Sociology (عمرانیات)
عمرانیات ایک معاشرتی علم ھے جس میں انسانی اداروں کا مطالعہ کیا جاتا
عمرانیات سماج میں موجود ھر جز کا مطالعہ کرتا ھے۔ ان کٓا وجہ جاننے کا کوشش اور حل پیش کرتا ھے، مختلف سماجی پہلووں میں سماجی ادارے، ثقافت، معاشی، سیاسی، مزھبی اداروں وغیرہ کا مطالعہ کرتا ھے۔
بانی عمرانیات کون تھا ؟ مسلم مفکرین کا خیال ھے کہ عبدالرحمان ابن خلدون عمرانیات کے پہلا اور حقیقی بانی ھے جس نے العمران کے نام سے اس علم کی بنیاد رکھی تھی اور سائنسی بنیاد پر سماجی مسائل پر بحث کیا تھا اور کئی مشہور کتابیں بھی لکھیں تھی
مگر چونکہ فرانسی مفکر آگسٹ کومٹے نے اس علم کا نام سوشیالوجی رکھا اس لیے مغربی مفکرین اس بات پر زور دیتے ھیں کہ سوشالوجی کا بانی کومٹے ھے کیوں کہ ھم العمران نہیں پڑھ رھے بلکہ سوشیالوجی کا مطالعہ کر رھے ییں ۔
عمرانیات کی تعریف میں ولیم گراھم سمنر کہتا ھے کہعمرانیا ت معاشرے کی سائنس ھے
ایمائیل ڈرکیم کہتا ھے کہ عمرانیات سماجی اداروں کی سائنس ھے۔
میک آیور کہتا ھے کہعمرانیات انسانی تعلقات کی سائنس ھے
عمرانیات سماج میں موجود ھر جز کا مطالعہ کرتا ھے۔ ان کٓا وجہ جاننے کا کوشش اور حل پیش کرتا ھے، مختلف سماجی پہلووں میں سماجی ادارے، ثقافت، معاشی، سیاسی، مزھبی اداروں وغیرہ کا مطالعہ کرتا ھے۔
بانی عمرانیات کون تھا ؟ مسلم مفکرین کا خیال ھے کہ عبدالرحمان ابن خلدون عمرانیات کے پہلا اور حقیقی بانی ھے جس نے العمران کے نام سے اس علم کی بنیاد رکھی تھی اور سائنسی بنیاد پر سماجی مسائل پر بحث کیا تھا اور کئی مشہور کتابیں بھی لکھیں تھی
مگر چونکہ فرانسی مفکر آگسٹ کومٹے نے اس علم کا نام سوشیالوجی رکھا اس لیے مغربی مفکرین اس بات پر زور دیتے ھیں کہ سوشالوجی کا بانی کومٹے ھے کیوں کہ ھم العمران نہیں پڑھ رھے بلکہ سوشیالوجی کا مطالعہ کر رھے ییں ۔
عمرانیات کی تعریف میں ولیم گراھم سمنر کہتا ھے کہعمرانیا ت معاشرے کی سائنس ھے
ایمائیل ڈرکیم کہتا ھے کہ عمرانیات سماجی اداروں کی سائنس ھے۔
میک آیور کہتا ھے کہعمرانیات انسانی تعلقات کی سائنس ھے
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Sociology Urdu Notes
Sociology does not claim to be a potentially all-inclusive and all-sufficing science of society which might absorb the more specialized social sciences. The late origin of sociology does not mean that its standing as compared with other social sciences is very weak. Its scope has been clearly demarcated right from the early days. Its concepts, terms, typologies and generalizations leading to theories, emerged from the very beginning. Moreover, there are striking similarities between sociology and other social sciences: man as a principal ingredient of their subject matters, applications of some methodological tools like observation, comparative method, casual explanations, testing and modification of hypothesis etc.
When so much is common to sociology on the one hand and the other social sciences it is understandable that there is some amount of commonness in the studies as well as mutual borrowings in the form of data, methods, approaches, concepts and even vocabulary.
In brief, sociology is a distinct social science, but it is not an isolated social science as the current trends indicate that every social science is depending more and more on inter-disciplinary approach, that is, historians and sociologists, for example, might even work together in curricular and search projects which would have been scarcely conceivable prior to about 1945, when each social science tendered to follow the course that emerged in the 19th century; to be confined to a single, distinguishable, though artificial, area of social reality.
