal practices
that destroy human motivation and toward practices that
liberate human involvement and creativity. Theories of
alienation, as exercises in social philosophy, help to keep alive
questions about the future of society by envisioning possible
alternatives that do not yet exist. Such exercises are necessary
if the social sciences are to retain a transformative potential
beyond the tyranny of what is and toward what could be.
7. Commodity Fetishism
In Marx's pioneering critique of capitalism, he brought
the commodity to the fore as a unit of analysis in the study of
capitalist social relations. In his works, Marx refined the
meaning of the term, suggesting that commodities were not
simply objects that fulfilled needs, but that their seeming
simple utility served to mask the social and material relations
that brought them into existence –particularly the human labor
necessary to produce them. For Marx, commodities had a
‘‘dual nature,’’ which was comprised of their utility(or use
value) and their value in the market (or exchange value).
Although a commodity was useful to the person who
bought it because it satisfied some need, it was also useful to
the person who sold it because its sale yielded value in excess
of the cost of the labor and materials necessary to produce it,

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either in the form of other commodities or in money. Marx’s

refinement of the term was in response to the work of
economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who
treated commodities as if their value were strictly further
facilitate the introduction of the notion of commodity fetishism
into social theory. At the end of the nineteenth century, even as
the role of fetishism in the evolution of human social life was
called into question, the centrality of capitalism and
commodity exchange in the social organization of the
Americas and Europe captured the attention of an emerging
sociological discipline.
The rapid rise and rationalization of industrial
development framed Max Weber’s discussion of the
relationship of (Christian) religious orientation and capitalist
accumulation, and the attendant availability of a wider range of
consumer goods informed Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of the
role of the commodity in bourgeois status hierarchies. What
had been for Marx a sarcastic metaphor for the
misapprehension of social relations as natural became
increasingly a sincere heuristic for examining the role of
commodities in the organization of daily social life: like its
archaic precursor, the commodity fetish mediated between
abstract economic forces and the actions of individuals.
8. Theory of Social Change
In Marx's analysis of the history of human society he
identified four modes of productions and he mapped social
change in the history according to the mode of productions

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may exist within any particular society at a given point in time.

But in all forms of society there is one determinate kind of
production which assigns rank and influence to all the others.
Here we shall discuss each of the four modes of production,
identified by Marx.
1. Asiatic Mode of Production: The concept of Asiatic
mode of production refers to a specific original mode
of production. This is distinct from the ancient slave
mode of production or the feudal mode of production.
The Asiatic mode of production is characteristic of
primitive communities in which ownership of land is
communal. These communities are still partly
organised on the basis of kinship relations. State power,
which expresses the real or imaginary unity of these
communities, controls the use of essential economic
resources, and directly appropriates part of the labour
and production of the community.
2. Ancient Mode of Production: It refers to the forms
which precede capitalist production. In some of these
terms slavery is seen as the foundation of the
productive system. The relation of masters to slaves is
considered as the very essence of slavery. In this
system of production the master has the right of
ownership over the slave and appropriates the products
of the slave’s labour. The slave is not allowed to
reproduce. If we restrict ourselves to agricultural
slavery, exploitation operates according to the
following modalities: the slaves work the master’s land

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and receive their subsistence in return. The master’s

profit is constituted by the difference between what the
slaves produce and what they consume. But what is
usually forgotten is that beyond this, the slaves are
deprived of their own means of reproduction. The
reproduction of slavery depends on the capacity of the
society to acquire new slaves, that is, on an apparatus
which is not directly linked to the capacities of
demographic reproduction of the enslaving population.
The rate of accumulation depends on the number of
slaves acquired, and not directly on their productivity.
3. Feudal Mode of Production: Marx and Engels writing
about feudalism tended to focus on the transition
between the feudal and the capitalist modes of
production. They were concerned with the ‘existence
form’ of labour and the manner in which the products
of labour were appropriated by ruling classes. Just as
capitalists exploited the workers or the ‘proletariat’, so
did the feudal lords exploit their tenants or ‘serfs’.
Capitalists grabbed surplus value and feudal lords
appropriated land rent from their serfs.
4. Capitalist Mode of Production: Capitalism refers to a
mode of production in which capital is the dominant
means of production. Capital can be in various forms. It
can take the form of money or credit for the purchase
of labour power and materials of production. It can be
money or credit for buying physical machinery. In
capitalist mode of production, the private ownership of

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capital in its various forms is in the hands of a class of

capitalists. The ownership by capitalists is to the
exclusion of the mass of the population.
In the German Ideology (1845-6), both Marx and
Engels outlined their scheme of history. Here, the main idea
was that based on a mode of production there was a succession
of historical phases. Change from one phase to the next was
viewed by them as a state of revolution brought about by
conflicts between old institutions and new productive forces. It
was only later on that both Marx and Engels devoted more
time and studied English, French and American revolutions.
They named them as bourgeois revolutions. Marx’s hypothesis
of bourgeois revolution has given us a perspective to look at
social changes in Europe and America. But more than this, it
has stimulated further research by scholars on this subject.
Secondly, Marx spoke of another kind of revolution. It
pertained to communism. Marx viewed communism as a
sequel to capitalism. Communism, according to Marx, would
wipe out all class divisions and therefore would allow for a
fresh start with moral and social transformation. This was the
vision both Marx and Engels carried in their minds for future
society. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find
that their vision has not come true and communism has not had
its sway around the world. All the same Marx’s ideas have
influenced the nature of growth of capitalism. Tempered with
socialist ideas it is now beginning to acquire a human face.
Marx’s concept of socialist revolution presupposes an era

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of shift from capitalism to socialism. He explained bourgeois

revolution as a defeat of the aristocracy. This defeat came at
the end of a long period of growth of capitalism. The
overthrow of the bourgeoisie is, on the other hand, only the
first phase of the revolutionary change from capitalism to
socialism. According to Marx the socialistic phase of
revolution would not be without classes, occupational division
of labour and market economy etc. It is only in the higher
phase of revolution there would be distribution of goods to
each according to his needs. This would be the phase of
communism. Thus, change to communism was perceived by
Marx as a series of steps to completely revolutionise the entire
mode of production.
In fact, Marx conceived intensification of class
antagonism in capitalism, because the new forces of
production do not correspond to the relations of production.
There will be increasing gap between the levels of distribution
of gains between the two classes. This shall leave the have-
nots extremely alienated and conscious of their class interests.
The new forces of production in capitalism are capable of mass
production and will dump heaps of prosperity at the feet of
bourgeoisie without helping the lot of proletariat, who would
continue to suffer from misery and poverty. This shall
accentuate the class consciousness and hasten the maturation
of the conditions for socialist revolution. The socialist
revolution according to Marx would be qualitatively different
from all the revolutions of the past as it would for the first
time, after the beginning of history of inequality and

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exploitation, usher in a stage of classless society with a hope

for all members of society.
9. Conclusion
This module we started with a biographical sketch of
Marx and why he considered as an important figure in the
history of sociological thought. Then we looked at the concept
of historical materialism as a materialist interpretation of
social, cultural and political phenomena. It propounds that
social institutions and related values are determined by the
mode of production processes rather than ideas in the
explanation of history. However, the word ‘determined’, in the
Marxian sense, refers to determination in the last analysis and
should not be taken in an absolute sense.
According to Marx historical materialism is a
dialectical theory of human progress. It regards history as the
development of human beings’ efforts to master the forces of
nature and, hence, of production. Since all production is
carried out within social organisation, history is the succession
of changes in social system, the development of human
relations geared to productive activity (mode of production) in
which the economic system forms the base and all other
relationships, institutions, activities, and idea systems are
“superstructural”.
Marx had rejected the strong emphasis of the
determining influence of cultural ideas as reflected in German
historicism. For him, the development of sociology required an
analysis of how the actual material and social conditions of

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people’s lives influenced their consciousness and behavior

aswell as their opportunities to develop their full human
potential. With his focus on the economic class structure, he
saw class divisions in modern society deepening as a result of
the advancing centralization of the means of production and
capitalists’ expanding levels of exploitation of workers in their
efforts to increase their profits. Although the capitalist system
was subject to periodic crises, their resolution should not be
expected to end the process of exploitation and class conflict
until the capitalist system is eventually overthrown through
revolutionary struggle.
KEY CONCEPTS
Alienation: Dehumanizing estrangement or separation of
workers from the means of production, the product of their
labor, their own species being, and humanity as a whole, in
capitalism.
Ancient Mode of Production: A production system where the
master has the right of ownership over the slave and
appropriates the products of his labour through servitude,
without allowing the slave to reproduce.
Asiatic Mode of Production: Community-based production
system where ownership of land is communal and the
existence of is expressed through the real or imaginary unity of
these communities.
Bourgeoisie: Owners of the means of production. Also known
as ‘Haves’ are those people who own the means of production
for example – landowners, capitalists in industrial societies.
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They are class of capitalists who, in all developed countries,

are now almost exclusively in possession of all the means of
consumption and of all the raw materials and instruments
(machines, factories necessary for their production
Capital: The raw materials and machinery used in the
production of commodities.
Capitalism It is one of the historical stages of society where
the means of production are mainly machinery, capital and
labour.
Capitalist Mode of Production Refers to a production system
where the owners of means of production, capitalists, extract
surplus labour from the proletariats in the form of profits.
Capitalists The ruling class in capitalism who control the
means of production.
Class: Groups of individuals who share a common position in
relation to the means of production. A fundamental social
group or a tangible collectivity which has the capacity to act as
a real social force. It is positioned in relation to the (non)
ownership of the means of material production. When people
share the same relationship to the means of production and
also share the similar consciousness regarding their common
interest, they constitute a class.
Class Consciousness: It is awareness on the part of the
members of a class of their common relationship to the means
of production.

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Class Interest: The aims, aspirations and assumptions of a

social class which are collectively shared by the members.
Class Consciousness Awareness of the objective class position
vis-à-vis others and an awareness of its historic role in the
transformation of society.
Class Struggle Conflict between two antagonistic social
classes which is the motive force of history.
Class-conflict When two classes having basic antagonism of
class interests struggle or clash in order to safeguard their class
interests then it is called class conflict.
Commodity Fetishism: Treating goods as if they have
magical powers capable of transforming an individual’s
capabilities.
Dialectical Materialism: It is the Marxian theory that seeks to
explain everything in terms of change which is caused due to
constant contradiction of mutually opposite forces found in
matter.
Dialectics: The conflict between two mutually opposite forces
or tendencies.
Exploitation: Laborers’ objective production of more value in
the form of commodities than they receive in the form of
wages, and lack of voice in exchange.
Feudal Mode of Production: Refers to a production system
where the lords appropriate surplus labour from the serfs in the
form of rent.

