Sociology as a form of consciousness by Berger

Sociology is neither a timeless nor a necessary undertaking of the human kind. It is constituted
by peculiarly modern form of consciousness. The peculiarity of sociological perspective becomes clear
when it is associated to the meaning of the term “society”- as how sociologists defined is a large
complex of human relationships, system of interactions (and it cannot be decided on quantitative
grounds alone), complex of relationships that is sufficiently enough to be analyzed by itself and
autonomous entity (set against others of the same kind).

However, the term “social” – quality of interaction, interrelationship and mutuality. Two men
chatting on a street corner does not constitute a “society” but what transpires between them is “social”.
It is also an object of inquiry (not segregated field of human activity) and it is present in, with and under
many different fields. Therefore, society consists of a complex social event.

Sociological Analysis is the web of meanings, expectations and conduct resulting from such mutual
orientation of society and social.

Sociological angle of vision is different from the perspective of other disciplines (ie. Economists)
concerned with human actions because they are more interested in a variety of human relationships
and interactions. For example, in economic goals it involves relationships of power, prestige, prejudice
and even marginal reference that economist fails to ponder upon as it focuses more on economic
activities.

Sociologists look at the same phenomena in a different way. He may look at these same phenomena but
his frame of reference will be quite different. Sociologist’s inquiry is segregated to the legal frame of
reference.

To ask sociological questions, it presupposes that one should look some distance beyond the commonly
accepted or officially defined goals of human actions. One must be aware that human events have
different levels of meanings that we may not be aware of.

Society acts as a hidden fabric of an edifice, the outside façade of which hides that fabric from the
common view. It is a world of motives and forces that could not be understood in terms of the official
interpretations of social reality.

Sociological thought as the “art of mistrust” (Nietzsche). It is grounded in the need to bring order and
intelligibility to the impressions of chaos that this array of historical knowledge made on some
observers.

Sociological Perspective can then be understood as “seeing through”, “looking behind” and “being up
on all the tricks”

“seeing through” – It involves a process of “seeing through” the facades of social structures. The social
mysteries usually lie behind these façades and the wish to penetrate these mysteries is an analogous to
sociological curiosity. (ex. A city with same design of houses). The perception of the reality behind the
façades then demands considerable intellectual effort.

“looking behind”- (political organization of a community). It would be exceedingly a naïve person to

believe that the surface information could give the political reality of a community. The sociologist will
still want to know above all the consistency of the “informal power” structure (configuration of men and
their power that cannot be found in any laws). He will insist that there is another level of reality to be
investigated in the particular system of power.

The sociologists will seek to penetrate he smoke screen of the official versions of the reality and try to
grasp the signals that come from the underworld.

Sociological problem is always the understand of what goes on here in terms of social interaction. It is
more concerned on how the whole system works in the first place and what are its presuppositions and
by what means it is held together.

Sociological Consciousness is the ability to look at a situation from the vantage points of competing
systems of interpretations. It arises when commonly accepted or authoritatively stated interpretations
of society become shaky.

Four Motifs of Sociological Consciousness

- Debunking motif- the roots of debunking motif is not psychological but methodological. The
sociological frame of reference carries with it a logical imperative to unmask the pretensions
and the propaganda by which men cloak their actions with each other. It lies in the
penetration of verbal smoke screens to the unadmitted and often unpleasant mainsprings
(motive/reason) of action.
- Unrespectable view of society – it does not imply revolutionary attitude. Thus, it tells us
that sociological understand has a bed effect to revolutionary ideologies because it sees
through the illusions of the present status quo and the illusionary expectations concerning
possible futures. However, total respectability of thought will invariably mean the death of
sociology.
- Phenomenon of Relativization- the modern era represents the consciousness of the world
in which values have been radically revitalized. The modern mind is mobile because it
participates vicariously in the lives of others differently located from oneself easily imagines
itself changing occupation or residence. To live in the modern society means to live at the
center of a kaleidoscope of ever-changing roles. Social mobility (movement from one social
stratum to another) augments this relativizing effect.
- Cosmopolitan Motif – urbane individual however passionately attached to his own city
roams through the whole wide world in his intellectual voyages.

The sociological perspective is a broad, open and emancipated view of human life.

BASIC OF SOCIOLOGY

Raison d’etre – Why is sociology still here? Why is the category of the social deserving of rigorous
study? (sociological imagination, form of consciousness) How is sociology reflected in the discipline?
Why is the study of the social being irreducible?

