This volume is the second in our ongoing project to anthologize the works of modern social scientists who apply and analyze the theories, concepts, and research methods of Karl Marx (1818-1883), Émile Durkheim (1859-1917), and Max Weber (1864-1920). Few thinkers in the history of the world have influenced future generations of social scientists — as well as political leaders, organizational policy makers, and citizens around the globe — more than the “holy trinity” of the social sciences, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.
Collectively, the intricate societal problems they defined and deeply explored during the 19th and early 20th centuries — involving social solidarity, individual freedom, bureaucracy, inequality, economic rationality, anomie, and class conflict, among many others — still dominate the thinking of scholars in all social science disciplines, including sociology, economics, anthropology, political science, education, social work, geography, and social psychology.
In short, the legacy of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber continues to live on, into the 21st century, compelling contemporary social scientists not only to learn the great masters’s seminal theories, concepts and research methods, but also to test, expand, challenge and even to deconstruct them.
Just as major societal changes during the 19th century deeply affected the thinking of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, so too have major changes in our times affected the way scholars perceive, evaluate, and use the works of the three great classical sociological masters. At the time of this writing, for example, the Internet is a global force that is affecting every social institution and tens of millions of individuals, including social scientists, in America and other countries. Its impact is forcing social scientists to rethink and adapt classical conceptions of community, authority, economic transactions, and empowerment, among a multitude of others. In similar fashion, modern social scientists have lived through and been affected by revolutionary cultural and social events such as the “Sixties,” the end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the rise of feminism. How have these and related changes affected the way social investigators apply and analyze Marx, Durkheim and Weber?
Answers to these and related questions are found in this anthology, The Living Legacy of Marx, Durkheim & Weber, Volume 2, which brings together another rich collection of articles that show how some of the world’s leading scholars research and dissect concepts such as class, anomie, bureaucracy, suicide, community, rationality, conflict, justice, religious ritual, identity, and meaning, which are at the heart of the writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.
As you will see from reading these articles, although each author focuses on a unique problem and approach, collectively the authors share an important implied consensus: that the works of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber remain vital for understanding, explaining, and attempting to predict behavior in human societies. The classical works continue to provide modern social scientists with inspiration that stimulates their imaginations, curiosity, critical intelligence, and quest for the truth, and provides them with the belief that a better society is possible through the application of reason and systematic study of human behavior.
As a result of reading these articles, it is my hope that you will not only grow from learning the content of the works, but that — in the spirit of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber — you will experience the unfolding of your sociological imagination that enables you to envision human societies in new ways and propose fresh solutions to both traditional and novel problems that threaten our well-being. Such creative thought is especially important now, at the beginning of the New Millennium, when the rapid rise of microprocessor-based technologies and the destruction of traditional communities are creating an unprecedented degree of anomie and new forms of inequality and intergroup hostilities. At the same time, the historic forces of bureaucratization, urbanization, and industrialization — analyzed in depth by Marx, Durkheim and Weber — continue to transform societies around the globe, as they interact with novel technological, environmental, and demographic trends and conditions.
In this new, global environment, the role of the social scientist is more important than ever — to define this “strange new land” into which millions of individuals and families are moving all around the globe, and to help leaders in government, communities, and business create policies and programs that will contribute to the building of a safe, sane social order for generations to come.
If modern social scientists can adapt classical sociological theory to help define solutions to the novel problems that will increasingly alter the lives of the majority of people on Earth, then their contribution will ensure that the legacy of Marx, Durkheim and Weber continues to live, well into the New Millennium.
Organization and Content of the Anthology
The articles in the anthology are divided into two broad parts: “Applications” (Part I) and “Analyses” (Part II). The selections in Part I are by authors who primarily use the concepts or methods of Marx, Durkheim, or Weber to study either contemporary or historical societal phenomena; and the articles in Part II are by authors who primarily analyze the theories, methods, or terminology of Marx, Durkheim, or Weber, focusing on the content of the works themselves. In making this broad division, it should be noted that some articles both apply and analyze the classical theories, and that the responsibility for classifying the articles as they appear in this anthology is that of the editor.
The remainder of this Introduction contains a brief overview of the articles, in the sequence they are presented in the anthology, to orient the reader to the selections. The concise statement of the focus of each article and a conclusion or two drawn by its author, presented here, only hint at the stimulating discussions that await the reader.
Part I: Applications of Marx, Durkheim and Weber
The Applications section begins with an article by K. Peter Takayama (p. 1), who applies Weber’s differentiation of the types of rationality to an analysis of Japanese religion. This approach enables us to interpret the occurrence of the patterning of Japanese religion as syncretistic religion; and it leads the author to conclude, among other things, that a particular substantive rationality with an emphasis on methodical ways of life subjugated practical rationality and led to the development of formal rationality in early Japan.