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Feudalism: It is also one of the historical stages of society

where the means of production are mainly land and labour.
Forces (Means) of Production: The raw materials,
technology, and land necessary for production. Both the
materials worked on and the tools and techniques employed in
production of material goods. These material-technical aspects
should not be confused with social relations of production. In
other words, it means the ways in which production is done;
the technological ‘know-how’, the types of equipments in use
and types of goods being produced, e.g., tools, machinery,
labour, etc.
Infrastructure: According to Marx, the materialistic structure
or economic structure is the foundation or base of society. In
other words, it is also called the infrastructure. The
superstructure of society rests on it. Infrastructure includes
mode of production and hence forces of production and
relations of production.
Labor Theory of Value: Theory stating that the value of a
commodity is determined by the amount of labor time it takes
to produce it.
Lords: The ruling class in feudalism, who exercise indirect
control over serfs.
Masters: The ruling class in slavery who exercise control over
slaves.

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Means of Production: It includes all the elements necessary

for production, e.g., land, raw material, factory, labour and
capital, etc.
Mode of Production: A mode of production is the relationship
between the relations of production and the forces of
production. Modes of production can be distinguished from
one another by different relationships between the forces and
relations of production. It refers to the general economic
institution i.e., the particular manner in which people produce
and distribute the means that sustain life. The forces of
production and the relations of production together define the
mode of production.
Proletariat: Those who sell their labor for a wage. Proletarian
are representatives of the lowest socioeconomic class of a
community. These people are also known as ‘Have-nots’ and
these are the people who do not own any means of production
except their own labour power. Hence all the landless peasants
or agricultural labourers in feudal societies and industrial
workers in capitalist societies are the proletariat.
Relations of Production: Refer to social relationships that
arise directly out of the process of production. These social
relationships include the relationships between the owners and
non-owners of the means of production. These relationships
decide and even determine the control and the capacity to
possess the product.
Revolution: It is the sudden, total and radical change in
society brought in by the matured conditions of class conflict.

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Serfs: Class of producers in the feudal mode of production

whose surplus labour is appropriated through rent.
Slaves: Class of producers in the ancient mode of production,
who are directly controlled by the masters as their private
‘property’.
Superstructure: All social, political and cultural institutions
of societies excepting economic institutions constitute the
superstructure of a society. Metaphor to represent the social
conditions of the existence of the infrastructure. It includes
state, schools, religions, institutions, culture, ideas, values and
philosophy, etc.
Surplus Value: The difference between what workers earn for
their labor and the price of the goods they produce.
Surplus Value (Absolute): Increasing productivity of labor by
extending the workday.
Surplus Value (Relative): Increasing productivity of labor
through the introduction of timesaving procedures, e.g.,
specialization, mechanization.
Workers: Class of producers in the capitalist mode of
production who have nothing except their labour power as
their only means of livelihood. Their surplus labour is
appropriated by the capitalists through profit.

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Reference and Further Readings

• Bottomore et al. (ed.) (1983). A Dictionary of Marxist
Thought. Oxford University Press: New Delhi
• Aron, Raymond 1967. Main Currents in Sociological
Thought. PenguinBooks: London
• Bottomore, T.B. 1975. Marxist Sociology, MacMillan:
London
• Coser, Lewis A. 1971. Masters of Sociological
Thought: Ideas in Historicaland Social Context.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. : New York
• Marx, K. (1859). A Contribution of the Critique of
Political Economy. Franz Duncker: Berlin
• Marx, K.(1861-1879). Capital (vol. I, ii & iii). Otto
Meissner: Hanbury
• Marx, K. (1844). 1959. Economic and Philosophical
Manuscript. Edited by Disk J. Stnik & translated by
Martin Milligan. Larence and Wishart: London
• Marx, K. and Engels F. (1845-6), 1937. The German
Ideology. Historisch Kritische Gesamtausgabe
• Marx, K. and Engels, F. (Manuscript of 1848).
Manifesto of the Communist Party. Burghard: London

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MODULE 3
MAX WEBER
Chapter Outline

9.1 Verstehen, Social Action, Ideal Type

9.2 Theory of Power and Authority, Bureaucracy
9.3 Rationality and Modernity- Rationalisation
9.4 The Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism

Objective of this Module

Discuss the meaning and characteristics of Verstehen,
Social Action, Ideal Type
Describe Weber’s types of social action and describe
three types of authority namely, traditional, charismatic
and rational-legal.
Discuss Weber’s views on rationality in sociological
investigation and value-free sociology.
Describe bureaucracy as the instrument for the
operation of rational-legal authority.
Explain the meanings of the terms rationality and
rationalization
Discuss the meaning of religion and economy and their
interconnections

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Understand the influence of the Protestant ethic on the

development of modern capitalism as discussed by
Weber
Review Weber’s comparative studies on three world
religions, i.e. Confucianism in China, Judaism in West
Asia and Hinduism in India
Evaluate Max Weber’s studies on religion and
economy in the context of Protestant ethics and spirit of
Capitalism
1. Introduction
In this module we will look at the contribution of Max
Weber to the development of classical sociological theory. We
will start with a brief biographical sketch of Weber’s life and
times. It will help us to understand intellectual ideas and
perspectives that influenced his thought. This module is
divided in to four parts. First part looks at three important
concepts developed by Weber as a part of methodological
inquiry in to the social world. These three concepts are
Verstehen, Social Action and Ideal Type. Though this concepts
we will discuss how Weber conceptualized Sociology as a
mode of inquiry distinct from the natural sciences, with a
distinctive subject matter concerning the meanings attributed
by social actors to their actions in a specific historical context.
In the second part of the chapter we will find some of
Weber’s important contributions in understanding power and
authority. We will start with a brief discussion of the
sociological concepts of power and authority with special
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reference to Weber understands of the terms. And we discuss

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

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

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In 1893, at the age of 29, Weber married Marianne

Schnitger, a distant cousin, and finally left his childhood home.
Today, Marianne Weber is recognized as an important
feminist, intellectual, and sociologist in her own right. She was
a popular public speaker on social and sexual ethics and wrote
many books and articles. Her most influential works, Marriage
and Motherhood in the Development of Law (1907) and
Women and Love (1935), examined feminist issues and the
reform of marriage. However, Marianne is known best as the
intellectual partner of her husband. She and Max made a
conscious effort to establish an egalitarian relationship, and
they worked together on intellectual projects. Interestingly,
Marianne referred to Max as her “companion” and implied that
theirs was an unconsummated marriage. Despite her own
intellectual accomplishments, Marianne’s 700-page treatise,
Max Weber: A Biography, first published in 1926, has received
the most attention, serving as the central source of biographical
information on her husband.
In 1894, Max Weber joined the faculty at Freiburg
University as a full professor of economics. Shortly thereafter,
in 1896, Weber accepted a position as chair of economics at
the University of Heidelberg, where he first began his
academic career. In 1904, Weber traveled to the United States
and began to formulate the argument of what would be his
most celebrated work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (Weber 1904–5/1958). After returning to Europe,
Weber resumed his intellectual activity. He met with the
brilliant thinkers of his day, including Werner Sombart, Paul

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Hensel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Ernst Troeltsch, and Georg

Simmel.
He helped establish the Heidelberg Academy of the
Sciences in 1909 and the Sociological Society in 1910
(Marianne Weber 1926/1975:425). However, Weber was still
plagued by compulsive anxiety. In 1918, he helped draft the
constitution of the Weimar Republic while giving his first
university lectures in 19 years at the University of Vienna. He
suffered tremendously, however, and turned down an offer for
a permanent post (Weber 1958:23). In 1920, at the age of 56,
Max Weber died of pneumonia.
3. Verstehen, Social Action, and Ideal Type
In this part we will discuss about three central ideas
that defined Weber's work in the discipline of sociology. In the
first part on Max Weber we will deals with three concepts such
as Verstehen, Social Action and Ideal Type. These three
concepts focus on Max Weber’s concern with methodology of
social sciences. These three concepts give a perspective and a
background to analyse the major theoretical formulations and
empirical context developed by Max Weber. So, a clear
understanding of these ideas is necessary in dealing with
Weber’s substantive and theoretical ideas. Weber was opposed
to pure abstract theorizing. Instead, his theoretical ideas are
embedded in his empirical, usually historical, research.
Weber’s methodology shaped his research, and the
combination of the two lies at the base of his theoretical
orientation.

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3.1 Verstehen
Verstehen is a German word usually translated as
‘‘understanding,’’ the concept of verstehen has become part of
a critique of positivist approaches to the social sciences.
Associated with the sociology of Max Weber, verstehen
derives from the hermeneutic critique of positivism that
emerged in German universities in the 1880s and 1890s that
gave rise to a dispute over method in the social sciences.
Weber felt that sociologists had an advantage over natural
scientists. That advantage resided in the sociologist’s ability to
understand social phenomena, whereas the natural scientist
could not gain a similar understanding of the behavior of an
atom or a chemical compound. Weber’s special use of the term
verstehen in his historical research is one of his best-known
and most controversial contributions to the methodology of
contemporary sociology.
Verstehen refers to understanding the meaning of
action from the actor’s point of view. It is entering into the
shoes of the other, and adopting this research stance requires
treating the actor as a subject, rather than an object of one’s
observations. It also implies that unlike objects in the natural
world, human actors are not simply the product of causal
forces. Individuals are seen to create the world by organizing
their own understanding of it and giving it meaning.
Weber defined sociology as “a science which attempts
the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby
to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects”

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(Weber 1947:88). In casting “interpretive understanding,” or

Verstehen, as the principal objective, Weber’s vision of
sociology offers a distinctive counter to those who sought to
base the young discipline on the effort to uncover universal
laws applicable to all societies. Weber’s view of the task of
sociology combines his emphasis on Verstehen (interpretive
understanding) with his view of social action: for Weber the
task of the sociologist is to understand the meanings
individuals assign to the contexts in which they are acting and
to determine the effects that such meanings have on their
conduct and the world.
One of the most systematic uses of this method by
Weber is in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
where he supplements structural and economic accounts of the
origin of capitalism in Europe with empathetic reconstruction
of the worldview of verstehen seventeenth century Calvinist
and other Protestant groups. He argues that Calvinist belief in
predestination, which precluded achieving salvation through
good works, provoked ‘‘an unprecedented inner loneliness’’
and search for signs of salvation. Through attempting to
resolve this paradox the theological quest for evidence of
divine grace was transposed into the worldly but ascetic
pursuit of capital accumulation, success in which was
interpreted by Calvinists as signaling divine selection.
What above example illustrates is that only through
empathetic reconstruction of actors’ meanings is it possible to
explain critical events like the growth of capitalism. At the
same time Weber categorically rejected the idea that verstehen

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involved simply intuition, sympathetic participation, or

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

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between the occurrence of a stimulus and the ultimate

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

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attainment of the actor’s own rationally chosen ends. Rational

action with reference to value is classified in terms of rational
orientation to an absolute value, that is, action which is
directed to overriding ideals of duty, honour or devotion to a
cause.
Traditional action type is classified as one which is
under the influence of long practice, customs and habits.
Affective action is classified in terms of affectual orientation,
especially emotional, determined by the specific states of
feeling of the actor. Since reality presents a mixture of the four
pure types of action, for our analysis and understanding we
separate them analytically into pure or ideal types. For
instance, the use of rational ideal types can help in measuring
irrational deviation and we can understand particular empirical
action by interpreting as to which of the four types of action it
most closely approximates.
3.3 Ideal Type
Ideal type is another methodological and conceptual
innovation of Weber. This methodological contribution helped
Weber to get a wide recognizion in contemporary sociology.
An ideal type is an analytical or conceptual construct that
highlights certain specific features of people’s orientations and
actions for purposes of analysis and comparison. According to
Weber ideal type is a mental construct, like a model, for the
scrutiny and systematic characterisation of a concrete situation.
Indeed, he used ideal type as a methodological tool to
understand and analyse social reality.

