SOIOLOGIMANIA

Perlunya Reorientasi Sosiologi di Indonesia

2009-01-14T01:05:00.000-08:00

I. PENDAHULUAN

Apabila Sosiologi difahami sebagai ilmu sosial yang paling komprehensif dan dapat menarik generasasi paling luas,
karena mempelajari dan menemukan hubungan antara pelaku sosial yang berkelompok, maka Sosiologi dapat seakan-
akan memanyungi ilmu-ilmu sosial lain.
Dalam ranah ilmu Ekonomi telah dikembangkan falsafah dasar mengenai penguasaan, pemanfaatan/eksploatasi dengan
tujuan produksi dan konsumsi sumberdaya, baik alam maupun manusia, menurut perinsip kegunaan (utilitarianisme).
Karena itu Ekonomi modern, menyimpang dari falsafah semasa ekonomi klasik A. Smith, mengabstraksikan dimensi
keadilan dan pemerataan (Gouldner, 1973). Itu pula yang mendekatkan sifat ekonomi ke ilmu alam diera neo-klasik.
Bersebrangan dengan itu Ethnologi memusatkan studi deskriptifnya pada budaya kelompok-kelompok ethnis, terutama
yang berada dalam tahap perkembangan pra-sejarah dan / atau pra-aksara. Ilmu Antroophologi yang sudah mulai
menjembatani dua ranah tersebut dengan mempelajari, baik aspek manusia sebagai organisme (Physical Antrhopology)
maupun perilaku dalam lingkungan kebudayaan (Ethology Cultural/Social Antrhopology).

Ilmu politik memusatkan perhatian pada hubungan dan interaksi yang berkaitan dengan pembagian dan pertukaran
kekuasaan (=power). Sejarah menjadi sangat relevant dalam menekuni Sosiologi karena menunjukkan kecenderungan
(trends) dan membuka peluang, baik untuk memahami proses perubahan, bertahap atau sebagai loncatan, maupun
membuka peluang untuk membanding gejala sosial/ kemasyarakatan. Beberapa cabang kelompok ilmu lain yang sering
di acu sebagai kelompok Humaniora seperti Hukum, Pendidikan dan komunikasi pun menunjang dan memberi
pengetahuan sangat berharga untuk sosiologi.

Dalam zaman penjajahan Belanda masyarkat Indonesia yang belum dipersepsikan sebagai satu kesatuan, lebih
dipelajari dari sudut pandang Ethnologi dan Antropologi budaya. Berkaitan dengan itu juga Hukum Adat sangat diminati
baik oleh sarjana Belanda maupun Indonesia, dan banyak diantara mereka bergelar Sarjana Hukum.
Mungkin minat tersebut juga merupakan kebutuhan pemerintah Hindia Belanda yang ingin menghayati sifat dan tata
kehidupan terutama suku-suku bangsa yang berperan di Nusantara. Nama-nama besar seperti Krom, Veth, dan Snouch
Hurgronje boleh dikatakan perintis ilmu-ilmu sosial ini di Indonesia sejak akhir abad ke-19 sampai awal abad ke-20.
Sejak tahun 1920-an timbullah minat sarjana-sarjana Belanda untuk memahami masyarakat lebih luas, karena gejala-
gejala sosial yang disoroti tidak terbatas pada lingkungan suku bangsa atau group ethnis. Di antaranya adalah B. Schrieke
(1890-1945) yang menulis karangan-karangan ethnografis dan sejarah, sehingga gabungan kedua konteks itu bercorak
Sosiologi. Salah satu variabel yang jelas mencerminkan ilmu Sosiologi yang menjadi garapan Schrieke adalah Akulturasi.
Misalnya Shcrieke mengulas “Pergeseran kekuasaan Politik dan Ekonomi di Nusantara antara abad ke 16 sampai abad
ke-17”. Satu sebab mengapa Schrieke kurang dikenal dan tulisannya kurang dibaca ialah karena beliau menulis dalam
bahasa Belanda. Baru setelah tahun 1955 beredarlah kumpulan karangan Schrieke yang diterjemahkan kedalam bahasa
Inggris (2 jilid. 1955).

Tokoh Belanda lain yang melalui karangan sejarah melukiskan mayarakat Indonesia adalah J.C. van Leur (1934-1942).
Jelas konteks makronya tercermin dari judul-judul karangan seperti a.l. Indonesian Trade and Society. Seorang Sarjana
Hukum lain yang dikenal dan menulis tentang Indonesia masa kini (kontemporer), bahkan juga meletakkan Indonesia
dalam konteks lebih luas lagi adalah Prof. W.F. Wertheim (1899-2001) yang pernah mengajar di Rechts Hogeschool di
Jakarta (1936) dan menjadi guru besar tamu di Fakultas Pertanian, UI (Bogor) 1957. Karena Wertheim mengalami
pendudukan Jepang di Indonesia dan sempat mengamati kebangkitan Nasional Indonesia pula, beliau, dapat merekam
perubahan sosial dalam bukunya “Indonesia Society in Transition” dari daerah jajahah menjadi Republik yang berdaulat.

II. PERKEMBANGAN TEORI SOSIOLOGI

Sarjana-sarjana Belanda yang meminati Sosiologi dahulu banyak bergelar Sarjana Hukum, dan aspek-aspek Sosiologi
juga diajarkan di Fakultas Hukum, mungkin warisan dari periode mempelajari Hukum Adat yang masih diminati. Ini
sebabnya mengapa baik di Universitas Indonesia dan di Universitas Gadjah Mada dosen-dosen Indonesia banyak
bergelar SH. Seperti misalnya Soelaeman Soemardi, Soekanto, Soetandiyo Wignyo Soebroto, Satjipto Raharjo dan lain-
lain.

Pengaruh sosiologi Eropa memang juga menggali dan dari pemikir-pemikir falsafah a.l. Bapak Sosiologi August Comte
(1798-1857). Pendekatan yang agak ethno-Antropologis tercermin juga dalam buku E. Durkheim tentang agama, tetapi
buku-buku lain seperti mengenai “Pembagian Kerja” (1966) dan “Bunuh Diri” sudah jelas dikarang dalam konteks makro
sosiologi. Memang penyebaran theori-theori klasik Sosiologi di Indonesia tidak terlalu luas, nama-nama seperti P.
Sorokin, M. Weber, Znaniecki, Marx, Von Wiese, G. Simmel, T. Shanin dan banyak lagi kurang mengisi bahan kuliah para
dosen.

Sejak pertengahan 1950-an Indonesia mulai mengirimkan mahasiswa untuk berbagai ilmu sosial keluar negeri, tetapi
ada kecenderungan lebih banyak ke Amerika Serikat daripada ke Eropa. Antara lain Soedjito Djojohardjo dikirim ke
Inggris, tetapi lebih banyak lagi yang belajar di Amerika dan menghasilkan thesis Ph.D. seperti Prof. Selo Soemardjan,
Mely Tan APU, Prof. Hasyah Bachtiar (hanya sebentar di Universitas Amsterdam sebelum ke Harvad) dan lain-lain.
Perlu dipahami bahwa pengembangan dan perkembangan theori yang digubah pakar Sosiologi tidak terlepas dari
kejadian-kejadian besar dalam masyarakat dan pengaruh-pengaruhnya kepada pemikir / ilmuwan yang kemudian
menerima sejumlah assumsi yang mendasari theori. Demikian keperluan pemerintah jajahan di Hindia Belanda
mendorong ilmuwan menelusuri adat kebiasaan suku-suku bangsa di Nusantara. Pengertian yang diperoleh
mengarahkan kebijaksanaan sedemikian rupa sehingga mereka yang dijajah tidak menimbulkan penolakan atau
pembangkangan yang terlalu kuat.

Dalam masa 1800-1825, dibawah pengaruh tumbuhnya kaum borjuis di Eropa dan awal industrialisasi yang
menimbulkan / menyuburkan “budaya utilitarianisme” sosiologi seakan-akan hanya mempelajari gejala-gejala yang
tersisa (unfinished business) dalam perjalanan revolusi industri. A. Gouldner (1973:92) mendeskripsikannya dalam
kalimat “Sociology made the residual, Social, Element its sphere”. Jadi ranah sosiologi seakan-akan dipisah dari
perkembangan ekonomi dan teknologi.
Baru sekitar pertengahan abad ke-19 sosiologi, ekonomi dan politik (Marx, 1848) mulai difahami sebagai bidang-bidang
ilmu yang saling terjalin.

“Sociology thus remains concerned with society as a “whole” as some kind of totality, but it now regards itself as
responsible only for one dimension of this totality. Society has been parceled out analytically (Tj. Only) among the various
social sciences. From this analytic standpoint, sociology is indeed, concerned with social systems or society as a “whole”,
but only as it is a social whole”. (Gouldner, 1973:94)
Theori dalam ilmu sosial pun mencari keteraturan perilaku manusia serta pemahaman dan sikap yang mendasarinya.
Karena keadaan masyarakat yang berubah-ubah, pemahaman, sikap dan perilaku warga / pelaku social pun dapat
berubah. Memang perubahaan sosial bisa bersifat makro, tetapi juga bisa lebih mikro mencakup kelompok-kelompok
masyarakat yang relatif lebih kecil dari satu bangsa, atau kumpulan bangsa-bangsa. Theori juga mengandung sifat
universalitas, artinya dapat berlaku di lain masyarakat yang mana saja, walaupun sering dibedakan atara Grand Theory
dan theori yang cakupannya tidak seluas itu.

Theori August Comte, Karl Marx dan beberapa theory Max Weber dapat digolongkan ke Grand Theory, sedangkan theori
Parson relatif mikro karena melepaskan diri dari kerangka sejarah dan memfokuskan analisnya pada sistem sosial dan
struktur, lebih khusus dalam masyarakat Amerika Serikat.

Seorang ahli Sosiologi Alwin Gouldner (1971) yang bersifat kritis dan menulis buku berjudul “The Coming Crisis of
Western Sociology” mengungkapkan bahwa Talcott Parsons menghasilkan “Academic Sosiology” dimasa Amerika Serikat
mengalami krisis ekonomi yang dahsyat (1930), bahkan aliran tersebut kemudian mempengaruhi di luar A.S.
Parsons juga mencoba mencari penyelesaian lebih prgamatis dalam zamannya yang pemikirannya membuahkan theori
“Social System”. Ini sebanya theori tesebut juga mempengaruhi pengajaran dan pemahaman sosiologi, yang waktu tahun
1930-an menarik banyak penganut pakar Sosiolog di luar AS. Bahkan sedemikian rupa sehingga menggusur theori-theori
sosiologi dalam tradisi Eropa, seperti Max Weber, Karl Mannheim dan lain-lain yang tidak mengesampingkan dimensi
falsafah dan sejarah. Jadi boleh dikatakan sosiologi Meso timbul dengan theori Parsons, tetapi dengan mengorbankan
faktor “dinamika” (perubahan sosial makro yang ciri Sosiologi Eropa) dengan mengunggulkan “Struktur dan Fungsi”.
Akibat pengaruh Amerika Serikat sebagai negara adidaya setelah 1950 yang terus meluas setelah perang dunia kedua,
theori Sosiologi dinegara berkembang pun terpengaruhi, karena menekuni masalah yang tidak melampaui batas “nation
state”. Negara-negara baru dengan kesadaran nasional yang tinggi ingin mengatur struktur kelembagaan dalam
masyarakat masing-masing.

Sekarang di Indonesia mulai terasa adanya dilemma, karena “nation state” belum mantap sudah timbul Globalisasi yang
pasti merubah pengelompokan dan perilaku-perilaku sosial yang lebih universal.

III. REORIENTASI SOSIOLOGI INDONESIA

Baik lahirnya “nation state” Indonesia di pertengahan abad ke-20 dan pembangunan nasional yang digalakkan selama
periode pemerintahan Orde Baru merangsang tumbuhnya theori struktur dan fungsi Parsons. Bukan saja pragmatik (non-
dinamika) yang dipentingkan karena tujuannya adalah pertumbuhan ekonomi, tetapi juga kurang mengulas perubahan
sosial dan konflik. Perubahan struktur sosial yang sebenarnya di Indonesia akan dimulai tahun 1960 dengan mengatur
agraria, berhenti tetapi itu (1965) dan kemudian andalannya adalah menumbuhkan klas menengah. Sering dikatakan
bahwa klas menengah merupakan prasyarat untuk pertumbuhan demokrasi maupun ekonomi.
Dialektika dalam masyarakat yang mengandung potensi konflik , antara sentralisme politik dan arus kebebasan generasi
muda yang tertekan, meletus waktu krisis 1997 dan Reformasi 1998 sampai menggoncangkan sendi-sendi masyarakat.
Gejala-gejala yang sebelumnya latent, sekarang menjadi perhatian Rakyat, dan aneka elite menjadi faktor yang penting
dalam usaha mecapai konsensus nasional baru.

Mengingat hal-hal tersebut diatas, terasa bahwa buku P. Sorokin (1928) “Contemporary Sociological Theories” sudah
diperluas dengan theori-theori yang sudah lebih mengintegrasikan beberapa cabang ilmu-ilmu sosial.
Pertautan antara aspek-aspek psikologi misalnya dapat ditemukan dalam buku R. Presthus (1962) dan D. Riesman dkk.
(1961). [1] K. Boulding (1962) seorang guru besar ekonomi menambahkan teori konflik dan memperkaya theori klasik
terdahulu (Marx, Simel, Coser). [2] Erat pula kaitannya dengan gejala-gejala yang kita alami sejak Reformasi 1998 adalah
buku-buku C. Wright MILLS (2959 dan 1963). [3] [1] Roberth Presthus (1962). “ The Organizational Society; An Analysis and
a Theory” New York, random House. David RIESMAN, dkk. (1961) “The Lonely Crowd.” New Haven, Yale University Press
[2] Kenneth BOULDING (1962). “ Conflict and Defensel; A General Theory”. New York, Harper Torchbooks. [3] C. Wright
Mills (1959). “The Power Elite”. New York, Oxford Univ. Press. ________ (1963). “Power Politics and People.” London,
Oxford Univ. Press.

Analisa-analisa pakar-pakar tersebut diatas menunjukkan pentingnya dinamika sosial dalam masyarakat modern yang
lebih memperkaya imajinasi sosiologi kita. Jadi di Amerika Serikat setelah T. Parsons timbul mazhab-mazhab Sosiologi
muda yang lebih memahami pentingnya gejala perubahan dan konflik sosial, yang pada hemat penulis lebih merupakan
warisan dari tradisi Sosiologi Eropa.
Ini dibenarkan oleh a. Gouldner yang menulis dan menyimpulkan bahwa “Academic Sociology semakin terjalin dengan
analisa K. Marx, sehingga di Amerika misalnya menimbulkan gerakan “New Left” menentang Establishment atau di Eropa
(Jerman) “Tentara Merah” dengan tokoh muda Beader Meinhof. Mungkin P.R.D di Indonesia dapat diketegorikan dalam
pemberontakan generasi muda seperti itu, yang sudah jenuh dengan elite Orde Baru di Jepang pun ada gerakan-gerakan
serupa.

Pemberontakan menentang tradisi dan pemikiran generasi “arrive” yang kolot oleh generasi muda selalu akan timbul
dalam masyarakat manusia sebagai terjadi tahun 1945, sebentar di tahun 1965 dan dewasa ini sejak tahun 1998. Dalam
arti yang lebih murni memang paradigma yang umum dianut sarjana Sosiologi di Indonesia perlu dirubah. Kalau di
Zaman Orde Baru sukar untuk menganalisa secara terbuka gejala stratifikasi sosial dan konflik antara Klas, sekarang
sudah lebih bisa diterima, karena memang gejalanya sudah ada sejak zaman penjajahan sekalipun.
Struktur feodal memang berlapis-lapis dan eksploatasi jelas sudah ada. Jadi perlu reorientasi sosiologi untuk banyak
ilmuwan Sosiologi dan cedekiawan yang memperhatikan perkembangan kebudayaan karena keadaan sudah berubah.
Tantangan bukan hanya ada di dalam negeri, tetapi sekaligus juga dalam hubungan kita dengan negara dan bangsa,
bukan saja yang geografis menjadi tetangga kita, tetapi juga dengan negara-negara sebenua, bahkan di benua lain.
Satuan pelaku sosial bukan saja lagi “nation state” tetapi komunitas negara atau bangsa yang sudah melintasi batas
nation-state. Mazhab-mazhab agama menjadi salah satu ilustrasi jelas, tetapi juga “pendukung pelestarian alam dan
lingkungan, serta perjuangan untuk “Hak Azasi Manusia” dan “Gender” dapat segera difahami sebagai komunitas besar
yang menjadi ciri pengelompokan Global. Sosiologi tidak dapat lagi bertahan dengan membatasi diri dengan mempelajari
“residual social elements seperti pernah digagas oleh cendekiawan Prancis Saint Simon di awal abad ke-19.
Inilah sebabnya mengapa perlu ada reorientasi Sosiologi di Indonesia; bukan ekonomi lagi yang akan bertahan sebagai
“The Queen of The Social Sciences”, tetapi sosiologi yang mengulur tangan kepada cabang-cabang ilmu Sosial lain dan
Humaniora untuk menganalisa dan memecahkan masalah kemasyarakatan secara terpadu.

Prof. Dr. Sediono MP Tjondronegoro, Ketua Ikatan Sosiologi Indonesia (ISI) Pusat, 1999 - 2003.
Makalah disampaikan pada Seminar Nasional “Menggalang Masyarakat Indonesia Baru yang Berkemanusiaan”. Diselenggarakan oleh Ikatan
Sosiologi Indonesia, tanggal 28 Agustus 2002 di Bogor.

SUMBER ACUAN
BOUMAN, P.J. (1976). Sosiologi, Pengertian dan masalah. Yogyakarta, Penerbit Yayasan Kanisius.
COSER, L. (1964). The Function of Social Conflict. New York, The Free Press.
DURKHEIM, E. (1966). The Division of Labour (Translation). New York, The Free Press.
_____________ (1962). Socialism. London, Colliers Books
GOULDNER, Alvin W. (1973). The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London, Heineman
HINDESS, Barry (ed. 1977). Sociological theories of the Economy. London, the Mac Millan Press.
KAZACIGIL, Ali (ed. 1994). Sociology: State of the Art I. International Social Sciences Journal, February 1994:139. Paris, Blackwell Publ.
MARX, K. (1956). Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. (Translation by T.B. Bottomore). New York, Mc Graw-Hill Books.
MARTINELLI, alberto (2002). “Markets, Government and Global Governance”. Presidential address, ISA XV Congress, Brisbane 2002
MILLS, C, Wright (1961). The Sociological Imagination. New York, Grove Press, Inc.
MUDIM BE, V.Y. (ed. Dkk, 1996). Open the Social Sciences. Refort of the Guilbenkian Commission of the Gulbenkian Commission on the
Restructuring of the Social Science. Stanford, Stanford Univ. Press.
PARSONS, Talcot (1951). The Social System; The Major Exposition of the Author’s Conceptual Scheme. New York, Free Press.
SIMMEL, G. (1955). Conflict and the Web of Group Affixations. New York, The Free Press.
____________ (1950). The sociology of George Simmel. New York, The Free Press of Glencol
SIMONDS, A.P. (1978). Karl Mennheim’s Sociology of Knowledge. Oxford, Clarendom Press
SOROKIN, P.A. (1928). Contemporary Sociological Theories; through the First Quarter of the 20th Century. New York, Harper Torchbooks.
STEINER, Philippe (2001). “The Sociology of Economic Knowledge”. The Return of Economic Sociology in Europe (a. Symposium) dalam
European Journal of Social Theory 4 (4). London, Sage Publications
WEBER, M. (1964). The Theory of Sociology Imagination. New York, Grove Press, Inc.
WERTHEIM, W.F. et.al. (ed.s 1955-1957). Indonesian Sociological Studies; Selected Writings of B. Schrieke (2 parts). The Haque, W. van
Hoeve.
Sumber: Jurnal Ekonomi Rakyat

Manfaat Belajar Sosiologi

2008-12-14T22:37:00.000-08:00

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. –Karl Marx–

Tidak sedikit mahasiswa baru sosiologi, bahkan yang lama sekalipun bertanya-tanya tentang apa guna ilmu yang dipelajarinya? Apa hubungan sosiologi dengan kehidupan nyata, alias dunia profesi yang akan dihadapinya. Tulisan ini dibuat untuk meningkatkan motivasi pribadi dan sekaligus nilai-nilai sosial pendukung setiap maha-siswa sosiologi dalam mempelajari ilmunya. Bahwa ternyata cukup banyak hal yang bisa dilakukan setelah mempelajari sosiologi, tentu dengan usaha serius.

Asal Mula ‘Sosiologi’

Sudah banyak tokoh yang mencoba mengamati manusia dan masyarakat. Mulai Konfusius (551-479 SM) di Cina; Plato (427-347 SM) dan Aristoteles (384-322 SM) di Yunani; Ibn Kaldun (1332-1406) di Arab; bahkan sastrawan ternama dari Inggris William Shakespeare (1564-1616) pun telah membuat refleksi tentang kehidupan manusia pada jamannya masing-masing. Namun, tokoh-tokoh tersebut masih lebih tertarik untuk membayangkan masyarakat yang ideal atau masyarakat yang seharusnya, tanpa melihat masyarakat sebagai apa adanya. Suatu pendekatan yang positivis memang, namun itu adalah lajur yang mungkin harus ditempuh untuk mencapai pada tahap-tahap selanjutnya.

Barulah pada tahun 1838 seorang pe-mikir Perancis Auguste Comte (1798-1853) mematenkan istilah ‘sosiologi’ sebagai cara baru melihat dunia, khususnya masyarakat yang menghidupi dunia itu. Comte menawarkan sebuah cara pandang melihat masyarakat sebagai apa adanya (yang kemudian terkenal dengan aliran positivism). Positivism berusaha menjelaskan sesuatu objek dari apa yang tampak. Positivism, dalam perkembangannya, mendapat kritik tajam dari pemikir. Kemudian muncul aliran baru bernama post-positivism, yang menjelaskan obyek dari hal-hal yang tak tampak. Pertanyaannya dasarnya, “Ada apa di balik peristiwa itu?”

Dari sini kita bisa melihat sosiologi bukanlah ilmu yang statis dan kaku (sak-klek), melainkan selalu dinamis dan bergerak menyesuaikan dengan konteks tempatnya hidup. Bagi sosiolog, permasalahan teknis yang dihadapi bukanlah menentukan aliran mana yang paling tepat untuk digunakan (positivism atau post-positivism), melainkan bagaimana memadukan aliran-aliran yang ada tersebut untuk mendapatkan pemahaman lebih menyeluruh tentang masyarakat.

