- Theories in sociology are abstract, general ideas that help organize and make sense of the social world
- Epistemology
Philosophical Roots of Classical Sociological Theory
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
- Suggested that people are responsible for creating the social world around them, and thus society could be changed through conscious reflection
- Was one of the first theorists to view people as responsible and accountable for the society the created
- In his most famous work Leviathan, meaning “monster” or “ruler”, Hobbes argued that since people are naturally rational beings, in order to gain peace and protection they would be willing to enter into a collective agreement that would see them give up some of their individual freedom and autonomy to an absolute authority
John Locke (1632-1704)
- Argued that God was responsible for the emergence of society and government
- Tabula rasa
Charles De Montesquieu (1689-1755)
- Suggested that people had never existed outside, or without, society
- Proposed that humans were defined and created by society
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
- Human beings did exist within a state of nature – a state in which people were presocial
- Believed that people entered into the social contract as free and equal individuals, and not because they had to
The Enlightenment
- Represents an intellectual movement that began around 1650 and ended with the French Revolution (1789-1799)
- Intellectuals were French (this is the main group of Enlightenment, often referred to as Philosphes)
- Before the Enlightenment, people’s thinking was directed by God, the Church, and the aristocracy
- Enlightenment thinking promoted human agency, and thus was a clear continuation of the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau
Functionalism
- Functionalists views the world as a dynamic system
- Social structures exist to help people fulfill their wants and desires
- View human society as being similar to an organism
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
- Coining the term survival of the fittest
- Moved beyond the biological application of evolution and argued that societies can be selected for
- Social Darwinism – Spencer’s assertion that societies evolve according to the same principles as do biological organisms
- Societies evolve because there is a reason for the changes
Emile Durkheim (1858 – 1917)
- Human actions originate in the collective rather than in the individual
- This assumption implies that the choices we make are not our own
- Individual behaviours are inspired by the collective social forces
- Collective conscience – drives your behaviours without you even being aware of it
- The significance of social facts is that they are evidence of the collective conscience
- When people do not feel connected to the group, they commit egoistic suicide; if they feel too connected, they commit altruistic suicide; if society fails to provide adequate direction and regulation of behaviour, they commit anomic suicide; when overregulation exists and people feel that life is too harsh and strict, they commit fatalistic suicide
- Anomie – Durkheim’s term for a state of normalness that results in the lack of clear goals and may ultimately result in higher suicide rates
- Mechanical solidarity – describes early societies based on similarities and independence
- Organic solidarity – describes later societies organised around interdependence and the increasing division of labour
- A social fact is external to the self, beyond the biography of the self, affects individual actions, behaviours, thoughts… (religion, fashion, education)
- Social Solidarity – a similarity in belief leads to the development of a conscience collective
- Collective conscience: similar ideas of morality
- Collective consciousness: similar ideas of time, space, reality
- Social Solidarity: Division of Labour
| Organic | Mechanical |
| Present in modern societies | Present in traditional societies |
| High dynamic density | Low dynamic density |
| High degree of labour specialization | Low degree of labour specialization |
Talcott Parsons (1902 – 1979)
- Social action theory – Parsons’ framework attempting to separate behaviours from actions to explain why people do what they do
- Four functional imperatives that are required for a social system to maintain homeostasis (AGIL):
- Adaptation: the social system must be able to gather and distribute sufficient environmental resources
- Goal Attainment: the system needs to establish clear goals and priorities
- Integration: the system needs to maintain solidarity within it as well as have the different units in society works together
- Latency: the system needs to motivate individuals to release their frustration in socially appropriate ways and to the imperatives of tension maintenance (recognizes the internal tensions and strains that influence all actors) and pattern maintenance (involves socially appropriate ways to display tensions and strains)
- Parsons’ AGIL typology was an important contribution to functionalists theory as it outlined the mechanisms for maintaining social equilibrium
Robert K. Merton (1910 – 2003)
- Social structures have many functions, some more obvious than others
- His analysis of manifest functions (the intended consequences of an action or social pattern) and latent functions (the unintended consequences of an action or social pattern)
Critiquing Functionalism
- Functionalism correctly assumes that changed in one area of society may lead to changed in others
- Functionalists assert that change is possible when the system faces challenges or dysfunctions
Conflict Theory
- Is based on the assumption that society is grounded upon inequality and competition over scarce resources that ultimately result in conflict, which often inspires social change