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“The ideal typical concept will develop our skill in

imputation in research. It is not a description of reality but it
aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a
description”. In other words, ideal types are concepts
formulated on the basis of facts collected carefully and
analytically for empirical research. In this sense, ideal types
are constructs or concepts which are used as methodological
devices or tools in our understanding and analysis of any social
problem.
Weber believed it was the responsibility of sociologists
to develop conceptual tools, which could be used later by
historians and sociologists. The most important such
conceptual tool was the ideal type:
An ideal type is formed by the one-sided
accentuation of one or more points of view and by
the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete,
more or less present and occasionally absent
concrete individual phenomena, which are
arranged according to those one-sidedly
emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical
construct…. In its conceptual purity, this mental
construct … cannot be found empirically anywhere
in reality (Weber, 1903–1917).
“Its function is the comparison with empirical
reality in order to establish its divergences or
similarities, to describe them with the most
unambiguously intelligible concepts, and to

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understand and explain them causally” (Weber,

1903–1917).
Between 1903 and 1908 Weber published several so
called ‘‘methodological’’ essays in which he addressed a wide
range of questions concerning the goals, subject matter, and
methods of the social sciences. The most famous of these
essays was ‘‘‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social
Policy,’’ published in 1904 as Weber was assuming the co
editorship of the influential journal. He sketched his vision of
the social sciences as grounded in cognitive interests that are in
part historical and in part theoretical, and as seeking relevance
to questions of value and contemporary social policy. Weber’s
extended discussion of concept formation focused on his
notion of ‘‘ideal type’’ concepts.
Ideal types are conceptual instruments that seek to
represent the most relevant aspects of a given object (e.g.,
‘‘city,’’ ‘‘patriarchy,’’ ‘‘capitalism’’) for purposes of social
scientific inquiry. They are formed as deliberate constructs
through a process of selection, abstraction, and idealization.
Ideal type concepts aim to be useful rather than descriptive, for
they are not intended to represent actual phenomena. Weber
maintained that they were in fact indispensable for purposes of
inquiry and clear exposition. Moreover, ideal types are well
suited to a vision of social science concerned with representing
the cultural significance and value oriented aspects of social
phenomena within the context of historically oriented causal
inquiries.

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For example, Weber distinguished four “ideal types” of

social action, reflecting differences in underlying subjective
orientations. These include two types of rational action
(instrumental versus value-oriented rationality) and two types
of nonrationalaction (traditional and affective). Instrumental
rationality involves conscious deliberation and explicit choice
with regard to both ends and means; that is, a choice is
consciously made from among alternative ends (or goals) and
then the appropriate means are selected to achieve the end that
has been chosen.
Value- oriented rationality, in contrast, involves a
subjective commitment to an end or goal that is not compared
to alternative ends but instead is regarded as ultimate. For such
actions the individual's rational choices are limited to selecting
the appropriate means. In contrast to these types of rational
action involving conscious deliberation and choice, traditional
action is followed simply because it is consistent with well-
established patterns or is habitual. Affective action expresses
feelings or emotions (or affect) without conscious deliberation.
All four of these are ideal types, of course; in real life,
individuals’ actions may reflect varying mixtures.
According to Weber conceived them, ideal types were
hypothetical and a reference not to something that is
normatively ideal but to an ideational type, which serves as a
mental model that can be widely shared and used because
analysts agree that it captures some essential features of a
phenomenon. The ideal type does not correspond to reality but
seeks to condense essential features of it in the model so that

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one can better recognize its real characteristics when it is met.

It is not an embodiment of one side or aspect but the synthetic
ideational representation of complex phenomena from reality.
For instance, Weber’s analysis took emergent terms
and ideas that were current in actual bureaucracies at the time
that he was writing and used them as the basis for theoretical
construction of an ideal type of bureaucracy. They were a
reconstruction of ordinary language in use into the ideal type.
Now a certain normative slippage occurs in this process,
because he is using ordinary language terms, as defined by
members of organizations, to describe what it is that these
members do. The members were those of the Prussian and
German bureaucracies of the state and military. They were
bounded by a ferociously strong sense of duty and
conformance. From the conceptual and empirical usages
scholars identified some important characteristics of ideal
types. They are,
 Ideal types are not general or average types. That is,
they are not defined by the characteristics common to
all phenomena or objects of study. They are formulated
on the basis of certain typical traits, which are essential
to the construction of an ideal type concept.
 Ideal types are not a presentation of total reality or they
do not explain everything. They exhibit partial
conception of the whole.
 Ideal types are neither a description of any definite
concept of reality, nor a hypothesis, but they can aid

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both in description and explanation. Ideal types are

different in scope and usage from descriptive concepts.
 In this sense we can say that ideal types are also related
to the analytic conception of causality, though not, in
deterministic terms.
 They also help in reaching to general propositions and
in comparative analysis.
 Ideal types serve to guide empirical research, and are
used in systematisation of data on historical and social
reality.
Weber used ideal types in three distinctive ways.
Indeed, his three kinds of ideal types are distinguished by three
levels of abstraction. The first kind of ideal types are rooted in
the historical particularities namely, Western city, the
Protestant ethics etc. In reality, this kind of ideal types refer to
the phenomena that appear only in the specific historical
periods and in particular cultural areas. The second kind relates
to the abstract elements of social reality, for example, the
concepts of bureaucracy or feudalism. These elements of social
reality are found in a variety of historical and cultural contexts.
The third kind of ideal type relates to the reconstruction of a
particular kind of behaviour (Coser 1977). In another word,
Weber offered several varieties of ideal types:
1. Historical ideal types. These relate to phenomena
found in some particular historical epoch (e.g., the
modern capitalistic marketplace).

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2. General sociological ideal types. These relate to

phenomena that cut across a number of historical
periods and societies (e.g., bureaucracy).
3. Action ideal types. These are pure types of action based
on the motivations of the actor (e.g., affectual action).
4. Structural ideal types. These are forms taken by the
causes and consequences of social action (e.g.,
traditional domination).
To sum up, according to Weber an ideal-type is not.
First, as a logical construct the ideal type does not describe
empirical reality. Rather, it clarifies our conceptual
understanding of what to look for in empirical data. Second,
the ideal-type does not directly provide a hypothesis about
reality. As a regulative principle it indirectly helps social
scientists to construct research questions and hypotheses about
social reality. Third, as a one-sided exaggeration the ideal-type
does not provide an account of some ‘average’ level of social
reality.
4. Theory of Power and Authority, Bureaucracy
4.1 Power
For Max Weber, power is an aspect of social
relationships. It refers to the possibility of imposing one’s will
upon the behaviour of another person. Power is present in
social interaction and creates situations of inequality since the
one who has power imposes it on others. The impact of power
varies from situation to situation. On the one hand, it depends

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on the capacity of the powerful individual to exercise power.

On the other hand it depends upon the extent to which it is
opposed or resisted by the others. Weber says that power can
be exercised in all walks of life. It is not restricted to a
battlefield or to politics. It is to be observed in the market
place, on a lecture platform, at a social gathering, in sports,
scientific discussions and even through charity. Weber
discusses two contrasting sources of power. These are as
follows:
1. Power which is derived from a constellation of
interests that develop in a formally free market. For
example, a group of producers of sugar controls
supply of their production in the market to
maximise their profit.
2. An established system of authority that allocates the
right to command and the duty to obey. For
example, in the army, a jawan is obliged to obey
the command of his officer. The officer derives his
power through an established system of authority.
As you have seen in the last point, any discussion of
power leads us to think about its legitimacy. It is legitimacy,
which according to Weber constitutes the core point of
authority. Let us now examine the concept of authority.
4. 2 Authority
Authority is another important concept developed by
Weber. Weber used the German word “Herrschaft”, to explain
dominance or authorities exercised in society. Different
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scholars translated this word in different ways such as

‘authority’, others as ‘domination’ or ‘command’. Herrschaft is
a situation in which a ‘Herr’ or master dominates or commands
others. Raymond Aron (1967) defines Herrschaft as the
master’s ability to obtain the obedience of those who
theoretically owe it to him. As we saw, power refers to the
ability or capacity to control another. Authority refers to
legitimised power. It means that the master has the right to
command and can expect to be obeyed. For a system of
authority to exist the following elements must be present:
1. An individual ruler/master or a group of
rulers/masters.
2. An individual/group that is ruled.
3. The will of the ruler to influence the conduct of the
ruled which may be expressed through commands.
4. Evidence of the influence of the rulers in terms of
compliance or obedience shown by the ruled.
5. Direct or indirect evidence which shows that the
ruled have internalised and accepted the fact that
the ruler’s commands must be obeyed.
We see that authority implies a reciprocal relationship
between the rulers and the ruled. The rulers believe that they
have the legitimate right to exercise their authority. On the
other hand, the ruled accept this power and comply with it,
reinforcing its legitimacy. According to Weber, there are three
systems of legitimation, each with its corresponding norms,