Theoretical Tradition – What are the ways by which society can be explained? Conflict, Durkheimian,
Microinteractionist Tradition

Methodological Tradition – How do we study the social world? The process of doing research…
Four Sociological Traditions by Randall Collins (INTRODUCTION)

Social Sciences is derived from social base (true), empiricisms

Agrarian Empire – they dealt on the fundamental questions but they forget the complete sense of this
and its application

Confucius – the first one who sought understanding towards social matters.

Since social thoughts are developed only if it passed on from one community to another and
lacking communities dedicated on this purpose, little social sciences has been passed on.

For any objective social knowledge to develop, two things had to happen.

1. societies (or at least parts of them) had to become rationalized (disenchanted)

2. the rise of a group of intellectual specialists who could create a social community of their
own- an intellectual community- within which the search for knowledge in its own right
could receive support.

The rise of the social sciences thinking

1. the rise of the ‘literati’ in ancient societies ( Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Japan, China)
2. The first systematic efforts at social thought were produce in the Greek city-states – rise of
intellectual community that is not dependent of religion or government.
3. Greek intellectual schools (Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Sophists and Plato) – religious cult that
added rationalized knowledge to their rituals and worships; political factions;
4. The first systematic consideration of society is found in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle-
“what forms the best society should take”; Plato’s school is to trained government leaders while
Aristotle’s school is to trained other intellectuals.

GREECE

1. SOCIOLOGY (rules, norms)

2. POLITICAL SCIENCES (political institution, political system)
3. PHILOSOPHY (questions of life)

Medieval Universities Create the Modern Intellectual

 The beginning of intellectual elite

 The philosophical upsurge of the medieval universities does not lead on a direct line into
modern intellectual life. The universities went through several waves of expansion and
contraction: from the point of view of the modern sociology of organizations, what took place
was a "goal displacement"; a staff division struggled to raise itself from being a means to some
other end into being an end in itself.
 Ecclesiastical University – it has religious/ Christian Power over them

Renaissance: Influences of Religion

 Rise of the intellectual ideology of humanism: Secular Culture over religion as a highest
intellectual standard
  Take off of Natural Sciences
 Revival of Universities; revived philosophy
 Social sciences is in turmoil during this era; no independence over theorizing abstractly about
the social world

RELIGIOUS WARS AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

 Kings wished to build their own national states- feudal aristocrats were replaced by kings,
churchly advisers to civilian bureaucrats
 In Protestant Germany: the church simply became part of the government bureaucracy;
social science was seen as developing information and techniques for government
purposes; Staatswissenschaft (state science) was a combination of what we might call
public administration and descriptive statistics; Conflict Tradition of Sociology started to
grow inspired by Realpolitik (realistic politics)
 For the social sciences, the takeoff period was the 1700s. In a characteristic burst of self-
confidence, the thinkers of the time referred to their era as the Enlightenment.

And Finally Sociology

 Sociology, as the general science of social phenomena, has the most diverse roots of all. It
derives from the materials of history and from the generalizing attempts of philosophers of history, from
the concerns of institutional and historical economists and from the fact-gathering of public
administrators and social reformers, from socially minded psychologists, and from the interests of
anthropologists in primitive culture and human evolution.
 Focus on welfare-style reforms
 Increased discomfort with established philosophy paved the way to the rise of SOCIOLOGY

Separation of different discipline

1. Economics – to manage our resources/materials
2. History – nations needs a past to justify its existence
3. Psychology – study of individual behavior
Why do we need to study human individually?
- You need to know yourself to know your niche (environment/group)
- Hinge on the importance of individual self
4. Sociology – through empirical thoughts; fundamental in sociology: structure that has cultural
elements; the rise of sociology parallels the rise of the modern world and the promise of industrial
society
5. Anthropology – culture that has structure

Social psychologist – the one who define norms

Ethical/ moral life rooted in a creedal (reduced formula that deduced what you believe) religion ( it is
also the rise of Christianity under the Jewish sector)

Influences of Religion
 1. Create a society that reflects the God’s will (2 sources of power: 1. Secular power 2. Ecclesial
Power)
 God’s Law – highest form of law
 Human Law- lowest form of law
2. Dyarchy- relationship between sacred and secular (saecula – of the age and of this lifetime)
power.
3. Foundations of social order in the ‘divine plan’ (will of God)

How political intuition should be organized is under the discipline of political Science.

According to the writings of Early Greeks:

What kind of human association do we form given the assumption that there is a human
nature? We are constituted to be a specific kind of individual.

Accdg to Collins the problem with Agrarian Empires is that they didn’t ponder to explore other
questions. They dealt on the fundamental questions but they didn’t explore the implications of those
ideas.

SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION (C. WRIGHT)

Mills details the “promise” of this imagination: why he thinks it’s important to ask these questions and
what he thinks they help us understand. For starters, a sociological imagination is able to shuttle
between the personal and historical. In the case of the contemporary man who feels trapped and
powerless, sociological study explains how these feelings are produced by something larger than an
individual’s life. Such study can show him how his personal life is also shaped by the society in which he
lives and the historical period to which he belongs. Sociology connects the personal and the historical by
recasting personal problems as historical ones and historical problems as personal ones. Personally, an
individual feels trapped; sociology asks, what is going on in history that produces this feeling? Or,
historically, the world is in a Cold War; sociology asks, how does this global situation get played out in
how people feel and think in their private lives?

To clarify the kind of work sociology does in connecting the personal and the historical, Mills makes a
distinction between personal “troubles” and public “issues.” Personal troubles are what an individual
experiences in his “milieu,” Mills’s word for the immediate situation in which man moves, such as his
family. "Troubles" are a private matter. In contrast, “issues” belong to a larger social structure. An issue
is a crisis in an institution, instead of a crisis in an individual. They are therefore a public matter. Mills
asks us to consider divorce. A man and a woman may have “troubles” in their marital milieu. That is on
the one hand a private matter. But when half of all marriages end in divorce in a society, that is also a
public issue having to do with the institution of marriage as a whole. You can’t describe so many
divorces just by looking at every individual’s troubles. You have to provide a larger social account
instead.

According to Mills, the same can be said of a number of other things that at first look like personal
troubles but end up being public issues as well. Unemployment, for instance: if one person in a society is
unemployed, that is a private problem. But if a society has a high rate of unemployment, then we need
to be asking social questions about how and why that is. Moreover, when we discover we are talking
about a structural issue, we realize we can’t provide personal solutions alone. You can’t solve a high
divorce rate by getting one husband and wife back together, just like you can’t solve widespread
unemployment by giving one person a job. You have to give social solutions to social problems.

To continue his discussion of the relation between personal milieu and social structures, Mills then
considers different ways in which the two can be related. He turns in particular to the relation between
personal values and public issues, and how a society does or does not support an individual’s values.
People with values supported by society experience well-being; those with values unsupported
experience crisis; and those whose values are neither supported nor unsupported experience
indifference. But some people may not have any deeply held values to begin with. These people,
according to Mills, experience uneasiness. Mills thinks that his contemporary period is characterized by
both indifference and uneasiness: social structures are not neatly characterized by any one issue; and
people don’t really formulate their values explicitly. It is this that the sociological imagination must now
explain.

To summarize so far: the sociological imagination is important today because it can relate personal
troubles and public issues, connecting biography and history, in order to give a complete sense of the
specific anxieties and crises in our society. But before sociology can accomplish this great task, Mills
says, we first have to consider some of the ways in which sociology has failed to do so. Sociology has a
great “promise,” but sometimes this promise has been distorted. That, Mills explains, will be the focus
of chapters 2-6 of The Sociological Imagination, after which he will return to the “promise,” in chapters
7-10.
For now, Mills lists three “tendencies” in sociology. Exaggerating one of these tendencies leads to the
distortions he will proceed to describe. The first is a historical tendency, characteristic of studies that
describe stages of the development of man, from primitive to civilized. The second is a human nature
tendency, which does away with history in order to describe man in universal terms: his desires or
weaknesses across time. The third is an empirical tendency, which measures more and more facts, for
instance by counting populations. Mills worries that people in the second tendency tend to over-
generalize, producing “grand theories,” as he will explain in Chapter 2, that do not explain any actual
social behavior. In contrast, people in the third tendency, which he discusses in Chapter 3, tend to over-
specialize, collecting a lot of data about one thing without really describing the larger society as a whole.
In the following chapters, Mills will aim to diagnose and correct these problems in order to give a better
program to realize the promise of the sociological imagination.

 Men often feel their private lives are a series of traps

 The more aware they may become, the more trapped they may feel
 Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding
both
 Information often dominates attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it
Sociological Imagination
 The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms
of its meaning for the inner life and external career of a variety of individuals
 The first lesson of the social science which embodies sociological imagination is the idea that the
individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within
his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all
individuals in his circumstances
 Being aware of what’s going on around you
 Every human lives in a historical sequence and each minute one is shaping this society and the
course of history, just as one is made by society and by its historical push and shove
 Those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked
three sorts of questions:
 What is the structure of this particular society as a whole?
 Where does the society stand in human history?
 What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period?
 Troubles occur within character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations
with others; they have to do with his self with those limited areas of social life of which his is directly
and personally aware (to deal with the self)
 Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the
range of his inner life (to deal with the public)
 Millieux – an environment or a setting; person’s social environment
 When people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them, they experience well-
being
 People who are unaware of any cherished values nor experience any threat, they
experience indifference
 Those who are unaware of any cherished values but still are very much aware of a threat are
experiencing uneasiness

