Sociology 1013

Module 2 : Theoretical and

Historical Foundations

EMMANUEL S. CALIWAN

INSTRUCTOR OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

JURIS DOCTOR (ON-GOING) COPYRIGHT 2015

Sociology – “socius” & “logus”

Both an academic field and a practical accomplishment, it may be

understood as the competence by which ordinary participants in social

settings recognize and obey (or violate) rules and norms that are widely

shared by others. The performance of sociological competence leads to

the practical accomplishment of the salient and enduring social

structures that organize social life into institutions. How practical

sociological competence is acquired remains a mystery, though it seems

to operate in much the same way as language acquisition in that the

ability to respond to social settings in a normal (or deviant) manner arises

suddenly at a relatively young age in early childhood. Even preverbal

infants know how to please (or irritate) care-givers in practically

competent ways. Practical sociological competence is not necessarily

discursive in that participants may or may not be able to discuss or

explain the reasons they behave as they do.

Academic sociologies can be distinguished from practical ones

by the trained ability to describe the discursive properties of

regularities in the competent achievements of social groups. The

child as a practical sociologist cannot say how she gets a care-

giver to change a diaper. An academic sociologist, however,

uses a disciplinary language to account for how regularities in a

society’s family structure may affect the interactions of children

and their care-givers. From its beginnings in the 1890s,

academic sociology has developed

along two lines.

Explanatory sociologies seek to follow the lead of pure

sciences by offering discursive explanations in formal,

preferably mathematical, languages.

Interpretative sociologies, by contrast, believe that,

unlike events in the natural world, social things cannot

be reduced to their formal properties because social

performances seldom conform exactly to competency

rules.

Social Theory

The systematic reflection on the nature of society and

social relationships, social theory is intimately tied to the

fate of sociology as a discipline concerned with the

empirical study of social life. Historians of social science

frequently associate both social theory and sociology with

the rise in the late eighteenth century of capitalist

modernity and its distinctive institutional separation of state

and civil society.

Sociological Theory

Any form of sustained reasoning or logic that endeavors to

make sense of observable realities of social life via the use

of concepts, metaphors, models, or other forms of abstract

ideas may be legitimately classified as sociological theory.

The need for theoretical reasoning is particularly acute in

sociology because of the remarkable complexity and

diversity of observable realities within any given social

group, among comparable groups, and between

dramatically different historical epochs and culturally

distinct civilizations

COMTE, AUGUSTE (1798–1857

Comte performed the signal service to the

discipline of coining the term ‘sociology’ which

first appeared in his 1838 Cours de Philosophie

Positive. For Comte, sociology was an empirical

observation-based comparative science which

would dominate the highest stage of human

evolution. He believed that thought developed

through the stages of the theological, the

metaphysical and the positive. Societies evolved

from the primitive through the intermediary to

the scientific.

Comte saw the increasing division of

labour making societies more complex,

specialized and internally differentiated.

Like Emile Durkheim later, he saw

modernization as paradoxical; increased

division of labour made people more

dependent on each other and thus

increased social solidarity but it also

created class divisions and a gulf

between the public and private worlds.

Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Marx was not a sociologist and did not consider himself

one. Although his work is too broad to be encompassed by

the term sociology, there is a sociological theory to be

found in Marx’s work. From the beginning, there were those

who were heavily influenced by Marx, and there has been

a continuous strand of Marxian sociology, primarily in

Europe. But for the majority of early sociologists, his work

was a negative force, something against which to shape

their sociology.

Alienation

The term is very widely used to convey a sense of improper loss or

detachment. Originally used in the active form, ‘to alienate’ meant to remove something from someone; ‘alienation’ was thus a

particular form of theft or confiscation.

The word was popularised by Karl Marx (1970) in his Economic and

Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 as a description for the

estrangement of people from their true human nature.People are

essentially creative. They re-shape the material world into objects

and in so doing put some of themselves into the things they make:

the products of their labour.

Ideology

Most generally an ideology is a coherent set of ideas

but more often than not it has the narrower meaning

distinguishes it from ‘belief system’) of some body of

ideas that justifies the domination of one group by

another. Although some users disclaim this implication,

the term (especially in its adjectival form ‘ideological’)

usually also suggests untruth.

FALSE CONSCIOUSNESSIt is common for social scientists to suggest that this or that group of

people is on specific occasions unable to understand correctly the

world, its place in it, or the causes of its actions. Marxists tend further to

argue that most people are unable fully to recognize their true interests

most of the time; ruling class ideology has made them partially blind to

their objective circumstances. A version of the idea has long been

influential in sociological accounts of popular or mass culture, which

after the Frankfurt School, is taken to be a bad thing because, like the

gladiatorial circuses organized by the Romans, it distracts the working

classes from seeing the true nature of their oppressed position. No

doubt people do not understand their situations objectively and

comprehensively. But the problem with the concept of false

consciousness is that it rests on the analyst’s claim to have a privileged

insight into the objective interests of others. No plausible defense ofsuch privilege has ever been made.

DOMINANT IDEOLOGY THESIS

Ideology suggests something more than a body of ideas; it

implies distortion and dishonesty for a particular purpose.

The well-known quotation from Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels – ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch

the ruling ideas’ – neatly expresses the proposition that

elites rule, not just by the threat of violence, but also by

persuading their subjects that their rule is legiti.mate

Forces of production

Although used inconsistently by Karl Marx and Frederich

Engels and by later Marxists, this term is useful in

distinguishing between those elements of the production

process that are necessary irrespective of the context in

which work takes place and the social relations of

production (which refers to such ‘political’ aspects of work

as social domination and exploitation). Among the forces

of production are raw materials, the tools or machinery

used to work those materials, labour power and skills.