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which justify the power to command. It is these systems of

legitimation which are designated as the following types of
authority.
1. Traditional authority
2. Charismatic authority
3. Rational-legal authority
Traditional Authority: This system of legitimation flows
from traditional action. In other words, it is based on
customary law and the sanctity of ancient traditions. It is based
on the belief that a certain authority is to be respected because
it has existed since time immemorial. In traditional authority,
rulers enjoy personal authority by virtue of their inherited
status. Their commands are in accordance with customs and
they also possess the right to extract compliance from the
ruled. Often, they abuse their power. The persons who obey
them are ‘subjects’ in the fullest sense of the term. They obey
their master out of personal loyalty or a pious regard for his
time-honoured status.
Briefly, traditional authority derives its legitimacy from
longstanding traditions, which enable some to command and
compel others to obey. It is hereditary authority and does not
require written rules. The ‘masters’ exercise their authority
with the help of loyal relatives and friends. Weber considers
this kind of authority as irrational. It is therefore rarely found
in modern developed societies.
Charismatic Authority: Charisma means an extraordinary
quality possessed by some individuals. This gives such people

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unique powers to capture the fancy and devotion of ordinary

people. Charismatic authority is based on extraordinary
devotion to an individual and to the way of life preached by
this person. The legitimacy of such authority rests upon the
belief in the supernatural or magical powers of the person. The
charismatic leader ‘proves’ his/her power through miracles,
military and other victories or the dramatic prosperity of the
disciples. As long as charismatic leaders continue to ‘prove’
their miraculous powers in the eyes of their disciples, their
authority stays intact. You may have realised that the type of
social action that charismatic authority is related to is affective
action. The disciples are in a highly charged emotional state as
a result of the teachings and appeal of the charismatic leaders.
They worship their hero.
Rational-legal Authority: The term refers to a system of
authority, which are both, rational and legal. It is vested in a
regular administrative staff who operate in accordance with
certain written rules and laws. Those who exercise authority
are appointed to do soon the basis of their achieved
qualifications, which are prescribed and codified. Those in
authority consider it a profession and are paid a salary. Thus, it
is a rational system. It is legal because it is in accordance with
the laws of the land which people recognise and feel obliged to
obey. The people acknowledge and respect the legality of both,
the ordinance and rules as well as the positions or titles of
those who implement the rules. Rational-legal authority is a
typical feature of modern society. It is the reflection of the
process of rationalisation. Remember that Weber considers

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rationalisation as the key feature of western civilisation. It is,

according to Weber, a specific product of human thought and
deliberation. By now you have clearly grasped the connection
between rational-legal authority and rational action for
obtaining goals.
4. Bureaucracy
According to Weber bureaucracy represents the pure
ideal-type of legal-rational authority and it is a defining feature
of modernity. Bureaucracy is organized on a hierarchical and
rational basis. Individuals and departments are coordinated
through explicit rules and procedures, records and files,
functions and positions, a transparent line of command, and
entry qualifications. It represents the most efficient exercise of
power in conditions of complex and large-scale populations. In
its most perfected form, bureaucracy organizes the permanent
staff of the modern state.
He studied bureaucracy in detail and constructed an
ideal type which contained the most prominent characteristics
of bureaucracy. He identified six major characteristics of the
ideal type bureaucracy:
1. Official duties and functions are performed by
accredited staff.
2. Offices are structured into a hierarchy of command and
supervision from higher authority to lower functions.
3. ‘The bureau’ or modern office is based on an
accumulation of written documents and files, kept
completely separate from private property.
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4. Specialized office functions require personnel to

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

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a specific causal component of their life chances, insofar as (2)

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

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(3) status groups delineated in terms of social estimations

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

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another: “Money and an entrepreneurial position are not in

themselves status qualifications, although they may lead to
them; and the lack of property is not in itself a status
disqualification, although this may be a reason for it”. There is
a complex set of relationships between class and status, and it
is made even more complicated when we add the dimension of
party.
While classes exist in the economic order and status
groups in the social order, parties can be found in the political
order. To Weber, parties “are always structures struggling for
domination”. Thus, parties are the most organized elements of
Weber’s stratification system. Weber thinks of parties very
broadly as including not only those that exist in the state but
also those that may exist in a social club. Parties usually, but
not always, represent class or status groups. Whatever they
represent, parties are oriented to the attainment of power.
3.3 Rationality and Modernity- Rationalisation
According to Weber, the contemporary world is
characterized by rationality. Max Weber believed that the key
to understand modern society is to be found in its rational
features and rationalising forces. For him, the modern Western
world is characterised by rationality. As a result of this, human
activity is marked by methodical calculation. Quantification,
predictability and regularity become important. Individuals
rely more on logic, reason and calculation than on supernatural
beliefs.
Weber argues that one of the prime forces bringing

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about modernity is the process of rationalization. He uses the

word rationalization in at least three different ways: He uses it
to talk about means-ends calculation, in which rationality is
individual and specific. Rational action is action based on the
most efficient means to achieve a given end. Secondly, Weber
uses the term to talk about bureaucracies. The bureaucratic
form is a method of organizing human behavior across time
and space. Initially we used kinship to organize our behaviors,
using the ideas of extended family, lineages, clans, moieties,
and so forth. But as the contours of society changed, so did our
method of organizing. Bureaucracy is a more rational form of
organization than the traditional and emotive kinship system.
Finally, Weber uses the term rationalization in a more
general sense. One way to think about it is to see
rationalization as the opposite of enchantment. Specifically, an
enchanted world is one filled with mystery and magic.
Disenchantment, then, refers to the process of emptying the
world of magical or spiritual forces. Part of this, of course, is
in the religious sense of secularization. Peter Berger (1967)
provides us with a good definition of secularization: "By
secularization we mean the process by which sectors of society
and culture are removed from the domination of religious
institutions and symbols" (p. 107).
Thus, both secularization and disenchantment refer to
the narrowing of the religious or spiritual elements of the
world. If we think about the world of magic or primitive
religion, one filled with multiple layers of energies, spirits,
demons, and gods, then in a very real way the world has been

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subjected to secularization from the beginning of religion. The

number of spiritual entities has steadily declined from many,
many gods to one; and the presence of a god has been removed
from immediately available within every force (think of the
gods of thunder, harvest, and so on) to completely divorced
from the physical world, existing apart from time (eternal) and
space (infinite). In our more recent past, secularization, and
demystification and rationalization, have of course been
carried further by science and capitalism.
This general process of rationalization and
demystification extends beyond the realm of religion. Because
of the prominence of bureaucracy, means-ends calculation,
science, secularization, and so forth, our world is emptier.
Weber sees this move toward rationalization as historically
unavoidable; it is above all else the defining feature of
modernity. Yet it leads inexorably to an empty society. The
organizational, intellectual, and cultural movements toward
rationality have emptied the world of emotion, mystery,
tradition, and affective human ties. We increasingly relate to
our world through economic calculation, impersonal relations,
and expert knowledge. Weber (1948) tells us that as a result of
rationalization the "most sublime values have retreated from
public life" and that the spirit "which in former times swept
through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them
together" is gone (p. 155). Weber sees this not only as a
condition of the religious or political institutions in society; he
also sees the creative arts, like music and painting, as having
lost their creative spirit as well.

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In Weber's work we can identify different types of

rationalities. The first type is practical rationality, which is
defined by Kalberg as “every way of life that views and judges
worldly activity in relation to the individual’s purely pragmatic
and egoistic interests” (1980:1151). People who practice
practical rationality accept given realities and merely calculate
the most expedient ways of dealing with the difficulties that
they present. This type of rationality arose with the severing of
the bonds of primitive magic, and it exists trans-civilization
ally and trans-historically; that is, it is not restricted to the
modern Occident. This type of rationality stands in opposition
to anything that threatens to transcend everyday routine. It
leads people to distrust all impractical values, either religious
or secular-utopian, as well as the theoretical rationality of the
intellectuals, the type of rationality to which we now turn.
Theoretical rationality involves a cognitive effort to
master reality through increasingly abstract concepts rather
than through action. It involves such abstract cognitive
processes as logical deduction, induction, attribution of
causality, and the like. This type of rationality was
accomplished early in history by sorcerers and ritualistic
priests and later by philosophers, judges, and scientists. Unlike
practical rationality, theoretical rationality leads the actor to
transcend daily realities in a quest to understand the world as a
meaningful cosmos. Like practical rationality, it is trans-
civilizational and trans-historical.
The effect of intellectual rationality on action is
limited. In that it involves cognitive processes, it need not

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affect action taken, and it has the potential to introduce new

patterns of action only indirectly. Substantive rationality
(similar to practical rationality but unlike theoretical
rationality) directly orders action into patterns through clusters
of values. Substantive rationality involves a choice of means to
ends within the context of a system of values. One value
system is no more (substantively) rational than another. Thus,
this type of rationality also exists trans-civilizationally and
trans-historically, wherever consistent value postulates exist.
Finally, and most important from Kalberg’s point of
view, is formal rationality, which involves means–ends
calculation (Cockerham, Abel, and Luschen, 1993). But
whereas in practical rationality this calculation occurs in
reference to pragmatic self-interests, in formal rationality it
occurs with reference to “universally applied rules, laws, and
regulations.” As Brubaker puts it, “Common to the rationality
of industrial capitalism, formalistic law and bureaucratic
administration is its objectified, institutionalized, supra-
individual form; in each sphere, rationality is embodied in the
social structure and confronts individuals as something
external to them” (1984:9). Weber makes this quite clear in the
specific case of bureaucratic rationalization: Bureaucratic
rationalization … revolutionizes with technical means, in
principle, as does every economic reorganization, “from
without”: It first changes the material and social orders, and
through them the people, by changing the conditions of
adaptation, and perhaps the opportunities for adaptation,
through a rational determination of means and ends.(Weber,
1921/1978:1116)

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Although all the other types of rationality are trans-

civilizational and epoch-transcending, formal rationality arose
only in the West with the coming of industrialization. The
universally applied rules, laws, and regulations that
characterize formal rationality in the West are found
particularly in the economic, legal, and scientific institutions,
as well as in the bureaucratic form of domination. Thus, we
have already encountered formal rationality in our discussion
of rational-legal authority and the bureaucracy.
3.4 The Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism
First let us look at the importance of The Protestant
Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism and the context in which
Weber wrote it. He wrote The Protestant Ethic at a pivotal
period of his intellectual career, shortly after his recovery from
a depressive illness that had incapacitated him from serious
academic work for a period of some four years. Prior to his
sickness, most of Weber’s works, although definitely
presaging the themes developed in the later phase of his life,
were technical researches in economic history, economics and
jurisprudence. They include studies of mediaeval trading law
(his doctoral dissertation), the development of Roman land-
tenure, and the contemporary socioeconomic conditions of
rural workers in the eastern part of Germany.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is
probably Weber's best-known work. It is a clear example of his
methodology. In it, he describes an ideal type of spirit of
capitalism, he performs an historical-comparative analysis to