Scope Of SociologyThere are two schools of thought with different viewpoints regarding scope and subject matter of sociology- formal school and synthetic school. According to formal school sociology was conceived to be a social science with a specifically defined field. This school had George Simmel, Ferdinand Tonnies, Alfred Vierkandt and Leopord Von Wiese as its main advocates. On the other hand the synthetic school with Durkheim, Hobhouse and Sorokin advocated a synthesis in form of coordination among all social sciences.Formal School of SociologyFormal school argued in favor of giving sociology a definite subject matter to make it a distinct discipline. It emphasized upon the study of forms of social relationships and regarded sociology as independent. According to Simmel sociology is a specific social science which describes, classifies, analyses and delineates the forms of social relationships or in other words social interactions should be classified into various forms or types and analysed.Simmel argued that social interactions have various forms. He carried out studies of such formal relationships as cooperation, competition, sub and super ordinate relationships and so forth. He said however diverse the interests are that give rise to these sociations; the forms in which the interests are realized may yet be identical. He emphasized on the process of abstraction of these forms from human relationship which are common to diverse situations.Vierkandt maintained that sociology should be concerned with ultimate forms of mental or psychic relationship which knit the people together in a society. According to Von Wiese there are two kinds of fundamental social processes in human society. Firstly the associative process concerning contact, approach, adaptation etc and secondly disassociate processes like competition and conflict. Apart from these two processes a mixed form of the associative and disassociative also exists. Each of these processes has sub-classes which in totality give approximately 650 forms of human relationships. Sociology should confine itself to the discovery of the fundamental force of change and persistence and should abstain from a historical study of concrete societies. Tonnies divided societies into two categories namely Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (association) on the basis of degree of intimacy among the members of the society. He has on the basis of forms of relationship tried to differentiate between community and society.Max Weber also makes out a definite field for sociology. According to him the aim of sociology is to interpret or understand social behaviour.But social behavior does not cover the whole field of human relations. Indeed not all human interactions are social. Sociology is concerned with the analysis and classification of types of social relationships.Criticism of formal SchoolFormal school has been criticized on the issue that it has emphasized on merely abstract forms and neglected the concrete contents of social life. Abstract forms separated from concrete relations cannot be studied. Ginsberg says that a study of social relationships would remain barren if it is conducted in the abstract without the full knowledge of the terms to which in concrete life they relate. Sociology doesn't alone study the forms of social relationship. Political science, International law also studies forms of social relationship. The conception of pure sociology is not practical as no social science can be studied in isolation from other social sciences.Synthetic School of SociologySynthetic school wanted sociology to be synthesis of the social sciences and thus wanted to widen the scope of sociology. According to Durkheim, sociology has three principal divisions' namely-Social morphology, social physiology and general sociology. Social morphology is concerned with geographical or territorial basis of life of people such as population, its size, density and distribution etc.This can be done at two levels -analysis of size and quality of population which affects the quality of social relationship and social groups. Secondly the study of social structure or description of the main forms of social groups and institutions with their classification. Social physiology deals with the genesis and nature of various social institutions namely religion, morals, law and economic institutions etc.In general sociology the main aim is to formulate general social laws. Attempt is made to find out if there are links among various institutions which would be treated independently in social physiology and in the course to discover general social laws.Hobhouse perceived sociology as a science which has the whole social life of man as its sphere. Its relations with the other social sciences are considered to be one of mutual exchange and mutual stimulation. Karl Mannheim's divides sociology into two main sections-systematic and general sociology and historical sociology. Systematic sociology describes one by one the main factors of living together as far as they may be found in every kind of society. The historical sociology deals with the historical variety and actuality of the general forms of society. It falls into two sections-comparative sociology and social dynamics. Comparative sociology deals mainly with the historical variations of the same phenomenon and tries to find by comparison general features as separated from industrial features. Social dynamics deals with the interrelations between the various social factors and institutions in a certain given society for example in a primitive society. Ginsberg has summed up the chief functions of sociology as it seeks to provide a classification of types and forms of social relationships especially of those which have come to be defined institutions and associations. It tries to determine the relation between different parts of factors of social life for example the economic and political, the moral and the legal, the intellectual and the social elements. It endeavors to disentangle the fundamental conditions of social change and persistence and to discover sociological principles governing social life.ConclusionThus on the basis of viewpoints of different sociologists we can get a general outline of the scope of sociology. Firstly the analysis of various institutions, associations and social groups which are results of social relationships of individuals should be the concern of sociology. Secondly the links among different parts of society should be studied. This objective is dealt with justice by functionalist school of sociology and Marxist school also gives importance to this viewpoint. Thus social structure should be given adequate importance in subject matter of sociology. Thirdly sociology addresses itself to the factors which contribute to social stability and social change. Fourthly sociology should also explain the trend of the changing pattern and the aftermath of the changes in the society.Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857)
The Theological phase was seen from the perspective of 19th century France as preceding the Enlightenment, in which man's place in society and society's restrictions upon man were referenced to God. By the "Metaphysical" phase, he was not referring to the Metaphysics of Aristotle or any other ancient Greek philosopher, for Comte was rooted in the problems of French society subsequent to the revolution of 1789. This Metaphysical phase involved the justification of universal rights as being on a vauntedly higher plane than the authority of any human ruler to countermand, although said rights were not referenced to the sacred beyond mere metaphor.
