Of the founders of sociology, four figures stand out; Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Duckheim, closely followed by George Herbert Mead. However, before we look at their work in detail we need

The founders

Of the founders of sociology, four figures stand out; Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Duckheim, closely followed by George Herbert Mead. However, before we look at their work in detail we need briefly to sketch the influence of other writers.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

Comte was the founder of sociology in the sense that he first named it in his book Cours de Philosophie Positive. Comte cannot be regarded as having given sociology much else of substance, apart from influencing other, later writers such as Durkheim. But he did lay the groundwork for a scientific, rather than philosophical approach to the study of society.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

Spencer, an English writer of the nineteenth century, was extremely popular in his time, although he has relatively little influence now. His major contribution to sociological thought was to stress the similarities between an organism and a society, and in particular the way each part of a society is inter-related. Although this may seem a relatively simple concept now, at the time it was novel. The greater part of Spencer’s writing concentrated on applying the concept of evolution to the development of societies, especially the idea of the survival of the fittest.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

Simmel has been rediscovered fairly recently. This reflects the changes in sociological thought over the last fifteen years. Until the mid 1960s, the emphasis of sociology, influenced particularly by Durkheim, was on the study of society as a whole. Sociologists concentrated their attention on such large-scale institutions as religion, the economic system, or the family. More recently there has been a school of thought which concerns itself more with the transient, informal interactions that make up our everyday experience, such as the relationship between teacher and pupil in the classroom. The focus has shifted from structures and systems to interactions between a few people. Much of Simmel’s writings concerns just this phenomenon of interaction. He makes an interesting distinction between ’form’ and ’content’ in social relationships. Certain ’forms’ of social action – such as conflict – may appear in many different contexts; or as he puts it, ’contents’. So rather that studying the various social structures, such as the family or the workplace, Simmel suggests that we look at forms of social interaction which appear in these situations. Using the above example, we would look at the way conflict appears in both the family and the workplace, thus building up an understanding of society in this manner.

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)

At approximately the same time that Simmel was exploring the idea of interaction in Germany, Mead was also examining the complexity of everyday interaction in the United States. We discuss the contribution of Mead in some detail later, but it is useful to give a brief outline of his work here.

By profession Mead was a philosopher not a sociologist; but it was sociologists who developed his ideas most enthusiastically, notably at the University of Chicago. Most of Mead’s work concerns the way that we all learn to behave appropriately in the thousands of different social interactions we engage in every day. Very often these interactions require us to act very differently. How do we learn the correct behavior? Mead suggests that we learn all these different ‘roles’ during childhood. As children, by playing at being a teacher in one game and a pupil in another, we learn the appropriate behavior when we have to engage these roles later in life. Similarly, in these games we gain an awareness of ourselves as others see us, as well as learning appropriate behavior towards others. By late childhood we have learnt how others perceive us. Furthermore, we have learnt the numerous roles that we may be expected to play. The games have taught us one more thing, to be able to put ourselves in the place of others, and imagine how they feel. In such a way we learn to intermesh our behavior with that of others to form the predictable, ordered society that we experience daily.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Undoubtedly, Durkheim was one of the most important contributors to sociological knowledge. He was the first holder of a Chair of Sociology, at Bordeaux University, and he started the influential sociological journal, L’Annee Sociologique. Durkheim’s approach to sociology was influenced by Spencer’s stress on the importance of treating social factors as related to each other, rather than studying each part in insulation, and Comte’s emphasis on the use of scientific method. Durkheim’s writing show a definite search for order, and this may well have been a response to the rapid social changes that we discussed earlier, which were especially noticeable in France. Durkheim wrote four books: The Division of Labour, Suicide, The Rules of Sociological Method, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Three main concerns appear in his work: first, to prove the value and distinctiveness of sociology; second, to analyse why societies hold together, and third, to show the close relationship between the different components of society.

In The Division of Labour, Durkheim discussed the reasons for the social unity of society. He claimed that two types of social solidarity exist: organic and mechanical. Mechanical societies stress the similarity between their members, as in tribal societies, and by emphasising this homogeneity, conflict is avoided. In organic societies, which are socially and technologically complex, social solidarity is maintained for the very opposite reason, that individuals are different. Each contributes to society a different task in the division of labour and so a mutual reliance is created. Durkheim is drawing a parallel here between the composition of the human body with its different organs, each of which needs the others to function, and the inter-relationship between different institutions of society. We can see fairly clearly that Durkheim saw individuals as completely under the control of society, rather like the puppet controlled by the puppeteer. The ‘strings’ operate on us through the ‘collective conscience’, that is the shared set of central social values found, he claims, in any society. If the collective conscience weakens, for whatever reason, then society’s control over us is lost. Society falls into a state of lawlessness with every person looking after his own interests, regardless of the social consequences. This situation is called as anomie, and reflects a breakdown of social control. Durkheim’s response to the crisis of social change in nineteenth-century Europe emerges quite clearly here in the concept of anomie, with its emphasis on the importance of social order and control.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim continued his quest into the origin and form of central values, as expressed through the collective conscience.

