Assignment: Ch. 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 for Test One.
Chapter One:
The Rise Of Sociology:
- classical: foundational statements on sociology
- began between French Revolution(1789-1799) and WWI.
- 18th century: rural, conservative, uneducated, isolated, lacking in organizational affiliation, largely ignored by the state
- 20th century: liberal, well-educated, members of unions, professional organizations, closely supervised by governmental bureaucracies-modern, bureaucratic, nation-state.
- feudal distinctions between commoner and aristocrat were erased? ideals of democracy and equality of rights ballooned.
- 1920, average American lives in an urban area
- more technology, bureaucracy, governmental intervention.
- weapons of mass destruction were invented during WWI(1914-1918)
- women's rights, union-organization, divide between urban, blue collar work and suburban white-collar work.
- pop-music, rejection of traditional sexual/aesthetic mores, and drug experimentation came to the fore.
- Louis XIV(1774 to 1792): very difficult to relate to
- modern world began between 1700 and 1900.
- the traditional, feudal system was abolished
Issues
a) social atomization(Hegel, Marx, Durheim)
b) alienation
c) loneliness
d) social disorganization (Comte, Durkheim)
e) secularization and decline of traditional religious beliefs( Weber, Comte, Durkheim)
f) a growing pessimism about individual's capacity to take rational control of their destiny (Freud, Pareto)
g) widening class division, class conflict, social fracture, and social dissension (Simmel, Pareto, others...)
- Sociology: maturity between 1880(end of 19th century) and 1920(beginning of 20th Century)
- before sociology: Hegel, Marx, Veblen, Nietzche, and Freud
- Hegel, professor of philosophy
- Marx, intellectual giant, great influence on sociology
- Veblen, founder of modern social economics
- Nietzche, antimodern critique
Agenda
- Marxist bias: working class is exploited
- Weberian: anti-Marxist agenda
- ideology: helps groups organize conceptions of authority and shared commitments: attempt to make political society meaningful and legitimate
- ideology: places limits on what may be thought
- strive for truth when blind adherence to custom, tradition, and habit are loosening their grip on the human mind
When is Sociology best:
- scientific and ideological: Spencer, Pareto
- choose among values and different social options
- based on natural sciences-"positivists"
- anti-positivism: wants to enhance human freedom and create humans that are free because they are self-reflective.
Bad Problems
- bureaucracy (Weber, Simmel)
- specialized roles/ diverse modes of consciousness make social relationships difficult-Durkheim, Comte, Spencer
- Pareto: inequality was a fixity in all societies
- Veblen: inequality can be overcome
- modern societies require a "distorted" or "false" consciousness to function effectively (Marx, Freud)
Institutionalization
- Comte, Spencer: academic outsiders
- Durkheim, first professor of society in France
- Weber, Simmel: first sociological society in Germany
- Durkheim believed a sociologist could be a major figure within the hierarchy of a nation
- Weber believed a sociologist could have a limited role, emphasized the limits of sociological knowledge.
- Comte, Durkheim, Spencer, Pareto, Simmel-positivism.
- D, C,S: instrumental science, help with cause/effect relations
- C, D, restructure social relationships in ways that are moral and harmonious
- Spencer, governmental intervention would disturb the "natural" balance
- Comte, Durkheim: interventionistic reform
- Mead: Scientifically grounded reformism
- 1914 to the 1960s: sociology could become as influential as physics or chemistry?
Issue:
- issue of power and domination: is there something fundamentally wrong with the structure of modern societies?
- French and German theorists: interested in broad and theoretical/philosophical issues
- Durkheim allied with the liberal, secular, and reform-oriented wing of the French political establishment
- Weber: tradition emphasized the uniqueness of human existence
- Weber: Germany was struggling to establish a sense of national identity
Enlightenment Philosophy and Classical Sociological Theory
- Enlightenment(1600s, 1700s) had its beginnings in the European Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries
- critical reaction against traditional authority
- knowledge-of nature/self couldn't derive from authority/tradition
- Rene Descartes(1596-1650) and Isaac Newton(1642-1727)
Descartes
- careful observation and clarity of expression served the pursuit of knowledge more faithfully than blind obedience to the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church
- his works were banned by the Roman Catholic Church
Newton:
- British Puritan scientist
- no contradiction between Protestant faith and use of reason to understand the universal and necessary laws of nature
- science upheld the dignity of man
French philosophers: Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot believed that both physical and social worlds could be understood by reason
- the universe had to follow natural laws
- natural laws, reason, social analysis, rational self understanding could lead to progress
- Diderot believed religious dogma was truth's worst enemy
- was a deist, ended his life as an atheist and a materialist
- no person had a natural right to govern another
- Rousseau: civil liberties derive from a social contract to which individuals must consent freely
- Rousseau: human freedom and potential are not realized individually
- Marx: Capitalism destroys an individual's "social essence."