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determine how and when that kind of capitalism came to exist,

and he uses the concept of verstehen to understand the
subjective orientation and motivation of the actors.
Weber had three interrelated reasons for writing the
book. First, he wanted to counter Marx's argument concerning
the rise of capitalism—Weber characterizes Marx's historical
materialism as "naive." The second reason is very closely
linked to the first: Weber wanted to argue against brute
structural force and argue for the effect that cultural values
could have on social action. The third reason that Weber wrote
The Protestant Ethic was to explain why rational capitalism
had risen in the West and nowhere else. Capitalism had been
practiced previously. But it was traditional, not rational
capitalism.
In traditional capitalism, traditional values and status
positions still held; the elite would invest but would spend as
little time and effort doing so in order to live as they were
"accustomed to live." In other words, the elite invested in
capitalistic ventures in order to maintain their lifestyle. It was,
in fact, the existence of traditional values and status positions
that prevented the rise of rational capitalism in some places.
Rational capitalism, on the other hand, is practiced to increase
wealth for its own sake and is based on utilitarian social
relations.
These writings took their inspiration in some
substantial part from the so-called ‘historical school’ of
economics which, in conscious divergence from British

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political economy, stressed the need to examine economic life

within the context of the historical development of culture as a
whole. Weber always remained indebted to this standpoint.
But the series of works he began on his return to health, and
which preoccupied him for the remainder of his career,
concern a range of problems much broader in compass than
those covered in the earlier period. The Protestant Ethic was a
first fruit of these new endeavours. An appreciation of what
Weber sought to achieve in the book demands at least an
elementary grasp of two aspects of the circumstances in which
it was produced: the intellectual climate within which he
wrote, and the connections between the work itself and the
massive programme of study that he set himself in the second
phase of his career.
In this earliest stage of his research Weber was
interested in ascertaining the contribution made by a set of
religious beliefs and practices to the development of the
specific form of modern (‘‘rational’’) capitalism as found in
Western Europe and the US. What marked this modern form of
capitalism as new was especially the emphasis on the
systematic organization of work done by laborers hired on a
formally free market, and enterprises devoted to the pursuit of
increasing profit without the constraints of traditionalism. Here
as elsewhere in his work
Weber recognized that there had been other prior forms
of capitalism in Europe as well as non western capitalistic
forms and practices. Likewise, he acknowledged that the rise
of capitalism as a specific economic system in modern Europe

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had many causes, both material and cultural. His central

problem here was, first and primarily, to explain the rise, not
of capitalism as a system, but of the peculiar ‘‘spirit’’(ethos,
mentality) of this new economic system, and second, to show
how this new ethos made specific contributions to the intensive
growth of modern capitalism in its most crucial stages,
especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence,
the problems he addressed were complex, yet circumscribed,
as were his hypotheses, lines of argument, interpretations of
evidence, and conclusions. This is not to say that his
arguments were free of ambiguities, nor that the evidence he
marshaled was completely convincing.
What was the new ‘‘spirit’’ of capitalism that Weber
took as the object of his inquiry? He described it as an ethic,
albeit a secular one, lacking immediate religious foundation or
reference, yet prescribing as a moral duty the pursuit of
earning more and more money as an end in itself. Whether as
an entrepreneur, independent craftsman, or laborer, an
individual is obliged to make the acquisition of money from
their occupation the center of their life.
At the same time, the individual is also duty bound not
to pursue wealth in order to spend money for the enjoyment of
luxury or leisure. The acquisition of wealth is its own reward.
Waste of time or money is admonished; frugality,
reinvestment, and credit worthiness are virtues. Although the
historical origins of this distinctly modern frame of mind are
unclear, Weber believed that this new positive moral outlook
on the acquisition of money had emerged in America and

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Western Europe by the eighteenth century. One of the

surprising claims is that Weber’s spirit of capitalism grew and
flourished largely independently of the system of capitalism
itself.
Weber acknowledges that Benjamin Franklin, though a
great exemplar of the new spirit, did not fit the model of the
modern capitalist, nor was capitalism very advanced in its
development in Franklin’s America. This fact of the
independent origin of the capitalist spirit, however, served
Weber’s view that it was not an ideology springing from the
economic system that was its rationale, as Marxism might have
posited. However, if the modern spirit of capitalism was not a
product of the form or system of capitalism, the question
becomes all the more urgent: What were the sources of this
new attitude toward the acquisition of wealth, an attitude that
became, as Weber put it, a leading principle of capitalism?
In his search for the historical origins of capitalism’s
modern spirit, Weber took as his point of departure the
contemporary controversies over the respective orientations of
Roman Catholics and Protestants toward capitalistic economic
activities. In this context it had been noted as a matter of
empirical fact that Protestants were more likely than Catholics
to be involved in the more innovative and technically skilled
types of capitalistic activity and at the same time were more
likely to pursue the patterns of training and education
appropriate for such work. Likewise, they tended to be more
prosperous than their more tradition bound Catholic
counterparts. The attempts to explain these differences were

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the stuff of wide ranging if unproductive controversies at the

time Weber himself began to take up the questions.
As Weber probed the possible sources of the
differences he found them to lie in the early history of
Protestantism. First, Luther and Lutheranism made key
contributions, particularly in advancing the idea that worldly
economic activities in pursuit of a livelihood were worthy
‘‘vocations,’’ thereby providing enterprise and work with
moral sanction. This, Weber reasoned, provided the impetus
for individuals to devote themselves to worldly economic
activity to a greater extent than in circumstances where
tradition had dictated that work was either morally neutral or
even evil, albeit necessary for economic sustenance.
Second, Calvin and Calvinism provided additional,
crucial incentives to work unstintingly in one’s economic
vocation. Here, Weber’s line of argument about the
connections between religious beliefs and economic activities
becomes intricate and turn son the paradox of unintended
consequences.
Weber’s central problem was to explain why capitalism
first arose in the West and not in other parts of the world. Core
features of capitalism, ‘the impulse to acquisition, pursuit of
gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money’, had
been around for a long time and in many places. ‘Unlimited
greed’ cannot be the defining feature. In fact the opposite may
be the case: ‘Capitalism may even be identical with the
restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational
impulse’ (1930: 17).

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Something else lay behind the ‘peculiar rationalism of

Western culture’. ‘Capitalism’, according to Weber, existed in
other societies like China, India, Babylon, in the classical
world and in the Middle Ages. But in each case the road to
economic rationalism was barred. By what? ‘Magical and
religious forces’ obstructed the development of rational
capitalism according to Weber. They lacked a guiding idea, an
‘ethos’ or a ‘spirit’ favourable to rational capitalism. Crucially,
only in the West did ‘the rational capitalist organization of
(formally) free labour’ appear (1930: 21). Free labour is
decisive for Weber: ‘Exact calculation – the basis of
everything else – is only possible on a basis of free labour’
(1930: 22).
KEY CONCEPTS
Bureaucracy: An organization based on impersonal,
standardized rules and procedures implemented by separate,
hierarchically ordered positions dedicated to performing
specialized tasks.
Charisma: The “gift of grace” demonstrated through miracles,
acts of heroism, or the pronouncement of divine revelations.
Charismatic Authority: Dominance based on disciples’
belief, trust, and devotion in recognition of their leader’s
charisma.
Calling: The Protestant doctrine asserting that each individual
has a “life-task” to be performed as a glorification of God.
Iron Cage: Dominance of material acquisition and
impersonal, bureaucratic forms of organization resulting in the

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decay of the human spirit and the disenchantment of the world.

Legitimacy: Possessing the ability to “rightfully” exercise
domination over others. Synonymous with authority.
Status: A positive or negative social estimation of honor
expressed through “styles of life” or patterns of consumption.
Class: People who share life chances or possibilities that are
determined by economic interests in the possession of goods
and opportunities for income within the commodity and labor
markets.
Ideal Types : Analytical constructs against which real-life
cases can be compared.
Nonrational Motivation for Action: Action that is motivated
primarily by values, norms, morals, traditions, the creation of
meaning, and/or emotional states.
Party: Group aimed at influencing a communal action no
matter what it content may be.
Power: The chance of a man or a number of men to realize
their own will in a social action even against the resistance of
others.
Power: The chance of a man or a number of men to realize
their own will in a social action even against the resistance of
others.
Protestant Ethic: Methodical, rational attitude toward worldly
affairs that characterized Protestant asceticism.
Rational Motivation for Action: Action that relies on the
“rational” or strategic choices of actors, where individuals and

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group actions are motivated primarily by the attempt to

maximize benefits and reduce costs.
Rationalization : An ongoing process in which social
interaction and institutions become increasingly governed by
methodical procedures and calculable rules.
Rational-Legal Authority: Domination based on the rule of
impersonal laws. Obedience is owed to the office or position in
which authority is vested.
Traditional Authority: Dominance based on the established
belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions. Subjects owe
their obedience to their “master,” whose demands for
compliance and loyalty are legitimated by sacred, inviolable
traditions.
Verstehen: Interpretive understanding.
References and Further Readings
1. Bendix, Reinhard. (1960). Max Weber: An Intellectual
Portrait, London: Heinman.
2. Freund, Julien. (1968). The Sociology of Max Weber, New
York: Random House
3. Indira Gandhi National Open University Course Material
(2005). Sociological Thought, IGNOU: New Delhi
4. Aron, R. (1967). Main Currents in Sociological Thought.
Volume 2, London Penguin Books.
5. Mitchell, G.D. (ed.) (1968). A Dictionary of Sociology.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

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6. Weber, M. (1930[1905]) The Protestant Ethic and the

Spirit of Capitalism. London: Unwin University Books.
7. Weber, M. (1949) The Methodology of the Social
Sciences. E.A. Shils and H. Finch (eds). New York: Free
Press.
8. Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of
Interpretive Sociology, Volumes I and II. Berkeley and
Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

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MODULE 4
GEORG SIMMEL
Chapter outline

4.1 Formal Sociology, Sociation and Group formation

4.2 Relationships and Social types
4.3 Philosophy of Money
4.4 Modernity - Metropolis

Objective of this Chapter

Examine the contribution of Simmel for the
development of Classical sociological theories.
Understanding the social and biographical details of
Simmel
Examine the Simmel's contribution to Formal
Sociology and to the understanding of Sociation and
Group formation
Discuss Simmel's contribution to understand social and
philosophical meaning of money in the modern time.
Discuss about the concept of modernity and metropolis
in Simmel's work.