What he announced by his term of the Scientific phase, which came into being after the failure of the revolution and of Napoleon, was that people could find solutions to social problems and bring them into force despite the proclamations of human rights or prophecy of the will of God. In this regard he was similar to Karl Marx and Jeremy Bentham. For its time, this idea of a Scientific phase was considered up-to-date, although from a later standpoint it is too derivative of classical physics and academic history. The other universal law he called the 'encyclopedic law'. By combining these laws, Comte developed a systematic and hierarchical classification of all sciences, including inorganic physics (astronomy, earth science and chemistry) and organic physics (biology and for the first time, physique sociale, later renamed sociologie).This idea of a special science-not the humanities, not metaphysics-for the social was prominent in the 19th century and not unique to Comte. The ambitious-many would say grandiose-way that Comte conceived of it, however, was unique.Comte saw this new science, sociology, as the last and greatest of all sciences, one that would include all other sciences, and which would integrate and relate their findings into a cohesive whole.
Comte's explanation of the Positive philosophy introduced the important relationship between theory, practice and human understanding of the world. On page 27 of the 1855 printing of Harriet Martineau's translation of The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, we see his observation that, "If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts can not be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them. He coined the word "altruism" to refer to what he believed to be a moral obligations of individuals to serve others and place their interests above one's own. He opposed the idea of individual rights, maintaining that they were not consistent with this supposed ethical obligation (Catechisme Positiviste).
Comte formulated the law of three stages, one of the first theories of the social evolutionism: that human development (social progress) progresses from the theological stage, in which nature was mythically conceived and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from supernatural beings, through metaphysical stage in which nature was conceived of as a result of obscure forces and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from them until the final positive stage in which all abstract and obscure forces are discarded, and natural phenomena are explained by their constant relationship. This progress is forced through the development of human mind, and increasing application of thought, reasoning and logic to the understanding of world.During his lifetime, Comte's work was sometimes viewed skeptically because he elevated Postivism to a religion and named himself the Pope of Positivism. Comte coined the term "sociology", and is usually regarded as the first sociologist. His emphasis on the interconnectedness of different social elements was a forerunner of modern functionalism. Nevertheless, like many others from his time, certain elements of his work are regarded as eccentric and unscientific, and his grand vision of sociology as the center-piece of all the sciences has not come to fruition.His emphasis on a quantitative, mathematical basis for decision-making remains with us today. It is a foundation of the modern notion of Positivism, modern quantitative statistical analysis, and business decision-making.
Karl Marx (1818- 1883)Karl Marx's (1818- 1883) thought was strongly influenced by: The most important concepts of Karl MarxThe following concepts of Marx have aided sociological thought significantly;Marx's view of history, which came to be called the materialist conception of history (and which was developed further as the philosophy of dialectical materialism) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps - episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed the ancient institution of legal slavery that was practiced in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet. (Hegel's philosophy remained and remains in direct opposition to Marxism on this key point.) Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly. The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was Engels' book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution.The notion of labour is fundamental in Marx's thought. Basically, Marx argued that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour" and the capacity to transform nature labour power. For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the human mind and human imagination:A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1) Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic and, with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting "nature" with "history". Sometimes they use the phrase "existence precedes consciousness". The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is - social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability. Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time.Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means / forces of production, literally those things, such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict. Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Conflict between social classes being something which is inherent in all human history:The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (The Communist Manifesto, Chap. 1) Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour-power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour - one's capacity to transform the world - is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market. Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labour-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo. Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity - when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land or tools necessary to produce. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power to live are "proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois." (Marx considered this an objective description of capitalism, distinct from any one of a variety of ideological claims of or about capitalism). The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists. Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one place and sell them in another; more precisely, they buy things in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour. The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx understood that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy. Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would in general be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor - must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." In the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School. Their work is known as Critical Theory, a type of Marxist philosophy and cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendance of Stalinism and Fascism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice for divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise.Other influential non-Bolshevik Marxists at that time include Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism. Henryk Grossman, who elaborated the mathematical basis of Marx's 'law of capitalist breakdown', was another affiliate of the Frankfurt School. Also prominent during this period was the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of the Communist Party.In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by reconstructing it through the lens of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic movement which also included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy. |
Veblen (1857 -1929)
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857 -1929) was a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist.The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), a satiric look at American society written while he taught at the University of Chicago, is his most famous work. He coined the widely used phrases "conspicuous consumption" and "pecuniary emulation".Thorstein Veblen's career began amidst the growth of the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. He argued that economics was inevitably shaped by culture and that no universal "human nature" could possibly be invoked to explain the variety of norms and behaviors discovered by the new science of anthropology.