- Immanual Kant, the greatest Enlightenment theorist?
- Kant: Enlightenment is leaving immaturity, the courage to use your own intelligence, you need the freedom to make the use of reason.
- reason> authority/tradition
- freedom/truth: complementary
- Rousseau: an individual is the product of social factors, must create institutions to help humanity achieve its true potential
- Kant: moral self-direction
- Kant: a civilized society is one that encourages individuals to act morally. Morality, is the outcome of free will.
- Kant: man is a natural object and a moral subject.
- Simmel/Weber: the individual could not be constrained by determinate laws
- Kant: as a rational, independent moral entity, the individual is free from at least some extrinsic, causal determinants of behavior
- Comte/Pareto: counter-Enlightenment: skeptical about the claim that individuals were potentially rational and perfectable beings
- Nietzche/Weber: the freedom of individuals to create meaning would destroy meaning
- Kant: no guidelines on how to behave
- Comte: Voltaire/Rousseau were partly responsible for the French Revolution and some of its excesses
- the jacobins of the French Republic and the founding fathers of the American republic liked Voltaire/Rousseau
- the capitalist class replaced the aristocratic class,
- end of 1700s, bourgeoisie were in control of Britain, France, and the U.S.A.
SOCIAL EVOLUTIONISM AND CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
- conservative theorists didn't grasp the variety/contingency of social forms
- they believed America after WWII was a well-integrated, well-ordered social system
- 1) dualism is an awkward/fragmented approach
- Marx/Weber: How does a society/institution reflect on history?
- Spencer/Hegel: Develop a unified field theory of order in and through change
- social order and social change: thought of together
- believed some societies were more advanced than others
- Christian: time is linear, only way crucifixion is significant
- Greeks: Change is repetitive: advance, maturity, decline
- non-western societies were considered less advanced
- teleology: a belief that there is an innate drive (telos) toward an end state
- Comte: theological to positive
- Marx: primitive to advanced communism
- classical: change would involve a continuation and development of the final form
- Hegel: history strives to overcome alienation
- Mead: influenced by Hegel
- Charles Darwin: biology is determined by environmental factors and always subject to further change
- classical social evolutionists: confused evolution with development
- development, pre-determined
- evolution, open-ended
- Comte: Theological(fetishism, polytheism, monotheism), Metaphysical, Positive (TMP)
- Marx: Primitive communism, ancient slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, advanced communism.
- Lewis Henry Morgan: savagery, barbarianism, civilization
Social Evolution
- Comte, outcome of the evolution of human mental states
- Hegel, dialectical movement based on the alienation of the spirit
- Marx: dialectical and materialist view of change
- Spencer: social evolutionism was subject to a universal law from incoherent homogenaity to coherent heterogenaity
- Veblen: materialist and cultural causal analysis of why social evolution occurred.
- Comte, Veblen, Hegel, Marx, Spencer: idea of progress in theories of development
- Spencer: progress is inherent in social development
- Marx: organized actions of people fighting for evolutionary developments (capitalism to state socialism to communism)
- Weber/Pareto: critical of "progress"
- Pareto: human instincts don't change,
- Weber: legal/rational authority over traditional authority led to a demystified and bureaucratized social life.
- Durkheim: Suicide results from decline of rules in one stage of society with no new set of rules.
The Problem Of Capitalism:
- imperialistic expansion, anti-aristocratic revolution, the industrial revolution> Western modernity
- information about other, "primitive" societies grew
- Spencer/Mead: sympathetic to the capitalist vision
- Marx: property ownership and human rights are limited within capitalism
- Durkheim/Comte: pro-and-against republicanism
- Durkheim/Comte: equality before the law, private property rights, the abolition of aristocratic privilege BUT want to restrain acquisitive desires.
- bourgeois behind rapid industrialization
- problems: low wages, unsafe conditions, long hours
- Spencer: free-market industrialism
- Durkheim/Comte: industrialization was chaotic but conditions for workers could be improved
- Marx/Veblen: a new class society would emerge
FRANCE: REVOLUTION AND COLLECTIVISM:
- France, most powerful nation state in Europe
- unified nation, centralized government
- unified, wealthy, style, aristocratic culture
- center of learning and social philosophy
- "salon society" encouraged social speculation, Voltaire and Rousseau were patronized by the leisured classes
- philosophers wanted to be thought of as enlightened, cultivated, and in touch with the latest intellectual fashions
- the middle class was most receptive to the idea of social change
- Louis XVI: extravagent debt> Estates General was summoned
- Three estates: aristocracy, clergy, commoners
- the commoners refused to approve the king's request for money, initiated an insurrection in the streets of Paris
- France switched between republicanism/dictatorship
- the workers of France saw their interests different from those of the ruling middle classes, turned to socialism
- socialism: utopian experimentation to advocating violent revolution
- Paris Commune of 1871, a worker-controlled socialist government-ultimately destroyed by government troops. 20,000 working-class citizens lost their lives.