In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim formulated many of the ideas that were to influence positivistic sociologists for the following 60 years. Positivism is the sociological approach that employs the use of the scientific methods from the physical sciences in social research. Durkheim argued that society is a fact that exists above and beyond the activities of any individual, in much the same way that a machine is more than its constituent parts, or a body is more than various organs that compose it. In the same way we can analyse as a set of inter-related institutions – the family, the economic system, etc. Each institution has its own existence, and can be considered a social fact. By stressing the factual nature of society, rather than the abstract qualities emphasized by Simmel for instance, Durkheim was arguing that sociology could be a science and could therefore use the same techniques.

The stress in both these books on the organic nature ofsociety, also led Durkheim to the conclusion that the best way to analyse the relationships of the various social institutions was in terms of their contributions to the survival of the society. Just as a heart can be seen as the organ that pumps blood around the body (i.e. that is its function), so the function of the economic system to the continuation of society can be analysed.

In Suicide Durkheim set out to prove that the best way to understand social phenomena is to look at them from the viewpoint of the influence of society. It is useful for us to look at this argument in some detail because it illustrates positivistic approach to sociology with both its contributions and failings.

The first thing to come to Durkheim’s attention was the similarity of year-by-year suicide rates in different countries; if suicide was such an individual phenomenon, surely there should be wide variations in the rate each year? In order to analyse the phenomenon further, he distinguished between three types of suicide: egotistic, altruistic and anomic.

Egoistic suicide

This occurs most often in those societies and social groups which stress the importance of the individual as opposed to the group. At the time Durkheim was writing, Protestant-based societies placed far greater emphasis on individuality than Catholic ones. (As we said earlier, it is important to realize the great influence of religion at that time.) In a comparison of the published suicide statistics of a number of European states, Durkheim found that there was a distinct variation in the rate of suicide between Catholic and Protestant countries. For instance he found that Bavaria had the lowest rates of suicide in Germany, and it was also the state with the highest proportions of Catholics. Durkheim’s explanation was that the rate of suicide was clearly linked to the degree of social cohesion – the tighter the social bonds that hold the individual to society, the lower the incidence of suicide. This conclusion was strengthened by his findings that single people have a higher suicide rate than those who are married or live in families.

Altruistic suicide

This form of suicide occurs in the societies which stress above all the responsibility of the individual to the society. Durkheim gives the example of the custom, known as suti and no longer practiced, where an Indian Hindu widow was expected to burn herself to death on the funeral pyre of her husband.

Anomic suicide

Durkheim noticed a curious fact about the official suicide statistics. Not surprisingly they rose in periods of economic depression, but they also rose in times of tremendous prosperity. The answer of this interesting phenomenon lay, according to Durkheim, in the concept of anomie we discussed earlier. In periods of sudden change, the guidelines to action provided by the stable, ordered society disappear, leaving the individual vulnerable and unsure, a state in which he or she is far more likely to commit suicide. Anomie is manifested in other ways too – in industrial conflict and divorce, for instance.

Overall, Durkheim’s conclusion was that any understanding of suicide has to start with and understanding of the social structure. This study has been used as an excellent example of scientific method, but some very serious criticisms of it can be found in our discussion on scientific method in Chapter 11.

Karl Marx (1818 – 83)

We discuss Marx’s work in some detail in subsequent chapters, so here we shall confine ourselves to a very brief introduction.

Of the three major founding fathers, Marx is undoubtedly the most influential in contemporary sociology, although paradoxically he never saw himself as a sociologist, but rather as a ‘political economist’ and a revolutionary. As we said earlier, the nineteenth century was a period of great turmoil, politically, socially and economically. The three founding fathers reacted rather differently to these crises. Durkheim looked back nostalgically to a period of order; Weber’s work looks to the future with some trepidation, as all he could anticipate was a bureaucratically dominated ‘iron cage’; but Marx, disgusted by the misery and oppression he saw around him, looked to the future with hope. His work led him to believe that the future must inevitably lead to a communist society.

Marx sat society as having its origins when people came together to produce necessities of life. For him the basis of society was economic production, and therefore this was the key to an understanding of it. The next step in his analysis concerned the development of economic differences between various groups in society. Marx suggested that the differences occurred when one group monopolized control of the economic resources of society, as a result gained power over other groups. Through the use of this power the dominant group could impose values favourable to it on the whole society.

The history of society is that of changes in the economic structure of society and with it changes in the dominant group. Each period of dominance by one group is known as an epoch. When Marxists analyse society, therefore, they attempt to relate the dominant values and practices to the interests of the interests of the ruling group.

Sociological perspectives

Max Weber (1864-1920)

Weber defined sociology as ‘the comprehensive science of human action’. The word action mentioned here, gives us an important insight into Weber’s concept of society, and the consequent method of sociological study adopted by him. Whereas both Marx and Durkheim had emphasized the structure of society, in the sense that it had a form that existed and was discernible, Weber said that it was merely a concept to describe an inter-related set of action. For example, the family can viewed as a structure – father, mother and children, linked in certain physical and legal ways; or as a set of action – the actions of living together and sharing certain activities. This has important ramifications for the sorts of questions that sociology asks, and how it goes about studying society.