Malcolm P. Cutchin and Robert R. Churchill (p. 32) employ Durkheim’s theory of suicide and social environments as a starting point to empirically examine the role of geographical scale and context in explaining the ecology of suicide. Based on data collected on suicide rates and 46 socioeconomic variables at three geographic scales — states in the United States, counties in New England, and townships in Vermont — the authors conclude that, while Durkheimian relationships appear in their results, they do not remain constant across scale and context. They suggest that the effect of scale and context is evident in suicide rate variation and must be taken into account if suicide is to be better understood.
Andrew J. Weigert (p. 52) advocates the need for a pluralistic and humanistic social psychology to comprehend the complexities of contemporary life, which is based primarily on the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. This approach also should include both other classical sociological theorists and recent work on the relationship of individuals to society, as it connects biography and history (i.e., self and society). The author hopes this approach, by focusing on identity, emotions, trust, morals, and meanings, would facilitate self-understanding, and improve human life.
Frank W. Young (p. 81) sketches out a neo-Durkheimian theory of small communities that articulates a non-materialist theory of how community structure determines the material welfare of the residents. The theory highlights a category of “transaction organizations” that contrast with dimensions of structure (differentiation, pluralism and solidarity), which are theoretically derived and universal. The author concludes, among other things, that average welfare is a function of the mutual reinforcement of one or more structural dimensions with an appropriate and efficient transaction organization; and that this theory, which embodies a radical application of the principle of embeddedness, stands in opposition to the two widely accepted materialist theories of community, central place theory/ecology and political economy.
Stanford M. Lyman (p. 97) focuses on how numerous mainstream U.S. sociologists and other social scientists in the Marxian and Weberian traditions, among others, opposed Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal’s research on the “race question” in An American Dilemma, published in 1944. Some opposed it for violating the research ideal of value neutrality, propagated by Weber, or for denying the validity of the theory of class conflict emphasized by Marx. In addition to arousing debate and discussion, the work also has furthered research, though its thesis has yet to be verified. Various critiques of it, discussed in Lyman’s article, not only are instructive about the use of method and theory in social science research, but they constitute a veritable sociology of the U.S. “race question.”
Donald R. LaMagdeleine (p. 175) uses Durkheim’s theoretical perspective on the relationship between civil religion and public education to examine the premises of school desegregation as a healing ritual meant to cure the evils wrought by U.S. apartheid. The author argues that, within the logic of Progressive Education, the idea was to ritually integrate the schools as a miniature melting pot, but that the policy’s assimilationist assumptions discounted U.S. black culture as championed by W. E. B. DuBois. The author concludes that research on the mixed effects of school desegregation and a new call for multiculturalism have undermined the Progressivist premises of desegregation, and that public education’s current confused state mirrors larger patterns of mythic struggle within U.S. society.
Jules J. Wanderer (p. 199) first compares the differing conceptualizations that Durkheim, Weber and Simmel held about the social bases of meaning, and then focuses on the latter’s conceptualization to analyze adventures in a theme park. According to the author, Simmel claimed the adventures consist neither in substances nor in risky business, but in a “form of experiencing.” They are produced by the symbolic manipulations of adventurers who synthesize, antagonize and compromise life’s content into fundamental categories of life. Thus what is endured and consumed in an adventure is not merely substantial, it is also symbolic. In other words, in a theme park, visitors endure and consume not persons, long lines, or park rides, but their representations as photo-opportunities-with-Mickey Mouse, long-lines-to-defeat, or a-park-attraction-to-see.
Anthony Synnott (p. 219) draws on the writings of Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and other founders of the social sciences, including Vilfredo Pareto and Thorstein Veblen, to consider — in a satirical vein — their little known contributions to “zoological” sociology and anthropology. In addition to the social scientists’ interest in lions, tigers, foxes, cats, dogs, and cows, various schools of the discipline are discussed, such as predator sociology and pet sociology. Other topics dissected are taboos, totemism, the sacred cow, cannibalism, and the apparent neurosis of some of the noted theorists.
The Applications section ends with an article by Lauren Langman (p. 238), who uses seminal concepts of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, among other theorists, to analyze the role of the construction and inscription of identities in hegemonic processes, i.e., processes in which social structures, identities, and desires are constructed to perpetuate or obscure inequalities that serve the interests of the ruling elite. A history of the tradition of the denial of selfhood is given, and a model is presented for theorizing how universal desires for (1) attachments and community, (2) recognition, dignity, and esteem, (3) feelings of agency and empowerment, and (4) avoidance of fear and anxiety shape selfhood and identity and drive the routines of everyday life. The author concludes that the success of hegemonic discourses throughout history is due to the fact that the ideologies and cultural understandings produced have offered real social and personal rewards.