- 1789-1919: the French favored social collectivism over individualism
- French Catholic: traditional, reactionary. Conservatives romanticized feudal life.
- socialists wanted an egalitarian and industrial collective.
- Marx lived in exile in Paris during the 1840s
- Comte/ Durkheim: conservative emphasis on the organic good of the collective
- Durkheim: indirect democracy
- Comte: antidemocratic, rule by an intellectual elite
GERMANY: DISUNITY AND IDEALISM
- Germany had many independent principalities
- boundaries by politics/religious differences
- modernization needed a centralized political authority?
- Germans lived under princes or the kaiser
- German academics were idealistic to escape from the disunity?
- Hegel/Marx: focused on community/unity
- Weber, concerned with legitimate authority
- Weber: Germany was backward, unimaginative, authoritarian
- Weber: wanted Germany to adjust to industrialism, bureaucracy, modernization
ITALY: CITY-STATES AND MACHIAVELLIANISM
- after fall of the Roman Empire, northern Europe developed a feudal order
- Italy split into city states
- Florence, Genoa, Venice: dominated foreign trade.
- Italian banks financed the rest of Europe
- both sides of a European war borrowed from the same financier
- wealth did not lead to unity
- wars created mercenary groups
- Italian political life-shifting alliances, self-serving deals, bribings, secret agreements, organized poisonings, planned assassinations
- Catholic leaders often declared war on the pope
- Niccollo Machiavelli wrote the Prince-political control is best taken through deceit, violence, and threat.
- northern Italian bourgeousie was unable to take control of the Italian state
- Italy-economically backward
- Hegel, Durkheim, Marx-political authority associated with morals
- Pareto: political/moral authority are not one
BRITAIN: INDUSTRIALISM AND UTILITARIANISM
- England, first to experience the industrial revolution
- powerful industrialists achieved power peacefully
- The Conservative party-party of landowners
- The Liberal party: party of the entrepreneurial and middle classes
- Benjamin Disraeli, radical, friend of the lower-middle classes
- Adam Smith + Adam Ferguson: highly successful economy was one of "natural" balance
- government interference and regulation were harmful
- British middle classes-less time for Hegel, Durkheim, or Marx.
- England: deregulation, decentralization, and personal freedom were important value orientations in England.
- England: Equality meant ability to compete
- France: Equality of outcome
- English competitive individualism made utilitarianism possible and meaningful
- Utilitarianism: Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
- 1. analysis of the utility of various actions in terms of the overall increase in general happiness or in terms of improvement in the general welfare
- 2. open opportunity
- 3. equality of rights before the law
- 4. minimum of governmental regulation
THE UNITED STATES: EXPANSION AND VOLUNTARISM
- The U.S. had no indigenous aristocracy
- 1. individualism
- 2. progress
- 3. opportunity
- a democratic society for white, male, middle-aged property owners was largely realized
- industrial and railroad boom after the Civil War
- the US surpassed Britain, France, Germany by 1900
- workers toiled for low wages/ 1000 controlled the main political parties and derived most of their income from unearned income
- Veblen, critical of wealthy, predatory businessmen
- Mead, believed the US was becoming more egalitarian
- voluntarism, the ability to choose between different types of behavior
NON-EUROPEAN ANTICIPATIONS OF SOCIOLOGY: SUN-TZU AND IBN KHALDUN
- sociology: offshoot of modernity and modern forms of experience
- promotes reflexivity and self-reflection
- Sun-Tzu: effective in the kingdom of Wu
- secular, analytical, instrumental approach to the social
- The Art Of War, stresses strategic planning
- the motivations of followers can be manipulated
- a long military confrontation weakens the peasant class that the rulers depend on
- Machiavelli-like emphasis
- Ibn Khaldun, causal factors that affect the rise and fall of civilizations
THE INFLUENCE OF CLASS,RACE, AND GENDER ON CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT
- all white and European men
- all were bourgeois, middle-class not aristocratic
- historical exclusion of racial minorities, working-class individuals, and women from sociology's institutionalization
- Nietzche: antisociological