One of his most important analytical contributions was what came to be known as the "ceremonial / instrumental dichotomy". Veblen saw that although every society is dependent on tools and skills to support the "life process", every society also appeared to have a stratified structure of status ("invidious distinctions") that ran contrary to the imperatives of the "instrumental" ("technological") aspects of group life. This led rise to the dichotomy: the "ceremonial" was related to the past, supporting the tribal legends; "instrumental" was oriented toward the technological imperative to judge value by the ability to control future consequences. The "Veblenian dichotomy" was a specialized variant of the "instrumental theory of value" due to John Dewey, with whom Veblen was to make contact briefly at The University of Chicago.
The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise together constitute an alternative construction on the neoclassical marginalist theories of consumption and production, respectively. Both are clearly founded on the application of the "Veblenian dichotomy" to cultural patterns of behavior and are therefore implicitly but unavoidably bound to a critical stance; it is not possible to read Veblen with any understanding while failing to grasp that the dichotomy is a valuational principle at its core. The ceremonial patterns of activity are not bound to just any past, but rather to the one that generated a specific set of advantages and prejudices that underly the current structure of rewards and power. Instrumental judgments create benefits according to an entirely separate criterion, and therefore are inherently subversive. This line of analysis was more fully and explicitly developed by Clarence E. Ayres of the University of Texas at Austin from the 1920s. In addition to these two books, his monograph Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution and the essay entitled "Why Economics is not an Evolutionary Science" have been influential in shaping the research agenda for following generations of social scientists. His ideas were also inspirational to the technocratic movement.
Max Weber
Sociology according to Weber is not confined to study of social action alone. It studies certain other factors as well. But the basic fact is that social action which according to Max Weber is that action is social in so far as by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by acting individual it takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course.
Social action according to Weber possesses the following characteristics:Relationship with the action of others: No action shall be called a social action unless it has relationship with the present, past or future behaviour of others. Others are not necessarily known persons. They may be unknown individuals as well. Social action includes both failures to act and possess acquiescence may be oriented to the past, present or accepted further behaviour of others.
Social action is not isolated: Social action in order to be really social has to be oriented to the behaviour of other animate things as well. Worship before an idol or worship in a lonely place is not a social action. It has to be oriented to the behaviour of animate beings as well. In every kind of action even overt action is social in the sense of the present discussions. Overt action is non social if it is oriented solely to the behaviour of the inanimate objects.
Result of cooperation and struggle between individual and members of the society: Mere contact with human beings is not a social action. It should deal with the cooperation and struggle between various individuals. A crowd that may collect at a place does not necessarily indulge in the social action unless it starts behaving with one another. Social action is not identical with the similar action, actions of many persons or action influenced by others.
Has a meaningful understanding with other, action or action of others: Mere contact with others or actions in relation to others are not a social action. Social action should have a meaningful understanding with the social action of others. In every type of contact of human beings has a social character. This is rather confined to cases where the actor’s behaviour is meaningfully oriented to that of others.
Weber argued that to explain an action we must interpret it in terms of it’s subjectively intended meaning. A person’s action is to be explained in terms of the consequences he or she intended purpose rather than in terms of its actual effects the two are often at variance. A subjectively intended meaning is also a causal explanation of the action, in that the end in view is a cause of present actions. For Weber it is important that action is defined in terms of meaningfulness and sociological analysis must proceed by identifying the meaning that actions have for actors.