Perkembangan Sosiologi

Sosiologi terus berkembang pesat sejalan dengan perubahan sosial yang terjadi sangat cepat sejak abad ke-17 sampai sekarang. Setidaknya, ada tiga hal yang menjadi variabel penyebab percepatan itu, yaitu:

(1) Pertumbuhan penduduk yang sangat pesat. Sampai 1990, bumi ini telah dihuni lebih dari 5,5 milyar manusia. Di Indonesia sendiri, sampai saat ini, sudah lebih dari 200 juta penduduk. Semakin banyak manusia makin kompleks pula interaksi dan masalah sosial yang bakal terjadi. Di sinilah sosiolog dituntut untuk tidak pernah ‘lelah’ untuk terus mengikuti perubahan sosial dan menjelaskannya;

(2) Inovasi teknologi yang terus berganti. Mulai dari terjadinya Revolusi Industri (yaitu penggunaan teknologi dalam industri) mengakibatkan manusia yang bertambah banyak itu kehilangan pekerjaan, masalah sosial baru bermunculan pesat. Hubungan manusia dan teknologi merupakan kajian menarik yang bisa digali lebih dalam, karena pada per-kembangan dan pembuatan teknologi (termasuk di dalamnya adalah budaya atau ‘aturan main’ yang menentukan perilaku) telah menjadi ‘tujuan’ tindakan manusia, bukan sebagai ‘sarana’ untuk mencapai tujuan hidup (Habermas, 1990). Apalagi kini perkembangan teknologi informasi telah mengubah secara drastis pola-pola interaksi sosial antar-manusia, dari face to face menuju via mass media. Model interaksi baru semacam ini telah menggeser hampir keseluruhan pandangan sosiologis ten-tang bagaimana manusia melakukan ‘kontak’ dan ‘komunikasi’, berinteraksi kata sosiolog Indonesia Soerjono Soekanto. Padahal, dalam pertemuan face to face terkadang masih dibutuhkan dalam interaksi (dan terkadang model inilah yang paling menentukan);

(3) Perubahan suhu politik ilmu pengetahuan. Ilmu pengetahuan, mengikuti Karl Marx (1818-1883), mempunyai kekuatan untuk mengubah masyarakat. Asumsi Marx ini dikembangkan Michel Foucault yang melihat lahirnya pengetahuan tidak bisa terlepas dari variabel yang bernama kekuasaan. Katanya, ketika ada kekuasaanlah pengetahuan bisa ada. Idealnya, kembali pada Marx, ilmu tidak hanya digunakan untuk menjelaskan realitas sosial yang terjadi, namun yang lebih penting adalah berusaha meniadakan ketidakadilan sosial yang terjadi dalam masyarakat. Pertanyaannya, apa guna ilmu pengetahuan terus berkembang (dan dikembangkan) jika ketidakadilan sosial tetap eksis, bahkan semakin besar? Semangat mewujudkan keadilan sosial itulah yang melatarbelakangi meletusnya berbagai macam gerakan sosial. Kata ‘kemerdekaan’ (liberty) menjadi kata yang sakral untuk diperjuangkan, bahkan hingga kini dalam wacana hak asasi manusia (HAM).

Atas dasar tiga variabel itulah, sosiologi seperti mendapatkan angin segar untuk terus menjamur dan berkembang pesat. Sayangnya, sistem persekolahan (pendidikan formal) di Indonesia, dan negara-negara lain pada umumnya, lebih berorientasi pada kepentingan dunia industri daripada masyarakat yang ditinggalinya. Kebanyakan ilmu yang dipelajari perguruan tinggi (termasuk sosiologi) telah ‘tercerabut’ dari akarnya, sehingga ilmu yang dipelajari tidak bisa digunakan dan berguna bagi mayoritas penduduk. Contoh, di Pulau Jawa lebih dari dua pertiga penduduknya adalah petani (dan nelayan) yang menggantungkan hidupnya pada alam (tanah dan laut), namun tidak banyak perguruan tinggi di Pulau Jawa (baik negeri ataupun swasta) yang menawarkan program-program studi yang berhubungan langsung dengan masalah pengembangan pertanian, misalnya. Kalau ada, peminatnya pun tidak banyak (dan biasanya gengsinya rendah). Ironisnya, jurusan-jurusan ini semakin hari semakin menyusut keberadaannya.

Ini hanyalah sebuah contoh ketidakadilan yang dibentuk secara struktural, yang kemudian berdampak pada kesadaran kolektif masyarakat. Kondisi semacam ini hanya semakin memperkokoh citra perguruan tinggi sebagai ‘menara gading’.

Paradigma-Paradigma Sosiologi

Teori-teori sosiologi semakin hari tambah banyak dan semakin variatif. Puluhan, ratusan, bahkan mungkin ribuan teori sudah dibangun oleh para sosiolog di seluruh belahan dunia ini. Dari teori-teori sosiologi yang muncul itu, pada dasarnya, dibangun berdasarkan tiga paradigma teoritik, yaitu:

(1) Paradigma struktural-fungsional, merupakan paradigma yang paling berpengaruh dalam perkembangan sosiologi. Paradigma ini berasumsi masyarakat sebagai sebuah sistem yang kompleks di mana setiap bagian dalam masyarakat saling bekerjasama untuk menjaga stabilitas. Ada dua kata kunci, yaitu ‘struktur’ dan ‘fungsi’. Struktur sosial adalah pola-pola sosial yang relatif stabil dalam jangka waktu yang lama. Fungsi sosial adalah konsekuensi yang dilakukan untuk menjaga kestabilan. Ada dua macam fungsi, yaitu fungsi manifes (atau fungsi yang disadari) dan fungsi laten (atau fungsi yang tidak disadari). Sedangkan jika struktur tidak berhasil mewujudkan kestabilan, maka disebut disfungsi sosial.

Contoh kasus, pendidikan mempunyai fungsi manifes mengajarkan keterampilan pada generasi yang lebih muda, agar siap menggantikan generasi yang lebih tua (fungsi produksi tenaga kerja). Fungsi laten pendidikan adalah melakukan internalisasi nilai-nilai dari generasi tua. Lewat pendidikan, diajarkan tata krama (manner) dalam masyarakat (fungsi sosialisasi). Seiring dengan usaha institusionalisasi pendidikan men-jadi sekolah formal, ditambah dengan meningkatnya kesibukan orangtua dengan pekerjaannya, akibatnya orang-tua pun pasrah bongkokan pada sekolah untuk urusan pendidikan anak-anaknya. Pendidikan dianggap semata tugas sekolah, dengan mengesampingkan peran institusi yang lain dalam melakukan fungsi pendidikan.

(2) Paradigma konflik-sosial. Masih dalam analisis makro, paradigma ini mencoba ‘membuka mata’ para penganut paradigma struktural-fungsional tentang kestabilan yang terjadi dalam masyarakat. Paradigma ini mengasumsikan masyarakat adalah sistem yang kompleks, ditandai oleh terjadinya ketidakadilan sosial dan konflik yang menggerakkan masyarakat itu. Paradigma ini kuat dipengaruhi pemikiran Marx yang melihat masyarakat terdiri dari kelas-kelas sosial yang lebih bersifat stratifikasi (bertingkat) ketimbang diferensial (sejajar).

Contoh kasus, sistem pendidikan formal (persekolahan), seperti dikatakan Randall Collins (dalam Wilonoyudho, 2005) adalah awal dari proses stratifikasi sosial. Akibat masuknya pengaruh kekuatan ekonomi, menyebabkan pendidikan yang baik dan bagus hanya bisa didapatkan oleh siapa yang bisa ‘membelinya’. Beragam fasilitas pendukung sekolah, seperti: buku dan majalah, televisi dan radio, internet, dan kursus-kursus di luar sekolah juga hanya bisa diikuti oleh kelas ekonomi mapan. Bagi yang tidak memiliki kekuatan ekonomi akan semakin tertinggal. Jadi, mobilitas sosial vertikal melalui pendidikan tinggal menjadi kenangan dan impian semata.

(3) Paradigma interaksi-simbolik. Tidak seperti dua paradigma sebelumnya, paradigma ini melihat masyarakat dari level mikro. Masyarakat diasumsikan sebagai produk interaksi sehari-hari antar-manusia. Ada dua konsep kunci dalam interaksi sosial, yaitu status sosial (posisi sosial seseorang dalam masyarakat) dan peran sosial (tugas-tugas yang harus dilakoni seseorang akibat posisi sosial yang melekat dalam dirinya).

Dalam praktiknya, status sosial tidak sakklek, melainkan selalu berubah sesuai dengan ruang dan waktu tempat se-seorang itu hidup. Perubahan status itu berdampak pada perubahan peran sosial seseorang secara mendadak pula. Kondisi ini potensial menyebabkan konflik peran (ketidaksesuaian peran sosial dalam dua atau lebih status sosial yang sedang terjadi secara bersamaan), yang menjadi akar permasalahan sosial secara makro.

Contoh kasus, keberhasilan pendidikan formal tidak melulu ditentukan oleh struktur, (baca: sistem pendidikan), melainkan lebih ditentukan oleh interaksi sehari-hari yang terjadi di sekolah itu. Bukan jaminan, sekolah favorit serta-merta akan menghasilkan murid yang berkualitas pula. Yang juga penting adalah, misalnya, bagaimana cara mengajar seorang guru di dalam kelas; apakah seorang guru mau membimbing murid-muridnya di luar kelas; apakah si murid aktif dalam diskusi (di dalam ataupun di luar kelas); apakah murid juga aktif mencari informasi lain tentang suatu matapelajaran selain dari buku dan guru yang ada; apakah murid juga melatih keterampilan-keterampilan lain.

Singkat kata, keberhasilan pendidikan terkadang lebih ditentukan kreativitas dari masing-masing aktor dalam masyarakat. Kebiasaan yang dilakukan. Komunitas yang digelutinya. Aktivitas yang ditekuni seseorang. Karenanya, ‘sukses’ melalui pendidikan menjadi sangat relatif, ukurannya tidak hanya sebatas dilihat dari nilai yang bagus.

Meskipun kelihatannya saling bertentangan, namun tidak ada yang paling benar diantara ketiga paradigma itu. Yang ada hanya saling melengkapi. Sosiolog profesional adalah yang berhasil memadukan ketiga paradigma tersebut untuk menjelas-kan fenomena untuk mendapatkan penjelasan yang lebih menyeluruh.

Berpikir Sosiologis

Hal tersulit dalam mempelajari sosiologi bukanlah menghafalkan, memahami ataupun menerapkan teori-teori atau paradigma sosiologi yang ada, melainkan bagaimana berpikir sosiologis ketika bertemu pada suatu masalah, apapun itu. Macionis (1997) menawarkan tiga kerangka berpikir sosiologis, yaitu:

(1) Melihat keseluruhan melalui sebagian. Berpikir sosiologis ibarat seorang ilmuwan mikrobiologi yang mengguna-kan mikroskop dalam melihat DNA untuk mengetahui asal-usul seorang manusia. Jadi, sosiolog tidak perlu melihat keseluruhan. Karena tidak mungkin kita akan meneliti semua anggota masyarakat. Dalam metodologi cara berpikir macam ini diturunkan menjadi teknik sampling. Cara melihat semacam ini jarang dilakukan oleh disiplin lain. Antropologi, misalnya, hanya melihat pada ‘sebagian’ itu secara mendalam. Psikologi pun cenderung melakukan hal serupa. Sosiologi berusaha melakukan generalisasi, inilah ciri khas sosiologi, sekaligus kelemahannya;

(2) Melihat keanehan-keanehan dalam kejadian sehari-hari. Seorang sosiolog akan melihat kejadian yang dianggap biasa oleh orang kebanyakan sebagai hal yang aneh. Bagi awam, cara berpikir ini bisa dikatakan sebagai tindakan iseng atau kurang kerjaan, namun bagi sosiolog pemula cara inilah yang sering digunakan. Tugas sosiolog, kemudian, adalah menggali lebih dalam tentang apa penyebab masalah sosial tersebut. Sosiolog berusaha mencari rasionalitas manusia yang melakukan tindakan;

(3) Melihat individu dalam konteks sosialnya. Sosiolog percaya bahwa setiap tindakan manusia dibentuk oleh lingkungan yang melingkupi manusia itu. Contoh, Emile Durkheim yang meneliti tentang fenomena bunuh diri. Lalu, apa yang dilakukannya? Jelas tidak mungkin mengorek informasi dengan cara melakukan wawancara terhadap orang yang sudah meninggal. Beruntunglah data statistik pada kantor kepolisian waktu itu cukup baik. Dari data itulah, ditambah dengan wawancara terhadap beberapa keluarga korban, Durkheim pun membangun salah satu teori sosiologi yang tetap relevan sampai sekarang tentang Solidaritas Sosial.

Yang paling membedakan sosiologi dengan disiplin ilmu sosial lain adalah kriteria berpikir sosiologis yang ketiga, melihat individu dalam konteks sosialnya. Pada dasarnya, segala tindakan manusia tidaklah murni muncul dari dirinya sendiri tetapi dikonstruksikan secara sosial (socially constructed). Contoh, motivasi setiap sepasang lelaki dan perempuan memutuskan untuk menikah tidak hanya ditentukan oleh alasan cinta semata, melainkan lebih ditentu-kan oleh faktor sosial, yaitu desakan dari orangtua atau tuntutan dari masyarakat sekitarnya (untuk kasus ‘kumpul kebo’ atau ‘perawan tua’). Bahkan, kesadaran pasangan suami-istri untuk punya anak pun tidak murni motif pribadi dari pasangan itu, akan tetapi telah terkonstruksi secara sosial. ‘Hubungan seks’ yang menurut anggapan banyak orang sebagai urusan privat masing-masing manusia dan dilandasi oleh insting individu ternyata tidak lepas dari konstruksi masyarakat. Lalu, bagaimana dengan tindakan sosial yang lain?

Modal-modal ‘Pertempuran Sosial’

Untuk bisa tetap survive dalam medan (field) pertempuran sosial) seseorang perlu memiliki modal yang kuat. Pembicaraan tentang modal (capital) dalam sosiologi terus berkembang sejak Marx hanya mengartikan-nya sebatas sebagai kepemilikan atas alat-alat produksi. Konsep modal paling mutakhir ditawarkan Pierre Bordieu (1930-2002). Bourdieu menyebutkan empat modal yang membuat manusia bisa bertahan hidup dalam medan sosial, yaitu (lihat Coriggan, 1997 dan Haryatmoko, 2002):

(1) Modal ekonomi, kepemilikan atas alat-alat produksi;

(2) Modal sosial, kepemilikan atas jaringan atau relasi pertemanan;

(3) Modal budaya, kepemilikan atas pengetahuan dan manner tertentu;

(4) Modal simbolik, hal-hal yang meng-utamakan kekuasaan simbolis untuk melegitimasi sesuatu hal.

Jelas, sosiologi tidak bisa menyediakan modal ekonomi, modal sosial, dan bahkan mungkin modal simbolik. Modal simbolik diberikan oleh pihak perguruan tinggi dalam bentuk gelar, Sarjana Sosial. Sosiologi hanya menawarkan sebagian modal budaya, yaitu melatih untuk berpikir sosiologis terhadap sebuah masalah. Itu pun kalau mahasiswa sosiolog mau berlatih untuk menggunakan-nya. Idealnya, profesi sosiolog adalah peneliti. Akan tetapi, struktur di Indonesia tidak terlalu mendukung kesejahteraan bagi pelaku di dunia penelitian. Akibatnya, sangat sedikit yang bertahan di bidang ini. Kemudian, banyak sarjana sosiologi yang misorientasi, mengalami krisis, bahkan frustasi.

Oleh karena itu, seorang mahasiswa sosiologi perlulah memperbanyak modal yang dimilikinya itu, khususnya modal sosial dan modal budaya. Modal sosial, seperti: perbanyak pertemanan (jangan hanya teman dari jurusan sosiologi saja, tapi juga dari disiplin lain), baik-baiklah dengan orang lain (kenalkan diri Anda), terlibat dalam organisasi (sebanyak mungkin), atau aktif mengikuti forum-forum diskusi yang ada. Modal budaya, seperti: kemampuan bahasa asing (Inggris, Jerman, Latin, Mandarin, Jepang dan lainnya), kebiasaan membaca dan menulis ilmiah maupun populer, penguasaan teknologi (komputer, internet, dan ponsel), kemauan untuk terus belajar, dan biasakan untuk selalu berpikir sosiologis ketika melihat masalah. Suatu saat, menurut Bourdieu, kedua modal tersebut akan lebih membantu seseorang bertahan hidup (survive) dibandingkan modal ekonomi dalam medan pertarungan sosial (field).

Jadi, apa pun profesi yang akan digeluti, jadikan kebiasaan berpikir sosiologis sebagai landasan mengembangkan profesi karena hanya itulah yang bisa diperoleh seseorang yang belajar sosiologi.

Penutup

Ada banyak ilmu yang mengambil manusia sebagai objek studinya. Ada kedokteran, biologi, filsafat, sastra, antropologi, sampai psikologi. Setiap disiplin itu menawarkan wawasan yang terbatas tentang kehidupan manusia. Namun, bukannya ingin sombong, tapi sosiologi menawarkan perspektif yang paling luas untuk melihat manusia (dan masyarakat), sehingga solusi penyelesaian masalah yang ditawarkan juga lebih banyak dan variatif.

Yang harus diingat, sosiologi ibarat ‘pisau yang membantu kita mengupas apel’. Sosiologi hanya alat untuk mempermudah kita menjelaskan sebuah peristiwa. Sosiolog harus secara konsisten dan kontekstual menggunakan ‘pisau’ itu, karena terkadang kita langsung menggigit apel, tanpa mengupasnya terlebih dahulu. Sebagai sosiolog, mana yang akan Anda pilih?

Daftar Pustaka
Corrigan, Peter (1995), The Sociology of Consumption, London: Sage Publication.

Habermas, Jurgen (1990), Ilmu dan Teknologi sebagai Ideologi, LP3ES: Jakarta.

Haryatmoko (2003), “Landasan Teoritis Gerakan Sosial menurut Pierre Bourdieu. Menyingkap Kepalsuan Budaya Penguasa,” artikel dalam Basis, edisi khusus Pierre Bourdieu, November-Desember 2003.

Macionis, John J. (1995), Society. The Basics (3rd ed.), Prentice Hall: New Jersey.

Soekanto, Soerjono (1999 [1982]), Sosiologi. Suatu Pengantar. PT RajaGrafindo Persada: Jakarta.

Wilonoyudho, Saratri (2005), “Sekolah yang Membunuh Siswanya,” artikel dalam Kompas, Senin, 16 Mei 2005, hal. 41.

Sumber:http://rasydprabawa.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/manfaat-belajar-sosiologi/

Max Weber

2008-12-14T22:36:00.001-08:00

Basic Terms (The Fundamental Concepts of Sociology)

Definitions of Sociology and Social action:

Sociology is a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action to arrive at a casual explanation of its course and effects. Sociology seeks to formulate type concepts and generalized uniformities of empirical processes. (History, on the other hand, is interested in the causal analysis of particular events, actions or personalities.)

Action is human behavior to which the acting individual attaches subjective meaning. It can be overt or inward and subjective. Action is social when, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual(s), it takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby guided. Social action may be oriented to past, present, or predicted future behavior of others. Others may be concrete people or indefinite pluralities.

Not all action is social: if it ain't oriented to the behavior of others, it ain't social. Also, it is not merely action participated in by a bunch of people (crowd action) or action influenced by or imitative of others. Action can be causally determined by the behavior of others, while still not necessarily being meaningfully determined by the action of others. If I do what you do because it's fashionable, or traditional, or leads to social distinction, its meaningful. Obviously the lines are blurred (pp 113-114), but it's important to make a conceptional distinction.

Modes of Orientation of social action:

Uniformity of social action = action which is wide-spread, frequently repeated by the same individual or simultaneously performed by many individuals and which corresponds to a subjective meaning attributable to the same actors.

Usage: probability of a uniformity in the orientation of social action, when the probability is determined by its actual practice ('it is done to conform with the pattern).

Custom: usage when the actual performance of the action rests on long familiarity. Non- conformance is sanctioned externally.

Action can also be uniform if the actor acts in his self-interests. The uniformity rests insofar as behavior is determined by purely rational actions of actors to similar ulterior expectations.

Types of Social Action, identified by mode of orientation:

1) rational orientation to a system of discrete individual ends. individuals can choose and adjudicate between both means and ends, though these considerations may be with reference to other absolute values.
2) rational orientation to an absolute value, involving conscious belief in the absolute value entirely for its own sake and independent of prospects for external success. Can choose b/t means, but only with relation to absolute, fixed end. Absolute values are always irrational.
3) affectional orientation. If this is uncontrolled reaction to some exceptional stimulus, it is not meaningful -- grey areas.
4) traditional orientation. If this is strict imitation, it is not meaningful -- grey areas.

THE METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIOLOGY

There are 2 kinds of meaning: 1) actually existing meaning in a given concrete case of a particular actor, or average or approximate meaning attributed to a given number of actors; and 2) theoretically conceived pure types of subjective meaning attributed to hypothetical actor(s) in a given type of action (like an ideal type).

The line between meaningful action and reactive behavior w/o subjective meaning is blurry.

The basis for understanding meaning may be either rational (logical or mathematical -- clear intellectual grasp of things) or emotionally empathetic or artistically appreciative (though sympathetic participation we grasp the emotional context in which the action took place).

For purposes of ideal type analysis, it's convenient to treat irrational (from the point of view of rational pursuit of a given end) action as deviation from a conceptually pure type of rational action. We compare this analytically clear type to empirical reality, and that increases our understanding of how actually action is influences by irrational factors. The more sharp and precise the ideal type (and thus the more abstract and unrealistic) the more useful it is in clarifying terminology and formulating classifications and hypotheses.

Some phenomena are devoid of subjective meaning. What is intelligible about an object is its relation to human action in its role either of means or of end, a relation which actors can be said to be aware of and to which their action has been oriented. If you can't make this relation (for example a hindering or favorable circumstance) it's not meaningful in the sense we care about.

There are 2 kinds of understanding: 1) direct observational understanding of subjective mean of a given act (eg, if i start to shout at you, you could directly observe my irrational emotional reaction by virtue of my shouting). 2) explanatory understanding: we understand motive, or, what makes an individual do a particular thing in a particular circumstance. Since we are interested in the subjective meaning of action, we must place an action in the complex of meaning in which it took place.

A motive is a complex of subjective meaning which seems to the actor and/OR the observer an adequate ground for the conduct in question.

In most cases, actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actually unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The ideal type case of meaning is where meaning is fully conscious and explicit: this rarely happens in reality.

Adequacy on the level of meaning: a subjective interpretation of a coherent course of conduct when its component parts in their mutual relation are recognized as a 'typical' complex of meaning. Eg, according to our current norms of calculation and thinking, the correct solution to an arithmatical problem.

Casual adequacy: there's a probability it will always actually occur in the same way. Eg, statistical probability, according to verified generalization from experience, that there would be a correct or incorrect solution to the arithmatical problem. Depends on being able to determine that there's a probability a will follow b.

Subjectively understandable action exists ONLY as the behavior of one or more individual human beings. States, for instance, are results of particular acts of individual persons. There is no such things as a collective personality that acts. These concepts of collective entities DO HAVE meanings in the minds of individual persons, and so actors orient their actions to them as if they existed or should exist.

Functional analysis is a good starting point for sociology. We need to know what kinds of action is functionally necessary for survival, and also for the maintenance of a cultural type and the corresponding modes of social action. We are interested, though, in the subjective meaning of actions to component individuals. The interesting question, then, is what motives determine and lead the individual members and participants in this situation to behave in such a way that the situation came into being in the first place.

THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP

Social relationship: the behavior of actors in so far as, in its meaningful content, the action of each takes account of the others and is oriented to the behavior of others. Mere group membership is not sufficient. The relation of the actors may be solidary, or the opposite. Eg, a 'state' ceases to exist when there is no longer a probability that certain kinds of meaningfully oriented social action will take place.

The subjective meaning need not be the same for all parties to the relationship. The relationship may be temporary or long term. Its subjective meaning may change over time.

The Concept of Legitimate Order
The validity of an order is the probability that people will orient their action to it.

Types of Legitimate Order

Legitimacy of an order can be upheld in 2 ways:
1) purely disinterested motives a) purely affectual, b) rational belief in absolute validity of an order as an expression of ultimate values, c) religious attitudes, through belief in need to follow order for salvation
2) entirely through self-interest based on ulterior motives

Convention: system of order where infraction meets with sanctions of disapproval and orders are considered binding.

Law: system of order where the above is enforced by a functionally specialized agency (e.g., the police).

A system of order with external sanctions may also be guaranteed by disinterested subjective attitudes. Eg, it can be both morally wrong and illegal to murder.

Bases of Legitimacy

Legitimacy may be ascribed to an order by those subject to it in the following ways:
1) tradition, belief in legitimacy of what has always existed.
2) affectual attitudes, legitimizing the validity of what is newly revealed or is a model to imitate
3) rational belief in its absolute value
4) legality. Readiness to conform with rules which are formally correct and have been imposed by accepted procedure.

Submission to an order is almost always determined by a variety of motives.

MAX WEBER Class, Status, Party

All communities are arranged in a manner that goods, tangible and intangible, symbolic and material are distributed. Such a distribution is always unequal and necessarily involves power. ''Classes, status groups and parties are phenomena of the distribution of power within a community'' (927). Status groups makes up the social order, classes the economic order, and parties the legal/political order. Each order affects and is affected by the other.