In the case of social change, Durkheim argued that society had moved from mechanical to organic forms of social structure, and Marx had seen an evolution from one economic and social epoch to the next. Weber saw social change taking place in the form of changes in the typical forms of social action. He distinguished four types of action: affective action; traditional action; wertrational action; and zweckrational action. Affective action is the spontaneous emotional form of action. Traditional action is that which we do, because it has always been done. Wertrational action is rational action toward a goal based on some value judgement, such as the correct action to gain salvation (value goal) is to pray, Finally zweckrational action is purposeful action which we engage in to obtain a rational goal, such as scientific activity. Weber saw a clear development in society toward this final type.

The emphasis on action led him to the belief that it was necessary to understand the individual’s perception of the situation. By doing this it was possible to understand why an individual acted in a certain way. The idea of seeing action though the eyes of power, Class, Status and Party, Weber used his ideas on action and verstehen to produce a classification of why individuals accept others’ authority. This is discussed in greater detail in Charter 7.

Weber’s best known study is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which is basically a reply to the writings of Marx on the development of capitalism. Marx had argued that the key to understanding society was the economic base; changes in this resulted in changes in the values of society. Weber disagreed, suggesting instead that individual’s values precede economic changes. He set out to prove, therefore, that the origins of capitalism, that is our form of society based upon industry and private property, lay in a particular set of religious beliefs.

Calvinism originated in Switzerland in the sixteenth century as one form of strict Protestant reformism. Its fundamental belief was that people, even before they were born, were destined to go to heaven or hell. This was based on the notion that as God knows everything, he also knows whether or not we will go to heaven.

The main problem for the individual was that there was nothing to be done to change his or her fate. At best one could strictly follow the ways of the Lord, awaiting some sign that he was among the “elect”. The signs offered by God on earth were material prosperity, for why God should let evil people prosper?

Calvinists also regarded this life as preparation for eternity, rejecting self indulgence and frivolity as sinful. Although hard work was encouraged, then, under the belief that “to work is to pray”, rewards in terms of material possessions were discouraged. Weber argued that the ethic of hard work and the lack of an outlet to spend the accumulated wealth, created ideal conditions for the growth of modern capitalism.

In the eighteenth century, inventors and entrepreneurs were searching for capital to invest in the newly developed machinery and industry. In the mainly Catholic countries of Europe, the merchants did not have the large amount of spare capital required. This was partly a result of the Catholic values, which saw no evil in ostentatious spending and left the merchants with little accumulated wealth that they were prepared to risk. Besides, they and the aristocracy were content with the economic system as it was. The Calvinists, however, had the will and the spare capital to invest. Weber saw the coincidence of Calvinist values and new inventions at that particular time as the main reason for the development of capitalism, particularly in Britain, where Calvinism was especially strong.

The final aspect of Weber’s work to concern us here is his contribution to methodology, particularly his concept of the ideal type. One of the major problems of social science is to gain a precise definition of a concept. This is particularly true of sociology which analyses commonly taken for granted concepts; where confusion over the exact meaning of the term may cloud the issue. The ideal type is a way of giving clarity to a concept. It basically means finding the elements that are usually present in a concept, standing them, and then measuring the objectives under discussion against this model. Perhaps this is easier to understand if we take an example such as a profession.

We probably all agree that medicine is a doctor’s profession; but what about nurses or estate agents? The British sociologist Greenwood has suggested an ideal type model of a profession, involving five criteria:

1. Systematic theory underlying their actions is a body of knowledge.

2. Professional authority, the client accepts unquestioningly the opinion of the expert.

3. The sanction of the community, the public accepts the exclusive right of the profession to deal in their area expertise.

4. Code of ethics, the profession controls its own members according to a strict code of ethics.

5. A professional culture, the profession has a common way of presenting itself to those outside, and of maintaining contact inside.

The nearer an occupation comes to filling all these criteria fully, the closer it is to a profession. Weber’s main contribution to sociology has been to insist on importance of action and ideas understanding society.

The founders: conclusion

The traditions laid down by the major figures of sociology, Marx Durkheim, Weber and Mead, can clearly be found in contemporary sociology. Throughout this book elements of the ideas presented above occur again and again.

The central questions they all asked was how society holds together to give a semblance of order, and this is still the major preoccupation of sociologists today. The work of Durkheim gave rise to the school of thought known as functionalism, because it looks at the functions that various social institutions perform for society. Mead’s work has given rise to the symbolic interactionists who examine the way people go about daily, taken for granted social intercourse. Marx’s writings have led to the development of a critical sociology, intent upon examining the ways they believe the ruling class dominate society. The work of Weber has not led to any particular school, but is diffused throughout these perspectives, to some extent modifying them all.

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