Mode of Production

Marxists use the term to describe a historically

specific combination of forces of production and

relations of production; or the economic basis of

work and its social organization. So we have the

feudal mode of production and the Asiatic mode

of production.

Relations of production

In Marxist economics the means of production

(the machines, the raw materials, the skills and the

labour power) combine with the pattern of social

relations between different groups involved in

production (primarily the social classes) to form

specific modes of production.

DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

As an approach in the social sciences, materialism gives

little or no place to ideas or culture in the explanation of

social action and social institutions, and insists that what

really matters is the economy and the world of production.

The dialectic is an idea popularized by Georg Hegel who

believed that history progressed through a series of clashes

between an idea (the thesis) and its opposition (the

antithesis) to a new idea (the synthesis). Karl Marx replaced

ideas in Hegel’s model by material forces.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

Karl Marx used this term to describe his theory of social

evolution. It was historical in the sense that it was

concerned with the order in which social forms unfolded. It

was materialistic in the sense that, in contrast to G.W.F.

Hegel’s idealism, it stressed the primacy of the economy

(and the social relations created in that realm) over culture

and the development of new ideas.

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)

For Durkheim, society is made up of “social facts” which exceed our

intuitive understanding and must be investigated through observations

and measurements. These ideas are so central to sociology that

Durkheim is often seen as the “father” of sociology (Gouldner, 1958).

To found sociology as a discipline was indeed one of Durkheim’s

primary goals.

believed that sociology, as an idea, was born in France in the

nineteenth century. He wanted to turn this idea into a discipline, a well

defined field of study. He recognized the roots of sociology in the

ancient philosophers—such as Plato and Aristotle—and more

proximate sources in French philosophers such as Montesquieu and

Condorcet. However, in Durkheim’s view, previous philosophers did

not go far enough because they did not try to create an entirely new

discipline.

Social Facts

are objective, existing independently of any individual’s

consciousness of them, are external to the individual,

and coerce the individual to behave in specific ways. As

Durkheim puts it, social facts such as the family, the legal

system, or marriage, for example, “will be felt to be real,

living active forces, which because of the way they

determine the individual, prove their independence of

him”

AnomieFrom the Greek a-nomos, meaning without laws, mores, and

traditions, in sociology, the concept refers to absence of norms and

of the constraints these provide. In The Division of Labor in Society

(1893 [trans. 1960]) Emile Durkheim describes how the division of labor

fails to produce solidarity or social cohesion through an absence of

proper regulation of relations or a type of regulation not in keeping

with the development of the division of labor. He calls this condition

the anomic division of labor. In Suicide (1897 [trans. 1951]), anomic

suicide results from inappropriately low levels of social regulation.

Economic crises, both depression and excessive growth, are held to

be a source of anomie.

Solidarity in sociological explanation is the factor that gives reality to collective

entities that are more than the mere aggregation of individuals who

make up or populate them.

is responsible for the sense of belongingness that individuals

experience in social life, and for the direction of their conduct

towards mutuality or interconnectedness that characterizes social

behavior and interaction.

implies collective norms through which group members are obliged

but not forced to participate in group activities.

Collective Conscience

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to

average citizens of the same society forms a

determinate system which has its own life; one

may call it the collective or common conscience.

. . . It is, thus, an entirely different thing from

particular consciences, although it can be

realized only through them.

Max Weber (1864–1920) is probably the best known and most influential figure in sociological

theory .

is widely regarded as the greatest figure in the history of the social

sciences, and as one of the founders of sociology as a discipline.

has been called the "bourgeois Marx," became a sociologist "in a long

and intense debate with the ghost of Marx."The title of one of his major

works, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, his concern with the Protestant

ethic, even his superb studies in Weltreligionen, all show his sustained

interest in the problems and issues Marx had raised. Though Weber was

influenced by the German historical school-itself engaged in a critical

examination of Marx's (and Hegel's) conceptions-the main character of

his total life's work was shaped by his debate with Marx; and among

those who took up the Marxian challenge, Weber was perhaps the

greatest.

Rationalization refers to the historical development of institutional orders such as the

law, the market, capitalist enterprise, and the bureaucratic state, all

of which are organized by impersonal and amoral principles that

facilitate the instrumental pursuit of means and ends.

Weber’s account of rationalization processes remains unsurpassed in

its historical sensitivity. Not only did he distinguish different

rationalization processes in the history of every modern institutional

order and cultural sphere, but he also recognized moral (substantive)

limits to rationalization in every order except capitalism, where formal

rationality goes unchecked.

Bureaucracy

While bureaucracy as a practice stretches back into antiquity

(especially the Confucian bureaucracy of the Han dynasty), and

while Max Weber in Economy and Society (1922 [trans. 1978])

explored its traditional origins , the modern rational-legal

conception of bureaucracy emerged in France in the eighteenth

century. Indeed, the word is French in origin: it compounds the

French word for an office – a bureau – with the Greek word for

rule. In the nineteenth century, Germany provided the clearest

examples of its success.

Verstehen

A term of art in hermeneutics made prominent in the nineteenth century.

Max Weber incorporated this aspect of hermeneutics into his

sociological method, and the term then entered the sociological lexicon.

In the methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften, Verstehen, literally

meaning understanding, refers to the effort to grasp the relevant

meaningful, cognitive, emotional, spiritual, and motivational qualities of

the minds of individuals at historically significant moments.

Verstehen is more oriented to historical inquiry in a second sense as well.

In order to grasp the relevant states of mind of actors, a historical

investigator must be knowledgeable in the ways of life and cultural

conventions for framing situations typically found in indigenous cultural

settings.