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1. Introduction
In this fourth and final module we will discuss about
the contribution of Georg Simmel to the classical sociological
theories. We will discuss about four important contribution of
Simmel to the discipline of Sociology. In the first part we will
looks at his methodological perspective and his contributions
to the development of formal Sociology. In the second part we
will examine the concept of sociation and Group formation. In
the third part we will analyze Simmel's contributions to
understanding of relationships and Social types in society. In
the fourth section we will discuss Simmel's most important and
well known contribution to understand social and
philosophical meaning of money in the modern time. In the
final section we will discuss about the concept of modernity
and metropolis in Simmel's work.
As we know, Georg Simmel was Weber’s
contemporary and a cofounder of the German Sociological
Society. Simmel was a somewhat atypical sociological
theorist. For one thing, he had an immediate and profound
effect on the development of American sociological theory,
whereas Marx and Weber were largely ignored for a number of
years. Simmel’s work helped shape the development of one of
the early centers of American sociology—the University of
Chicago—and its major theory, symbolic interactionism.
The Chicago school and symbolic interactionism came,
as we will see, to dominate American sociology in the 1920s
and early 1930s (Bulmer, 1984). Simmel’s ideas were

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influential at Chicago mainly because the dominant figures in

the early years of Chicago, Albion Small and Robert Park, had
been exposed to Simmel’s theories in Berlin in the late 1800s.
Park attended Simmel’s lectures in 1899 and 1900, and Small
carried on an extensive correspondence with Simmel during
the 1890s. They were instrumental in bringing Simmel’s ideas
to students and faculty at Chicago, in translating some of his
work, and in bringing it to the attention of a large scale
American audience.
Another atypical aspect of Simmel’s work is his “level”
of analysis, or at least that level for which he became best
known in America. Whereas Weber and Marx were
preoccupied with large-scale issues like the rationalization of
society and a capitalist economy, Simmel was best known for
his work on smaller-scale issues, especially individual action
and interaction. He became famous early for his thinking,
derived from Kantian philosophy, on forms of interaction (for
example, conflict) and types of interactants (for example, the
stranger).
Basically, Simmel saw that understanding interaction
among people was one of the major tasks of sociology.
However, it was impossible to study the massive number of
interactions in social life without some conceptual tools. This
is where forms of interaction and types of interactants came in.
Simmel felt that he could isolate a limited number of forms of
interaction that could be found in a large number of social
settings. Thus equipped, one could analyze and understand
these different interaction settings. The development of a

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limited number of types of interactants could be similarly

useful in explaining interaction settings. This work had a
profound effect on symbolic interactionism, which, as the
name suggests, was focally concerned with interaction.
One of the ironies, however, is that Simmel also was
concerned with large-scale issues similar to those that obsessed
Marx and Weber. However, this work was much less
influential than his work on interaction, although there are
contemporary signs of a growing interest in the large-scale
aspects of Simmel’s sociology. It was partly Simmel’s style in
his work on interaction that made him accessible to early
American sociological theorists. Although he wrote heavy
tomes like those of Weber and Marx, he also wrote a set of
deceptively simple essays on such interesting topics as
poverty, the prostitute, the miser and the spendthrift, and the
stranger.
The brevity of such essays and the high interest level of
the material made the dissemination of Simmel’s ideas much
easier. Unfortunately, the essays had the negative effect of
obscuring Simmel’s more massive works (for example,
Philosophy of Money, translated in 1978), which were
potentially as significant to sociology. Nevertheless, it was
partly through the short and clever essays that Simmel had a
much more significant effect on early American sociological
theory than either Marx or Weber did.
There are four basic levels of concern in Simmel’s
work. First are his assumptions about the psychological

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workings of social life. Second is his interest in the

sociological workings of interpersonal relationships. Third is
his work on the structure of and changes in the social and
cultural “spirit” of his times. He also adopted the principle of
emergence, which is the idea that higher levels emerge from
the lower levels. Finally, he dealt with his views in the nature
and inevitable fate of humanity. His most microscopic work
dealt with forms and the interaction that takes place with
different types of people. The forms include subordination,
super-ordination, exchange, conflict and sociability.
2. Biographical Sketch
Georg Simmel was born on March 1, 1858, in the very
heart of Berlin, the corner of Leipzigerstrasse and
Friedrichstrasse. This was a curious birthplace--it would
correspond to Times Square in New York--but it seems
symbolically fitting for a man who throughout his life lived in
the intersection of many movements, intensely affected by the
cross-currents of intellectual traffic and by a multiplicity of
moral directions. Simmel was a modern urban man, without
roots in traditional folk culture.
Simmel was the youngest of seven children. His father,
a prosperous Jewish businessman who had converted to
Christianity, died when Simmel was still young. A friend of
the family, the owner of a music publishing house, was
appointed the boy's guardian. Simmel's relation to his
domineering mother was rather distant; he seems not to have
had any roots in a secure family environment, and a sense of

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marginality and insecurity came early to the young Simmel.

After graduating from Gymnasium, Simmel studied history
and philosophy at the University of Berlin with some of the
most important academic figures of the day: the historians
Mommsen, Treitschke, Sybel and Droysen, the philosophers
Harms and Zeller, the art historian Hermann Grimm, the
anthropologists Lazarus and Steinthal (who were the founders
of Voelkerpsychologie), and the psychologist Bastian.
By the time he received his doctorate in philosophy in
1881 (his thesis was entitled "The Nature of Matter According
to Kant's Physical Monadology"), Simmel was familiar with
vast field of knowledge extending from history to philosophy
and from psychology to the social sciences. This catholicity of
tastes and interests marked his entire subsequent career.
Deeply tied to the intellectual milieu of Berlin, both inside and
outside the university, Simmel did not follow the example of
most German academic men who typically moved from one
university to another both during their studies and after;
instead, he decided to stay at the University of Berlin, where
he became a Privatdozent (an unpaid lecturer dependent on
student fees) in 1885.
His courses ranged from logic and the history of
philosophy to ethics, social psychology, and sociology. He
lectured on Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Nietzsche,
among many others. Often during a single academic year he
would survey new trends in sociology as well as in
metaphysics. He was a very popular lecturer and his lectures
soon became leading intellectual events, not only for students

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but for the cultural elite of Berlin. In spite of the fascination he

called forth, however, his academic career turned out to be
unfortunate, even tragic.
He was the author of six books and more than seventy
articles, many of which had been translated into English,
French, Italian, Polish, and Russian. Yet, whenever Simmel
attempted to gain an academic promotion, he was rebuffed.
Whenever a senior position became vacant at one of the
German universities, Simmel competed for it. Although his
applications were supported by the recommendations of
leading scholars, Max Weber among others, they did not meet
with success.
After his dissertation, his first publication, entitled On
Social Differentiation (1890), was devoted to sociological
problems, but for a number of years thereafter he published
mainly in the field of ethics and the philosophy of history,
returning to sociology only at a later date. His two major early
works, The Problems of the Philosophy of History and the two
volumes of the Introduction to the Science of Ethics, were
published in 1892-93; these were followed in 1900 by his
seminal work, The Philosophy of Money, a book on the
borderline between philosophy and sociology. After several
smaller volumes on religion, on Kant and Goethe, and on
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Simmel produced his major
sociological work, Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of
Sociation, in 1908. Much of its content had already been
published previously in journal articles.

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He then turned away from sociological questions for

almost a decade, but he returned to them in the small volume
published in 1917, Fundamental Questions of Sociology. His
other books in the last period of his life dealt with cultural
criticism (Philosophische Kultur, 1911), with literary and art
criticism (Goethe, 1913, and Rembrandt, 1916), and with the
history of philosophy (Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, 1910).
His last publication, Lebensanschauung (1918), set forth the
vitalistic philosophy he had elaborated toward the end of his
life.
3. Formal Sociology, Sociation and Group formation
Simmel played an important role in developing a
distinctive methodology for the social science which gave an
independent status to sociology as a special discipline. Simmel
rejected sociology as a comprehensive study of all social facts,
since as such it would be only a label for numerous special
disciplines treating different aspects of the same general
object, human life and its products. But if sociology has no
concrete object of its own, it nevertheless gains a special object
of cognition by isolating analytically the aspect of interaction
from the whole of social reality. Interactions are to be analyzed
not only where they have crystallized into relatively permanent
structures or social institutions, but also on the level of the
more transitory interpersonal relations. This emphasis on the
subinstitutional, or microsociological, was novel for his time.
Simmel was also impatient with the confusion between
sociology and the philosophy of history or social philosophy,

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and he wanted sociology to keep close to observable

phenomena, leaving all metaphysical interpretations that
transcend objective knowledge to what he later (1917) called
“philosophical sociology.” However, Simmel did not conceive
of sociology in a positivistic fashion, as a science of laws. He
had early rejected the use of natural science as a model for the
disciplines dealing with man and his creations, and he did not
side with the positivists in the hotly debated issue of the
idiographic as against the nomothetic character of social
science. Rather, he attempted to play down any such
distinction by pointing out that both viewpoints are alternative
modes of perception. But the search for social laws never
appeared promising to him.
As early as 1890 he wrote that since a given event may
have several and alternative causes, so that it can be produced
by varying constellations of factors, it is usually impossible to
formulate rules about a lawful association of isolated variables.
When he himself described some specific regularity in his
substantive analyses he repeatedly pointed out that this was not
to be taken as a “law,” but only as a descriptive generalization,
leaving quite open which causes might produce it under
varying conditions. Simmel expressly denied the existence of
laws of social development or of history in general and once
even suggested that what we now know as natural laws may at
some later time be revealed to be superstitions.
Simmel did not reject the possibility of causal
explanation in the realm of human life and its products. But
such explanation was for him essentially psychological in

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nature. Ultimately, the genesis of specific social forms and

cultural objectifications must be derived psychologically. In
his substantive analyses, Simmel again and again offered
psychological explanations for the phenomena he described,
both in terms of the conscious motives, interests, or goals of
the individuals involved, and in terms of unconscious psychic
mechanisms determining the reactions of these individuals.
But he did not draw on any systematic psychological theory;
rather, his often strikingly sensitive and perceptive
explanations seem the result of introspection and conjecture.
In 1890 Simmel defined the subject matter of sociology
as consisting of interactions and interrelations, but he did not
remain content with this definition. Later, going back to the
basic distinction made in his philosophy, he demanded that the
forms of interaction be distinguished from their contents and
held that only the former constitute sociology’s special object
of cognition. Still later (1917), this seems to have appeared too
restrictive to him, and he conceived of a “general sociology” in
addition to formal sociology; but he failed to make its
approach clear.
The contents of interaction are its motive powers –
individual drives, purposes, interests, and so forth. The forms
of interaction, or social forms, are not structured real entities
(analogous to the forms of culture) but abstract, analytical
aspects of social reality. They might best be conceived of as
basic structural configurations or structuring principles.
Simmel found a justification for this distinction in the seeming
independence of forms and contents: the same structural