Society as Objective Reality (63-146)

 the human organism manifests an immense plasticity in its response to the environmental forces at
work on it.
 there is no human nature in the sense of a biologically fixed substratum determining the variability of
socio-cultural formations. There is only human nature in the sense of anthropological constants (for
example, world-openness and plasticity of instinctual structure) that delimit and permit man's socio-
cultural formation
 Man construct his own nature or man produces himself.
 Every culture has a distinctive sexual configuration, with its own specialized patterns of sexual
conduct and its own 'anthropological' assumptions in the sexual area
 The empirical relativity of these configurations, their immense variety and luxurious inventiveness,
indicate that they are the product of man's own socio-cultural formations rather than of a biologically
fixed human nature.
 The formation of the self, then, must also be understood in relation to both the ongoing organismic
development and the social process in which the natural and the human environment are mediated
through the significant others
 The same social processes that determine the completion of the organism produce the self in its
particular, culturally relative form
 The character of the self as a social product is not limited to the particular configuration the
individual identifies as himself
 It goes without saying, then, that the organism and, even more, the self cannot be adequately
understood apart from the particular social context in which they were shaped.
 Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its sociocultural and psychological
formations
 The most general answer to this question is that social order is a human product, or, more precisely,
an ongoing human production through externalization
 although no existing social order can be derived from biological data, the necessity for social order as
such stems from man's biological equipment.

Origins of Institutionalization

 Habitualized actions retain their meaningful character for the individual although the meanings
involved become embedded as routines in his general stock of knowledge, taken for granted by
him and at hand for his projects into the future.
 Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by
types of actors
 Institutions also, by the very fact of their existence, control human conduct by setting up
predefined patterns of conduct
 It is important to stress that this controlling character is inherent in institutionalization as such,
prior to or apart from any mechanisms of sanctions specifically set up to support an institution
 The institutions are now experienced as possessing a reality of their own, a reality that confronts
the individual as an external and coercive fact
 It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, is a humanly
produced, constructed objectivity.
 man and his social world interact with each other. The product acts back upon the producer.
Externalization and objectivation are moments in a continuing dialectical process. And
internalization (by which the objectivated social world is retrojected into consciousness in the
course of socialization)
 one will deviate from programmes set up for one by others than from programmes that one has
helped establish oneself

Conflict Tradition (47-120)

 Society is consisting of conflicts; when conflicts are not openly taking place is a process of
domination
 DOMINATION - Its vision of social order consists of groups and individual trying to advance their
interests over others
 It concerns mainly in the normal structure of dominant and subordinate interest groups
 conflict sociology mainly focuses on historical materials and to be especially aware of long-term
patterns of change
 Conflict theory states that tensions and conflicts arise when resources, status, and power are
unevenly distributed between groups in society and that these conflicts become the engine for
social change. In this context, power can be understood as control of material resources and
accumulated wealth, control of politics and the institutions that make up society, and one's
social status relative to others(determined not just by class but by race, gender,
sexuality, culture, and religion, among other things).
 macroanalysis
Notes on the Conflict Tradition in Sociology

1. First of all, conflict tradition is a bit of a misnomer (misleading term). Conflict refers to points in
time when two or more parties are battling it out – the “it” could be a war, a strike, an election, a
legislative struggle, etc. The point of this tradition, however, is that conflict is not extra-ordinary; it is a
permanent condition of social life. Conflict occurs all of the time because the social order is built
around the realities of domination – i.e., the domination of certain social classes over others; the
domination of one gender over another. Sometimes the conflict occurs without our being conscious of
it. Think of the slave, serf, or worker who has internalized a subordinate status in society. Domination
is certainly occurring. In this sense, the conflict tradition is integral to the fabric of everyday life.