Power

Power is 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 who are participating in the action'' (926).

Power may rest of a variety of bases, and can be of differing types. ''Economically conditioned power is not identical with power... The emergence of economic power may be the consequence of power existing on other grounds. Man does not strive for power only to enrich himself economically. Power, including economic power, may be valued for its own sake. Very frequently the striving for power is conditioned by the social honor it entails. Not all power entails honor.'' Power is not the only basis of social honor, and social honor, or prestige, may be the basis of economic power.

''Power, as well as honor, may be guaranteed by the legal order, but... [the legal order] is not their primary source. The legal order is rather an additional factor that enhances the chance to hold power or honor; but it cannot always secure them'' (926-7).

Class

Class is defined in terms of market situation. A class exists when a number of people have in common a specific casual component of their life chances in the following sense: this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income under conditions of the commodity or labor markets.

When market conditions prevail (eg, capitalism), property and lack of property are the basic categories of all class situations. However, the concept of class-interest is ambiguous. Collective action based on class situations is determined by the transparency of the connections between the causes and the consequences of the class situation. If the contrast between the life chances of different class situations is merely seen as an acceptable absolute fact, no action will be taken to change the class situation.

A class in and of itself does not constitute a group (Gemeinschaft). ''The degree in which social action and possibly associations emerge from the mass behavior of the members of a class is linked to general cultural conditions, especially those of an intellectual sort'' (929). ''If classes as such are not groups, class situations emerge only on the basis of social action.''

Status Groups and Honor

Unlike classes, status groups do have a quality of groups. They are determined by the distribution of social honor. A specific style of life is shared by a status group, and the group itself is defined by those with whom one has social intercourse. Economic elements can be a sort of honor; however, similar class position does not necessitate similar status groups (see old money's contempt for the nouveau riche). People from different economic classes may be members of the same status group, if they share the same specific style of life.

The way in which social honor is distributed in the community is called the status order. Criteria for entry into a status group may take forms such as the sharing of kinship groups or certain levels of education. The most extreme of a status system with a high level of closure (that is, strong restriction of mobility between statuses) is a caste system. There, status distinctions are guaranteed no only by law and convention, but also by religious sanctions.

Relationships between Class and Status group; between Class situation, Status Situation, and Stratification.

Status groups can sometimes be equal to class, sometimes be broader, sometimes more restrictive, and sometimes bear no relation to class (duh). In most cases, status situation is the apparent dimension of stratification: ''stratification by status goes hand in hand with a monopolization of ideal and material goods or opportunities'' (935). Class situation can take precedence over status situation, however. ''When the bases of the acquisition and distribution of goods are relatively stable, stratification by status is favored'' (935). Technological and economic changes threaten stratification by status, and ''push class situation to the foreground.... Every slowing down of the change in economic stratification leads, in due course, to the growth or status structures and makes for a resuscitation of the important role of social honor'' (930).

Parties

''Parties reside in the sphere of power'' (938). ''Parties are... only possible within groups that have an asssociational character, that is, some rational order and a staff of persons'' (938). Parties aim for social power, the ability to influence the actions of others, and thus may exist in a social club, the state, or a cohort of graduate students at the University of Chicago.

Parties may represent class or status interests, or neither. They usually represent a mix.

''The structure of parties differs in a basic way according to the kind of social action which they struggle to influence.... [T]hey differ according to whether or not the community is stratified by class or status. Above all else, they vary according to the structure of domination'' (938-9).

MAX WEBER The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

abbreviations: MWC = modern, western capitalism

Introduction

Though knowledge and observation of great refinement have existed elsewhere, only in the West has rationalization in science, law and culture developed to such a great degree. The modern West absolutely and completely depends for its whole existence, for the political technical, and economic conditions of its life, on a specially trained organization of individuals, so that the most important functions of everyday life have come to be in the hands of technically, commercially and above all legally trained government officials. Nowhere else does this exist to such a degree as it does in the West.

The most fateful force in modern life is capitalism. The impulse to acquisition has existed always and everywhere and has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism is the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise. This enterprise must be continuous, because in a capitalistic society, anyone who did not take advantage of opportunities for profit-making would be doomed to extinction.

A capitalistic economic action rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization of opportunities for exchange, on (formally) peaceful chances for profit. Where this is rationally pursued, calculations in terms of money are made, whether by modern bookkeeping or more primitive means. Everything is done in terms of balances of money income and money expenses. Whether the calculations are accurate, or whether the calculation method is traditional or by guess-work affects only the degree of the rationality of capitalistic acquisition.

Characteristics of modern Western capitalism: rational industrial organization (that is, attuned to a regular profit and not to political nor irrational speculative opportunities for profit); separation of business from the household; rational bookkeeping. Capitalistic adventurers (in search of booty, whether by war or exploitation) have existed everywhere, but only in the modern West has developed... the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labor.

The rationality of MWC is dependent on the calculation of technical factors, and so is dependent on the development in science of the exact and rational experiment. C'ism did not cause this development: but, the continuing development of this type science is supported by capitalistic interests in practical economic applications.

The peculiar rationalism of Western culture extends to many fields -- science, mystical contemplation, military training, law and administration. Each of theses fields may be rationalized in terms of very different ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from one point of view may well be irrational from another. The development of economic rationalism is partly dependent on rational technique and law, but it also requires people to have a favorable disposition toward adopting certain types of practical rational conduct.

In this book, we will treat ONLY ONE SIDE OF THE CAUSAL CHAIN, the connection of the spirit of modern economic life with the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism.

Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification

Catholics show a stronger propensity to remain in their crafts, and become master craftsmen, while Protestants are attracted to a larger extent to the upper ranks of skilled labor and administrative positions in factories. Protestants own a disproportionate share of capital. All other things equal, Protestants have been more likely to develop economic rationalism than Catholics. Weber seeks the explanation in 'the permanent intrinsic character of their religion,' and not only in their temporary external historico-political situations.

The Reformation meant not the elimination of the church's control over everyday life, but a substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. While the Catholic church was fairly lax, Calvinism 'would be for us the most absolutely unbearable form of ecclesiastical control of the individual which could possibly exist.'

Protestantism must not be understood as joy of living or in any other sense connected with the Enlightenment. Early Protestantism (e.g., Luther, Calvin) had nothing to do with progress in an Enlightenment sense. Not all Protestant denominations had an equally strong influence on the development of members' business acumen and spirit of hard work.

The Spirit of Capitalism

The spirit of capitalism is ''an historical individual: a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we united into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance'' (47).

Ben Franklin is an example of someone who espouses a philosophy of avarice which is: the ideal of an honest man of recognized credit. It includes a duty on the part of an individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. It is not mere business astuteness, it is an ethos; infraction of its rules is not foolishness or bad business, but forgetfulness of duty.

In this ethic, economic acquisition is no longer considered a means of subsistence: it is the ultimate purpose of a man's life. This is combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life. (NOTE: From the standpoint ''of the happiness of, or utility to, a single individual, this ethic appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational'' (53)).

People now are born into a capitalistic economy which presents itself to them as the unalterable order of things in which they must live. In so far as a person born now is involved in the system of market relationships, he must conform to capitalistic rules of action. Today's capitalism selects the subjects it needs through economic survival of the fittest. The interesting question, according to Max, is WHERE DID THIS SITUATION COME FROM?

It did NOT arise as the superstructure or reflection of economic situations. For example, the spirit of capitalism such as espoused by our buddy Ben Franklin was present before capitalistic order.

In order to arise, the spirit of capitalism had to struggle with its 'most important opponent,' traditionalism. For instance, workers will respond to an increase in piece rates by doing less work, collecting the usual amount of money, and going home early. Men do not ''by nature'' wish to earn more and more money, they simply wish to live as they are accustomed to and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.

Another way of attempting to increase productivity is to lower wages or piece rates, so that workers must work harder and longer to earn the same amount as before. This method has its limits. It (and capitalism) requires a surplus population which can be hired cheaply in the market. Also, too large a surplus population can encourage the development of labor intensive methods, rather than more efficient methods: low wages do not equal cheap labor. And, if you pay people too little, their efficiency and attentiveness decreases.

Thus, it would be better if labor were performed as if it were an absolute end in itself. This can only be the process of a long and arduous education (for example, being raised Pietist). Capitalism ''now in the saddle'' can fairly easily recruit the required workers, but this was not always the case.

Capitalism can exist with a traditionalistic character. The animating spirit of the entrepreneur may be the traditional rate of profit, the traditional amount of work, the traditional manner of labor-management relations, and the essentially traditional circle of customers and manner of attracting new ones. Take the example of the putting out system.

In such a system, this leisureliness can be destroyed, without any essential change in the form of work organization (such as vertically integrated factories). The spirit of capitalism is the cause of this change. Where the spirit of capitalism appears and is able to work itself out, it produces its own capital and monetary supplies as the means to its ends, but the reverse is not true (69).

Protestantism was not merely a stage prior to the development of a purely rationalistic philosophy, however. Rationalism shows a development which by no means follows parallel lines in the various departments of life. Since life may be rationalized from fundamentally different basic points of view and in very different directions, we must ask the origin of the irrational element which lies at the basis of this particular concrete form of rational thought: the conception of a calling.

Luther's Conception of The Calling

The idea of a calling -- a life-task, a definite field in which to work -- is peculiar to Protestants. Protestantism had a further new development, which was the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of an individual could assume. The only way of living acceptably to God was solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world (his calling), NOT by trying to surpass worldly morality by monastic asceticism (80).

Remember important part of Reformation: By faith, not works, shall ye be saved. You are justified by faith, etc. So all those indulgences earned by crawling on your knees up stairways, etc. don't get you anything.

For the time being (before Calvin et al. got hold of it), the idea of the calling remained traditionalistic and its only ethical result negative: worldly duties were no longer subordinated to ascetic ones; obedience to authority and acceptance of things as they were, were preached.

The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism

However, this idea of the calling was not sufficient for the development of the spirit of capitalism. We needed the effects of forms of ascetic Protestantism: Calvinism, Pietism, Methodism and the Baptist sects.

An important thing to keep in mind is that these folks were not motivated by acquisitive lusts, but rather by salvation of the soul.

Calvinists believed in predestination. God designated before the creation of the world who would be saved and who would get to rot in hell. All creation exists for the sake of God, and has meaning only as means to the glory and majesty of God. Human merit or guilt plays no part in the possession of grace, since that would make God's decrees subject to human influence. This doctrine 'must above all have one consequence... a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual' (104). The individual was forced to follow the path of his own destiny decreed for him from eternity without help from others or from the Church -- complete elimination of salvation through the Church and the sacraments (which Lutheranism retained). This meant the elimination of magic from the world. [It also meant the doing away with a periodical discharge of the emotional sense of sin (confession).]

Now, the elected Christian should glorify God in life by fulfilling God's commandments to the best of his ability. This requires social achievements of the Christian because God decrees that social life shall be organized according to his commandments.

Fear and lack of knowledge of whether or not one is going to rot in hell led to a need for ordinary men to find certitudo salutis (certainty of salvation). Pastoral advice to these poor, tortured dudes contained two themes: 1) an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect grace. 2) Intense worldly activity as the most suitable means to attain that self-confidence [thus we eliminate the free rider problem]. The Calvinist sought to identify true faith by its fruits: a type of Christian conduct which served to increase the glory of God. Good works do not affect salvation, but they are indispensable as a sign of election. In practice, this means God helps those who help themselves. The Calvinist creates a conviction of his own salvation.

For Catholics, good works were not a part of a rationalized system of life -- they could be performed sporadically, to atone -- whereas for Calvinists they are. The God of Calvinism demanded not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system. The moral conduct of the average man was subjected to a consistent method for conduct as a whole. The end of this asceticism was to be able to lead an alert, intelligent life: the most urgent task the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment. The most important means was to bring order into the conduct of its adherents. Hence we have methodically rationalized ethical conduct.

The Calvinistic doctrine of predestination was only one of several possible motives which could have supported the methodical rationalization of life. However, it had not only a unique consistency (by virtue of being based on logical deduction, rather than religious experience) and was psychologically extraordinarily powerful.

Pietism

This sect sought to make the invisible Church of the elect visible on this earth. By means of intensified asceticism these folks hoped to enjoy the blissfulness of community with God in this life. Sometimes this latter tendency led to displays of emotion, which were antithetical to Calvinist restraint. Other than that, however, the practical effect of Pietistic principles was an even stricter ascetic control of conduct in the calling:

1) Methodical development of one's own state of grace to a higher and higher degree of certainty and perfection in terms of the law was a sign of grace.
2) a belief that God's Providence works through those in such a state of perfection.

Since some of these folks believed grace subject to repentance, by the creation of methods to induce repentance even the attainment of divine grace became in effect an object of rational human activity.

Methodism

Though rebirth, an emotional certainty of salvation as the immediate result of faith was an important factor, the emotional act of conversion was methodically induced. Emotion, once awakened, was directed into a rational struggle for perfection. This provided a religious basis for ascetic conduct after the doctrine of predestination had been given up by these folks.

Nothing new was added to the idea of the calling.

The Baptist Sects

The church was viewed as a community of personal believers of the reborn. Salvation was achieved by personal, individual revelation; it was offered to everyone, though not everyone took it.

The injunction was to be in the world but not of it, so worldly enjoyments and unnecessary social intercourse with non-reborn folks was avoided. The Holy Spirit worked in daily life, and spoke directly to any individual who was willing to hear. This leads to an eventual elimination of all that remained of the doctrine of salvation through the Church and sacraments. This accomplished the religious rationalization of the world in its most extreme form.

Conscience is the revelation of God to the individual.

The rationalization of conduct within the world, but for the sake of the world beyond, was the consequence of the concept of calling of ascetic Protestantism.

Asceticism and The Spirit of Capitalism

In Puritan thinking, the real moral objection to possession of wealth is to relaxation in the security of possession, the enjoyment of wealth with the consequence of idleness and the temptations of the flesh, above all distraction from the pursuit of a righteous life. It is only because possession involves this danger that it is suspect at all. Not leisure and enjoyment, but only activity serves to increase the glory of God. Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. Thus, inactive contemplation at the expense of work is right out.

Labor is an approved ascetic technique, but is also considered in itself an end of life as ordained by God. Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace. Wealth does not exempt anyone from this.

The division of labor, which has a providential purpose in the thought of the Puritans, leads to qualitative and quantitative improvements in production, and thus serves the common good. But, in addition, specialization is encouraged by the calling, to which it provides an ethical justification; for, ''outside of a calling the accomplishments of a man are only casual and irregular and he spends more time in idleness than in work.'' If God presents to His elect a change for profit, he must pursue it: the Christian must follow the call by taking advantage of the opportunity. The acquisition of wealth in the performance of a calling is morally permissible and enjoined.

-- Asceticism turned against the spontaneous enjoyment of life. So, sport, for instance, is acceptable only if it serves a rational purpose, say, increasing physical efficiency.

-- The powerful tendency toward uniformity of life, which today so immensely aids the capitalistic interest in the standardization of production, had its ideal foundation in the repudiation of all idolatry of the flesh (eg, non-ascetic, flashy or attractive clothing).

The Puritan outlook on life 'stood at the cradle of modern economic man' (174). This religious epoch bequeathed to its utilitarian successors ''an amazingly good... conscience in the acquisition of money, so long as it took place legally'' (176). In addition, the power of religious asceticism provided owners with sober, conscientious and industrious workmen. And, it provided comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of goods in the world was ordained by God.

The religious basis had died away by Ben Franklin's time. Limitation to specialized work is now a condition of any valuable work in the modern world. ''The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production and today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.''

The Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions

Motives for the Rejections of the World: The Meaning of Their Rational Construction
Individual spheres of value presented here as ideal types have a rational consistency rarely found in reality. This essay proceeds from the most rational forms reality can assume; it attempts to find out how far certain rational conclusions, which can be established theoretically, have been drawn in reality. Perhaps, also, we can find out why those rational conclusions have not been drawn.

Typology of Asceticism and Mysticism
Two contrasting abnegations of the world:
1) active asceticism that is a God-willed ACTION of the devout who are God's tools. Rationally active asceticism, in mastering the world, seeks to tame what is creatural and wicked through work in a worldly vocation (inner-worldly asceticism);
2) contemplative POSSESSION of the holy as found in mysticism. The individual is not a tool, but a vessel of the divine. Desired: other-worldly religious state; contemplative flight from the world.

Active asceticism may confine itself to controlling wickedness in the actor's own nature; in this case, it avoids any action in the orders of the world (asceticist flight from the world). In external bearing, it thereby comes close to contemplative flight. Conversely, the mystic may determine s/he need not flee from the world, and so be an inner-worldly mysticist, remaining in the orders of the world.

Directions of the Abnegation of the World:
Formulated abstractly, the rational aim of redemption religion has been to secure for the saved a holy state, and thereby a habitude that assures salvation. This takes the place of an acute and extraordinary, and thus a holy state which is transitorily achieved by means of orgies, asceticism, or contemplation. Most prophetic and redemptory religions have lived not only in an acute, but a permanent state of tension in relation to the world and its orders. The more the religions have been true religions of salvation, the greater has this tension been. The tension has been greater the more religion has been sublimated from ritualism and towards 'religious absolutism.' Indeed, the further the rationalization and sublimation of external and internal possession of -- in the widest sense -- things worldly has progressed, the stronger has the tension on the part of religion become. For the rationalization and conscious sublimation of man's relations to the various spheres of values, internal and external, as well as religious and secular, have then pressed towards making conscious the internal and lawful autonomy of the individual spheres; thereby letting them drift into those tensions which remain hidden to the original naive relation with the external world.

The more comprehensive and the more inward the aim of salvation has been, the more it has been taken for granted that the faithful should ultimately stand closer to the savior, the prophet, the priest, the brother in the faith than to natural relations and to the matrimonial community. Prophecy has created a new social community; thereby the relationships of the sib and of matrimony have been devalued.

Communities of villages, members of the sib, the guild or of partners in seafaring, hunting and warring expeditions have known two elemental principles: first, the dualism or in-group and out-group morality. For in-group morality the principled obligation to give brotherly support in distress has existed. All this followed the principle of ''your want of today, may be my want of tomorrow'' (this principle was not rationally weighed, but it played its part in sentiment). Accordingly, haggling in exchange and loan situations, as well as permanent debt-enslavement and similar kinds of enslavement, were confined to outgroup morality and applied only to outsiders.

The religiosity of the congregation transferred the ancient economic ethic of neighborliness (I'll help you out today, since I may need you to help me out tomorrow) to the relations among brothers of the faith. What had previously been the obligations of the noble and the wealthy became the fundamental imperatives of all ethically rationalized religion (to care for orphans and widows, to give alms). The principle that constituted the communal relations among the salvation prophesies was the suffering common to all believers (whether or not the suffering actually existed or was a constant threat, whether it was internal or external). The more imperatives that issued from the ethic of reciprocity among neighbors were raised, the more rational the conception of salvation became, and the more it was sublimated into an ethic of absolute ends.

The Economic Sphere
The tension between brotherly religion and the world has been most obvious in the economic sphere. All the primeval magical or mystagogic ways of influencing spirits and deities have pursued special interests. The sublimated religions of salvation, however, had been increasingly tense in their relationships with rationalized economies.

A rational economy is a functional organization oriented to money-prices which originate in the interest-struggles of men in the market. Calculation is not possible without estimation in money prices and hence without market struggles. Money is the most abstract and impersonal element that exists in human life. The more the world of the capitalist economy follows its own immanent laws, the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of brotherliness. Ultimately no genuine religion of salvation has overcome the tension between their religiosity and a rational economy.

The paradox of all rational asceticism is that rational asceticism has created the very wealth it rejected.

There have only been two consistent avenues for escaping the tension between religion and in the economic world in a principled and inward manner:
1) the Puritan ethic of the vocation. Puritanism, as a religion of virtuosos, renounced the universalism of love and rationally routinized all work in this world into serving God's will and testing ones state of grace. Puritanism accepted the routinization of the economic cosmos, which , along with the whole world, it devalued as creatural and depraved. It involved a renunciation of salvation in favor of the groundless and always only particularized grace. Actually, this standpoint of unbrotherliness was no longer a genuine religion of salvation. A genuine religion of salvation can exaggerate brotherliness to the height of the mystic's acosmism of love.
2) Mysticism. The mystic's benevolence does not inquire into the man to whom and for whom it sacrifices. Mysticism is not interested in his person. Mysticism is a unique escape form this world in the form of an objectless devotion to anybody, not for man's sake, but purely for devotion's sake.

The Political Sphere
The consistent brotherly ethic of salvation religions has come into an equally sharp tension with the political orders of the world. Local (community, tribe, household, etc.) gods and magic were not a problem The problem arose when these barriers of locality, tribe and polity were shattered by universalistic religions. And the problem arose in full strength only when this god was a god of 'love.' The problem of tension with the political order emerged for redemption religions out of the basic demand for brotherliness. In politics as in economics, the more rational the political order became, the sharper the problems of these tensions became.

The brotherliness of a group of men bound together in war appears valueless in brotherly religions; it is seen as a mere reflection of the technically sophisticated brutality of the struggle. It's consecration appears as the glorification of fratricide.

The only two consistent solutions (first three guesses don't count...): puritanism and mysticism. Puritanism believes God's commands should be imposed on the world by the means of the world -- violence, so ''just war'' is not a problem for Puritanism (God is on their side). The mystics take a ''radical political attitude'' of ''turning the other cheek'' which makes them appear ''necessarily vulgar and lacking in dignity in the eyes of every self-assured worldly ethic of heroism.''

Organic social ethics (where religiously substructured) stands on the soil of brotherliness, but, in contrast to mystic and acosmic love, is dominated by a cosmic, rational demand for brotherliness. It point of departure is the experience of the inequality of religious charisma. The fact that the holy should be accessible to some and not all is unbearable to organic social ethics. It therefore attempts to synthesize this inequality of charismatic qualifications with secular stratification by status, into a cosmos of God-ordained services which are specialized in function. Certain tasks are given to every individual and every group according to their social and economic position as determined by fate. Without something like the Indian doctrine of Karma (which says there's a reason why you're bottom dog), every organic social ethic unavoidably represents an accommodation to the interests of the privileged strata of the world.

From the standpoint of inner-worldly asceticism, the organic ethic lacks the drive for an ethical and thorough rationalization of individual life. In such matters, it has no premium for the rational and methodical patterning of personal life in the interest of the individual's own salvation. The organic pragmatism of salvation must consider the redemptory aristocracy of inner-worldly asceticism, with its rational depersonalization of life orders, as the hardest form of lovelessness and lack of brotherliness. It must also consider the redemptory pragmatism of mysticism as a sublimated and unbrotherly indulgence of the mystic' s own charisma. Both inner-worldly asceticism and mysticism ultimately condemn the social world to absolute meaninglessness (or, at least they hold that God's aims concerning the world are utterly incomprehensible).

The rationalism of religious and organic doctrines of society cannot stand up under this idea; for it seeks to comprehend the world as an at least relatively rational cosmos in spite of all its wickedness: the world must hear at least traces of the divine plan of salvation.

The organic ethic of society is an eminently conservative power hostile to revolution. Virtuoso religion is a potentially revolutionary force. Its revolutionary turn may assume two forms:
1) (from inner-worldly asceticism, with an absolute divine law) it becomes a religious duty to realize this divine natural law. This corresponds to an obligation to crusade.
2) (from mysticism) The commands of the world do not hold for the man who is assured in his obsession with god.

The Aesthetic Sphere
The development of intellectualism and the rationalism of life make art become a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right. Art comes to provide a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and begins to compete directly with salvation religion. [The refusal of modern man to assume responsibility for moral judgements tends to transform judgements of moral intent into judgements of taste.]