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principle can be observed in groups or relations characterized

by widely divergent contents, while the same content (interest,
purpose) may be found expressed in different forms of social
organization.
Simmel’s attempt to explain the concept of social form
with a misleading analogy between sociology and geometry
and his admitted failure to make his methodological principle
quite explicit did much to provoke criticism of his “formal
sociology.” Such criticism was especially directed against the
form-content distinction, on the grounds that in social reality
the structural details of any concrete group and its particular
syndrome of “contents” are inseparably linked. This is true
and, incidentally, is quite obvious from Simmer’s own
analyses.
But Simmel expressly distinguished the forms of
sociation from their embodiment in special social units.
Conceived of as very general, abstract structural principles, or
basic modes of interrelationship among social elements, the
forms of sociation can indeed be isolated analytically.
Structural principles that Simmel himself named are the
relation of superordination-subordination; the relation of
antagonism (conflict); the division of labor, or relation of
functional interdependence; the in-group-outgroup relation and
the related principle of party formation; the principle of
representation; the principles of spatial and temporal
structuring; and the quantitative dimension. Other structural
principles are implied in Simmel’s writings, such as the

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dependence-autonomy dimension, which plays such a crucial

role in his analysis of group membership and individuality.
The specific task of sociology was for Simmel not the
causal explanation of these social forms, but the analysis of
their objective meaning. This distinction is analogous to one
commonly made in the analysis of forms of culture, such as
objects of art and systems of ideas: they possess an objective
meaning, which is something distinct from their
psychologically explained genesis. The objective meaning (the
analogy does not fit completely) of social forms rested for
Simmel in their essential characteristics and range of empirical
variation, on the one hand, and in their consequences, on the
other. His Soziologie (1908b) contains several chapters
devoted to the analysis of selected structural principles in these
terms. In other chapters he started by focusing on a specific
type of group (e.g., secret societies) or class of persons (e.g.,
the stranger, the poor man, the aristocrat) and proceeded to
show how they are characterized and determined by a unique
constellation of several of these structural principles.
Where Simmel dealt with the essential characteristics
of some social form, his writing has a strongly
phenomenological flavor. But the inclusion of the
consequences or effects of social forms breaks this
confinement and links his formal approach with his theory of
social development, since he selected for analysis the
consequences of given structural configurations either for
individualization or for the preservation and functioning of
groups. This procedure is obvious not only in the topical

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chapters on these subjects, but also where he treated specific

structural principles (e.g., conflict), special types of
relationship, such as marriage, or special types of groups, such
as secret societies. Thus his Soziologie, often criticized for
being an unsystematic collection of substantive analyses only
vaguely connected with his formal approach, really does
possess a surprising—if partly implicit—internal coherence.
Georg Simmel, as we have already mentioned, rejected
the organicist theories of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer
and German historical tradition. He did not believe that society
can be viewed as a thing or organism as Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer did. For him society is “an intricate web of
multiple relations between individuals who are in constant
interaction with one another: society is merely the name for a
number of individuals, connected by interactions” (Coser
1971: 178).
Simmel introduced the term sociation, which he
believed to be the major field of study for the students of
society. Sociation implies the particular patterns and forms in
which human beings relate to each other and interact.
According to him society is nothing more than all the
individuals who constitute it. But here he has also drawn
attention to the fact that people in groups of different sizes –
dyads, i.e., two persons, triads i.e., three people, or groups with
more than three persons, interact differently from each other.
A qualitative change in terms of organisation takes
place with the increase in number of persons in a group.

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According to Georg Simmel there cannot be a totalistic social

science, which studies all aspects of social phenomenon, for
even in natural sciences there is no one “total” science of all
matter. Therefore, he states that science must study dimensions
or aspects of phenomena instead of global wholes or totalities.
In this context he believes that the task of sociology is to
describe and analyse particular forms of human interaction and
their crystallisation in group characteristics, such as, the state,
the clan, the family, the city etc. He says that all human
behaviour is behaviour of individuals but a large part of this
human behaviour can be understood if we understand the
social group to which the individuals belong and the kind of
constraints they face in particular forms of interaction. He
emphasised the study of forms of interaction and this approach
gave impetus to rise of formal sociology. Let us discuss this
point further.
3.1 Sociation
Simmel coins the idea of ‘sociation’
(Vergesellschaftung) to address these infinitesimal forms of
interaction. Sociation refers to those stable and patterned forms
of reciprocal interaction between individuals who are ‘with-
one-another, for-one-another, in-one-another, against one-
another, and through-one-another, in state and commune, in
church and economic association, in family and in clubs’
(Simmel, 1971: 127). At every moment people look at each
other, are jealous, write text messages, advertise on social
networking sites, take lunch with each other, attend sports,

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gossip, dress up and adorn themselves (or dress down and

appear casual):
all the thousands of relations from person to
person, momentary or enduring, conscious or
unconscious, fleeting or momentous, from
which the above examples are taken quite at
random, continually bind us together. (1997:
110)
Sociation is malleable, tenacious and reciprocal.
Individuals form themselves and society through ‘innumerable,
specific relations and in the feeling and knowledge of
determining others and of being determined by them’ (1971:
7). Sociation emerges at ‘the intersection of various social
circles’ and is subject to their distinctive weave and woof
(Simmel, 1976). Society and individuality are merely different
aspects of the same social reality: We perform the synthesis
‘social being’. We are capable of constructing the notion of
society from the very idea of beings, each of whom may feel
himself as the terminus a quo [starting point] and the terminus
ad quem [end point] of his developments and destinies and
qualities. And we do construct this concept of society, which is
built up from that of the potentially autonomous individual, as
the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the individual’s
very life and fate. (Simmel, 1971: 18)
Simmel develops a geometrical notion of social circles.
In modernity individuals belong to a wide range of social
circles: family (parental, spouses and self), occupation

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(superiors, subordinates, colleagues), club, party, trade union,

professional body, neighbourhood, voluntary group, through to
the widest circles of social class or national identity (Simmel,
1976: 97). Points of contact between social circles shift as
individualsjoin or leave, ensuring that the elements of
objective culture are continually re-combined in new ways.
Sociation is not the same thing as ‘society’. Society
cannot be grasped inits entirety all at once. Simmel located his
concept of sociation within the standard dispute of his time
about ‘society’: One side mystically exaggerates its
significance, contending that only through society is human
life endowed with reality. The other regards it as a mere
abstract concept by means of which the observer draws the
realities, which are individual human beings, into a whole, as
one call strees and brooks, houses and meadows, a ‘landscape’.
(1997: 120)Society is not a thing-like substance. For Simmel
(1971: 27) there is no such thing as society ‘as such’ or
interaction ‘as such’. Society is fundamentally a relational
concept; it exists only in and through forms of sociation.
Instead of treating society as an independent substance,
as with Durkheim’s social facts, for Simmel ‘everything
interacts in some way with everything else’. It is only through
specific social forms that society also emerges. Sociation is
neither the cause nor the consequence of society; it is society.
Society as a complex whole is not the sum of individual people
in the same way that a collection of individual trees becomes a
forest. Society is a ‘synthesis’ or a unity of individuals in
countless interactions, connections and forms of association.

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While sociation extracts and distils into a definite form what is

specifically ‘social’ the abstract idea of ‘society’ is merely a
‘frame’ which contains the innumerable
4. Relationships and Social types
According to Georg Simmel there are no “pure” forms
existing in any social reality. All social phenomena consist of a
number of formal elements. These formal elements are like
those of cooperation and conflict, subordination and
superordination etc. Thus, there is no “pure” conflict or “pure”
cooperation found in society. The “pure” forms are only
abstractions which are not found in real society but have been
created by Georg Simmel to study the real, existing social life.
There is, therefore, a similarity between Georg Simmel’s
“forms” and Max Weber’s concept of “ideal types” about
which you will learn later in this course. Complementary to the
concept of social form, Georg Simmel discussed the concept of
social types.
In the study of society, Georg Simmel made an attempt
to understand a whole range of social types such as “the
stranger”, “the mediator”, “the poor”, and so on. His social
types were complementary to his concept of social forms. A
social type becomes a type because of his/ her relations with
others who assign a certain position to this person and have
certain expectations of him/ her. The characteristics of the
social type are, therefore, seen as the features of social
structure.
To explain his social type, Georg Simmel gives the

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example of “the stranger” in his book, The Sociology of Georg

Simmel (1950). The stranger has been described by Simmel as
a “person who comes today and stays tomorrow”. This
stranger is someone who has a particular place in the society
within the social group which he has entered. The social
position of this stranger is determined by the fact that he or she
does not belong to this group from the beginning. It is this
status of the stranger which determines his or her role in the
new social group and also the interaction that takes place.
As a stranger, a person is simultaneously both near to
one as well as distant. Not being part of the social group the
stranger can look at it objectively without being biased. Thus,
the stranger can be an ideal intermediary in any kind of
exchange of ideas or goods. In this way, the position of the
stranger is fixed in a society and defined. This is only example
of Georg Simmel’s social types. He has discussed several
others too, such as, “the poor”, “the adventurer”, etc. (Coser,
1971: 183).
5. Philosophy of Money
We should not leave Simmel without saying something
about Philosophy of Money (1907/1978), because its English
translation made Simmel’s work attractive to a whole new set
of theorists interested in culture and society. Although a macro
orientation is clearer in Philosophy of Money, it always existed
in Simmel’s work. For example, it is clear in his famous work
on the dyad and the triad. Simmel thought that some crucial
sociological developments take place when a two-person group

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(or dyad) is transformed into a triad by the addition of a third

party. Social possibilities emerge that simply could not exist in
a dyad.
For example, in a triad, one of the members can
become an arbitrator or mediator of the differences between
the other two. More important, two of the members can band
together and dominate the other member. This represents on a
small scale what can happen with the emergence of large-scale
structures that become separate from individuals and begin to
dominate them. This theme lies at the base of Philosophy of
Money. Simmel was concerned primarily with the emergence
in the modern world of a money economy that becomes
separate from the individual and predominant. This theme, in
turn, is part of an even broader and more pervasive one in
Simmel’s work: the domination of the culture as a whole over
the individual.
As Simmel saw it, in the modern world, the larger
culture and all its various components (including the money
economy) expand, and as they expand, the importance of the
individual decreases. Thus, for example, as the industrial
technology associated with a modern economy expands and
grows more sophisticated, the skills and abilities of the
individual worker grow progressively less important. In the
end, the worker is confronted with an industrial machine over
which he or she can exert little, if any, control. More generally,
Simmel thought that in the modern world, the expansion of the
larger culture leads to the growing insignificance of the
individual. Although sociologists have become increasingly