2. The central figure in the conflict tradition is Marx. Collins approaches Marx with the idea of
separating the wheat from the shaft. There are certain aspects of Marx that are very important to the
conflict traditions and others that can be discarded. Collins begins his discussion of Marx by focusing on
Hegel. Marx attended a German university; he earned a doctorate in philosophy. The dominant
intellectual figure in Germany philosophy at that time was Hegel. Hegel’s philosophy was a quest to
make the whole of history comprehensible. What is history all about? What overall meaning does it
have? There is, of course, the Henry Ford theory of history – according to Ford, history is just one
damn thing after another. No pattern, no purpose. If history did have pattern and purpose, it would
give meaning to human existence. Philosophers like Hegel struggled with the advances of science and
the way in which these called into question religious beliefs. If religious doctrines could no longer be
accepted, then what was the purpose of life? Hegel’s response to this question was that the meaning of
life becomes revealed over the course of history. Life is the development of what Hegel
calls Spirit. Everything in history – individuals, institutions, civilizations are but manifestations of this
Spirit. Spirit goes through a process of become aware of itself. As this process of self-realization
unfolds, the ultimate meaning of history becomes clear. The process of Spirit’s development coincides
with the development of humanity from lower to higher stages. At the end of history, humanity is fully
developed – this is the manifestation of spirit having become full self-conscious of itself. Fully
developed humanity is the manifestation of all this. Sound weird? Well, what Hegel was attempting to
portray was the secular redemption of humanity in history, as opposed to it spiritual redemption in the
afterlife. In this sense, Hegel was a quasi-religious thinker. Now, with regard to conflict, Hegel saw all
of history as Spirit in conflict with itself. Conflict was a normal state of affairs until the end of history,
when Spirit is at one with itself. After that point, no more conflict.

3. Marx was quasi-religious in exactly the same sense Hegel was. He too longed for some sense of
purpose and meaning to human life and he sought it in history. Marx too focused on human
development. History, for him, is the story of human development. Communism is the final chapter of
this story, where human capacities are fully developed and mankind lives happily ever after. Again, as in
Hegel, this is secular redemption. Marx also adopts the conflict perspective, but he sees conflict much
differently. For him, conflict is not a question of Spirit being at odds with itself. Marx insists on a
materialist view of life. From this point of view, the fundamental activity people engage in is the
material production of their lives. Essential to this process is the production of the means of
existence. Conflict occurs in terms of how this material production is organized. This is what Marx calls
a mode of production. There have been different modes of production in history. In the ancient world,
it was master vs. slave. In the feudal period, serf vs. lord. In the capitalist era, worker vs.
capitalist. Each of these relations organizes a mode of production. Each is also the site of permanent
social conflict. Indeed conflict drives history forward. Class struggle, wrote Marx and Engels in
the Communist Manifesto, is the engine of history.

4. Collins says forget about Marx and philosopher of history and concentrate on Marx the analyst of
conflict. What do we get when we do this? We get a focus on Marx’s collaboration with Engels. More
substantively, we get a theory of classes. For Marx, classes are units of analysis. Social classes are
anchored in the way a mode of production is organized. In this sense, social classes are tied to the
economic base of society and to the way in which this economic base is organized. Marx and Engels
also recognized numerous intermediate social classes – these were and are floating classes that are not
tied in any determinant way to the mode of production. Their role in conflicts is often pivotal. Marx’s
conflict theory focused on the conflict between two primary classes. The bourgeoisie represents the
members of society who hold the majority of the wealth and means. The proletariat includes those
considered working class or poor. With the rise of capitalism, Marx theorized that the bourgeoisie, a
minority within the population, would use their influence to oppress the proletariat, the majority class.
The uneven distribution within the conflict theory was predicted to be maintained through ideological
coercion where the bourgeoisie would force acceptance of the current conditions by the proletariat.
Marx further believed that as the working class and poor were subjected to worsening conditions, a
collective consciousness would bring the inequality to light and potentially result in revolt. If conditions
were subsequently adjusted to address the concerns of the proletariat, the conflict circle would
eventually repeat.
5. Classes are interdisciplinary entities. They have an economic foundation. They are often involved
in political clashes. They also produce their cultures. Culture for Marx and Engels is just like food or
tools. Culture is material and it is produced and reproduced over time. The production of culture is
integral to social conflict. One famous passage from Marx and Engels is “the ideas of the ruling class are
the ruling ideas in society.” This is generally so because the ruling class controls the means of mental
production. This might include religious institutions, universities, the media, and so forth. The
dominant classes also employ intellectuals. The latter are often constrained by their masters who don’t
often tolerate challenges to the legitimacy of the social order. This is why, incidentally, that Marx was
run out of the German university system. Marx and Engels’ point here is the culture is an instrument of
conflict. We must know how to read culture as a mask that cloaks the underlying interests of
particular social classes in society.