The Erotic Sphere
The brotherly ethic of salvation religion is in profound tension with the greatest irrational force of life: sexual love. The more sublimated sexuality is, and the more principled and relentlessly consistent the salvation ethic of brotherhood is, the sharper is the tension between sex and religion. A principled ethic of religious brotherhood perceives that inner, earthly salvation by mature love competes in the sharpest possible way with devotion to a supra-mundane God. Inner-worldly and rational asceticism (vocational asceticism) can accept only the rationally regulated marriag

The Intellectual Sphere
The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world. Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasing pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power.

The less magic or merely contemplative mysticism and the more pure doctrine a religion contains, the greater is its need of rational apologetics. The more religion became book-religion and doctrine, the more literary it became and the more efficacious it became in provoking rational lay-thinking, freed of priestly control. However, there is no ''unbroken'' religion working as a vital force which is not compelled at some point to demand the credo non quod, sed quia absurdum (some saint said this, but i can't remember which one, it means ''i believe it because it is absurd''. i think it was said in reference to the trinity), the sacrifice of the intellect.

Redemptory religion defends itself against the attack of the self-sufficient intellect, by raising the claim that religious knowledge moves in a different sphere.

The need for salvation, consciously cultivated as the substance of religiosity, has resulted from the endeavor of a systematic and practical rationalization of life's realities. All religions have demanded as a specific presupposition that the course of the world be somehow meaningful, at least in so far as it touches upon the interests of men (this claim arises first as the problem of unjust suffering and just compensation for the unequal distribution of individual happiness in the world). From here, the claim has tended to progress toward an ever increasing devaluation of the world. For, the more intensely rational thought has seized upon the problem of a just and retributive compensation, the less an entirely inner-worldly solution could seem possible, and the less an other-worldly solution could appear probable or even meaningful.

The intellect, like all culture values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy. Worldly man has regarded the possession of culture as the highest good. In addition to the burden of ethical guilt, however, something has adhered to this cultural value which was bound to depreciate it with still greater finality, namely, senselessness (if the cultural value is to be judged in terms of its own standards).

The pure inner-worldly perfection of self by a man of ''culture'', the ultimate value to which ''culture'' has seemed to be reducible is meaningless for religious thought. This meaninglessness follows for religious thought from the obvious meaninglessness of death when viewed from the inner-worldly standpoint. The cultivated man can die weary of life, but never satiated with it; for, the perfectibility of the man of culture, in principle, progresses indefinitely, as do the cultural values.

Culture appears as man's emancipation from the organically prescribed cycle of natural life. For this reason, culture's every step forward seems condemned to lead to an every more devastating senselessness. The advancement of cultural values seems to become a senseless hustle in the service of worthless, moreover self-contradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends. The advancement of cultural values appears the more meaningless the more it is made a holy task, a ''calling.''

The need for salvation responds to this devaluation by becoming more other-worldly, more alienated from all structured forms of life, and by confining itself to the strict religious essence. The reaction is the stronger the more systematic the thinking about the ''meaning'' of the universe becomes, the more the external organization of the world is rationalized, the more the conscious experience of the world's irrational content is sublimated. AND NOT ONLY THEORETICAL THOUGHT LED TO THIS DISENCHANTING OF THE WORLD, BUT ALSO THE VERY ATTEMPT OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS TO PRACTICALLY AND ETHICALLY RATIONALIZE THE WORLD.

These specific intellectual and mystical attempts at salvation in the face of these tensions succumb in the end to the world dominion of unbrotherliness. One the one hand, their charisma is not accessible to everyone. Hence, in intent, mystical salvation means aristocracy; it is an aristocratic religiosity of redemption. And, in the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among the strata of the economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.

MAX WEBER: General Economic History

Chap 22, The Meaning and Presuppositions of Modern Capitalism

C'ism is present wherever the industrial provision for the needs of a human group is carried out by the method of enterprise. A rational capitalistic enterprise is one with capital accounting, according to the methods of modern bookkeeping and the striking of a balance. In a given economy, parts may be capitalistically organized, and other parts not so. An epoch is capitalistic if the provision of its wants is organized capitalistically to such a degree that the whole economic system would collapse if we take away the capitalistic form of organization.

General presuppositions for the existence of modern day capitalism (thinking along the ideal type line):
1) Rational capital accounting. This involves the appropriation of all physical means of production as the property of autonomous private enterprises.
2) Freedom of the market, in the sense of the absence of irrational limits on trading in the market.
3) Rational technology, to permit the required calculability. This implies mechanization.
4) Calculable law, the dependability of calculable adjudication and administration.
5) Free (not slave or serf) labor, people legally in the position to, and economically compelled to, sell their labor on the market without restriction.
6) Commercialization of economic life: general use of commercial instruments to represent share rights in enterprise and also in property ownership.

Chap27, The Development of Industrial Technique

Real distinguishing characteristic of the modern factory: the concentration of ownership of workplace, means of work, source of power and raw material in the hands of the entrepreneur.

Key: Shift from nature's power (water) to more manageable, reliable, calculable forces (like steam). This, along with mechanization, permits rationalization of work.

Development of use of coal, and subsequent production of iron had 3 important consequences:

1) released technology and productive capabilities from the limits inherent in the qualities of organic industry (eg, horses get tired, the wind doesn't always blow, etc.)
2) mechanization of the production process thorough the steam engine liberated production from the organic limitations of human labor (it ain't just horses that get tired; and people can't lift as much, work as fast, as reliably, etc.)
3) through union with science, the production of goods was emancipated from the bonds of tradition and came under the dominance of freely roving intelligence.

Recruitment of the labor force for this new form of production was carried by means of indirect compulsion. The enclosure movement and changes in agricultural production left a bunch of people wandering around without jobs, who were forced into jobs by being threatened with the ''workhouse'' if they didn't take jobs in the new factories. From the beginning of the 18th c., there began to be laws to regulate employers conduct toward their employees, to ensure laborers were paid in money and not in kind.

War needs and luxury consumption fed capitalism's growth. However, all those silly folks who've argued that war was the driving force are wrong. While the desire of nobility and the upperclasses for luxury goods was important, the increasing production of tapestries and carpets was a key marker of the democratization of luxury, which is the crucial direction of capitalistic production. The decisive impetus for c'ism could only come from mass market demand.

C'ism's characteristics
1. C'ism alone produced a rational organization of labor.
2. Lifted barrier between internal and external economics, internal and external ethics, and the entrance of the commercial principle into the internal economy with the organization of labor on this basis.
3. disintegration of primitive economic fixity with the entrepreneur organization of labor.

The reason this development took place only in the West is due to special features of the West's general cultural evolution: rational law, rational empirical science, a state with a professional administration, specialized officialdom, men with a rational ethic in the conduct of life.

Ch 28, Citizenship

Outside the occident there have not been cities in the sense of a unitary community. Occidental cities originally arose through the establishment of a fraternity; it was in its beginnings first above all a defense group, an organization of those economically competent to bear arms, to equip and train themselves. These folks owned their own arms: this is key.

In places like Egypt, Asia, India and China, irrigation was a big issue, and so kings' bureaucracies developed. The king and his staff required the compulsory service of the dependent classes; they in turn were dependent on that bureaucracy. The king also held a military monopoly. In the west, self-equipment and religious brotherhoods (eg, crusaders) meant kings did not have a military monopoly, and so cities could be formed in a western sense, based on mutual defense.

Also, ideas and institutions in the orient connected with magic, which supported such systems as caste systems, did not exist in such strength in the occident.

Chap 29, The Rational State

Modern capism can survive only in the modern rational state.
Characteristics of the Modern Rational State:
1) Expert officialdom and rational law. Key: rationalization of procedure... formal juristic thinking inherited from Roman law.
2) Economic policy that is continuous and consistent and not dependent on ritualistic/traditional considerations. The first appearance of a rational economic policy was mercantilism: external economic policy consists in taking every advantage of the opponent, to strengthen the hand of the government in its external relations. Mercantilism signifies the development of the state as a political power, this development is to be done directly by increasing the tax paying power of the population. However, mercantilism wasn't free market: the govt supported monopolies, gave colonial privileges, etc. It disappeared when free trade was established.

Ch 30, The Evolution of The Capitalistic Spirit

While several factors fed into the development of capitalism, ''in the last resort the factor which produced capitalism is the rational permanent enterprise, rational accounting, rational technology and rational law, but not these alone. Necessary complementary factors were the rational spirit, the rationalization of the conduct of life in general, and a rationalistic economic ethic'' (260).

In the middle ages, the position of the church on economic ethics was that it excluded ''higgling'' (cute word; he means haggling), overpricing and free competition and included the principle of a just price and the assurance to everyone of a chance to live.

Since Judaism made Christianity possible and gave it the character of a religion essentially free from magic, it rendered a service by removing one of the most serious obstructions to the rationalization of economic life (magic). Prophesies (rather than oracles by lot, etc.) have released the world from magic and in so doing have created the basis for our modern science and technology, and for capitalism.

Basically, then, Weber chats re: the spirit of capitalism, which you know all about from somewhere else.

As noted earlier, the breakdown of the dual economic ethics was key.

A note on class conflict: ''It was possible for the working class to accept its lot as long as the promise of eternal happiness could be held out to it. When this consolation fell away it was inevitable that those strains and stresses would appear in economic society which since then have been growing rapidly. This point had been reached at the end of the early period of capitalism, at the beginning of the age of iron, in the 19th century'' (270).

The Types of Authority and Imperative Control/The Types of Legitimate Domination (depends on your translation)

Basis of Legitimacy

Domination is defined as the probability that certain specific commands (or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of people. A certain minimum of voluntary submission is necessary; thus on the part of the submitter there is an interest (whether based on ulterior motives or genuine acceptance) in obedience.

- Not every claim protected by custom or law involves a relation of authority. For instance, if I ask Charles to pay me for the work i do as fulfillment of our contract, I am not exercising authority over him.

- The legitimacy of a system of authority may be treated sociologically only as the probability that to a relevant degree the appropriate attitudes will exist and the corresponding conduct ensue.

- Obedience means the action of the person 'obeying' follows a course such that the content of the command can be taken as the reason for his/her action.

3 Pure Types of Legitimate Authority
1. Rational/legal grounds. belief in the legality of patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands. Authority held by legally established impersonal order, extends to people only by virtue of offices they hold.
2. Traditional grounds. established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising authority under them. Authority held by person of the chief who occupies the traditionally sanctioned position of authority; matter of personal obligation and loyalty within the scope of tradition.
3. Charismatic grounds. devotion to the specific and exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative pattern or order revealed by him. Leader obeyed by personal trust in him, his revelation, heroism, coolness, as far as those qualities fall within the scope of the obeyers belief in his charisma.

Rational Legal Authority with a Bureaucratic Administrative Staff

Typical person in authority occupies an office. Person who obeys authority does so only in his capacity as a member of the corporate group, and what he obeys is only the law. Fundamental Qualities: 1) continuous organization of official functions bound by rules
2) specified spheres of competence involving a) sphere of obligations as marked out by a specialized division of labor, b) provision to incumbent of necessary authority to do his sphere of thangs, c) necessary means of compulsion clearly defined and their use subject to definite conditions.
3) organization of offices follows principle of hierarchy.
4) rules which regulate conduct of an office can be either technical rules or norms. when their application is fully rational, specialized training is necessary.
5) office holder separated from ownership of means of production and administration (first of all, separation of house from workplace)
6) complete absence of appropriate of position by incumbent
7) acts, rules and decisions are formulated and recorded in writing

BUREAUCRACY, almost the same...
1) office holders personally free and subject to authority only within the scope of their impersonal official obligations
2) hierarchy of offices
3) sphere of competence
4) free selection into office; filled by free contractual relationship; always free to resign
5) candidates appointed, not elected, on basis of technical qualifications
6) remuneration is by fixed salaries of $$
7) office is sole or primary occupation of incumbent
8) constitutes a career; system of promotion
9) official can't own means or appropriate position
10) official subject to strict and systematic discipline and control in conduct of office.

Monocratic bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degrees of efficiency and is the most rational means known of carrying out imperative control over people. Makes possible a high degree of calculability.

Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge.

General Social Consequences of bureaucratic control
1) tendency of levelling in the interest of broadest possible recruitment in terms of technical competence
2) tendency to plutocracy due to interest in greatest possible length of technical training
3) dominance of spirit of formalistic impersonality. Sine ira et studio, w/o anger or passion, and hence without affection or enthusiasm. All subject to formal equality of treatment.

Traditional Authority
Traditional authority is bound to the precedents handed down from the past and to this extent is oriented to rules.
Leaders' commands legitimated in one of two ways:
1) in terms of traditions which themselves directly determine the content of the command and the objects and intent of authority.
2) a matter of the chief's free personal decision, in that tradition leaves him some leeway.

When resistance occurs, the accusation is that the chief is not following the tradition. The system itself is not questioned.

A chief can have an administrative staff: patrimonial recruitment of staff comes from people who have a traditional tie of personal loyalty to the chief (children, slaves, clients, etc.). Extrapatrimonial recruitment comes from people in a purely personal relation of loyalty (vassals, etc.)

The staff lacks: clearly defined spheres of competence subject to impersonal rules; rational ordering of relations of superiority and inferiority; regular system of promotion and free contract; technical training as a requirement; fixed salaries in $$.

Gerontocracy and Patrimonialism are forms of traditional authority w/o a personal administrative staff of the chief. G is rule by elders, and P is where there's rule by someone designated by inheritance. There is still a general idea of everyone being a member of the group, though there is by no means equal distribution of power.

With the development of a purely personal administrative staff, we get patrimonialism. Members of the group are now treated as subjects.

A patrimonial retainer can be supported by: maintenance at his lords table, by allowances from the chief (primarily in kind), by rights of land use in return for services, by appropriation of property income, fees, or taxes, by fiefs.

Charismatic Authority
The basis for obedience lies in the conception that it is the duty of those who have been called to a charismatic mission to recognize its quality and to act accordingly... it's a matter of personal devotion to the possessor of the quality.

There is no legal wisdom oriented to judicial precedent. Charismatic authority is specifically irrational in the sense of being foreign to all rules. It repudiates the past, and is in this sense a revolutionary force.

It is hostile to everyday economic considerations. It can only tolerate irregular, unsystematic, acquisitive acts.

In traditional periods, it is the greatest revolutionary force. Reason is equally revolutionary, and works from without by altering the situations of action, or it intellectualizes the individual. Charisma may involve a subjective or internal reorientation which may result in a radical alteration of the central system of attitudes, a completely new orientation towards different problems and structures of the world.

The Routinization of Charisma
In pure form, charismatic authority exists only in the process of originating. It becomes either rationalize or traditionalized, or a combo of both for the following reasons:
1) ideal and material interests of the followers in the continual reactivation of the community
2) interests of the administrative staff, disciples or followers of the char'ic leader in continuing their positions, so that their own status is stable on a day to day basis.

As soon as the position of authority is well established, and above all as soon as control over large masses of people exists, it gives way to the forces of everyday routine. There is an objective necessity of patterns of order and organization of the administrative staff in order to meet the normal, everyday needs and conditions of carrying on administration. In addition, there is a striving for security, requiring legitimation of positions of authority and social prestige and economic advantages held by the followers.

The process of routinization is thus not confined to the problem of succession, and does not stop when it is solved. The most fundamental problem is the transition from the charismatic administrative staff and its mode of administration to one that can handle everyday conditions.

Possible Types of Solution:
1) search for new charismatic leader on basis of criteria that will fit him for position of authority
2) revelation thorough oracles, lots, etc... legitimacy is then dependent on technique of selection, which means a form of legalization
3) by designation by leader of his successor
4) designation of successor by charismatically qualified staff, and successors recognition by the community... legitimacy can come to depend on technique of selection, again legalization
5) hereditary charisma... this may lead to either traditionalization or legalization (divine right, etc.)
6) charisma transmitted by ritual means from one bearer to another, or created in a new person... this may become charisma of office (eg, the Big Potato, the Pope himself).

Routinization also takes the form of the appropriation of powers of control and economic advantages by the disciples. Again, it can be either traditional or legal, depending on whether or not legislation of some sort is involved. This is how we get differences between, say, the clergy and the laity.

MAX WEBER: Methodology of the Social Sciences

Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy

The purpose of this new journal (where this essay appeared) is ''the education of judgement about practical social problems'' and ''the criticism of practical social policy.''

Questions to be addressed:
What is the validity of the value-judgements which are uttered by the critic? In what sense, if the criterion of scientific knowledge is to be found in the 'objective' validity of its results, has he (the critic) remained within the sphere of scientific discussion? In what sense are there in general 'objectively valid truths' in those disciplines concerned with social and cultural phenomena?

The science of social institutions and culture arose for practical considerations, with the purpose of producing value-judgement as measures of state policy. Knowledge of what ''is'' was conflated with knowledge of what ''should be''; this was because natural laws and evolutionary principles dominated the field. This journal will try to reject this conflation, since ''it can never be the task of an empirical science to provide binding norms and ideals from which the directives for immediate personal activity can be derived.'' Value-judgements should not be eliminated, but subjected to scientific criticism. Science can help an actor choose between alternative ends by analyzing the appropriateness of a means for an end, and by providing information on what a desired end will cost in terms of the loss of other values. The acting person can then choose from among the values involved according to his own conscience or personal view. Science can show him that all choosing involves the espousal of certain values.

Every science of cultural life must arrive at a rational understanding of the ideas which underlie every concrete end. Science can judge these ideas and ends ONLY according to a logical and historically defined standard of value which can be elevated to a certain ''level of explicitness'' beyond individual sentiment. Science can tell a person what s/he can do, not what s/he should do. Put another way, treating the ideas as a coherent system of thought, science can point out to an actor what is possible within his or her value system, and what would be contradictory to that value system.

Problems of social policy are not based on purely technical considerations of specific ends, but involve disputes about the normative standards of value which lie in the domain of general cultural values. This conflict over general cultural values does not occur solely between 'class interests' but between general views on life and the universe as well (take that, Karl).

It is NOT POSSIBLE to establish and to demonstrate as scientifically valid 'a principle' for practical social science from which the norms for the solution of practical problems can be unambiguously derived. While social science needs the discussion of practical problems in terms of fundamental principles, that is, the reduction of unreflective value-judgements to the premises from which they are logically derived, the search for a ''lowest common denominator'' of in the form of generally valid value judgements is not empirical, impractical and entirely meaningless. We cannot establish on the basis of ethical imperatives or norms for concretely condition individual conduct, normatively desirable cultural values. (57)

Objective science must distinguish between value judgements and empirical knowledge, and try to see factual truths. However, value-judgements of the practical interest of the scientist will always be significant in determining the focus of attention of analytical activity (my values direct me in what I think are interesting or important questions or matters to investigate -- this gets called, value-relevance elsewhere: there is no harm, according to Max, in allowing your values, personal interests or social commitments to guide you in the selection of research topics; however, once you start researching, you need value-neutrality).

This journal will pursue logical analysis of the content of ideals, while not ignoring how ideals motivate value-judgements. It will present social policy, i.e., the statement of ideals, in addition to social science, i.e., the analysis of facts. In non-scientific discussions of policy, it must be made clear where the investigator stops analyzing and where the evaluating and acting person begins to present his sentiments (make value judgements). Again, individual sentiments don't have to be eliminated, nor can they be, but they should be kept strictly separate from scientific analysis. ''An attitude of moral indifference has not connection with scientific 'objectivity'.''

As said before, every recognition of a scientific problem reflects specific motives and values on the part of the investigator. This journal, a good journal, will try to avoid developing on a character on the basis of the values of its common contributors.

A social science problem is one which throws light on the ''the fundamental socio-economic problem: the scarcity of means'' (64) For us, phenomena have the following cultural significance (since we are interested in socio-economic data), ''economic,'' ''economically-relevant,'' ''economically-conditioned.'' This journal (thus, by extension, our buddy Max), considers all of these as important since material interests influence all aspects of culture w/o exception (67).

Our science, the science of economic cultural phenomena seeks particular causes for these phenomena, so it is also interested in historical knowledge. We want to investigate the general cultural significance of the socio-economic structure of the human community and its historical forms of organization (66-7). Treatment of these social problems will (hopefully) result in solutions for social policy.

This limited scope (focus on the socio-economic aspect of cultural life) is deliberately one-sided, because general social science is ambiguous without some specification of the way in which this social is to be investigated. This journal is interested, however, in the economic interp of history, not the materialist conception of history as a causal formula (take that, Karl). Karl's materialist conception is popular among laymen and dilettantes (not to mention, so I hear, hat-wearing, feminist vegetarians) who are not satisfied until they find economic causes for every freakin' thing under the sun.

The explanation of everything by economic causes alone is never exhaustive in any sense whatsoever in any sphere of cultural phenomena, not even in the economic sphere itself. We choose this one-sided approach, however, as a way to investigate cultural reality by specific technical means and using qualitatively similar categories (remember, though, material interests are found in every aspect of culture).

There is no absolutely objective scientific analysis of culture independent of special and one-sided viewpoints according to which social phenomena are selected, analyzed, and organized for expository purposes. These view points are necessary in order to engage in an empirical science of concrete reality which seeks to understand the cultural significance of individual events in their contemporary manifestations and the causes of their being historical so and not otherwise. The infinite multiplicity of life means that we can select only a segment of it for scientific investigation.

Ideal Type:
Formulated by exaggerating one side of reality, or selecting multiple aspects of reality and synthesizing them into a unified analytical construct. The analysis of reality is concerned, for Max, ''with the configuration into which (hypothetical!) 'factors' are arranged to form a cultural phenomena which is historically significant to us'' (75). The ideal type is derived inductively from the real world. You compare the type with empirical reality to see how it differs. Then, you look for the causes of the deviations.

MAX WEBER: Methodology of the Social Sciences

The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality in Sociology and Economics

--Value-judgements are practical evaluations of the unsatisfactory or satisfactory character of phenomena subject to our influence.
--In teaching, a lecture should be different from a speech, and teachers should not impose their ideas on their students simply because students are prevented from leaving and from protesting. There is no specialized qualification for personal prophesy, and for that reason it is not entitled to freedom from external control. Students should gain from teachers today: 1) the ability to fulfill a given task in a workmanlike fashion; 2) the ability to recognize facts, even those which may be personally uncomfortable, and to distinguish them from his/her own evaluations; 3) learn to subordinate himself to his task and repress the impulse to exhibit his personal tastes or other sentiments unnecessarily.
--The unresolvable question—unresolvable because it is ultimately a question of evaluation—as to whether one may, must, or should champion certain practical values in teaching, should not be confused with the purely logical discussion of the relationship of value-judgements to empirical disciplines such as sociology.
--The distinction between empirical statements of fact and value-judgments is difficult. However, all recognizable value judgements should be made rigorously explicit to both the researcher him/herself and his/her audience.
-- Weber does not believe in value free sociology, he believes in striving for value-neutral sociology
--The specific function of science is to ask questions about the things which convention makes self-evident.
--''Understanding'' explanations do justice to a person who really or evidently thinks differently. They are scientifically valuable 1) for the purposes of a causal analysis which seeks to establish the motives of human actions and 2) for the communication of really divergent evaluations when one is in discussion with a person who really or apparently has different evaluations from one's self.
--The shallowness of our routinized daily existence in the most significant sense of the word consist in the fact that the persons who are caught up in it do not become aware, and above all do not wish to become aware, of the motley of irreconcilably antagonistic values that they hold... value-spheres cross and interpenetrate (18).
--The discussion of value-judgements can have only the following functions:
1) the elaboration and explication of ultimate, internally consistent value-axioms, from which the divergent attitudes are derived. People are often in error, not only about their opponents' evaluations, but also their own. The procedure for this analysis begins with concrete particular evaluations and analyzes their meanings and then moves to the more general level of irreducible evaluations. It is not empirical and it produces no new knowledge of facts. It's validity flows from its logic.
2) deduction of implications for those accepting certain value-judgements which follow from certain irreducible value axioms when these axioms alone are used to evaluate certain situations of fact. This deduction depends partly on logic, and partly on empirical observation for the most complete casuistic analyses of all such empirical situations subject to practical evaluation.
3) determination of the factual consequences which the realization of a given practical evaluation must have: 1) in the event of being bound to certain indispensable means, 2) in the event of the inevitability of certain, not directly desired repercussions (these empirical observations may lead us to determine the end cannot be achieved, or that in its achievement there may be other, undesired consequences which make our end too dangerous to pursue. We may be made to reconsider our ends, means and repercussions, so that they become a new problem for us, or we may discover new axioms which we had not previously taken into consideration).