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attuned to the broader implications of Simmel’s work, his early

influence was primarily through his studies of small scale
social phenomena, such as the forms of interaction and types
of interactants.
Simmel's major work concerns money and the social
meaning of money. In this book Simmel is concerned with
large social issues, and this book can be thought of as on a par
with The Division of Labour of Durkheim, although not as
extensive and thorough as Marx's Capital or Weber's Economy
and Society. In his book Philosophy of Money, Simmel is
concerned with money as a symbol, and what some of the
effects of this are for people and society. In modern society,
money becomes an impersonal or objectified measure of value.
This implies impersonal, rational ties among people that are
institutionalized in the money form. For example, relations of
domination and subordination become quantitative
relationships of more and less money -- impersonal and
measurable in a rational manner. The use of money distances
individuals from objects and also provides the means of
overcoming this distance. The use of money allows much
greater flexibility for individuals in society -- to travel greater
distances and to overcome person-to-person limitations.
Simmel thus suggests that the spread of the money
form gives individuals a freedom of sorts by permitting them
to exercise the kind of individualized control over "impression
management" that was not possible in traditional societies. ...
ascribed identities have been discarded. Even strangers become
familiar and knowable identities insofar as they are willing to

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use a common but impersonal means of exchange. At the same

time, personal identity becomes problematic, so that
development of the money form has both positive and negative
consequences. That is, individual freedom is potentially
increased greatly, but there are problems of alienation,
fragmentation, and identity construction.
The Philosophy of Money (1907/1978) illustrates well
the breadth and sophistication of Simmel’s thinking (Deflem,
2003). It demonstrates conclusively that Simmel deserves at
least as much recognition for his general theory as for his
essays on microsociology, many of which can be seen as
specific manifestations of his general theory. Although the title
makes it clear that Simmel’s focus is money, his interest in that
phenomenon is embedded in a set of his broader theoretical
and philosophical concerns. For example, as we have already
seen, Simmel was interested in the broad issue of value, and
money can be seen as simply a specific form of value.
At another level, Simmel was interested not in money
per se but in its impact on such a wide range of phenomena as
the “inner world” of actors and the objective culture as a
whole. At still another level, he treated money as a specific
phenomenon linked with a variety of other components of life,
including “exchange, ownership, greed, extravagance,
cynicism, individual freedom, the style of life, culture, the
value of the personality, etc.” (Siegfried Kracauer, cited in
Bottomore and Frisby, 1978:7). Finally, and most generally,
Simmel saw money as a specific component of life capable of
helping us understand the totality of life. As Tom Bottomore

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and David Frisby put it, Simmel sought no less than to extract
“the totality of the spirit of the age from his analysis of
money” (1978:7).
The Philosophy of Money has much in common with
the work of Karl Marx. Like Marx, Simmel focused on
capitalism and the problems created by a money economy.
Despite this common ground, however, the differences are
overwhelming. For example, Simmel saw the economic
problems of his time as simply a specific manifestation of a
more general cultural problem, the alienation of objective from
subjective culture (Poggi, 1993). To Marx these problems are
specific to capitalism, but to Simmel they are part of a
universal tragedy—the increasing powerlessness of the
individual in the face of the growth of objective culture.
Whereas Marx’s analysis is historically specific,
Simmel’s analysis seeks to extract timeless truths from the flux
of human history. As Frisby says, “In his The Philosophy of
Money . . . [w]hat is missing . . . is a historical sociology of
money relationships” (1984:58). This difference in their
analyses is related to a crucial political difference between
Simmel and Marx. Because Marx saw economic problems as
time-bound, the product of capitalist society, he believed that
eventually they could be solved. Simmel, however, saw the
basic problems as inherent in human life and held out no hope
for future improvement.
In fact, Simmel believed that socialism, instead of
improving the situation, would heighten the kinds of problems

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discussed in The Philosophy of Money. Despite some

substantive similarities to Marxian theory, Simmel’s thought is
far closer to that of Weber and his “iron cage” in terms of his
image of both the modern world and its future. The Philosophy
of Money begins with a discussion of the general forms of
money and value. Later the discussion moves to the impact of
money on the “inner world” of actors and on culture in
general. Because the argument is so complex, it is only
highlighted here.
One of Simmel’s initial concerns in the work, as we
discussed briefly earlier, is the relationship between money
and value (Kamolnick, 2001). In general, he argued that people
create value by making objects, separating themselves from
those objects, and then seeking to overcome the “distance,
obstacles, difficulties” (Simmel, 1907/1978:66).The greater the
difficulty of obtaining an object, the greater its value.
However, difficulty of attainment has a “lower and an upper
limit” (Simmel, 1907/1978:72). The general principle is that
the value of things comes from the ability of people to distance
themselves properly from objects. Things that are too close,
too easily obtained, are not very valuable. Some exertion is
needed for something to be considered valuable. Conversely,
things that are too far, too difficult, or nearly impossible to
obtain are also not very valuable. Things that defy most, if not
all, of our efforts to obtain them cease to be valuable to us.
Those things that are most valuable are neither too distant nor
too close. Among the factors involved in the distance of an
object from an actor are the time it takes to obtain it, its

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scarcity, the difficulties involved in acquiring it, and the need

to give up other things in order to acquire it. People try to
place themselves at a proper distance from objects, which must
be attainable, but not too easily.
In this general context of value, Simmel discussed
money. In the economic realm, money serves both to create
distance from objects and to provide the means to overcome it.
The money value attached to objects in a modern economy
places them at a distance from us; we cannot obtain them
without money of our own. The difficulty in obtaining the
money and therefore the objects makes them valuable to us. At
the same time, once we obtain enough money, we are able to
overcome the distance between ourselves and the objects.
Money thus performs the interesting function of creating
distance between people and objects and then providing the
means to overcome that distance.
6. Modernity - Metropolis
One of Simmel's most notable essays is The Metropolis
and Mental Life from 1903, which was originally given as one
of a series of lectures on all aspects of city life by experts in
various fields, ranging from science and religion to art. The
series was conducted alongside the Dresden cities exhibition of
1903. Simmel was originally asked to lecture on the role of
intellectual (or scholarly) life in the big city, but he effectively
reversed the topic in order to analyze the effects of the big city
on the mind of the individual. As a result, when the lectures

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were published as essays in a book, to fill the gap, the series

editor had to supply an essay on the original topic himself.
The Metropolis and Mental Life was not particularly
well received during Simmel's lifetime. The organizers of the
exhibition over-emphasized its negative comments about city
life, because Simmel also pointed out positive transformations.
During the twenties the essay was influential on the thinking of
Robert E. Park and other American sociologists at the
University of Chicago who collectively became known as the
"Chicago School". It gained wider circulation in the 1950s
when it was translated into English and published as part of
Kurt Wolff's edited collection, The Sociology of Georg
Simmel. It now appears regularly on the reading lists of courses
in urban studies and architecture history. However, it is
important to note that the notion of the blasé is actually not the
central or final point of the essay, but is part of a description of
a sequence of states in an irreversible transformation of the
mind. In other words, Simmel does not quite say that the big
city has an overall negative effect on the mind or the self, even
as he suggests that it undergoes permanent changes. It is
perhaps this ambiguity that gave the essay a lasting place in the
discourse on the metropolis.
The deepest problems of modern life flow from the
attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and
individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of
society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the
external culture and technique of life. The antagonism
represents the most modern form of the conflict which

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primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily
existence. The eighteenth century may have called for
liberation from all the ties which grew up historically in
politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to
permit the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in
everyone, to develop without inhibition.
The nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in
addition to man's freedom, his individuality (which is
connected with the division of labor) and his achievements
which make him unique and indispensable but which at the
same time make him so much the more dependent on the
complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the
relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his
full development, while socialism found the same thing in the
suppression of all competition, but in each of these the same
fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the
individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-
technological mechanism.
7. Conclusions
In this final module we discussed the contributions of
Georg Simmel to the development of classical sociological
theory. In the first part we gave a short description of his
biography and details of the socio-historical background in
which he developed his perspective on sociology and social
theory. Then we have presented to you some of the central
ideas of Simmel, such as his formal sociology, his description

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of the social types, his ideas on the role of money in society

and finally his ideas about modern culture.
Simmel is unique among the four leading classical
theorists in emphasizing the micro level. However, he moved
back and forth between micro and macro levels, showing how
similar types of social processes can be manifested at different
levels. Although his intellectual environment was permeated
by German historicism, his work dealt mainly with forms or
patterns of interaction. Both social conflict and social cohesion
can be regarded as basic forms of interaction in his
perspective. This focus on both conflict and cohesion allows
for incorporation of Durkheim’s emphasis on interdependence
and solidarity plus Marx’s analysis of class conflict. Simmel
also contrasted forms of interaction and patterns of individual
involvement in small-scale social settings and those in larger
social systems, and he emphasized how the latter are becoming
more and more important in modern society.
KEY CONCEPTS
Blasé Attitude: An intellectualized approach to life, void of an
emotional investment in “differences,” that protects the
individual from becoming overwhelmed by the intensity of
city life.
Content: The drives, purposes, interests, or inclinations that
lead individuals to interact with each other.
Forms: This is a concept given by Georg Simmel. The various
“shapes” of interaction through which individuals pursue their
interests and satisfy their desires. It refers to the underlying
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uniformities of patterns of interaction of individuals, social

actors in social, political economic fields.
Types: This concept too has been given by Georg Simmel and
is related to his concept of social forms. An individual’s
identity derived from her relationship to others. He has
described a whole range of types from “the stranger”, “the
adventuror” to the “the renegade”. According to such concept
as “the stranger”, a person is a stranger not because he/ she
wanders from one place to another but because of the special
status enjoyed by that person as one joins a social group in
which he/ she is not originally a member. Thus, a stranger has
a fixed social position in society and due to this position is not
biased and can perform certain roles special to a stranger
alone, like acting as an intermediary.
Reference and Further Readings
• Coser, L.A. 1971 Maters of Sociological Thought,
Ideas in Historical and Social Context, Harcourt Brace
Javonovich Inc: New York
• Frisby, David, Georg Simmel (Ellis Horwood,
Chichester and Tavistock, London, 1984), Key
Sociologists Series.
• Morrison, Ken 2012. Marx Durkheim Weber:
Formations of Modern Social Thought. Sage
Publications
• Ritzer, George, Sociological Theory (McGraw-Hill,
New York, 1992)

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• Simmel, Georg, The Philosophy of Money (Routledge,

London, 1990
• Wolff, Kurt, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Free
Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1950)
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