- Two basic principles that all conflict theorists share are (1) power is the core of all social relationships and is scarce and unequally divided among members of society, and (2) social values and the dominant ideology are vehicles by which the powerful promote their own interests at the expense of the weak
- Natural or physical inequality – according to Rousseau, inequality based on physical differences established by nature (e.g., strength, intelligence)
- Moral or political inequality – according to Rousseau, inequality based on human classification of valuable things (e.g., money, social status)
Marx and Engels
- To understand social development and history one needs to understand dialectics and idealism
- Dialectics – Hegel’s view of society as the result of oppositions, contradictions, and tensions from which new ideas and social change can emerge
- Idealism – the belief that the human mind and consciousness are more important in understanding the human condition than is the material world
- Marx rejected Hegel’s idealistic philosophy as being impractical and dismissive of the importance of the interaction of the material and social worlds
- Mark and Engels believed that human consciousness and human interaction with the material world could can change society, a perspective at odds with conservative reaction theorists, who believed that an external force defined and directed human activity
- Marx’s Base/Superstructure Model – the base is the material and economic foundation for society; the superstructure can be understood as all of the things that society values and aspires to once its material needs are met
- The forces of production are the physical and intellectual resources a society has with which to make a living
- Relations of production – a relationship based on power that defines a society’s use of productive assets and the relationship between social classes
- Ideology – a set of beliefs and values that support and justify the ruling class of a society
Critiquing Conflict Theory
- Conflict approach tends to diminish the many areas of our lives where we experience an uncoerced consensus about things we feel are important
- Also sometimes fails to acknowledge that much struggle today is not a personal desire for power but instead is institutionalized
- Insistence on the primary and driving role of economics and materialist interpretations of social life
- It focuses too much on macro-level issues and fails to investigate individual motivations and reactions to tensions and conflicts in people’s lives
Symbolic Interactionism
- Emphasize that society and all social structures are nothing more than the creations of interacting people and that they can be changed
- According to Ritzer, symbolic interactionism maintains seven fundamental principles:
- Unlike other animals, human beings have the capacity for thought
- Human thinking is shaped by social interaction
- In social settings, people learn meanings and symbols that allow them to exercise their distinctively human capacity for thought
- Meanings and symbols enable people to carry on uniquely human actions and interactions
- People are able to change meanings and symbols that they use given their interpretation of various social situations
- People are able to make these modifications in part because they have the unique ability to interact with themselves. By doing so, they examine different courses of action and select the one with the most advantages and the least disadvantages
- The culmination of patterns of action and interaction make up groups and societies
- Highlight the important ways in which meanings are created, constructed, mediated, and changed by members of a group or society
Max Weber (1864 – 1920)
- Verstehen – Weber’s term for a deep understanding and interpretation of subjective social meanings
- “put yourself in someone else’s shoes”
George Simmel (1858 – 1918)
- One of the first sociologists to challenge and reject, the organic theories of social development as proposed by Comte, Durkheim, and Spencer
- Society was not a living thing nor was it an abstract creation of the intellect
- Simmel viewed society as the summation of human experience and its patterened interactions
- Formal society – Simmel’s theory that argues that different human interactions, once isolated from their content, can be similar in form
George Herbert Mead (1863 – 1931)
- Suggested that the “social organism” is not an organic individual but “a social group of individual organisms”
- The individual exists as a member of a social organism, and his or her acts can be understood only in the context of social actions that involve other individuals
- The concept of self emerges once individual actors can reflect on themselves as objects and see their actions as the result of social processes
- I is the unsocialized self, the entity that is spontaneous, creative, and impulsive. The Me is the socialized self that monitors the actions of the I. That is, the judgemental, reflective, and controlling side of the self that reflects the values and attitudes of the society
Charles H. Cooley (1864 – 1929)
- Held that sociology should be the study if social reality, including individual consciousness
- Suggested that the best way for a sociologist to examine the social world was through a method he called sympathetic introspection (the value of putting yourself into other persons’ shoes and seeing the world as they do)
- The looking-glass self is an inactive process by which we develop our self-image through the cues we receive from others
- There are three basic components to the looking-glass self:
o We must imagine how we appear to others
o We need to imagine how others would judge that appearance
o We must reflect on that image and develop some self-feeling