--Problems in social science are selected by value-relevance -- relevance for values of the researcher/problem-selector. The task of a value-neutral science, once the problem of interest is chosen, is the reduction of, say, a communist standpoint to its most rational and internally consistent form, and the empirical investigation the pre-conditions for its existence and its practical consequences. This analyses, though, can never tell us whether or not we should be communists; no science can. Strictly empirical analysis can provide a solution to a problem only where it is a question of a means adequate to the realization of an absolutely unambiguous end.
--When the normatively valid is the object of empirical investigation, its normative validity is disregarded. Its existence and not its validity is what concerns the investigator.
--An example of what NOT to do: Because the state is tremendously important and has a great deal of power in modern life, people conclude that it represents the ultimate value and that all social actions should be evaluated in terms of their relations to its interests. This is an inadmissible deduction of a value-judgement from a statement of fact. Bad, bad, bad.

MAX WEBER: Politics as a Vocation

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

First, a general chat on states.
Politics is any kind of leadership in action (Class, Status, Party: remember, social clubs and grad school cohorts can have parties, just as states can). For this lecture, we will understand politics as the leadership or influencing the leadership of a political association, today (1918) a state.

The decisive means of politics is violence.
A state is defined by the specific means peculiar to it, the use of physical force. The state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Politics, then, means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state. The state is a relation of men dominating men by means of legitimate violence (you already know the three ways it can get legitimated, so I'm not telling you). Leaders may arise on those three foundations as well.

How do the politically dominant powers maintain that dominance? Organized domination calls for continuous administration, requires that human conduct be conditioned to obedience to the power-bearers. It requires control over the material goods necessary for the use of physical violence. Thus, it requires control of the personal executive staff and the material implements of administration. All states may be classified by whether the staff of men themselves owns the administrative means, or whether they are separated from it (necesse. for bureaucracy).

Now to chatting about politics as a vocation.
There are two ways to make politics your vocation: you can live for it or off it. It you live for it, you make it your life in an internal sense, either because you enjoy power or because you serve some cause. If you live off it, you strive to make it your permanent source of income (cf Dan Rostenkowski). All party struggles are struggles for the patronage of office, as well as struggles for objective goals (see D.R. again). Setbacks in participating in offices are felt more severely by parties than is action against their objective goals.

The development of politics into an organization which demanded training in the struggle for power, and int eh methods of this struggle as developed by modern party policies, determined the separation of public functionaries into two categories: administrative officials and political officials. Political officials can be transferred any time at will, and can be dismissed or at least temporarily withdrawn. Cabinet ministers often are much less in control of their areas than divisional heads, who are long-term, administrative appointees; a minister is simply the representative of a given political power constellation.

The genuine official, even a political official, conducts his business sine ira et studio (at least formally, as long as the vital interests of the ruling order are not in question). To be passionate, on the other hand, is the element of the politician and above all of the political leader. ''Since the time of the constitutional state, and definitely since democracy has been established, the demagogue has been the typical political leader'' (96). The current state of affairs is a ''dictatorship resting on the exploitation of mass emotionality'' (107). Next to the qualities of will, the force of demagogic speech has been above all decisive in the choice of strong leaders.

''What kind of man must one be if he is to be allowed to put his hand on the wheel of history?'' (115). He must have passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion. Passion in the sense of matter-of-factness, of passionate devotion to a cause, to the god or demon who is its overlord. Responsibility to the cause must be the guiding star of action. For this, a sense of proportion is needed Warm passion and a cool sense of proportion must be forged together in one and the same soul.

The politician must combat vanity, in order to be matter-of-factly devoted to his cause and preserve some distance, not least from himself. Lack of objectivity and irresponsibility are the two deadly sins of politics; vanity, the need to personally stand in the foreground, temps the politician to commit these sins. The final result of political action regularly stands in completely inadequate and often paradoxical relation to its original meaning (oh, cheery old Weber). Because of this fact, the serving of a cause must not be absent if action is to have inner strength. Exactly which cause looks like a matter of belief (117). Some kind of faith must exist in a politician, ''otherwise it is absolutely true that the curse of the creature's worthlessness overshadows even the externally strongest political successes'' (117).

Then is a discussion of two ethics, the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility. They are fundamentally different and irreconcilably opposed. The ethic of ultimate ends, formulated in religious terms, is: ''The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord.'' If an action of good intention leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he, but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. The ethic of responsibility, on the other hand, requires one to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action. The man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes into account precisely the average deficiencies of people. He does not feel in a position to burden others with the results of his own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say, these results are ascribed to my action. On the other hand, the ultimate ends dude feels a ''responsibility'' only to keep his intentions good.

In many cases, the attainment of good ends is bound up with the price of using morally dubious or dangerous means, and must face the possibility of evil ramifications. From no ethics in the world can it be concluded when and to what extent a good ends justifies ethically dangerous means and ramifications. (121) The ethics of absolutism goes to pieces on the problem of justification of means by ends. Everything that is striven for through political action operating with violent means and following an ethic of responsibility endangers the salvation of the soul. If, however, on chases after the ultimate good in a war of beliefs, following a pure ethic of absolute ends, then the goals may be damaged and discredited for generations because responsibility for consequences is lacking. A man following an ethic of responsibility will arise at a place where he must say, Here I stand; I can do no other. Here, the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility are supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man, a man who can have the calling for politics (127).

MAX WEBER: The Social Psychology of the World Religions

The world religions, to Max, are Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, and they are chosen because they have a large number of followers, and for no other reason. He will also consider Judaism, since it is an important precursor to Christianity and Islam and because of its significance for the development of the economic ethic of the West.

The term 'economic ethic' points to the practical impulses for action which are founded in the psychological and pragmatic contexts of religion. The religious determination of life conduct is only one of the determinants of the economic ethic. The religiously determined way of life is itself profoundly influenced by economic and political factors.

Those strata which are decisive in stamping the characteristic features of an economic ethic may change in the course of history; nevertheless, as a rule one may determine the strata whose styles of life have been at least predominately decisive for certain religions. For example, Confucianism was the status ethic of prebendaries, men with literary educations who were characterized by a secular rationalism. Christianity began its course as a doctrine of itinerant artisan journeymen. It is not the case for Weber that ''the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling classes,'' however. And, however incisive the social influences, economically and politically determined, may have been upon a religious ethic in a particular case, it receives its stamp primarily from religious sources, and most predominantly from the content of its annunciation and promise.

One of the foci of religious ethics has been the evaluation of suffering. By treating suffering as a symptom of secret guilt and of a crime in the sight of G/god/s, religion has psychologically met a very important need. The fortunate is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. Good fortune wants to be legitimate fortune. Religion provides the theodicy of good fortune for those who are fortunate.

Salvation religions are religions of suffering. Under the pressure of typical and ever-recurrent distress, the religiosity of a 'redeemer' evolved. This religiosity presupposed the myth of a savior, hence (at least relatively) a rational view of the world. In Judaism, the term messiah was originally attached to the saviours from political distress, as transmitted by the hero sagas. In Judaism, and in this clear-cut fashion only in it and under very particular other conditions, the suffering of a people's community, rather than the suffering of an individual, became the object of hope for religious salvation. The usual rule was that the savior bore an individual and universal character at the same time that he was ready to guarantee salvation to the individual and to any individual who would turn to him.

The tribal and local gods, gods of the city and the empire, have taken care only of the interests that concern the collectivity as a whole. In the community cult, the community as such turned to its god. The individual, however, turned to the sorcerer and magician for help with his personal evils. Hereditary dynasties of mystagogues or trained personnel under a head determined in accordance with certain rules developed. Collective religious arrangements for individual suffering per se, and for salvation from it, originated in this fashion. The typical service of magicians and priests becomes the determination of the factors to be blamed for suffering; that is, the confession of sins. Where religious development was decisively influenced by prophecy, sin was no longer merely a magical offense: it was a sign of disbelief in the prophet and his commandments.

While prophets have not generally been descendants of depressed classes, it has generally been the depressed classes who need a redeemer. Thus, most prophetically announced religious of redemption have been located in the less-favored social strata. For these, such religiosity has been either a substitute for, or a rational supplement to, magic.

The need for an ethical interpretation of suffering and of the meaning of the distribution of fortunes among men increased with the growing rationality of conceptions of the world. There have been three rationally satisfactory answers to questions about the basis of the incongruity between destiny and merit: Karma, dualism (from Zoroastrianism) and the predestination decree of the deus abscondidus (the absconded god; kind of a cool phrase). These solutions are rationally closed, and are found in pure form only as exceptions.

Ecstatic states (orgies, quietistic edification, contemplative mortification, etc) have been sought first of all, for the sake of the emotional value they offered the devout. Rationalized religions have sublimated the orgy into the sacrament. Every hierocratic and official authority of a church fights against virtuoso religion and its autonomous development. The church is the holder of institutionalized grace, and seeks to organize the religiosity of the masses.

The kind of empirical state of bliss or experience of rebirth that is sought after as the supreme value by a religion has varied according to the character of the stratum that was foremost in adopting it. The conception of the idea of redemption is very old, if one understands by it a liberation from sickness, hunger, etc., ultimately from suffering and death. However, redemption attained a specific significance only where it expressed a systematic and rationalized image of the world and represented a stand in the face of the world. Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men's conduct. Yet very frequently the world images that have been created by ideas have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. From what and for what one wished to be redeemed, and let us not forget, could be redeemed, depended upon one's image of the world.

Behind every religion lies a stand toward something in the actual world which is experienced as specifically senseless. Thus, the demand has been implied: the world order, in its totality, could, and should somehow be a meaningful cosmos. The various great ways of leading a rational and methodical life have been characterized by irrational presuppositions, which have been accepted simply as given and incorporated into life. What these presuppositions have been is historically and socially determined, to a very large extent, through the peculiarity of those strata that have been the carriers of the ways of life during its formative and decisive period. The interest situation of these strata, as determined socially and psychologically, has made for their peculiarity.

Where prophecy has provided a religious basis, this basis could be one of two fundamental types of prophesy: exemplary and emissary. Exemplary prophesy points the way to salvation by exemplary living (usually contemplative and apathetic-ecstatic ways of life). Emissary prophesy addresses its demands to the world in the name of a god. These demands are ethical, and often of an active acetic character.

The civic strata, conditioned by the nature of their life, which is greatly detached from economic bonds to nature, tend toward a practical rationalism in conduct. Their whole existence has been based on technological or economic calculations and upon the mastery of nature and man. These strata tend toward religions of active asceticism. Wherever the direction of the whole way of life has been methodically rationalized, it has been profoundly determined by the ultimate values toward which this rationalism has been directed.

All kinds of practical ethics that are systematically and unambiguously oriented toward fixed goals of salvation are rational, partly in the same sense as formal method is rational, and partly in the sense that they distinguish between valid norms and what is empirically given.

All ruling powers need legitimacy, which comes in three kinds...

In the main, it has been the work of jurists to give birth to modern Western states, as well as modern Western churches. Jurists work in the realm of formal rationalization, they follow procedures, etc. With the triumph of formalistic (rather than substantive) juristic rationalism, the legal type of domination appeared in the West.

Emile Durkheim

2008-12-14T22:35:00.001-08:00

On the Division of Labor in Society.

Book1, Chp 1: 'The method of determining this function'

In this chapter, Durkheim asks what the division of labor (DOL) in society is. First, he states that since the DOL increases both the reproductive capacity and skill of the workman, it is the necessary condition for the intellectual and material development in societies (12). However, the DOL also has a moral character which is more important. It can create a feeling of solidarity between two or more people (17).

To explain how the DOL contributes to feelings of solidarity, Durkheim (DH) uses the simple example of a married couple. He claims that if the DOL between the sexes were reduced to a certain point, material life would disappear, only to leave behind sexual relationships. The DOL goes beyond purely economic interests; it constitutes the establishment of a social and moral order sui generis. However, DH admits that in marriage people are also bounded because of their similarities. In this sense, they are bonded outside the DOL (22).

The marriage analogy cannot explain the significance of the DOL for large societies. DH asserts, 'these great political societies cannot sustain their equilibrium save by the specialization of tasks; the DOL is the source...of social solidarity (23). DH states here that Comte was the first to point out that the DOL was something other than a purely economic phenomenon. Comte argued that it was the 'continuous distribution of different human tasks which constitutes the principal element in social solidarity' (23). The DOL has a moral character because the needs which it fulfills for social solidarity, order, and harmony are moral needs (24).

Law

The most visible symbol of social solidarity is law (24). Law is the organization of social life in its most stable and precise form. All the essential varieties of social solidarity are reflected in law (25). We can classify different types of law to see which types of social solidarity correspond to them. Two types of law exist. The first type is repressive (covers penal law), which imposes some type of 'damage' on the perpetrator. The second type is restitutive, which does not necessarily imply any suffering on the part of the perpetrator but consists of restoring the previous relationships which have been disturbed from their normal form (covers civil, communal, procedural law).

Durkheim, Emile. On the Division of Labor in Society.
Book1, Chp2 'Mechanical Solidarity, or Solidarity by Similarities,'

In this chapter, DH demonstrates how repressive law reflects a society characterized by mechanical solidarity. Penal rules express the basic conditions of collective life for each type of society (32).

The nature of crime 'disturbs those feelings that in any one type of society are to be found in every healthy conscious' (34). in 'Lower forms' of society (those most simply organized) law is almost exclusively penal or repressive (37). Penal law demonstrates the strength of the resistance of collective sentiment to a given crime (38).

The collective conscience is the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society that forms a determinate system with a life of its own (39). Durkheim defines an act as criminal when it offends the collective conscience (39).

It is actually public opinion and opposition which constitutes the crime. An act offends the common consciousness not because it is criminal, but it is criminal because it offends that consciousness. A crime is a crime because we condemn it (40). All crimes floe directly or indirectly from the collective conscience (43).

The role of an authority with power to govern is to ensure respect for collective practices and to defend the common consciousness from its 'enemies.' In lower societies, this authority is greatest where the seriousness of the crime weighs the heaviest. Here the collective consciousness posses the most power (43).

DH argues that in antiquity, people punished for the sake of punishment. However, nowadays society punishes in order to instill fear in potential criminals (46). Yet, punishment has still remained an act of vengeance and expiation (atonement). What society avenges, and what the criminal must expiate, is the 'outrage to morality' (47). It is the attack upon society that is repressed by punishment.

Punishment is a 'reaction of passionate feeling, graduated in intensity, which society exerts through the mediation of an organized body over those of its members who have violated certain rules of conduct' (52). Punishing crime sustains the common consciousness.

Two consciousnesses exist within humans: one which represents individual personalities and the other which represents the collectivity (61). The force which is shocked by crime is the result of the most vital social similarities and its effect is to maintain the social cohesion that arises from these similarities (61).

Punishment publicly demonstrates that the sentiments of the collectivity are still unchanged (despite the deviant ways) of the offender and thusthe injury that the crime inflicted on society is made good. In fact, the primary intent of punishment is to affect honest people (63).

In this chapter, Durkheim shows that a social solidarity exists because a certain number of states of consciousness are common to all members of the same society. This is the solidarity which repressive law embodies.

Durkheim, Emile. On the Division of Labor in Society
Book1 Chp 3 'Solidarity Arising From the DOL, or Organic Solidarity'

To start his discussion of restitutory law which corresponds to the organic state of society, DH contrasts it to repressive law. Whereas repressive law corresponds to the 'center of common consciousness,' restitutory sanctions either constitute no part at all of the collective consciousness, or subsist in it weakly. Second, whereas repressive law tends to stay diffused throughout society, restitutory law works through more specialized bodies: ie, courts, magistrates, and lawyers (69-70).

Despite the removed role of restitutory law from society, society still intervenes in restitutory sanctioning. The formation of a contract directly concerns the parties involved: nonetheless, if a contract has a binding force, it is society which confers that force. If society does not give its blessing to the obligations that have been contracted, then these obligations are reduced to only moral promises. Hence the presence of society in restitutory law, although not necessarily felt, is nonetheless essential.

Part of restitutory law, the corpus of real rights (the right to property and mortgage), corresponds to negative solidarity. Negative solidarity can consist of links between persons and things. However, relationships between people, though in no way 'real,' can also express negative solidarity. This occurs when the relationships are created to prevent or repair damage. These relationships do not imply co-operation (74). Hence, the rules relating to real rights form a definite system whose function is not to link the different parts of society together, but to clearly mark the barriers which separate them.

Negative solidarity is actually only possible where positive solidarity is present. for a man to recognize that others have rights, he must limit his own. This 'mutual limitation' is only realizable in a spirit of understanding and harmony. To need peace, men must already be united in a bond of sociability (different from Hobbes).

Aside from 'real' rights which DH considers ultimately expressive of negative solidarity, the rest of restitutory law (domestic law, contractual law, communal law, procedural law)expresses a positive cooperation which derives essentially from the DOL (77). For instance, civil law (adoption, divorce, etc)determines how various family functions are allocated and expresses the solidarity that unites the members of the family as a result of the domestic DOL (78). The relationship of the DOL to contractual law is similar. Contracts typically involve reciprocal obligations that involve co-operation.

Law plays a part in society analogous to the nervous system in an organisms. The system regulates the various body functions so they work together in harmony. The nervous system thus expresses the degree of concentration that the organism has reached as a result of the physiological DOL. Likewise, we can ascertain the measure of concentration that a society has reached through the social DOL, according to the development of cooperative law with its restitutory sanctions.

There are two types of positive solidarity. The first kind, mechanical solidarity, links the individual to society without any intermediary. Society is organized collectively and is composed of beliefs common to all members of the group. The bond which unites the individual with society is completely analogous to that which links the thing to the person. The individual consciousness depends on the collective consciousness.

In the second kind of solidarity, organic solidarity, the society is a system of different functions united by definite relationships (83). This brings about the DOL. Here each individual must have a sphere of action and a personality which is his own. Individuality grows at the same time as the parts of society. Society becomes more effective at moving in concert though at the same time each of its elements has more movements that are peculiarly its own.

Durkheim, Emile. On the Division of Labor in Society
Book1 Chp4 'Another Proof of the Preceding Theory'

The preponderance of repressive law over cooperative law must be greater when the collective type of solidarity is more pronounced and the DOL more rudimentary. yet to the degree that tasks become specialized, the balance between society and the type of law becomes upset and begins to change (88).

The more primitive a society is, the more resemblances there are between its members. By contrast, members of advanced, 'civilized' societies are quite distinguishable from one another (89). Organic similarities correspond to psychological similarities between members of primitive societies. Furthermore, members of advanced societies are increasingly organically and psychologically different. Diversity becomes greater as types become more developed (91). Hence, the higher the social type, the more developed the DOL.

The two forms of law Durkheim distinguishes preceding this chapter vary at diverse levels on the social scale. In the lowest societies, the state of law seems wholly repressive. DH shows from the Pentateuch (ancient Hebrew law) that cooperative and restitutory law amounted to little in primitive societies (93). In fact, the whole society under Hebrew law appeared repressive. Society insisted on expiation and not mere reparation (94). Repression dominates the entire corpus of law in lower societies because religion (repressive in nature) permeates all legal activity (94).

Although repressive law has not diminished in importance in modern times, restitutory law has expanded greatly and has grown more complex with the development of society (97). Yet, contractual law (procedural/restitutory)is still not entirely separated from penal (repressive law), because often the refusal to comply with a contract results in a fine (97).

However, repressive and restitutory law still vary fairly directly with the degree of society's development. Repressive law, typically involving sanctions for crimes against the whole community is common in lower, mechanical societies. law is simply an expression of morals. Where acts of violence are frequent, they are tolerated. their criminal character is in inverse proportion to their frequency. Thus, in lower societies crimes against the individual are common and placed on the lower rung of the penal ladder. Instead, crimes against the community take priority. This is because in lower societies the evolution of the collective consciousness is widespread and strong, while the DOL has not yet taken place (99).

Durkheim, Emile. On the division of Labor in Society
Book1 Chp7 'Organic solidarity and Contractual Solidarity'

Durkheim bases this detailed discussion of organic solidarity and contracts on a dispute against Spencer. Spencer claims that industrial solidarity is spontaneous and that there is no need for a coercive apparatus to produce or maintain it. Social harmony is simply established of its own accord. Durkheim asserts that, were this the case, the sphere of social action would diminish greatly because it would no longer be needed except to enforce negative solidarity (149). This is not the case.

Spencer also argues that the normal form of exchange is contract. For this reason, the extent of central authority diminishes. As freedom of action increases, contracts become more general. This general social contract requires the free agreement of human wills and is irreconcilable with the DOL.

DH states that this type of spontaneous, general social contract has never existed. Societies are spontaneously contractual only to the extent that an individual chooses to remain in the society in which he was born, and hence he abides by that society's rules. For Spencer, society would be no more than the establishment of relationships between individuals exchanging the products of their labor without any social action intervening to regulate that exchange (152).

Durkheim disputes Spencer by claiming that social intervention is on the rise. the legal obligations which society imposes on its members are becoming more and more complex. restitutory law is growing. If social intervention no longer has the effect of imposing certain uniform practices on everybody, it consists more in defining and regulating the special relationship between the different social functions (153).

Spencer would answer that not every kind of control has decreased, just positive control. Durkheim counters that positive control is far from disappearing; in fact, restitutory law is continually growing (154).

[negative control = regulations which make a person refrain from acting e.g., do not help a farmer with his crop, simply prevent him from stealing his neighbor's.]

[positive control = regulations which make a person act eg,impose a certain method of farming upon a farmer]

Durkheim next states that although Spencer is correct in claiming that contractual relationships are multiplied as society is divided up, he has failed to note that non-contractual relationships are developing at the same time (155). Durkheim argues that 'private law,' typically contractual, is really quite public. For instance, marriage and adoption, although private matters, were formerly endorsed by the church and are now endorsed by civil authority (155). As domestic obligations become more numerous, they tend to take on a private character.

The role played by contract is continually decreasing, and social control over the way obligations are regulated is increasing. This is due to the progressive disappearance of segmentary organization. Everything segmentary is increasingly absorbed into larger society.

The contracts that remain are entirely removed from the sphere of individual negotiation and are submitted to the regulatory force of society. contractual law exists to determine the legal consequences of our acts which we have not settled beforehand. It expresses the normal conditions for attaining equilibrium and constrains us to respect obligations for which we have not contracted. it is the role of society to determine what contractual conditions are capable of being executed, and if necessary, to restore them to their normal form (162). And just as society plays a role in shaping contracts, contracts play a role in shaping society. An extensive network of relationships which contribute to social solidarity can stem from contracts.

Durkheim also disputes Spencer's idea that exchange of information takes place freely on the market place without a need for a regulating apparatus. Using a biological analogy, Durkheim insists that the 'sympathetic nerve system of society must include, apart from a system of transmission paths, truly regulatory organs which amplify or moderate stimuli according to need (165). The state's role as regulator becomes increasingly larger and diverse the higher the type of society (167).

The growth of government is attributable to the progress of the DOL and to the process of transformation from segmentary societies to organized societies. First, the central organism faced with less resistance from the segmented forces, begins to develop and become more powerful. The local organs, instead of preserving their individuality, come to merge into the central mechanism (168-9). As a society becomes more and more organically organized, disturbances even of a general character begin to have repurcussions on higher centers, which then become obliged to intervene (170).

Social life is derived from a dual source: the similarity of individual consciousnesses and the social DOL (172).

The similarity of consciousnesses gives rise to rules, which under the threat of repressive measures, impose uniform beliefs and practices. The more pronounced the similarity, the more completely social life is mixed up with religious life (172).

On the other hand, the DOL gives rise to legal rules that determine the nature of a divided up society, but punishment for law breakers in this case involves only reparative measures which lack any expiatory character (172). In organic society, members' dependence on the state continues to grow. As a result, they are continually reminded of their common solidarity.