6. More generally, Marx and Engels see culture as constrained by the material circumstances in
which it is developed. These material circumstances make certain kinds of cultural expression possible;
they also rule out other types of cultural expression. Collins illustrates this point with his discussion of
the production of science in laboratories. What can be said depends on the material setting. This
material setting consists of the dominant institutions within which inquiry proceeds – for example, the
influence of corporations and governments on universities. It also depends on the existing traditions of
scientific discourse. These too are material. They are part of the incessant competition between
intellectuals, a topic that we touched on in discussing Collins’ prologue. Finally, another constraint are
the material instruments which scientists use to measure natural phenomena. The point here is that
mental production does not simply happen inside the mind; it happens in the material world and it is
shaped by the constraints that this world imposes. Marx and Engels go on to discuss the way in which
the material circumstances of social classes shape their world views and thus constrain the way in which
they are able to engage in social conflict. Again, a general point: consciousness does not determine
existence; rather existence determines consciousness.

7. Marx and Engels also develop a clear conception of political conflict. There are two major points
in Collins’ presentation of their ideas. First, the outcomes of conflicts are shaped by the means of
mobilization that contending social classes have at their disposal. To what extent are social classes
able to organize themselves for conflict? Generally speaking the upper classes are much better
organized. They are aware of their interests, in constant communication with one another, continuously
organized to put pressure on the state, and so forth. Members of the lower classes on the other hand,
are more likely to be ignorant or apathetic, isolated from one another, confused by upper class ideology,
or too busy trying to survive to advance their own interests. Notice the control over the means of
mental production is crucial to the means of mobilization. Think of how important this connection is, for
example, in electoral contests. The means of mobilization can change of course as the material basis of
society becomes altered. For example, the rise of huge factories in the 19th century concentrated
workers in particular places. These material conditions gave rise to the organization of working class
political parties. The workers thereby enhanced their means of mobilization. Today, we live in a service
economy. Huge concentrations of workers under one factory roof are much rarer. Labor unions have,
as a result, grown weaker. The capacity of workers to mobilize themselves has diminished. So the
bosses, linked by faxes, cell phones, email, etc, have the upper hand in terms of mobilization capacities.

8. Another important point that Marx and Engels make with regard to political conflict is the role of
the state. States require a material base in order to survive. This turns out to be important constraint
on what states can do. States which attempt to undertake significant economic reforms on the behalf of
workers are often faced with investment strikes by capitalists. The resulting economic chaos
undermines the capacity of the state to govern; at the extreme, it threatens the very existence of the
state. In a number of third world states, foreign economic influences constrain what states can
do. Weaker states sometimes collapse under the pressure of foreign and domestic demands. These can
erode the material basis of the state. Another way of thinking about this is from the perspective of the
capitalist class. They exercise political influence on account of their investment decisions. Business
leaders need not directly pressure political officials. Those officials understand the stability of the state
depends on a prosperous economy and they will adopt policies to keep capitalists content. Marx viewed
capitalism as part of the historical progress of economic systems, and believed that it was rooted
in commodities — or things that are purchased and sold. For example, he believed that labor is a type of
commodity. But since laborers have little control or power in the economic system (because they don’t
own factories or materials), their worth can be devalued over time. This can create an imbalance
between business owners and their workers, which can lead to social conflicts. He believed these
problems would eventually be fixed through a social and economic revolution.

9. Importantly, the conflict tradition is not simply about social classes in the way that Marx and Engels
define them. Conflict also occurs between genders. Engels might be seen as a father of feminism (this
is a patriarchal notion!) in terms of his work on sexual stratification. Weber introduces additional units
of analysis into the conflict tradition – classes (understood as groups seeking to carve out a particular
place for themselves in the market), status groups, and parties (or factions). Status groups are defined
in terms of their cultural affinities. Ethnic groups may be status groups, for example. Again, they may
not be. Are Afro-Americans – or some portion of them – a status group? Have they ever been? We can
raise the same question about whites, Asians, or Chicanos. The additions of gender, class (in Weber’s
sense), status group, and party broaden the applicability of the conflict tradition to the social
phenomena we encounter in everyday life. They also enable us to better understand the complexity of
social conflict by considering the way in which particular patterns of domination are related to one
another. How, for example, is sexual stratification related to class domination?

Durkheimian Tradition (181-241)

1. The focus here is on the creation of social solidarity. This solidarity is created largely through
ritual and, as we learn later in the chapter, rituals can assume numerous forms. There are
differences between the Durkheimian tradition and the rational choice tradition. Consider once
again Locke’s discussion of empiricism – individuals generate their own ideas through reflecting on
their own sensory experience. This is the basis of their autonomy. Hence rational choice theory
focuses on exchanges between these autonomous and self-interested individuals. Now the
Durkheimians see all of this as the tip of the social iceberg. Sure, we may see ourselves and
autonomous and self-interested individuals engaged in strategic games with other such social
actors, but what are the social conditions which make this kind of social existence
possible. Durkheim would have agreed with Marx: consciousness does not determine existence, but
rather existence determines consciousness. Where they differ, of course, is in terms of how they
conceptualize existence. Marx emphasized the material production of social life. Durkheim focused
on something even more general: social morphology. He would, in fact, say that it is social
morphology that determines the consciousness of individuals.
 Durkheim chose suicide to study because it is at the opposite extreme from social solidarity: the
case where the social bonds are so weak that the individual finds life meaningless and forcibly
removes him/herself from it. Durkheim wished to demonstrate the power of social ties; because
these are usual taken for granted when things are going normally, one must compare normal
conditions with those in which they break down.
 Comte: sociology was the most important science because its application would correct all social
evils and create a perfect society.
2. On page 186 we learn that social morphology refers to the structural relationships between
people. Social morphology or structure is the foundation for Durkheim’s entire approach to the
study of society. Different social morphologies or structures will produce different states of
consciousness. So the individual is not prior to society, as the rational choice theorists would have
it. Rather society is prior to the individual. More specifically, different social structures produce
different kinds of social solidarity. Thus Durkheim distinguishes between different levels of social
density and these, in turn, give rise to different kinds of belief systems. Thus, for example, in a
complex urban society, “…the personification of social and natural processes gives way to abstract
concepts.” (189) The transition, however, isn’t uniform. People may still occupy low or high density
positions within modern society. The discussion of urban villagers refers to this.
 The structure of the entire society is determined by how large a population there is, how spread
out it is across the territory, andwhat means of communication exist that bring about
intermittent contacts.
 Durkheim's principle that the physical density of society determines behavior and ideas holds at
the level of smaller groups as well as for the whole society
3. Durkheim sees the modern world as problematic. Collins talks about the way in which the
social structure creates a kind of cocoon around the individual. We can refer to this as the
 experience of social integration. Complex modern societies do not integrate their members as
completely as small scale traditional societies. Durkheim sought to illustrate this point with his
study of suicide. Here he compared rates of suicide across different social groups. His empirical
conclusion was that rates of suicide are highest among people who are most loosely connected to
other individuals. How might one explain this finding? Durkheim’s explanation centers on the
importance of ritual. Rituals are ‘collective representations’ that are enacted in front of the
assembled group. These enacted rituals give people a consciousness of their membership in the
group. Rituals convey the experience of social integration. People who live without these
experiences are more likely to find that their existence is meaningless, that life is not worth
living. The incidence of suicide can be understood as a failure of social integration; it is a small step
in the direction of society falling apart.
 A ritual is a moment of extremely high social density. Usually the more people that are brought
together, the more intense the ritual
 But these ideas are efficacious precisely because they are social, because they remind
individuals of where their memberships and loyalties lie. Durkheim referred to them as
"collective representations”.
4. On the other hand, we can argue that ritual is essential to sustaining the energies of social
integration. With no ritual at all, society would fall apart. This gets at a central theme in this
theoretical tradition. For Durkheim and his followers we cannot simply take the existence of society
or social order for granted. This is something that has to be explained. Social solidarity is the glue
that holds society together. The energies of social solidarity must be constantly generated and
regenerated anew through social rituals. It is also important to not that rituals have a carry over
effect. “Ideas carry over the effect of society when people are between rituals or when contacts are
low key rather than highly ritualized.” (191). Rituals, in other words, resonate through the rest of
our social lives. Ideas or symbols associated with rituals can play a role in shaping our behavior.
 Durkheim's model, thus, gives us a two-level world. We think inside our social ideas, and these
ideas form the contents of our consciousness. We do not see the symbolic significance of our
social ideas because we take them for granted. They are a kind of glass through which we see
the universe and which we don't even notice until it is broken by some social disruption.
 Durkheim depicts society as having a conscious, superficial level and an unconscious structure
within which the real determinants operate.
 We think ourselves rational, masters of our own destinies' in fact our rationality itself is given to
us by the social structure we inhabit, a structure that forms us to think in one particular way
rather than another.
 The "unconscious" level in Durkheim's theory is not mysterious or obscure. It is the morphology
of social structure, the "social physics" of the physical density of the group that is spread out
across the landscape; its pattern in time is people coming together and drifting apart in the
rituals of highly focused attention
5. Now let’s go back to the rational choice perspective. We may regard ourselves as rational
actors. Durkheim would again say that this is the tip of the social iceberg. He would argue that
there is a non-rational basis of society which shapes are beliefs and attitudes. How do we
understand ourselves? Where do our interests and preferences come from? Recall that the rational
choice perspective has a rather philosophical answer to this question. People are able to form their
own ideas from their own experience. Here is where Durkheim objects. For our experience of the
world is primarily a social experience and not simply a sensory of experience. We are socialized into
a pre-existing world of meanings and rituals. This is the non-rational foundation of rational
 behavior. Rational individuals contract with one another in the market place, but such contracts,
argues Durkheim, require a deeper, pre-contractual solidarity.
 Montesquieu's -ancient republics are what Durkheim called the "mechanical solidarity" type:
societies that are small and dispersed over large areas. Within each group, the individual is
subordinated to the community. The basic sentiment of this type of society is what
Montesquieu called the striving for "virtue," obeying all the old sacred rites and sacrificing
oneself for one's family and one's city.
 Montesquieu's monarchies represent the more modern end of the continuum in which societies
have become large, densely settled, arid internally specialized and coordinated. Th~
characteristic sentiment of these societies is what Montesquieu called "honor," which is
equivalent to Durkheim’s spirit of "individualism," the striving to exalt the self.
6. Collins goes on to talk about the ways in which Durkheim’s ideas were developed. We needn’t
worry about the macro wing of the Durkheimian tradition. The most useful applications of this
tradition are not applied to the entire structure of society, but rather to particular group practices
within it. Let’s consider two examples of group practices.
7. The first is Fustel’s The Ancient City. Here religion and ritual constitute the social group. This is
to say, social groups don’t merely exist, they have to be produced. Successful rituals can constitute
a powerful group identity. There is such a thing, of course, as a botched social ritual in which the
energies of social solidarity go astray. It is important to note some of the characteristics of the ritual
situation: the presence of the group face to face, a common focus of attention and shared emotion,
nonpractical actions carried out for symbolic ends. In Fustel’s account, families constituted
themselves as groups through rituals. Religion likewise provided a basis for the formation of
coalitions between families. These were the first Greek and Latin cities. Why could such a coalition
only form itself as a cult? Why could the coalition simply reflect the interests of each of its
members? These are questions a rational choice theorist might ask. The answer is that the civic
cult with its temple provided a forum in which patriarchs of the leading family could create identify
with one another. This identify was cast into the form of a new set of religious beliefs which served
to symbolize the group. (206).
8. The boundaries of morality correspond to the boundaries of the group. Exile was the
most severe punishment in the ancient world. To be exiled from the group was to be deprived of
the group’s protection. One became a social non-entity subject to whoever could despoil one. The
same principle applies to ancient warfare. There was no such thing as the law of war in this
era. Such abstract concepts would have to await the emergence of modern society. Rather the
other side was a social non-entity in the same sense that exiles were.
9. Note an important implication of these points: ritual can serve as a basis for both solidarity
within the group and conflict between social groups. In this sense, the conflict tradition might be
understood as an extended reflection on Weber’s notion of a status group. Status groups are
formed on the basis of cultural affinities. But where do these affinities come from? How are they
mobilized? The Durkheimian tradition points toward the social practices that answer these
questions.
10. Conflict theorists are closely attuned to the realities of domination and stratification in
society. The Durkheimian tradition has much to say about the way in which stratification
work. Lloyd Warner found that different religious groups not only symbolized different social
groups, they also served to keep these groups stratified and separate. Religion shapes the basis of
intimate association, thereby generating different forms of social solidarity. But there are also
patriotic ceremonies that can be construed as ritual weapons of solidarity.
 In Quantity and Quality in Social Research

Quantitative Research – Social Survey is one of the main method of data collection
Main vehicles of Quantitative Research – survey and experiment

 Analysis of previously collected data

 Structured observation – records observation with predetermined sched
 Content Analysis – quantitative analysis of communication content

Positivist Sociology – study of society based on systematic observation of social behavior.

 Requires carefully operationalizing variable and ensuring the measurement is both reliable and
valid
 Observe how variables are related and tries to establish cause and effect
 Sees an objective reality “out there”
 Favors quantitative data
 Is loosely linked to structural-functional theory

DIFFERENT MEANING OF POSITIVISM

 First and foremost, positivism entails a belief that the methods and procedures of the natural
sciences are appropriate to the social sciences
 Positivism entails a belief that only those phenomena which are observable, in the sense of
being amenable to the senses, can validly be warranted as knowledge.
 Many accounts of positivism suggest that scientific knowledge is arrived at through the
accumulation of verified facts (INDUCTIVISM)
 Scientific theories are seen by positivists as providing a kind of backcloth to empirical research in
the sense that hypotheses are derived from them (DEDUCTIVE)
 Positivism is also often taken to entail a particular stance in relation values