Durkheim (1858 - 1917)
Emile Durkheim (1858 - 1917) was concerned primarily with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era, when things such as shared religious and ethnic background could no longer be assumed. In order to study social life in modern societies, Durkheim sought to create one of the first scientific approaches to social phenomena. Along with Herbert Spencer, Durkheim was one of the first people to explain the existence and quality of different parts of a society by reference to what function they served in keeping the society healthy and balanced-a position that would come to be known as functionalism.Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the sum of its parts. Thus unlike his contemporary Max Weber, he focused not on what motivates the actions of individual people (methodological individualism), but rather on the study of social facts, a term which he coined to describe phenomena which have an existence in and of themselves and are not bound to the actions of individuals. He argued that social facts had an independent existence greater and more objective than the actions of the individuals that composed society and could only be explained by other social facts rather than, say, by society's adaptation to a particular climate or ecological niche.
In his 1893 work The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim examined how social order was maintained in different types of societies. He focused on the division of labor, and examined how it differed in traditional societies and modern societies. Authors before him such as Herbert Spencer and Ferdinand Toennies had argued that societies evolved much like living organisms, moving from a simple state to a more complex one resembling the workings of complex machines. Durkheim reversed this formula, adding his theory to the growing pool of theories of social progress, social evolutionism and social darwinism. He argued that traditional societies were 'mechanical' and were held together by the fact that everyone was more or less the same, and hence had things in common. In traditional societies, argues Durkheim, the collective consciousness entirely subsumes individual consciousness-social norms are strong and social behavior is well-regulated.In modern societies, he argued, the highly complex division of labor resulted in 'organic' solidarity. Different specializations in employment and social roles created dependencies that tied people to one another, since people no longer could count on filling all of their needs by themselves. In 'mechanical' societies, for example, subsistence farmers live in communities which are self-sufficient and knit together by a common heritage and common job. In modern 'organic' societies, workers earn money, and must rely on other people who specialize in certain products (groceries, clothing, etc.) to meet their needs. The result of increasing division of labor, according to Durkheim, is that individual consciousness emerges distinct from collective consciousness-often finding itself in conflict with collective consciousness.Durkheim also made an association of the kind of solidarity in a given society and the preponderance of a law system. He found that in societies with mechanical solidarity the law is generallyrepressive: the agent of a crime or deviant behaviour would suffer a punishment, that in fact would compensate collective conscience neglected by the crime-the punishment acts more to preserve the unity of consciences. On the other hand, in societies with organic solidarity the law is generally restitutive: it aims not to punish, but instead to restitute normal activity of a complex society.The rapid change in society due to increasing division of labor thus produces a state of confusion with regard to norms and increasing impersonality in social life, leading eventually to relative normlessness, i.e. the breakdown of social norms regulating behavior; Durkheim labels this state anomie. From a state of anomie come all forms of deviant behavior, most notably suicide.
Durkheim developed the concept of anomie later in Suicide, published in 1897. In it, he explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, explaining that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, people have a certain level of attachment to their groups, which he calls social integration. Abnormally high or low levels of social integration may result in increased suicide rates; low levels have this effect because low social integration results in disorganized society, causing people to turn to suicide as a last resort, while high levels cause people to kill themselves to avoid becoming burdens on society. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. This work has influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study. Finally, Durkheim is remembered for his work on 'primitive' (i.e. non-Western) people in books such as his 1912 volume Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and the essay Primitive Classification that he wrote with Marcel Mauss. These works examine the role that religion and mythology have in shaping the worldview and personality of people in extremely (to use Durkheim's phrase) 'mechanical' societies.Durkheim was also very interested in education. Partially this was because he was professionally employed to train teachers, and he used his ability to shape curriculum to further his own goals of having sociology taught as widely possible. More broadly, though, Durkheim was interested in the way that education could be used to provide French citizens the sort of shared, secular background that would be necessary to prevent anomie in modern societies. It was to this end that he also proposed the formation of professional groups to serve as a source of solidarity for adults.Durkheim argued that education has many functions:
1. To reinforce social solidarity
- History: Learning about individuals who have done good things for the many makes an individual feel insignificant.
- Pledging Allegiance: Makes individuals feel part of a group and therefore less likely to break rules.
- School is a society in miniature. It has a similar hierarchy, rules, expectations to the "outside world". It trains young people to fulfill roles.
- Sorts students out into skill groups. Teaches students to go into work depending on what they're good at.