Thus DH argues that altruism is not Spencer's conception of an ornament to social life, but it is the fundamental basis of social life. Every society is a moral society, because men cannot cohabitate without agreeing and cooperating. Hence, even societies characterized by organic solidarity and the DOL are moral because cooperation has an intrinsic morality. this morality grows as the individual personality grows stronger (as opposed to in mechanical solidarity when morality depends on common sentiment) (173-4).

There are 'two great currents of social life.' The first has origins in social similarityand is segmentary. it gradually becomes overshadowed by the second type of society, which is composed of individual differences and organic cooperation. Nonetheless, the segmentary structure never completely disappears (174).

Durkheim, Emile. On the Division of Labor in Society.
Book 2 chap 2 'The Causes'

In this chapter, DH explains the causes of the DOL. First, the segmentary organization of society must recede. The segments lose their individuality and they coalesce so that the 'social substance' is free to enter upon new combinations. Social life becomes more general and relationships become more numerous. Individuals who were formerly separated from each other draw together and engage in active exchanges (moral or dynamic density) (201).

The DOL is in direct proportion to the moral density of society. (Moral density also increases with the growth of physical density). the increase of social density can occur in three ways:
1: the increasing spatial concentration of a people
2: the growth of towns
(towns do no exist in segmentary societies)
(the development of urban centers is not pathological, but is representative of higher society)
3: increase in number and efficacy of means of communication (201-2).

Although societies can increase in volume (absolute size), they do not necessarily increase in density. A society which grows larger but does not increase its social contacts can remain segmentary and not evolve into a division of labor (204).The growth and condensation of societies does not permit a greater DOL, but they necessitate it.

Spencer claims that the variety of environments in which individuals live channels them to specialize in different paths of labor (eg: seashore ---]fisherman). If this specialization increases with the size of societies, it is because the internal differences increase at the same time. Durkheim asks however, is this diversity alone sufficient to bring about the DOL (206)? If such differences make the DOL possible, they do not impose that division. WHY do men specialize (208)?

Labor become increasingly divided as societies grow in density not because of external circumstances, but because the struggle for existence becomes more strenuous (208). Men differentiate their specialties in order to decrease competition and to coexist (DH draws a comparison to Darwin's law of animal differentiation --]survival) (209). Hence, any concentration in the social mass necessarily determines the progress of the DOL (210).

To the extent that the social constitution is segmentary, each segment has its own organs that are kept at a distance from similar organs by social partitions. but as these partitions disappear with the advancement of society, the segments begin to struggle to substitute each other. This struggle eventually diminishes, resulting in specialization. Thus higher societies make room for all their members (213). humans specialize and increase the DOL in order to survive in new conditions of existence. Greater economic productivity is merely a consequence of the DOL, and not a cause or motivation (217).

The DOL must be carried out between members of a society that is already 'constituted.' (Those people facing competition who are not already in a bounded society will simply flee each other.) The DOL actually causes the activities which it differentiates to converge and brings people closer together (217). For this to occur, the members of society must not only be liked materially, but they must have moral ties (218). Thus, organic society must arise from a mechanical society which already has a structure of collective beliefs. (this is directly opposite to Spencer's theory that a society is produced by cooperation. DH argues that cooperation necessarily supposes the pre-existence of society (219).

For the DOL to function, groups which apparently perform distinct tasks must actually intermingle and be absorbed into one another (221).

Durkheim, Emile. On the DOL in Society
Book2 Chp5 'Consequences of the Foregoing'

In very simple societies, members can easily replace each other in tasks. Comte and Spencer would argue that in higher societies, as social organization is perfected, it becomes more and more impossible for members to switch out of roles. However, DH disagrees. He claims that the phenomena of substitution is also observable in even the highest levels of society (271).
A member of society must always be ready to change functions to accommodate a break in social equilibrium. as labor is divided up more in human societies, this elasticity increases. consequently the function becomes more and more independent of the organ (member of society) which performs it. For instance in higher societies, men performing different social functions are distinguished less and less by physical features (2
The DOL is a necessary consequence of the growth of volume and density of society. as the number of individuals between whom social relations are established increases, men can only maintain their position by specializing more. Men go forward because they must. Civilization is but an after-effect (not a cause) of the DOL (276). Furthermore, individuals are more a product of common social life than a determining factor in it. Individuals depend on the diversity of social conditions to differentiate themselves (277). The more numerous and diverse individuals are, the more strongly and rapidly they react together . As a result, social life becomes more intense. This intensification constitutes civilization (278). The product of these social relationships becomes an entity in itself (society sui generis).

Spencer purports that the individual has every interest in establishing relationships which serve him alone. This activity shapes society, and social progress consists solely of improving these relationships for the maximization of individual ends.
Durkheim contends, 'Spencer does not see in societies a true reality, existing by itself by virtue of specific and necessary causes, one that consequently bears down upon man, imposing upon him its own nature and to which he is forced to adapt in order to continue living' (281). (society sui generis)
In effect, man does not shape society. according to DH, 'it is because society changes that we must change' (282). DH labels this concept a mechanistic theory of progress.' Because the ideal of civilization depends upon the ever changing social environment, we will never be without our goals for society (282).
According to DH, man is more or less entirely guided by social life. He credits very little to the human psyche alone. He claims that man develops his psychological life in response to his level of sociability (284). Plus, man has only gained the ability to reason because he is a social animal. Social life even influences his emotions. as man's social life grows in complexity, so does his psyche.
We should not present social life as the result of individual natures alone -- as does Spencer. Individual natures emerge from social life; consequently, social facts are not just a mere development of psychological facts (286). Everything found in the consciousness of individuals comes form society.

Durkheim, Emile. On the DOL in Society
Book3 Ch1 'The Anomic DOL'

The DOL is typically a normal phenomenon, but from time to time it enters a pathological state (291), In certain points of the social organism, certain functions are not adjusted to one another. As labor becomes increasingly divided up, these phenomena become more frequent .(eg: bankruptcies, commercial crises, hostility between labor and capital).
DH applies the following ideas from Comte:
The DOL, if pushed too far, can become a source of disintegration, The individual may isolate himself in his own special activity, forget his fellow workers, and no longer have any idea of what the common task consists (294). Although the diversity of functions is both useful and necessary, unity does not arise spontaneously. The task of realizing and maintaining it must be carried out by the state (295).
DH states that the organ of government develops with the DOL, by mechanical necessity. As social functions grow and differentiate, more events impact upon the controlling organ whose role as regulator consequently increases. However, the government cannot be omnipotent; in reality, the unity of organized societies stems from the spontaneous consensus of its parts. the government can only 'bestow its blessing' on society. thus, as labor is divided up, a progressive decomposition over the whole of society can occur (297), furthermore, functional diversity creates a moral diversity . The collective sentiments become powerless to contain the centrifugal tendencies brought about by the DOL.
Although Comte saw the DOL as a source of solidarity, he did not perceive this solidarity as sui generis. for this reason, he saw the disappearance of order in the DOL as a morbid phenomenon and a threat to social cohesion. However, DH contends that the weakening of the collective consciousness id normal. It is not possible for social life to be without struggle. Solidarity between organs in society cannot abolish competition but only moderate it (302).
The regulatory process which stems from solidarity emerges form the DOL. The DOL evokes definite ways of acting that relate to the unchanging conditions of social life. these habits become transformed into rules of conduct.
If solidarity does not arise from the DOL, it is because the relationships between the organs in the system are not well regulated -- they are in a state of anomie. The rules which stem from social solidarity where organs are in close contact fix the conditions of equilibrium to some degree. however, if contacts between organs are blocked, they cannot be repeated enough for rules to take on a definite form. Hence, the rules constituted from these relationships are only general and vague (304). For example, the conditions of industrial life create low levels of contact between organs (worker and worker, worker and family, worker and capitalist). Because these transformations occur with such rapidity, conflicting interests which result from the change have not had time to strike a new equilibrium (306).
DH recognizes that the DOL has been blamed for turning workers into 'lifeless cogs' (306). But, he argues that the DOL does not produce these circumstances as a result of its nature. Under normal conditions, the DOL requires that the individual worker interact with his coworkers. he works toward a goal which he can conceive of fairly distinctly, and he feels that he is of some use. Then, the DOL is a source of solidarity.

Durkheim, Emile. On the DOL in Society
Book 3 Chp2 'The Forced DOL'

For the DOL to create social solidarity, it is not enough that everyone have a task -- the task must be agreeable to him. If the DOL produces unrest, it is because the distribution of social functions does not correspond to the distribution of natural abilities. Constraint binds people to their functions, and only a troubled form of solidarity can exist (311).
Normally, labor is divided according to the distribution of aptitude in society. The DOL produces social solidarity when it arises spontaneously (32). perfect Spontaneity corresponds to absolute equality in the external conditions of struggle for a position in the DOL. Constraint occurs when this struggle becomes impossible (313).
Perfect spontaneity cannot exist in any society. inequalities build up through time. For instance, the hereditary transmission of wealth makes the external conditions of the 'struggle' very unequal. The 'higher' the society, the less these inequalities exist (313-4).
In an organic society, the sentiments held in common do not possess a great deal of strength to keep the individual bound to the group. Subversive tendencies emerge more readily than in mechanical societies. hence, in organized societies it is indispensable that the DOL work to attain the goal of spontaneity. these societies should attempt to eliminate all external inequalities. They cannot sustain solidarity unless their constituent parts are solidly linked (315-6).
Equality in the external conditions of the struggle is needed to secure each individual to his function and to link these functions with each other,. This proposition introduces a long discussion from DH on the importance of equality in contracts. He states that contracts necessarily develop with the DOL. There is a consensus of a certain kind that is expressed in contracts and represents (in the 'higher species' an important factor in collective thought (316).
Durkheim also contends that 'there can be no rich or poor by birth without there being unjust contracts' (319). these injustices are found more often in less advances societies, where contractual relations are less developed. Yet as labor becomes more divided up and the social doctrine weakens, these injustices become more unbearable and people start creating contracts to make relationships more fair.
Lastly, DH makes a pitch for the importance of society over nature. Contracts regulate social life because if not, people will take advantage of each other. In the broad scheme, liberty and equality are products of regulation. Man as a social being regulates things in nature, 'stripping them of their amoral character.' '[Man] cannot escape from nature save by creating another world in which he dominates it. that world is society' (321).

Durkheim, Emile. The DOL in Society
Book3 chp 3 'Another Abnormal Form.'

The last abnormal form of the DOL occurs when the 'organs' of the system do not function smoothly and continuously together to furnish efficient production of social solidarity. Although the DOL might be highly developed, it is very poorly integrated. This does not always occur because there is a lack of a regulatory organ, but because the regulator does not distribute work in such a way that each individual is kept sufficiently busy to increase the functional activity of every worker (324).
Every increase in functional activity can create an increase in social solidarity when as a result of becoming more active, the functions become more continuous. When all functions at the same tame become even more active the continuity of each one of them will be increased even more (326).
As actions are more solidly linked to one another , they become more dependent on one another (326). The more individuals which work in a society, the more each individual will specialize. At the same time, each worker must increase his activity to meet the needed amount of product. Hence, a second reason for why the DOL fosters social cohesion: 'It fosters the unity of the organization by the very fact that it adds to its life.'

EMILE DURKHEIM The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Intro. 'Subject of our Study: Religious Sociology and the Theory of Knowledge.'

According to DH, a religious system is most primitive when it is found in a society with the simplest form of organization, and when it is possible to explain the religious system without using any element borrowed from a previous religion. The study of simple religions shows us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity, as well as leads to an understanding of the religious nature of man (13). At the foundation of all systems of beliefs there are a number of fundamental representations, concepts, and ritual attitudes which, despite the diversity of their forms, have the same objective significance and fulfill the same functions everywhere (17).

Primitive civilizations offer privileged cases of the study of religion. These societies are characterized by simplicity and conformity of thought and conduct. The religion Durkheim will analyze in this book is foreign to any idea of a god or divinity. The 'forces' to which the rites are addressed are very different from those in modern religions, yet they aid us in understanding modern religions (19). When primitive religious beliefs are systematically analyzed, the principal categories of understanding are found . In fact, they are a product of religious thought (22).

Religion is eminently social. Religious representations express collective realities. Religious rites are a manner of acting which arises from assembled groups and are destined to excite certain mental states in these groups. The categories of understanding are of religious origin; they are social affairs and the product of collective thought (22). these categories include time, specie, class, force, personality, and efficacy (23-5).

DH states that society is the highest representation of nature. 'The social realm is a natural realm which differs from the others only by greater complexity' (31). However, nature does not differ radically from one case to another. The relations that exist between things are essentially similar across realms (31). Although the categories of time, space, class, cause and personality are constructed out of social elements, their social origin points to the fact that they have a foundation in the realm of nature (32).

Thus DH unites two opposing viewpoints in his theory of knowledge (the categories of understanding). The apriorists believe that knowledge is made up of empirical fact and representation. On the other hand, the empiricists only study positive knowledge. DH claims that the theory of knowledge (wherein the categories of thought have a dual social and natural nature) combines all the principles of the apriorists and the empiricists. According to him, the categories of understanding are no longer single empirical facts but are 'complex instruments of [human thought]' (32).

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In this chapter DH also postulates on the dual nature of man. There are two beings in man: an individual whose foundation is in his body and whose circle of activity is very limited, and a social being which represents the intellectual and moral order of society (29).

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Book 1 Chp1 'Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion'

In this chapter Durkheim defines religion. In the first two sections, he sets forth definitions of religion which are erroneous, in order to assist readers in freeing their minds of misconceptions. to begin with he argues that the supernatural is not a characteristic of the religious (39). in order to say something is supernatural, it must happen out of the natural order of things (41). However, the idea of a necessary order did not exist before the construction of the positive sciences. Furthermore, religion's main goal is to explain every day events. It is not true that the notion of religion coincides with the extraordinary or the unforeseen. hence the idea of the supernatural is not of primitive origin; man has forged it as he has developed science (43).

Next, DH asserts that all religions cannot be associated with divinity or the worship of a supreme deity. Some religions, Buddhism for example, stress other practices instead. In Buddhism, salvation is the worshippers' primary concern -- not Buddha (47). DH also contends that even with the deistic religions, there are many rites which are completely independent of any idea of gods (e.g.: the Bible forbids wearing garments of flax and hemp) (49). hence, all religious powers do not emanate from divine personalities (50).

DH now begins his discussion of religion. first, he characterizes all the elementary phenomena which comprise religion (51). Religious phenomena can be classified in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rules. Beliefs are states of opinion and consist in representations, whereas rites are determined modes of action (51).

All religious beliefs classify things as either profane or sacred. Sacred things are considered superior in dignity and power to profane things, particularly men (52). Men typically consider themselves inferior to anything sacred; yet if man depends on gods, this dependence is reciprocal. without the offerings and sacrifices of man, gods would die (53).

Despite the heterogeneity of sacred and profane things, it is possible for the profane to pass into the world of the sacred. For example, this occurs when men are initiated into religious life with certain ceremonies (54).

However, the sacred and the profane are so heterogeneous that their differences eventually break down into antagonism. men are exhorted to withdraw themselves completely fro the profane world in order to lead an exclusively religious lives. the profane and the sacred cannot approach each other and keep their own nature at the same time (55).

Hence, we arrive at the criteria for religious beliefs. 'Religious beliefs are the representations which express the nature of the scared things and their relations with each other or with profane things. Rites are the rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of these sacred objects' (56).

The totality if these beliefs, when organized in a way so as to form a system having a certain unity and a strict independence from other systems, constitutes a religion . A religion is not made up of a single idea; it is a whole made up of distinct parts. All religions recognize a plurality of sacred things, in addition to the system of cults -- each with some autonomy (56). Because of the variety of cults, there exist groups of religious phenomena which do not belong to any specific religion. If a cult survives while the group of people which practiced it disintegrates, the cult may remain as folk lore.

There is a distinction between magic and religion. Magic , like religion, is made up of beliefs and rites. It also has its dogmas, but they are less speculative because they have utilitarian ends. However, whereas religion has a church and a community of worshippers with common beliefs, there is no church in magic (60). The magician has a clientele and it is quite possible that none of them know each other (59-60). magic lacks the moral community formed by all the believers in a single faith (61). From this DH derives a more detailed definition of religion: 'a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things...things set apart and forbidden -- beliefs and practices which unite all those who adhere to them into one moral community ' (62). Because religion is inseparable from the church, it is clear that religion is eminently collective (63).

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Book 3 Chp 4 'The Positive Cult -- cont'd'

Religious rites are observed not for the physical effects they might produce, but to remain faithful to the past and to maintain the groups normal physiognomy. Rites remake individuals and groups morally (414-5).

DH uses the cases of the Warramunga, the Intichuma, and the Arunta to illustrate the above proposition. Although they are separate entities, each tribe has a rite which commemorates a single ancestor. This rite recollects the past and also brings it to the present through a dramatic representation. The officiant is not an incarnation of the ancestor, but an actor playing a role(416).

These ceremonies are dramas which are believed to act on the course of nature (418). However, their most important function is to sustain the vitality of the mythic beliefs common to the group, and hence, revivify the most essential elements of the collective consciousness. Through ritual, individuals are strengthened in their social natures. The rite exercises a moral action more so than a physical action.

Not all rituals are performed with the external goal of acting on nature for material ends. Some simply represent the past for the sake of representing it (420). When the participants leave the ceremony, they go with a sense of moral well being (423). Ceremonies attach themselves to totems, which are incapable of physical effect. They can only exist in representations whose object is to commemorate the past (424).

Aside from illustrating the nature of a certain cult, ritual representations also serve recreative and aesthetic purposes. Rituals restore the moral of the group. They allow men to pass from the real world to an imaginary one. They even pass from the commemorative rite to public merrymaking. Some religious ceremonies, whose soul object is to distract, were probably ancient rites. Even games and art have retained a religious character (425). Recreation is one of the forms of moral remaking, which is the principal goal of the rite.

A religious rite can have a plurality of specific purposes. For instance, fasting is a penance, a preparation for communion, and it even confers 'positive virtues.' Inversely, many rites can produce the same effect and mutually replace one another. For instance, to assure the reproduction of the totemic species, one can resort to oblations, imitative practices, or commemorative representations. This proves the plasticity and extreme generality of useful action which stems from the rites (431). Most importantly, common sentiments are expressed in common acts. The particular nature of these acts is secondary.

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
'Conclusion'

In the final chapter, Durkheim equates religion to society. He says that society is the cause of the sui generis sensations of the religious experience. Furthermore, social action dominates religious life (466).

In addition, the fundamental categories of thought and science have religious origin. In fact, nearly all great social institution, moral and legal rules, have a basis in religion. Religion is the concentrated reflection of collective life, and its principal purpose is to influence moral life (466-7).

Religion systematically idealizes. Collective life 'awakens' religious thought in order to bring about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. Thus man places another world -- a sacred, ideal; world -- above his every day profane life (469). In creating new ideals, society remakes itself (470).

Although certain religious symbols mat disappear with time, every society will always feel the need to reaffirm the collective sentiments which make up its unity (474-5).

There are two elements of religious life. Feasts and rites (the cult)are a system of practices oriented toward action. The second is a system of ideas whose object is to explain the world (476). religion attempts to explain realities by connecting things with each other -- to systematize them. Scientific logic actually stems from the methodology of religion.

DH next begins a discussion on the concept as a collective representation. Although a concept may not apply to every individual, it corresponds to the way in which society considers the things of its own experience (483). By the mere fact that society exists, there is a whole system of representations by means of which men understand each other.

A collective representation guarantees objectivity because it is collective. It was been able to maintain and generalize itself because it has sufficient reason -- the men who accept it verify it by their own experience. Thus, DH takes it as an axiom that religious beliefs contain a truth which must be discovered (486).

DH reiterates that the categories of knowledge (time, space ,etc.)are social. Since they are concepts themselves, they are the work of the group (488). The relationships which they express could only have been learned through society (491). Time, space, and class were all created out of cooperation (492). Yet logical organization differentiates itself from its original social organization as societies expand and integrate. Social moulds must readapt. human thought is not a primitive fact, but it is a product of history (493).

Hence there is not really such a great antinomy between science and religion. Both systems of thought are directed toward the universal and imply that the individual can raise himself above his own point of view and live an impersonal life. Impersonal reason is synonymous with collective thought.

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Book 2 Chp 7 'Origins of these Beliefs'

In this chapter, DH discusses how men have constructed the belief in totems. A totem in religion is ' a symbol, a material expression of something else' (236). it symbolizes god, but also the society which worships it (the clan). In fact, the god of the clan is nothing else than the clan itself, personified under the visible form of the totem (typically animal or vegetable) (236). The totem's efficacy comes from its psychical power over its worshippers as well as its moral authority over the society (238).

Because people do not perceive what the cause of the force of the collective conscious is, they believe it comes from a force outside themselves. This is the moral conscience and men have always represented it with religious symbols (242).

Consequently humans get the impression that there are two sorts of reality: on the one hand there are profane things, and on the other, there are sacred things. Society constantly creates sacred things out of ordinary ones (243). humans add sacred qualities to objects (261). Society consecrates men and ideas.

The individual cannot penetrate the sacred without 'entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy' (250). Hence, in the midst of this effervescence, DH contends, the religious idea seems to be born (250). By concentrating itself almost entirely on in specific moments, collective life has been able to attain its greatest intensity and efficacy, as well as give men a more active sentiment of the double existence they lead (251).

DH explains how collective forces come to be thought of under the forms of totems, especially in the shape of an anima or plant. he first contends that the transfer of sentiments to a thing comes from the fact that the idea of a thing and the idea of its symbol are closely related in our minds. The result is that emotions provoked by the one extend to the other. Since widespread emotions are common to a group, they must be associated to something that is common to all (primitive clans: plants and animals). This is the totemic emblem(252).

The totemic emblem is like the visible body of god; it represents the collective force of the clan -- its religious force (253). Religious forces are moral powers because they translate to the way in which the collective conscious acts on individual consciousnesses (254). Totems have a dual purpose: they animate and discipline minds, but they also [are believed to] make plants grow and animals reproduce.

Religion is a system of ideas with which individuals represent to themselves their own society, and the obscure but intimate relations which they have with it (257). Religion strengthens the bonds attaching the individual to the society of which he is a member (258).

The clan chooses to rally around an emblem because not only does it clarify the sentiment society has of itself, but it also serves to create this sentiment (262). If social sentiments are connected with something that endures (emblem), the sentiments themselves become more durable. Emblems constantly bring collective sentiments to the fore (263).

Social life is only made possible by a vast system of symbols. Yet the clan is not the only society which uses totemic practices. generally speaking, a collective sentiment can become 'conscious of itself' only by being fixed on some material object. Social necessity brings about this fusion of things and social life facilitates their union.

Durkheim also reiterates that because religion fostered the idea that there are internal connections between things, it opened up the way for science and philosophy. This is of course, because religion is a social affair which stems from collective thought.

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Book 3 Chp1 'The Negative Cult and its Functions: the Ascetic rites.'

In this chapter DH will illustrate the characteristic attitudes which the primitive observes in the celebration of his cult, and will classify the most general forms of his rites as well as explain their origins. DH asserts that every cult has a double aspect --negative and positive. Two sorts of rites are closely associated to this double aspect (337).

The purpose of the negative cult (or rites) is to separate sacred and profane beings. These rites forbid certain ways of acting in the form of interdictions. Religious interdiction implies the notion of sacredness (338-9).

Some examples of religious interdictions are: Australian tribe members (profane) are forbidden to carry the bones of a dead men (sacred) unless they are wrapped in bark. A moral general example is: people (profane) cannot consume certain forbidden animal meats (sacred). (341-2). moreover, if certain foods are forbidden to the profane because they are sacred, other foods are forbidden to sacred person because they are profane. In either case, contact between the two is forbidden.

Nothing which either directly or indirectly concerns the profane life should be confused with the religious lie (344). In general all acts characteristic of the ordinary life are forbidden while religious events are taking place (345-6). These rules are strongest for the public cult, or public practice of religion, as opposed to an individual's private practice of religion (which DH contends is still influenced by social religion) (347).