Part II: Analyses of Marx, Durkheim and Weber
The Analysis section begins with an article by Patricia Mei Yin Chang (p. 291), who refutes the logic of Emile Durkheim’s evolutionary model of social solidarity, on the grounds that he required every society to be constituted by a symbol or totem but violated this requirement in his description of tribal society in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Reinterpreting Durkheim’s empirical evidence, the author suggests that clans are both ritual and symbolic entities of mechanical solidarity that gain meaning only within a symbolic tribal cosmology whose ties of ritual practice and identity constitute a type of semiotic organicism. The author claims that this interpretation makes Durkheim’s evolutionary thesis of social solidarity from mechanical to organic implausible, and she suggests an alternative model in which the two types of solidarity are nested and constitutive of one another. This conclusion implies that one must switch the level of analysis from the clan to the tribe, and focuses on the tribal rules that generate identity at the clan level.
Walter L. Wallace (p. 302), in a unique interpretation of Weber’s theory that puts forth an image of society viewed cross sectionally or “structurally,” claims it makes a fundamental difference if we conceptualize the basic participant-organizing institutions as fourfold, including a scientific institution, rather than any other way. The author claims that the inclusion of a scientific institution is the key to accounting for two types of technical invention central in Weber’s work, namely, machinery and bureaucracy; and that the inclusion makes possible a more systematic and parsimonious analysis of the participant organizing institutional structure of human societies. The participant-organizing institutions are viewed as comprising differentiated but interdependent economic, political, religious, and scientific components, whose distinctive products are specified as wealth, power, honor, and knowledge.
Lydia Voigt (p. 330) analyzes Durkheim’s treatment of the concept of justice, claiming that it not only represents the tension among nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas, but provides an interesting synthesis. Durkheim’s contribution, however, goes beyond some of his contemporaries and predecessors. Envisioning a merger between philosophy and science in the creation of a new discipline, i.e., sociology, he suggests a novel approach to the study of the ultimate humanistic concept—justice. At the heart of this analysis, Voigt examines what is conceptually fundamental and historically distinctive in Durkheim’s concept of justice. The author concludes that his unique approach to justice is founded upon and exemplified by the tension of values and perspectives which characterize nineteenth and early twentieth century social thought, particularly, utilitarian, rationalist, Marxist and positivistic orientations.
Robert G. Perrin (p. 346) analyzes “externalistic” and “main factor” theories of social and cultural change — such as Marx’s “economic factor” and Max Weber’s “religious factor”— in contrast to Pitirm A. Sorokin’s theory of immanent (or autogenous) social and cultural change. Sorokin argued that externalistic and main factor theories were “illusional” because the real causes of significant change lie within the system changing (so the role of external factors is limited to “facilitating or retarding” changes already under way), and that major change is “in togetherness.” Perrin claims, however, that when Sorokin’s argument is closely examined, we discover that his case for viewing sociocultural change as immanent and “in togetherness” rests on a number of problematic definitions, qualifications, and scope conditions. In the end, Sorokin does not confute “externalistic” and lead-lag (or “main factor”) theories of change as much as he articulates the conditions (e.g., optimal system integration and “power”) that can limit or neutralize their impact. These conditions, however, are hardly ever achievable in the social world as we know it. Thus, Perrin concludes that Marxian, Weberian, and other “externalistic” theories of social change, including ones identifying “main factors,” are very appropriate for the social sciences.
Warren D. TenHouten (p. 370) claims that, although Durkheim’s final, and arguably greatest, book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, was a study of Australian Aboriginal religious practices, most theoretical discussions of Durkheim ignore the topic of his book — the Aborigines — and their remarkable culture. The author thus examines, with a critical eye, what Durkheim had to say about Aboriginal culture, with emphasis on time-consciousness, sentiment, and mentality, and places his statements and claims in their historical and ethnographic contexts. Drawing on the work of Durkheim’s contemporaries, TenHouten sees Durkheim to be a man of his life and times— imbued with prejudices and a Eurocentrism that clouded his judgment, and saddled with an argument that the essence of totemic religion is between the sacred and the profane. As a result, TenHouten argues that Durkheim, along with most of his contemporaries, underestimated the intelligence and cultural tenacity of the Aborigine; and that, by placing his claims of affect and classification at the center of Aboriginal spirituality, Durkheim missed a central point, to wit, that the basis of totemism is not the distinction between the sacred and the profane but an ecologically sound insight, shared by indigenous peoples globally, into the interconnectedness of all things and beings.
John Drysdale (404) claims that recent interpretations of Weber’s theory of concept formation have concluded that it is seriously defective and therefore of questionable use in social science. Some critics have argued that Weber’s ideas depend upon Rickert’s epistemology, whose arguments they find to be invalid: thus, by implication, Weber’s theory fails. Considering these critical assaults, Drysdale attempts to reconstruct Weber’s theory on the basis of his 1904 essay on objectivity. Pivotal to Weber’s theory is his distinction between concept and judgment (hypothesis), where the former is the interpretive means to the formation of explanatory accounts (judgments). His theory includes criteria for abstraction and synthesis in the construction of ideal-type concepts as well as criteria for their evaluation. From his analysis, Drysdale concludes that Weber provides a reasonably coherent, if incomplete, theory of concept formation which does not depend on Rickert’s epistemological arguments.
Mahmoud Sadri and Arthur Stinchcombe (p. 433) analyze Durkheim’s Division of Labor in Society to draw out the major implications of this classical treatise on the potentials and pitfalls of modernity. According to the authors, Mechanical Solidarity connotes the following: (1) natural resemblances are accentuated, (2) social sim-ilarities are stressed, (3) “collective conscience” consolidates the above two emphases, (4) the resulting solidarity relies on few strong inflex-ible “points of attachment” between individual and society, and (5) consequently, “ascribed status,” whether natural (gender, age, race) or social (tribal and ritual affiliations) is salient. Organic solidarity con-notes the following: (1) natural resemblances are de-emphasized, (2) social similarities are eviscerated, (3) collective conscience is enfeebled, (4) the ties that connect individuals and positions are “more numerous” but “weaker, and (5) consequently, “achieved status” is augmented. The authors conclude that complex societies enable individuals to juggle the ascribed and achieved properties of their status and to “bleed in” those characteristics where appropriate. Contemporary examples include varying the salience of gender identities at work, and the salience of ethnic identities in elections. In organically solidary societies there is more “room” for varying saliencies and thus more freedom and autonomy for the individual.
Thomas W. Segady (p. 451) points out that, although Weber’s works on the sociology of religion were seminal, one work that has remained largely neglected for English-speaking audiences is The Religion of India, first published in essay form near the end of his life. In this work, Weber demonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of world religions and interest in the contributions of religious ideologies to the development of rationalism in other spheres of life. In dissecting The Religion of India and assessing its role in Weber’s thought on religion as a cultural force shaping rational systems of social action, Segady points out that Weber’s sociohistorical analysis is centered on the rise of rational structures in India as a result of the cultural values and beliefs imparted by orthodox and heterodox Hinduism. Weber’s analysis is intended to demonstrate that, although several forms of rationality can be traced to Hindu beliefs, one aspect distinctly absent is the “this worldly” ethos leading to distinctive rational characteristics that result in capitalism. Thus, Segady concludes that The Religion of India represents a continuation of the intellectual concerns Weber expressed in The Protestant Ethic and other essays on religion.
The anthology concludes with an article by A. Javier Treviño (p. 471), who reviews a recent book on Durkheim, Durkheim and the Jews of France, by Ivan Strenski, and discusses it in conjunction with a recently issued work by Georg Simmel, Essays on Religion, translated and edited by Horst Jürgen Helle and Ludwig Nieder. According to Trevino, Strenski argues against an essentialist reading of Emile Durkheim’s Jewishness, claiming that such a reading ignores both the possible non-Jewish sources of Durkheim’s thought and the Jewish features obviously missing from his writings on the nature of religious beliefs and practice. The essays by Simmel highlight both his concern with the relationship of religion to modernity, personality, art, methods, and sociology, and his principal analytic concepts. From analyzing these two books, Trevino wonders which of these two thinkers—who wrote about religion at the same time and in the same ways— influenced the other, or if their similarities may be attributed mainly to their having worked in the same sociohistorical context. In any case, Trevino concludes that the two volumes will undoubtedly open up a new world of exploration for scholars wishing to delve further into the religious writings of these two seminal theorists.
Richard Altschuler
Manhattan, April 2000
Notes
1 See, e.g., The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (NY: International Publishers); Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (eds. T. B. Bottomore and Maximillian Rubel. Baltimore: Penguin, 1964; orig. 1848); The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969; orig. 1848); Capital (NY: International Publishers, 1967; orig. 1867).
2 See, e.g., The Division of Labor in Society (NY: Free Press, 1964; orig. 1893); The Rules of Sociological Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; orig. 1894); Suicide: A Study In Sociology (NY: Free Press, 1951; orig. 1897); The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (NY: Free Press, 1965; orig. 1915).
3 See, e.g., The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930; orig. 1904); The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (ed. Talcott Parsons. NY: Free Press, 1964); The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949); From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (eds. H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills. NY: Oxford University Press, 1946).
|