Up to this point, the negative cult appears only to be a system of abstentions. Nonetheless, it is found to exercise a positive action on the religious and moral nature of the individual. The individual cannot lead any religious life unless he begins to withdraw somewhat from temporal life. In this manner then, the negative cult is a condition of access to the positive cult (348). For instance, the result of the numerous interdictions of the negative cult in primitive religions is to bring about a radical change in the initiate to the given religion. after he takes part in the rather primitive negative rites, he acquires a sacred character and is considered reborn by the rest of the group (350). y The understanding of the positive effects of negative rites allows us to better understand the purposes of asceticism. Both ancient and modern religions attribute a sanctifying and strengthening power to suffering (354-5). DH explains the reason for this :'suffering is the sign that...certain of the bonds attaching [the individual] to his profane environment are broken; so it testifies that he is partially freed from his environment' (355). In order to serve his gods (the positive cult), the individual must sacrifice his profane interests (356).

But asceticism and the negative cult do not serve only religious purposes. Religious interests are only the symbolic form of social and moral concerns. Not only do the gods demand suffering and abnegation from their followers, but so does society. To fulfill his duties to society, the individual will always have to suppress his instincts, whatever the dogmas or mythologies of the time (356).

The main reason for the necessity of the separating powers of the negative cult is the 'contagiousness' of the sacred world. Certain rites, objects, or people are sacred, yet they cannot help but to come into contact with the profane, by virtue of the multitude of other things they are associated with. The sanctity of sacred things is contagiously transmitted to everything which evokes the idea of them (359). Hence, even the least proximity (material or moral) can draw religious forces out of their domain. Precautions in the form of the negative cult are essential to keep things in their separate domains (358-360). From this, DH concludes that 'every profanation implies a consecration'(560).

The extreme facility with which religious forces diffuse is not surprising. Religious forces are collective moral forces which are made up of ideas that stem from society sui generis (362). The sacred contagion' is not a process where religious forces leave the objects in which they are embodied. The religious value of objects was conferred to them by society. Thus, the same religious principle can animate very different objects and this explains how plants, animals, people, and even rocks are made into totems (i.e. Jesus - lamb - fig leaves- -crosses).

To close this chapter, DH draws a relationship between religion and the sciences (for the ten millionth time). Scared contagion, by showing the connectedness of things, opened the way for future scientific thought which utilizes the important concept of relationships between things that do not appear to be connected (365).

Note: negative rites: separate the sacred from the profane via prohibitions positive rites: stess the individual's commitment and membership in the social community piacular (expiatory) rites: confirm the loss of group members by specifying ways of cpoing. 'funeral are for the living.'

EMILE DURKHEIM'Anomic Suicide'TS 916-29

DH prefaces this chapter with the statement that society not only attracts the sentiments and activities of individual with unequal force, but it is a power controlling them (241).
He then asserts that it is a well-known fact that economic crises have an aggravating effect on suicidal tendency (241). in both Vienna and France of the late 19th century, suicides increased with the number of bankruptcies 242.
The increase in poverty, however, is not the cause for the increase in suicides. In fact, even fortunate crises which enhance a country's prosperity affect suicide like economic disasters (243). If financial crises increase suicides it is not because they increase poverty, it is because they are disturbances of the collective order. During a disturbance of the social equilibrium, men become more disposed to self destruction (246).
No person can be happy unless his needs are insufficient proportion to his means (246). Moreover, satisfactions received only stimulate needs further; thus the more one has, the more one wants (248). Any obstruction to man's actions to satisfy his needs can be quite painful
Human passions must be limited by an exterior, regulating force. This must be a moral force which regulates moral needs (248). Society must play this moderating role; it is the only moral power superior to the individual (249). If the individual respects regulations, is docile to collective authority, and has a 'wholesome moral constitution,' he will know better than to ask for more. Hence, this puts an end to his desires. Yet it is not enough that the average level of needs for an individual be fixed by public opinion. Society must also fix the way opportunities are open to individuals (250). It must require sacrifices and concessions of its members in the name of public interest (251).
Typically, the people subject to social regulation are in agreement with it (251). However, a state of upheaval can occur when society is going through some sort of abnormal crisis. When society is so disturbed, it is incapable of exercising a regulatory influence. From this comes the rise in suicide rates (252).
During this time of upset, individuals must struggle to readjust to new social classifications. Society cannot adjust them instantaneously to their new lives (252). individuals no longer know limits to their own desires, thus worsening the state of deregulation or anomy (253). Poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraint in itself. On the other hand, the less limited one feels, the more intolerable all limitation appears (254).
Anomy is actually a chronic state in the sphere of trade and industry. The progress of capitalism has freed industrial relations from all regulation (254). religion has lost its power of preaching asceticism, and the government has become a tool and a servant to economic life. the liberation of human desires has only been made worse by the development of industry (255).
Anomy, therefore, is a regular factor in suicide in modern societies. Egoistic suicide results from man's no longer finding a basis for his own existence and altruistic suicide occurs because man believes his basis for existence is situated beyond life. Yet, anomic suicide results from man's activities lacking regulation and his consequent sufferings (258).
Economic anomy is not the only anomy which may give rise to suicide. domestic anomy can also cause suicide. In countries where divorce is prohibited, wives are more likely to commit suicide than husbands. However, wives are less likely to commit suicide in countries where divorce is allowed. On the contrary, in countries where divorce is allowed, the husband is more likely to commit suicide (266).
DH explains the above phenomena by explaining his idea of the purpose of marriage. According to him, it is the regulation of sexual relations. It forces a man to attach himself to the same woman forever and this forms the state of moral equilibrium from which the husband benefits (270).
On the other hand, the unmarried man faces a different situation. His desire for women can go unchecked. The uncertainty of his indeterminateness condemns him to constant change and anomy (271).
Women's sexual needs are less developed because their mental lives are less developed. hence, they do not require strict social regulation as men do. Thus, marriage is not as useful to them for limiting suicides. Marriage only makes it more difficult for women to change their living situations if they become intolerable. Consequently, anything that makes marriage more flexible can only improve women's situation. Divorce protects them from suicide (272).

EMILE DURKHEIM'Types of Suicide'TS 213-18

At the onset of this article, DH sets up three propositions: 1: Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of religious society
2: ' ' ' ' ' domestic society
3: ' ' ' ' ' political society

Thus, suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups, of which the individual forms a part (213).
Egoistic suicide springs from excessive individualism, wherein the individual ego asserts itself to excess in the face of the social ego (214). Egoism is the generating cause of egoistic suicide. In addition, the bond attaching man to life relaxes because the one attaching him to society is weak. The individual yields to the slightest shock of circumstance because the state of society has made him a ready prey to suicide (216).
Just as excessive individuation can lead to suicide, so can insufficient individuation. In altruistic suicide, society binds the individual too tightly. In this case, the ego is not its own property; it is completely blended into a group spirit. Since this type of suicide is characteristically performed as a duty to a group, DH calls it 'obligatory altruistic suicide.' However, DH does acknowledge that not all altruistic suicide is obligatory (217). Other forms are 'optional altruistic suicide,' and 'acute altruistic suicide' (this second one can be likened to mystical suicide from religious fervor ). Altruistic suicide was typically found in lower, ancient societies which were based on mechanical solidarity. today, the most common type of altruistic suicide is death in war (217).
DH concludes by contending that there is really not such a big difference between altruistic and egoistic suicide. he recognizes that many people find something moral in altruistic suicide, but he asks, 'isn't the notion of individual autonomy in egoistic suicide also moral?' furthermore, when a man commits altruistic suicide, he still values the individual personality, even in others. thus, every sort of suicide is merely the 'exaggerated of deflected form of a virtue.' The way those types affect moral conscience then, does not differentiate them into separate types (218).

EMILE DURKHEIM --- Rules of the Sociological Method pp50-146

In chapter 3, DH presents the rules sociologists should use to distinguish normal social phenomena from pathological social phenomena. Average types depict normal phenomena and all others are morbid (pathological) phenomena, which have dire consequences for society. Pathological types can only be defined in relation to a given species. What is pathological for one group may not be for another (56).

Three rules for establishing the normality of phenomena:

1: a social fact is normal, in relation to a given social type at a given phase of its development, when it is present in the average society of that species at the corresponding phase of its evolution.

2: one can verify the results of the preceding method by showing that the generality of the phenomenon is bound up with the general conditions of the collective life of the social type considered.

3: this verification is necessary when the fact in question occurs in a social species which has not yet reached the full course of its evolution. (64).

DH contends that many essential social phenomena come to light when the proper methodology is used. for instance, although many criminologists assume crime is pathological, they are incorrect (65). First of all, crime is normal because no society is exempt from it (67). If the collective conscience of a society is strong, it will designate certain acts as criminal. What confers the criminal character of an act is not its intrinsic quality, but the definition which the collective conscience assigns to it. Crime is necessary because it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of social life and it is useful because these conditions are indispensable to the evolution of morality and of law (70).
Through crime, individual originality is able to express itself. it directly prepares changes in society because where crime exists, collective sentiments are sufficiently flexible to take on a new form. Crime sometimes helps determine the form they will take (71).
Hence, the criminal plays a definite role in social life. In fact, if a crime in a society drops below an average rate, this could be indicative of a severs social disorder. with a drop in the crime rate, a revision in the theory of punishment becomes necessary (72).
DH closes this chapter by stating that the principal object of all sciences is to define and explain the normal state and distinguish it from its opposite (74). The generality of phenomena must be taken as a criterion of their normality (75).

In chapter 4, 'The Classification of Social Types,' Durkheim asserts that it is not possible to institute the laws of science only after reviewing all the facts they express. Too many varied facts exist (79). It is better to substitute a limited number of types for the indefinite multiplicity of individuals. This will not only order pre-existing knowledge, but will create new knowledge (80). Because the nature of the group depends on the nature and number of component elements and their mode of combination, we must use these general characteristics as their basis. the general facts of social life follow from this basis. We can call the classification of social types 'social morphology.'

DH proposes to classify social groups according to the degree of complexity in organization which they represent. The simplest group is the 'horde,' and then the 'clan' which is a compound of hordes, and then the 'city -state' which is an aggregate of clans, etc (83-84). Within these types, one can distinguish between groups by the level of integration of their sub-groups (85). However, the more complex a social group is, the less definite its contours. Nonetheless, DH chooses to call each social group a 'species,' even if it is formed only once (86-7).

In chapter 5, DH establishes guidelines for the explanation of social facts. He argues that to show the usefulness of a fact, it is not enough to explain how it originated or why it is what it is. Instead, 'when the explanation of a social phenomenon is undertaken, we must seek separately the efficient cause which produces it and the function it fulfills' (95). the question is not whether the cause has a distinct purpose, but whether or not a correspondence between the function and the result exists which is useful to the organism (95).
DH asserts that theories of psychology are insufficient as premises for social reasoning, but they can test the validity of propositions established inductively. The ultimate explanation of collective life consists in showing how it emanates from human nature in general (98).
Social phenomena do not derive from individual consciousnesses and hence, sociology is not a corollary of individual psychology. Social life is not merely an extension of the individual being. the external impulse to which he submits cannot come from within him (101). Thus, we must seek to explain social life in the nature of society itself. a whole is not identical to the sum of its parts; hence, society is not just a mere sum of individuals. It is the system formed by individuals' association (103). The group acts differently than its members would if they were isolated (104).
The concept of the social milieu as the determining factor of collective evolution is of utmost importance to DH. The pressure it exerts on groups within the milieu modifies their organization (116), If we reject the social milieu, sociology cannot establish any relations of causality (117). The causes of social phenomena are internal and do not spring from the individual (121).
Many attempts to explain social facts have lost all ideas of social discipline. On the contrary, DH's principle creates a sociology which sees the spirit of discipline as the essential condition of all common life (124)

In chapter 6, DH sets forth rules for the establishing of sociological proofs. Since social phenomena are not within the control of the sociological experimenter, he must employ the comparative method by conforming to the principal of causality. the basis of sociological comparisons must be the following proposition:

A given fact always has a single corresponding cause (128).

If suicide appears to depend on more than one cause, it is because in reality there are several kinds of suicides (129).
However, social phenomena are much too complex for the effect of all the causes to be removed except for one in a given case. DH suggests using the method of concomitant correlations or variation. With this method, it is not necessary that the variables outside those which are being compared be excluded (130). Concomitant variation shows how two facts can mutually influence each other in a continuous manner (130). Sometimes this method introduces a common cause to two or more social phenomena (132).
Because societies are formed by many elements from preceding historical eras, one cannot explain a social fact of any complexity except by following its complete development through all social species (139). Furthermore, to arrive at a fair comparison across societies, one must compare the societies at the same period in their development (140).

In his conclusion, DH first contends that his method is entirely independent of philosophy; it abandons generalizations and enters the world of facts (142). Second, his method is 'objective;' it is dominated by the idea that social facts are things and must be treated as such. If sociological phenomena are only systems of objectivized ideas, to explain them is to rethink them in their logical order. Only methodical experiments can extract the 'truth' from things. Third, DH's method is exclusively sociological (144). A social fact can be explained only by another social fact, and this explanation is possible by pointing out the principal factor in collective evolution -- the social milieu.
The above three characteristics make sociology a distinct and autonomous science (145).

EMILE DURKHEIM'On the Normality of Crime,' pp. 872-75 in Theories of Society, edited by Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Kaspar D. Naegele, and Jesse R. Pitts. New York: Free Press.

Crime is normal, an inevitable and necessary part of every society. (It may take abnormal forms, such as when the crime rate is unusually high.) 'A society exempt from it would be utterly impossible' (872). Since people differ from 'the collective type,' there are some divergences which tend toward the criminal. However, whatconfers a 'criminal character' on divergences from the collective type is not 'the intrinsic quality of a given actbut that definition which the collective consciousness lends them' (873).

Crime has an 'indirect utility' (874): In order for transformations in law and morality to be possible, 'thecollective sentiments at the basis of morality must not be hostile to change, and consequently must have butmoderate energy.... Every pattern is an obstacle to new patterns, to the extent that the first pattern is inflexible'(873-4). This 'moderate energy,' which permits change, also permits crime. If there were no crime, it wouldbe evidence that change was not possible: 'To make progress, individual originality must be able to expressitself' (874).

However, crime also has a direct utility. Crime 'in certain cases directly prepares these changes [progress]. Where crime exists, collective sentiments are sufficiently flexible to take on a new form, and crime sometimeshelps to determine the form they will take' (874), Example, Socrates; freedom of thought was once a crime. Socrates' crime prepared the way for a 'new morality and faith which the Athenians needed, since the traditionsby which they had lived until then were no longer in harmony with the current conditions of life' (874). Thus,'[c]ontrary to current ideas, the criminal no longer seems a totally unsociable being.... On the contrary, heplays a definite role in social life' (874).

Then Durkheim goes on a little jag about pathology and how the normality of phenomena should be defined,which I am not going to give much more shrift than this, though you may want to read it in detail: 'If,however, the most widely diffused facts can be pathological [for instance, crime], it is possible that the normaltypes never existed in actuality; and if that is the case, why study the facts?... The principle object of allsciences of life, whether individual or social, is to define and explain the normal state and to distinguish it fromits opposite.... In order that sociology may be a true science of things, the generality of phenomena must betaken as the criterion of their normality' (875). This is actually an important issue, and sheds light on whyEmile sets up his concepts the way he does.

Karl Marx

2008-12-14T22:30:00.000-08:00

(1818-1893)

(all page numbers refer to Tucker, unless otherwise indicated)

Marx on the History of His Opinions (pp. 3-5)

This is the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), where Marx establishes his materialist conception of history.

The economic structure of society is the sum of people's relations to production, which correspond to a definite stage of their material productive forces. This economic structure is the foundation for legal and political superstructures as well as social consciousness. When the material forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, a social revolution, which would transform the economic conditions of production and the ideological forms of consciousness, is possible.

A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (pp. 16-25)

Background information on Hegel and Feuerbach (Averneri, pp. 8-27) Marx became interested in Hegel's philosophy because of his dissatisfaction with Kant's "antagonism between the 'is' and the 'ought.'" Hegel's philosophy offered a way to eliminate this dichotomy by "realizing idealism in reality." Marx later realizes that this dichotomy remains in Hegel's philosophy, hidden in the inner contradictions of his theory of social and political institutions.

Feuerbach provided Marx with a methodological device to critique Hegel - the transformative method. Hegel argued that thought was the subject and existence was the predicate. Feuerbach, however, wanted to ground the subject in space and time and thereby develop a materialistic philosophy. His transformative method takes the human and the subject and thought as the predicate.

The Critique
Marx critiques Hegel's political philosophy in order to get at the roots of the Hegelian system. His discussion of sovereignty (pp. 18-19) is an example of his application of the transformative method to critique Hegel. Hegel saw the state as an entity abstracted from the social and historical forces which created it. He ignored the social context of human relations and rationalized existing social organizations. This is apparent in Marx's discussion of ancient, medieval, and modern politics (pp. 21-23). Lastly, Marx criticizes Hegel's notion that the bureaucracy is the "universal class." Marx argues that the 'apparent idealism of the bureaucracy's dedication to the general well-being of society is nothing but a mask for it's own coarse, materialistic ends" (Averneri, p. 23). "Democracy is the true unity of the general and the particular" (p. 21). It is the state of society in which the individual is no longer juxtaposed against society.

On the Jewish Question (pp. 26-46)

Written in 1843, Marx reviews two studies on the Jewish question written by Bruno Bauer, another Young Hegelian.

The question is how to emancipate the Jews. The answer is that we have to emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others. Political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation. Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual human has absorbed into her/himself the abstract citizen; when s/he has become a species-being and has recognized her/his own powers as social powers so that s/he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power. The perfected political state is the species-life of a person, as opposed to her/his material life.

A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction (pp. 53-65)

Written in 1843, Marx argues for a "radical revolution" to achieve self-realization. This is the first time he writes of the proletariat as the vehicle for revolution.

Marx begins this essay with a criticism of religion, which he claims is the premise of all criticism. Feuerbach used religion as the basis of his transformative method. Marx follow his lead by saying that "man makes religion; religion does not make man" (p. 53). Also, religion creates the illusion that people are happy, but people must abandon this ideal and demand real happiness, which can only be found in the material world.

Marx then criticizes the state of affairs in Germany and the problem of the rule of private property over nationality. Germany has long been the "theoretical consciousness" of other nations but not it needs a revolution which will "raise it not only to the official level of modern nations, but to the human level" (p. 60). Marx calls for a partial revolution in which "a section of civil society emancipates itself and attains universal domination" (p. 62). The proletariat is the ideal class to lead the revolution because it is "a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society" and because it's sufferings are universal The proletariat will find its intellectual weapons in philosophy. "Philosophy is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is the heart" (p. 65).

Theses on Feuerbach (pp. 143-145)

Here Marx is criticizing the 18th century materialist view that consciousness is nothing but a reflection of the material, environmental condition of human existence. This view portrays people as passive and inhibits possibilities of change (Averneri, pp. 66-67).

Marx also emphasizes the importance of practice over theory. Social change is revolutionary practice. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point it to change it" (p. 145).

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (pp. 66-105)

Estranged Labor
"With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity. ... (T)he object which labor produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer" (p. 71).

Four characteristics of the alienation of labor: (See also Giddens, pp. 12-16; Swingewood, pp. 65-67)
1.) The relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object exercising power over him/her. The worker does not control the fate of his/her products and therefore does not benefit from them.

2.) The relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process. Since labor is forced it offers no intrinsic satisfactions. It becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

3.) Estranged labor turns man's species being into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. The alienation of men from their species being is a social separation from socially generated characteristics and propensities (Giddens, p. 16).

4.) Man is estranged from man. All economic relations are social relations; human relations, in capitalism, tend to become reduced to operations of the market (Giddens, p. 14).

Note of clarification: The difference between objectification and alienation (Swingewood, p. 65) Hegel does not distinguish between the two ideas. For Marx, objectification is a process through which humanity externalizes itself in nature and society and thus necessarily entering into social relations. Alienation occurs only when humanity, having externalized itself, encounters its own activity, its essence, operating as an external, alien, and oppressive power.

Private Property
Private property is the product of alienated labor and the means by which labor alienates itself (p. 79). "Communism is the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore is the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man. It is a complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being" (p. 84). The transcendence of private property is the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes.

The Meaning of Human Requirements (pp. 93-101)
The need for money is the true need produced by the modern economic system. The power of money decreases exactly in inverse proportion to the increase in the volume of production.

The Power of Money (pp. 101-105)
"Money is the pimp between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me" (p. 102). Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

Society and Economy in History (pp. 136-142)

Marx wrote this letter in 1846 as a critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty. He later expanded it into a book called The Poverty of Philosophy. He attacks Proudhon's individualistic economic model and develops his argument for a historical materialist approach to understanding society and economy.

According to Marx, society is the product of humans' reciprocal action. All human relations are based on material relations. The economic forms in which men produce, consume and exchange are transitory and historical. Because Proudhon does not take a historical approach, he fails to recognize the importance of such "economic evolutions" as the division of labor and machinery.

Proudhon is also a classical materialist and Marx criticizes this approach for overlooking the fact that human nature itself is the ever-changing product of human activity, i.e., of history (Averneri, p. 71). This relates to Marx's critique of Feuerbach's mechanistic materialistic position in the Theses of Feuerbach.

The German Ideology (146-200)

Written by Marx and Engels in 1845-46, this is essentially an elaboration of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, with particular emphasis on the "materialist conception of history."

Marx complains that Old Hegelians comprehended everything by reeducating it to a Hegelian logical category, and the Young Hegelians criticized everything by attributing it to religious conceptions; but no one had yet tried to connect German philosophy with German reality (pp. 148-149).

Stages of development of the division of labor:
1.) tribal: elementary division of labor; extension of natural d of l existing in family
2.) ancient communal: urban system of masters and slaves; communal private property
3.) feudal state: rural system of lords and serfs; little d of l; feudal organization of trades into guilds Marx emphasizes the need to look at different societies and see how the social and political structure of each is connected to production

The production of the means to satisfy biological needs is the production of material life itself. The satisfaction of the first need leads to new needs. The production of new needs is the first historical act. Marx stresses that needs are historical and not natural (p. 156; Averneri, p. 73).

The d of l implies a contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community. In communist society, no one has one exclusive sphere of activity and society regulates the general production (p. 160).

Communism is a "world-historical" movement comprised of individuals directly linked up with world history (p. 162).

Civil society is the form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces that transcends the state and the nation (p. 163).

Concerning the Production of Consciousness:
The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas (p. 172).

The Real Basis of Ideology:
The greatest division of material and mental labor is the separation of town and country. This is the separation of capital and landed property and the beginning of property having its basis only in labor and exchange (p. 176).

Big industry universalized competition and thus produced "world history" for the first time (i.e., people were not dependent on the whole world to satisfy their wants).

Relation of State and Law to Property:
Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, outside civil society. The State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests.

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse (p. 193). Only in the community is personal freedom possible (p. 197).

Wage Labor and Capital (pp. 203-217)

Published in 1849, Marx sets out the economic content of his argument for the first time.

Wages are the sum of money paid by the capitalist for a particular labor time or for a particular output (p. 204).

Labor power is a commodity which the worker sells to capital. The worker sells his life activity in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. The worker belongs not the individual capitalist, but to the capitalist class (pp. 204-205).

The cost of the production of labor power is the cost required for maintaining the worker as a worker; the price of labor is the price of the necessary means of subsistence (p. 206).

Wage minimum is the cost of production of simple labor power, i.e., the cost of existence and reproduction of the worker.

Commodities are products which are exchangeable for others. Exchange value is the ratio in which commodities are exchangeable (if this ratio is expressed in money, then exchange value is simply the price of a commodity) (p. 208).

The more productive capital grows, the more the d of l and application of machinery expand, the greater the competition among workers, and the more wages contract (p. 216). Nevertheless, the rapid growth of capital is the most favorable condition for wage labor because it may improve the material existence of the worker (pp. 211, 217).

The Grundrisse (pp. 224-226, 236-244)

Written in 1857-58, Marx states his view on the method of political economy and develops his thesis on production as the basic category.

Production:
There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones; but the so-called general preconditions of all production (e.g., property and the protection of acquisitions) are nothing more than these abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped (p. 226).

Exchange:
1.) there is no exchange without the d of l
2.) private exchange presupposes private production
3.) the intensity, extension, and manner of exchange are determined by the development and structure of production

Method of Political Economy:
Labor has become the means of creating wealth in general and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form (pp. 240-241).

Bourgeois society is the most developed and most complex historical organization of production. Studying bourgeois society is the key to understanding the structure and relations of production of former types of society (e.g., feudal, ancient, etc.); but this is possible only through the self-criticism of bourgeois society (pp. 241-242).

Capital, VolumeI (pp. 294-438)

Written in 1867, Marx aims to explore the capitalist mode of production and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode.

Part I: Commodities and Money (pp. )
Capitalism is a system of commodity production. A commodity is a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort. There are two characteristics to every commodity:
1.) use value is the utility of a thing independent of the amount of labor time used to produce it. Use-value is realized only through use or consumption. It is the substance of all wealth.
2.) Exchange value is the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort. It is a quantitative relation.

Values is the labor power expended in production. It is measure by the quantity of value-creating substance, i.e., labor. It varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness of the labor incorporated in it.

The labor time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.

The two-fold character of labor = useful labor + simple labor power
Useful labor is that which makes a product a use-value.
Simple labor power is that which, on the average, apart from any special development, exists in the organism of every ordinary individual.

Money-form is the value-form of commodities common to them all.

Relative value is the value expressed in relation to something else; it presupposes the presence of another commodity. Equivalent value is the second commodity whose value is not expressed but it provides the material in which another value is expressed.

Fetishism occurs when the social character of human labor appears to people as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor. A definite social relation between people assumes the form of a relation between things. An expression of human creativity appears to be a natural object (Averneri, pp. 117-119). This fetishism is due in part to money, which conceals the social character of private labor.

Part II: The Transformation of Money into Capital
The circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital.

M - C - M = capital
M' = M + M (M = surplus value)M - C - M' = general formula of capitalLabor power is the capacity for labor. It is the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in people which they exercise whenever they produce a use-value.The value of labor power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the laborer.

Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus Value
The elementary factors of labor-process:
1.) work itself
2.) subject of work
3.) its instruments

Surplus value is whatever the worker produces over and above the proportion of the working day needed to produce the worker's own value.

Absolute surplus value is produced by the prolongation of the working day. Relative surplus value is produced by the curtailment of the necessary labor time plus an alteration in the respective length of the two components of the working day, that in which the laborer works for him/herself and that in which s/he works for the capitalist.

Part IV: Production of Relative Surplus Value(pp. 376-417)

Machinery produces relative surplus-value by depreciating the value of labor power, cheapening the commodity, and raising the social value of the article produced above its individual value. This only lasts until machinery becomes more general in a particular field. Then, the use of machinery converts variable capital (invested in labor-power) into constant capital (machinery), which does not produce surplus value (p. 405). Machinery does not free the laborer from work, but makes that work uninteresting.

Part V: Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus Value (pp. 417-431)

The composition of capital:

capital

value material

variable constant means living
of labor
production power

The growth of capital involves the growth of the variable constituent (i.e., the proletariat). This is the basis of the "reserve army" (p. 423).

The absolute law of capitalist accumulation = the greater the social wealth, the larger the reserve army, the greater the pauperization.

Part VIII: So-Called Primitive Accumulation (pp. 431-438)

Accumulation is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its starting point.

The starting point of the development that gave rise to the wage-laborer as well as to the capitalist was the servitude of the laborer.

The Communist Manifesto (pp. 469-500)

Marx and Engels were commissioned in 1847 to write a manifesto for the Communist League. With highly charged rhetoric, they restate many of the basic premises of Marx' earlier works. They argue that:

1.) Economic production and the structure of every historical epoch constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch.

2.) All history has been a history of class struggles.

3.) This struggle has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppress it (the bourgeoisie) without freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, and class struggles.

It is important to note that in his polemical writings, Marx frequently oversimplified his view of class struggle into the opposition between 2 classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. However, he believes in a more complex class structure including "transition classes," as is evident in The Eighteenth Brumaire (Swingewood, pp. 84-86).

The immediate aim of Communists is the formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, and the conquest of political power by the proletariat. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property in general, but the abolition of bourgeois property because it exemplifies the exploitation of the many by the few.

The first step of revolution is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class. Then it is necessary to wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win. Workers of the world unite!!!!!

Class Struggle in France 1848-50 (pp. 586-593)

Marx sets out to explain why the workers' insurrection in France in 1848 failed. In February 1848, King Louis Philippe was forced to abdicate because of protests of Parisian workers. In June there was another workers' insurrection, which was crushed by the military. In December, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president and in 1851 he made himself emperor by coup d'etat.

Marx says that the revolution was based on social relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonisms. The Provisional Government which had emerged in February was largely bourgeoisie. They had used the workers only as fighters for bourgeois causes. Though the proletariat did not win the revolution, they won the terrain for the fight for their revolutionary emancipation.

Any merely political insurrection of the proletariat trying to create politically conditions not yet immanently developed in the socio-economic sphere is doomed to fail (Averneri, p. 194). A real revolution is only possible when modern productive forces and bourgeois productive forms come in collision with one another.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (pp. 594-617)

Marx wants to "demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part" (p. 594). He is treating an actual historical event from the viewpoint of the materialist conception of history.

Marx divides the French Revolution into 3 main periods:
1.) The February period: while the proletariat reveled in the vision of the wide prospects that had opened before it, the old powers of society had assembled themselves and taken over.

2.) The period of the Constitution (May 4, 1848 - May 1849): This was the foundation of the bourgeois republic. The proletariat tried to revolt with the June insurrection, but everyone else had united against this "party of anarchy," these "enemies of society."

3.) The period of the Constitutional Republic (May 29, 1849 - December 2, 1851): Under Bonaparte, the favored section of the bourgeoisie concealed its rule under cover of the crown. Bonaparte represented the small peasants. The great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack from a sackful of potatoes. They do not form a class because there is no national union or political organization.

Bonaparte sees himself as the adversary of the political and literary power of the middle class, but by protecting its material power, he allows it to regain political power. Bonaparte wants to make the lower classes happy within the framework of a bourgeois society. He would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes, but he can't give to one class without taking from another.

Class Struggle and Mode of Production (p. 220)

In a letter to his friend Joseph Weydemeyer, Marx writes about what he considered most innovative in his analysis of the human historical process. He acknowledges that others before him had discovered the existence of classes and the struggle between them. What Marx did was to prove: 1.) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, 2.) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and 3.) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

Classes (pp. 441-442)

The three big classes of modern society are the wage-laborers, capitalists, and landowners. The law of development of the capitalist mode of production is to divorce the means of production from labor and to concentrate the scattered means of production into large groups, thereby transforming labor into wage-labor and the means of production into capital. Marx is concerned with defining what a class is. He starts with the hypothesis that a class can be defined by its sources of revenues. For example, wage-laborers live on wages, capitalists on profits, and landownders on ground-rent. However, he begins to argue that this is not a sufficient definition because it would lead to the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank. This manuscript is incomplete and Dahrendorf picks up on this subject and tries to complete Marx's definition of a class

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOCIOLOGY MAJORS

2008-08-31T21:15:00.000-07:00

If there is one question that career counselors and faculty advisors are asked more often than all others by students seeking assistance with career planning, it is this: "What can I do with this major?" An undergraduate student in the liberal arts and sciences is actually developing a broad array of skills that might be applied to any number of careers, rather than developing an in-depth expertise in just one area. Therefore, a better question to pose might be: "What skills am I developing in my major, and how might I explore careers that would require these skills?" The study of sociology provides an understanding of the social character of human life and the ways in which social organizations influence human affairs. Sociology's subject matter ranges from how family members interact with each other to the analysis of social revolutions; from problems of racial conflict to the study of the aging process. Because sociologists study the behavior of both people and groups, the field is an excellent concentration for undergraduates who hope to pursue careers in law, business, health professions or social science. Students with a bachelor's degree can often secure employment as research assistants, data analysts or as case workers. Advanced degrees are generally required for consulting work, administrative positions, college teaching, or certain research jobs.

SKILLS/ABILITIES
Communication Skills:
Observing people, data, and things
Informing and explaining information
Interviewing skills
Strong verbal and writing skills
Organizing/Managing Abilities:
Planning and designing projects
Organizing ideas, materials, and objects
Decision-making
Developing and adapting ideas
Human Relations Skills:
Sensitivity to people and problems
Knowledge of human relationships & social processes
Ability to represent others
Assessing people's needs
Research Abilities:
Gathering and analyzing information
Strong problem solving skills
Comparing and clarifying skills
Reviewing and evaluating projects and ideas
Knowledge of survey research methods
Computer and statistical skills
Sampling for surveys and marketing
Manipulating numerical data
Solving quantitative problems
Working self-directedly
Tabulating data
Setting and meeting deadlines

OCCUPATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOCIOLOGY MAJORS:

˜Admissions Counselor
˜Adoption Agent
˜Advertising Manager
˜Alcohol & Drug Case Worker
˜Banking/Branch Management
˜Budget Analyst
˜Career Services Counselor
˜Case Aid Worker
˜Child Welfare Officer
˜City Planner
˜Civil Engineer
˜Clergy
˜Community Relations Director
˜Compensation/Benefits Worker
˜Congressional Aid
˜Consultant
˜Consumer Advocate
˜Consumer Survey Advisor
˜Convention Organizer
˜Cooperative Extension Agent
˜Correctional Case Worker
˜Corrections Officer
˜Cottage Parent
˜Criminologist
˜Customer Relations
˜Data Analyst
˜Data Processing
˜Day Care Worker
˜Delinquency Counselor
˜Demographic Analyst
˜Dietitian
˜Editor
˜Family Guidance Clinic Worker
˜Family Preservation Case Worker
˜Family Services Specialist
˜Financial Aid Director
˜Foster Care Worker
˜Fund-raiser/Development Officer
˜Gerontologist
˜Government Worker
˜Group Therapist
˜Health Care Worker
˜Hospital Administrator
˜Human Resources Administrator
˜Human Services Worker
˜Independent Living Trainer
˜Industrial Sociologist
˜Insurance Agent/Broker
˜Job Analyst
˜Labor Force & Manpower
˜Labor Relations Representative
˜Life Quality Research
˜Manufacturing Representative
˜Market Researcher
˜Marketing Research Analyst

˜Marriage and Family Therapist
˜Mass Communications Analyst
˜Medical Social Worker
˜Mental Health Agent
˜Motivational Speaker
˜News Correspondent
˜Nutritionist
˜Parole Officer
˜Peace Corps/VISTA Worker
˜Penologist
˜Personnel Interviewer
˜Personnel Specialist
˜Personnel-Training & Development
˜Policy Analyst
˜Political Systems Researcher
˜Population Specialist
˜Probation Officer
˜Professor
˜Program Director
˜Public Administrator
˜Public Health Educator
˜Public Health Statistician
˜Public Opinion Surveyor
˜Public Relations Specialist
˜Public Service Worker
˜Recreation Director
˜Recreation Therapist
˜Rehabilitation Counselor
˜Reporter
˜Research Analyst
˜Research Assistant
˜Research Director
˜Sales Campaign Planning
˜Sales Representative
˜School Counselor
˜Secret Service Agent
˜Social Movements Organizer
˜Social Science Analyst
˜Social Scientist
˜Social Survey Director
˜Social Welfare Examiner
˜Social Worker
˜Statistical Analyst
˜Statistician
˜Survey Research Technician
˜Survey Specialist
˜Systems and Programming
˜Specialist
˜Teacher
˜Technical Writer
˜Therapy Aid
˜Urban Planner
˜Veterans Affairs Specialist
˜Welfare Counselor
˜Writer/Author

Suggestions to Enhance Your Skills
˜ Concentrate course work in areas of interest.
˜ Learn skills in communication, such as public speaking, one-on-one communication, analytical writing, etc.
˜ Gain experience via part-time or summer jobs, internships or practicum placements, and volunteer work.
˜ Emphasize research methods, statistics, and computer skills.
˜ Develop good research skills. Volunteer to work on a research project with a professor
˜ Pursue an excellent academic record.
˜ Obtain counseling courses and experience for counseling and case worker positions.
˜ Acquire related experience.
˜ Consider business minor or double major for positions in administration, and master's in health care administration for advancement.
˜ Take courses in social psychology or industrial psychology.
˜ Volunteer as a tutor.
˜ Secure strong personal recommendations.
˜ Learn the federal, state, and local government job application process.
˜ Acquire knowledge of community problems and government resources.

RESEARCHING YOUR CAREER IDEAS
How do you find out what’s out there?
Researching careers is a time-consuming, but necessary process. Waiting until graduation to start thinking about your career plans is as foolish as studying after you’ve taken your final exams.
1. Written and On-line Resources:
˜ Visit Career & Counseling Services’ Career Resource Center
˜ Visit the Chalmer Davee Library
˜ Browse the Internet, such as Career & Counseling Services’ Web Page
2. People Resources:
˜ Talk with Faculty and Alumni
˜ Join Professional Organizations
˜ Conduct Occupational Interviews
˜ Use Career & Counseling Services’ “Career Information Network”
˜ Consult Employer Directories and the Yellow Pages
3. Obtain Direct Experience:
˜ Job Shadowing
˜ Volunteer or part-time work
˜ Internships are essential! Talk with your departmental faculty coordinator for internship information.

Tugas Presentasi Sosiologi Global Prestasi School

2008-03-11T02:35:00.000-07:00

Tugas presentasi Sosiologi dengan nilai tertinggi:
Stratifikasi Sosial oleh: Aldila, Apsi, Astrina, Dewi & Rhadianty

Stratifikasi Sosial

2008-03-04T18:25:00.001-08:00

Skl sosiologi 2007/2008

2008-02-26T18:49:00.000-08:00

Standard kopetensi kelulusan

Mendeskripsikan Interaksi sosial sesuai dengan nilai dan norma yang berlaku dalam masyarakat.
Menidentifikasi proses sosialisasi dalam pembentukan kepribadian.
Mengidentifikasi berbagai perilaku menyimpang dan pengendalian sosial dalam masyarakat.
Menganalisis bentuk-bentuk struktur sosial dan konsekuensinya terhadap konflik dan mobilitas sosial.
Menganalisis kelompok sosial dalam masyarakat multikultural.
Menjelaskan proses perubahan sosial pada masyarakat dan dampaknya terhadap kehidupan maasyarakat
Menganalisis peran dan fungsi lembaga sosial
Menyusun rancangan dan melakukan penelitian sosial sederhana

Uraian

SKL I

Interaksi sosial

Proses interaksi sosial
Syarat-syarat terjadinya interaksi sosial
Bentuk-bentuk Interaksi sosial
Faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi interaksi sosial

Nilai dan norma sosial

Jenis-jenis Nilai dan norma sosial
Fungsi nilai dan norma sosial
Keteraturan dan tertib sosial

SKL II

Sosialisasi

Proses sosialisasi
Bentuk-bentuk sosialisasi
Media sosialisasi

Sosialisasi sebagai proses pengenalan nilai dan norma sosial, budaya dalam pembentukan kepribadian

SKL III

Perilaku menyimpang

Terjadinya perilaku menyimpang sebagai akibat sosialisasi tidak sempurna
Berbagai jenis perilaku menyimpang

Pengendalian sosial

Fungsi pengendalian sosial
Sifat dan cara pengendalian sosial
Peran lembaga pengendalian sosial

SKL IV

Stratifikasi sosial

Dasar pelapisan atau stratifikasi sosial
Bentuk-bentuk stratifikasi sosial

Deferensiasi sosial

parameter agama, etnik dan ras, profesi serta gender .

Konflik sosial

Faktor penyebab konflik sosial
Bentuk-bentuk konflik sosial
Upaya membatasi konflik (Bentuk-bentuk Akomudasi)
Pengaruh Interseksi dan konsulidasi terhadap integrasi sosial.

Mobilitas sosial

Faktor penyebab terjadinya mobilitas Sosial
Bentuk-bentuk mobilitas sosial
Saluran mobilitas sosial.

SKL V

Keragaman kelompok sosial meliputi :

Faktor yang mendasari terjadinya kelompok sosial
Bentuk-bentuk kelompok social : Komunitas, kerumunan, dan masyarakat( paguyuban/patembayan)

Analisis terhadap kelompok sosial dalam masyarakat multikultural meliputi :

Ciri-ciri masyarakat multikultural
Sebab terjadinya multikulturalisme perilaku dalam masyrakat multikultural

SKL VI

Perubahan sosial

Proses perubahan sosial
Bentuk perubahan sosial
Faktor penyebab perubahan sosial
Dampak Perubahan sosial meliputi :
1. Dampak positif ( Globalisasi, Demokratisasi)
2. Dampak negatif ( Westernisasi, Sekularisme, Konsumerisme, Hendonisme)

SKL VII

Lembaga sosial

Hakekat Lembaga sosial
Tipe-tipe Lembaga sosial
Peran dan fungsi dari :
> Lembaga Keluarga
> Lembaga Pendidikan
> Lembaga Agama
> Lembaga Hukum
> Lembaga Ekonomi
> Lembaga Politik

SKL VIII

Langkah-langkah penelitian sosial

Menyusun rancangan penelitian sosial
Teknik pengumpulan data
Analisis dan Interprestasi hasil penelitian
Fungsi laporan penelitian sosial.

Sosiologi

2008-01-21T22:12:00.000-08:00

Sosiologi adalah pengetahuan atau ilmu tentang sifat masyarakat, perilaku masyarakat, dan perkembangan masyarakat. Sosiologi merupakan cabang Ilmu Sosial yang mempelajari masyarakat dan pengaruhnya terhadap kehidupan manusia. Sebagai cabang Ilmu, Sosiologi dicetuskan pertama kali oleh ilmuwan Perancis, August Comte. Comte kemudian dikenal sebagai Bapak Sosiologi. Namun demikian, sejarah mencatat bahwa Émile Durkheim ( ilmuwan sosial Perancis) yang kemudian berhasil melembagakan Sosiologi sebagai disiplin akademis. Sebagai sebuah ilmu, sosiologi merupakan pengetahuan kemasyarakatan yang tersusun dari hasil-hasil pemikiran ilmiah dan dapat di kontrol secara kritis oleh orang lain atau umum.

Pengertian
Sosiologi merupakan sebuah istilah yang berasal dari kata latin socius yang artinya teman, dan logos dari kata Yunani yang berarti cerita, diungkapkan pertama kalinya dalam buku yang berjudul “Cours De Philosophie Positive” karangan August Comte (1798-1857). Sosiologi muncul sejak ratusan, bahkan ribuan tahun yang lalu. Namun sosiologi sebagai ilmu yang mempelajari masyarakat baru lahir kemudian di Eropa.
Sejak awal masehi hingga abad 19, Eropa dapat dikatakan menjadi pusat tumbuhnya peradaban dunia, para ilmuwan ketika itu mulai menyadari perlunya secara khusus mempelajari kondisi dan perubahan sosial. Para ilmuwan itu kemudian berupaya membangun suatu teori sosial berdasarkan ciri-ciri hakiki masyarakat pada tiap tahap peradaban manusia.
Dalam buku itu, Comte menyebutkan ada tiga tahap perkembangan intelektual, yang masing-masing merupakan perkembangan dari tahap sebelumya.
Tiga tahapan itu adalah :
Tahap teologis; adalah tingkat pemikiran manusia bahwa semua benda di dunia mempunyai jiwa dan itu disebabkan oleh suatu kekuatan yang berada di atas manusia. Tahap metafisis; pada tahap ini manusia menganggap bahwa didalam setiap gejala terdapat kekuatan-kekuatan atau inti tertentu yang pada akhirnya akan dapat diungkapkan. Oleh karena adanya kepercayaan bahwa setiap cita-cita terkait pada suatu realitas tertentu dan tidak ada usaha untuk menemukan hukum-hukum alam yang seragam. Tahap positif; adalah tahap dimana manusia mulai berpikir secara ilmiah. Comte kemudian membedakan antara sosiologi statis dan sosiologi dinamis. Sosiologi statis memusatkan perhatian pada hukum-hukum statis yang menjadi dasar adanya masyarakat. Sosiologi dinamis memusatkan perhatian tentang perkembangan masyarakat dalam arti pembangunan.oe
Rintisan Comte tersebut disambut hangat oleh masyarakat luas, tampak dari tampilnya sejumlah ilmuwan besar di bidang sosiologi. Mereka antara lain Pitirim Sorokin, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, George Simmel, dan Max Weber (semuanya berasal dari Eropa). Masing-masing berjasa besar menyumbangkan beragam pendekatan mempelajari masyarakat yang amat berguna untuk perkembangan Sosiologi.
Herbert Spencer memperkenalkan pendekatan analogi organik, yang memahami masyarakat seperti tubuh manusia, sebagai suatu organisasi yang terdiri atas bagian-bagian yang tergantung satu sama lain. Karl Marx memperkenalkan pendekatan materialisme dialektis, yang menganggap konflik antar-kelas sosial menjadi intisari perubahan dan perkembangan masyarakat. Emile Durkheim memperkenalkan pendekatan fungsionalisme yang berupaya menelusuri fungsi berbagai elemen sosial sebagai pengikat sekaligus pemelihara keteraturan sosial. Max Weber memperkenalkan pendekatan verstehen (pemahaman), yang berupaya menelusuri nilai, kepercayaan, tujuan, dan sikap yang menjadi penuntun perilaku manusia.

Definisi Sosiologi

Berikut ini definisi-definisi sosiologi yang dikemukakan beberapa ahli.
Pitirim Sorokin Sosiologi adalah ilmu yang mempelajari hubungan dan pengaruh timbal balik antara aneka macam gejala sosial (misalnya gejala ekonomi, gejala keluarga, dan gejala moral), sosiologi adalah ilmu yang mempelajari hubungan dan pengaruh timbal balik antara gejala sosial dengan gejala non-sosial, dan yang terakhir, sosiologi adalah ilmu yang mempelajari ciri-ciri umum semua jenis gejala-gejala sosial lain.
Roucek dan Warren Sosiologi adalah ilmu yang mempelajari hubungan antara manusia dalam kelompok-kelompok.
William F. Ogburn dan Mayer F. Nimkopf Sosiologi adalah penelitian secara ilmiah terhadap interaksi sosial dan hasilnya, yaitu organisasi sosial.
J.A.A Von Dorn dan C.J. Lammers Sosiologi adalah ilmu pengetahuan tentang struktur-struktur dan proses-proses kemasyarakatan yang bersifat stabil.
Max Weber Sosiologi adalah ilmu yang berupaya memahami tindakan-tindakan sosial.
Selo Sumardjan dan Soelaeman Soemardi Sosiologi adalah ilmu kemasyarakatan yang mempelajari struktur sosial dan proses-proses sosial termasuk perubahan sosial.
Paul B. Horton Sosiologi adalah ilmu yang memusatkan penelaahan pada kehidupan kelompok dan produk kehidupan kelompok tersebut.
Soejono Sukamto Sosiologi adalah ilmu yang memusatkan perhatian pada segi-segi kemasyarakatan yang bersifat umum dan berusaha untuk mendapatkan pola-pola umum kehidupan masyarakat.
William Kornblum Sosiologi adalah suatu upaya ilmiah untuk mempelajari masyarakat dan perilaku sosial anggotanya dan menjadikan masyarakat yang bersangkutan dalam berbagai kelompok dan kondisi.
Allan Jhonson Sosiologi adalah ilmu yang mempelajari kehidupan dan perilaku, terutama dalam kaitannya dengan suatu sistem sosial dan bagaimana sistem tersebut mempengaruhi orang dan bagaimana pula orang yang terlibat didalamnya mempengaruhi sistem tersebut.

Sumber:http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosiologi