Sociology: Confrontation and comparison of Marx, Weber and Durkheim (part 2)

Introduction
Ways of investigation: On methodology
Extending Theory: On Modernity
Religion, Culture and Social Realities
Individual and Society
Conclusion

Introduction

Theoretical knowledge in the social sciences is based on the classical concepts of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. In the first part of this article, in which we compare and contrast these three influential theorists, we cover their basic perspectives. We have seen Marx provide the conceptual basis of social class, means of production, the materialist theory of history, the theory of surplus value, class consciousness in the capitalist system and the trajectory of class struggle, revolution or communism. While Marx outlined all these questions primarily in his book The Capital, The German Ideology, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The Communist Manifesto, and Louis Bonaparte's Eighteen Brumaire, Durkheim brought a different kind of understanding of the social system and of the social structure. In particular, The division of labour, The rules of the sociological method, Suicide and The elementary forms of religious life collect Durkheim's main thematic and conceptual theses. Weber's religion, rationalization, action and social stratification, political power and a different vision of capitalism are elaborated in The Protestant Ethics and The Spirit of Capitalism, Economy and Society, and some reading in political writings.

In this post we will discuss the sociological tradition and their perspectives regarding methodological examples, thematic interactions with religion, culture and other social phenomena. We will try to understand how these three philosophers perceived modernity and encountered the complexities of individual-community interactions. In general, it gives indulgence to the sociological tradition and knowledge of the classical era, and also informs about the source of the sociological imagination. As Robert Nisbet (1993) observed:

Major ideas in the social sciences invariably have roots in moral aspiration. However abstract the ideas may eventually become, however neutral they may come to seem to scientists and theorists, they do not ever really divest themselves of their moral origins…. There is no direction from scientific greatness when we emphasize that such men as Weber and Durkheim were working with intellectual materials- values, concepts, and theories- that could never have come into their possession apart from persisting moral conflicts in the nineteenth century. Each of the ideas makes its first appearance in the undisguised, unambiguous terms of moral affirmation. Community begins as a moral value; only gradually does the secularization of this concept become apparent in sociological thought in the century. Precisely the same is true alienation, authority, status and others. The moral texture of these ideas never wholly lost. Even in the scientific writings of Weber and Durkheim, a full century after these ideas had made their first appearance, the moral element remains vivid. The great sociologists never ceased to be moral philosopher. (2003[1993]:18)

It may be true that most classical sociological theories have two sides: the meaning of moral assumptions and the nature of the subject. Our intellectual challenge is to discover the general propositions embodied in the basic ideas of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. They have tried to construct the ideas and theories holistically by presenting a different area of human life and society that we should keep in mind to discuss a specific topic.

Durkheim points out that while the primary domain of psychology is understanding the internal processes of the individual, the primary domain of sociology is "social facts". As a social scientist, he advocated a systematic and methodical investigation of social facts and their impact on the individual. He was interested in both objective and subjective elements of society, such as external social facts and feelings of solidarity or commitment to a moral code. Similarly, Marx's economic philosophy is not only concerned with the market, money and profit, but is rooted in humanistic science and prophecy. In analyzing the economic dynamics of capitalism, he took into account the social and moral problems inherent in the capitalist system. We found that Weber "combined a methodical and scientific approach with a concern for the material conditions and systems of ideas of modern societies" (Edles and Appelrouth 2010:07). With these intellectual challenges to read and reveal the central themes and interconnectedness of ideas, we will continue to discuss some important concepts in sociology by comparing and contrasting Marx, Weber and Durkheim.

Ways of investigation: On methodology

While we have discussed how classical theorists develop their arguments about morality and emphasize society as a moral unit, they have certainly taken a certain approach in examining society. Durkheim was influenced by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and advocated "positivism" as a methodological perspective. He therefore builds the foundations on which the methods follow a juridical relationship between phenomena and are modeled on the natural sciences, developing "positive science". Weber rejected this positivist connection of the social sciences with the natural sciences, arguing that the method of science, both of things and of people, always proceeds through abstraction and generalization. When Durkheim argues that social facts (or social phenomena or forces) are the subject of sociology, Weber argues that sociology is the science "aimed at the interpretive understanding (Verstehen) of social behavior in order to obtain an explanation of the cause, of its course and its effects” (Weber 1964: 29).

Durkheim's second major work, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), manifests the guidelines of methodological perspectives for the social sciences and the art of explaining social life. He believes that these rules are useful for seeing the existence of social realities outside of the individual and for examining social facts. It also describes a difference between individual facts and social facts and defines social facts as follows

A social fact is to be recognized by power of external coercion which it exercise over individuals, and the presence of this power may be recognized by the existence of some specific sanction or by the resistance offered against every individual effort that tend to violate it. The essential characteristic is that it is independent of the individual forms it assumes in its diffusion. (Durkheim 1938[1895]: 10)

According to Durkheim, social facts are general throughout society, diffuse within the group, external to the individual, and form the objective structure of society. It can be recognized by the force of external coercion or by the resistance offered to individual efforts to violate social rules and mores. He then offered the way to study social facts and to do so Durkheim suggested that we consider social facts as things (Durkheim 1938: 3). Things are not 'ideas' and 'ideas have no reality' so when we look at social facts we have to deal with 'material things' which can be legal rules, customs and religious rules because they have the power of external coercion, these they are not merely formed impression of the mind. However, with an emphasis on "social facts as things" as a basic rule, Durkheim proposes guidelines for the observation and study of social reality, where he develops criteria and formulates bases for comparing and analyzing social institutions and their functions. Weber, on the other hand, rejects the idea that societies are best understood as a unit. Methodologically, he advanced an interpretative and subjective sense of social realities and independent actions. As he mentioned in Economy and Society:

Sociology… is a science that offers an interpretive understanding of social action and in doing so, provides a causal explanation of its cause and effects. We shall speak of “action” insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior – be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is “social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course. (Weber 1968: 04)

Weber depends on meaningful actions and the subjective meaning of the motives behind those actions if he carefully avoids discovering an objectively correct meaning. He then spoke of the relevance of values, which should be distinguished from the neutrality of values. He noted that values remain central to our research process, even when choosing our subjects. From this argument, he also developed the most important conceptual tool allowing researchers to escape the dilemma of comparative studies: the concept of ideal type. Weber also shows mastery from the methodological point of view, unlike Durkheim and Marx, by proposing causality and probability in social science research. But when we talk about the contradiction and consistency of methodological examples in the sociological practices of Durkheim and Weber, what about Marx?

Both Durkheim and Weber began with a critical approach to Marx's historical materialism. However, Marx rejected abstract idealism and acquired a critical method for identifying social relations in the economic phenomena of capitalism. The central academic goal for Marx was to provide an empirically grounded description of the capitalist economic system by illustrating the historical process. In this sense, his most important contribution in the social sciences is Capital. There are reasoning, calculations and explanations. This sociological description, historical interpretation, and quasi-formal reasoning about economic institutions and relations reflect that Marx's research style has a number of characteristics. He is a materialist because he focuses on the forces and relations of production, and believes that technology and power are fundamental compared to other social formations. He focuses on the relevance of classes and class conflict within historical change. At the same time, dialectics is not Marx's methodological position, but merely a high-level hypothesis (Little 1987, Ollman 1993). A large number of twentieth-century social scientists have argued that the rational choice approach can be regarded as Marx's methodological perspective and that it is also eclectic (Elster 1985, IIyenkov 1982, Przeworski 1985).

Extending Theory: On Modernity

Sociology deals with human action and interaction, and sociologists are fascinated by new theories and methods. Kenneth Allan (2013) has argued that theoretical thinking is a way of seeing and being aware of the world. Marx, Weber and Durkheim build theories from empirical phenomena. They provide some key concepts, definitions and tools for exploring human society. All of them extend modern social science theory while simultaneously dealing with the facts and phenomena of modernity. One can understand Weber's assertion of the "ideal type of modernity" and his idea of the rationality and disenchantment of the Western world.

The theory of modern society by Marx, Weber and Durkheim is widely appreciated and is considered a fundamental analysis of modernity in classical sociological theory. Marx established that alienation is a central problem of modern capitalist society, and his discussion of alienation is the crux of modern sociological thought. Alienation is defined as the socio-psychological feeling of alienation from work, from one's fellows and from oneself. Marx considers that this alienation has its roots in the capitalist mode of production itself (Elwell 2006). In his words:

The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the 'master' (Marx, 1976[1867] :393-394).

Further on, in the same volume of Capital, he continues: "Modern industry has torn the veil which concealed from men their own process of social production, and which has made the various spontaneously divided branches of production so many mysteries, not only for foreigners, but also for others. initiates. The principle pursued therein of decomposing each process into its constituent movements, independently of their possible execution by human hands, created the new modern technical science” (Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. I, pp. 456-457). On a serious note, he considered it a major problem of modern labor and the modern division of labor in capitalist society. It is not only the problem in the economic field, but it also affects the social relations in modern life. Thus, a central insight into Marx's critique of alienation in capitalist society is simply the importance of recognizing "men as authors and actors of their own drama" (Marx 1977, 206). With this preoccupation with alienation, he also pointed to agency as an important element in understanding modern society.

When Marx reflected on alienation, Durkheim chose “anomie” as the key concept for understanding modernity. He analyzed modern society and social structure based on his theory of anomie. But it also begins with the discussion of structural interdependencies that create pressure for integration and also increase the rate of division of labor. People also tend to perceive a socially differentiated culture. Therefore, all these problems together lead to problems which are problems of modernity. Then he works on possible social pathologies such as anomie and the forced division of labour. He noted the crisis of modernity:

We are certainly not predestinated from birth to any particular form of employment, but we nevertheless posses tastes and aptitudes that limit our choice. If no account is taken of them, if they are constantly frustrated in our daily occupation, we suffer, and seek the means of bringing that suffering to the end. (Durkheim 1984 [1893] 310-11)

As Allan (2013) argues, Durkheim's theory is motivated by his concern for culture in modernity and sees modernity as driven by increasing population density and division of labour. We see a constant appearance of these problems in Durkheim's argument. Somehow this condition corresponds to what Marx spoke of alienation. Marx's alienation and Durkheim's division of labor both led to suffering and separation. But both differ in how people perceive them and how these conditions present. Durkheim's alienation is the result of a pathological division of labor and exists as a subjective condition.

Marx's alienation happened with organic evolution and people come to know about it through class consciousness. With Marx and Durkheim, Weber plays a central role in theorizing modernity, and his position has been termed "cultural pessimism." The term cultural pessimist has some merit given Weber's often disappointing observations about modern society. In the influential text, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber suggests that:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive selfimportance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” (Weber 2001: 124)

He clearly mentioned that the spirit of Christian asceticism and rational behavior are the basic elements of modern capitalism and modern culture. Furthermore, modern society has been shaped by terms such as "bureaucratization", "rationalization", "intellectualization" and "disenchantment with the world". He also understood the development of philosophical and scientific empiricism, from technical development to spiritual ideals, the quantitative cultural significance of ascetic Protestantism with capital rationalism to describe modern culture and the status of modernity. Three of them were worried about the structural aspect of modernity. Despite their differences in the perspective to be developed, they offered a reason for ambivalence to revisit the site of modernity with a cultural and phenomenological perspective.

Religion, Culture and Social Realities

Marx, Weber, and Durkheim all advanced a wide variety of thoughts and concepts related to religion. Taking the idea of sacred and profane as two important dividing lines, he proposed that society is the soul of religion. It can shape one's thoughts and feelings and give people a sense of hope and something to believe in. Marx helps us understand the mass appeal of religion to society, and he must take the historicity and class position in this regard. As he defines:

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. (Marx 1976)

He also believes that the criticism of religion disenchants man so that he thinks, acts and shapes his reality like a man who has abandoned his illusions and regained his senses. He makes a distinction between real sun and illusory sun to talk about religion and states that "religion is only the illusory sun that revolves around man ...". On the other hand, Durkheim saw religion as a combination of practices and beliefs leading to collective consciousness and social solidarity. He defines religion as: "A unified system of beliefs and practices relating to sacred things, that is, separate and forbidden things—beliefs and practices which unite into one moral community called the church, all who adhere to them." . (Durkheim 1995:44)

Here we can see how Durkheim's view of religion differs from Marx's. Marx sees religion as an important context of his theoretical perspective of false consciousness, with Durkheim summarizing it with his theory of social solidarity and collective consciousness. In the future, we should consider the contribution of Durkheim and Weber, who brought religion as the central theme and analytical locus of sociology and anthropology, made it intellectually rigorous at the same time. Weber never suggests a formal definition of religion, but his writings on religion reflect the historical and cultural context of the development and social implications of different religions. His views on religion are particularly expressed in Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, Religion of China, Religion of India and Ancient Judaism. At the same time, we can discern a number of ideas about religious complexity in relation to social action and economic behavior that have accumulated in the Economic Ethics of World Religions and Economics and Society series. Due to religious complexity and multicausality, he compared modern Western capitalist development with China and India. It identifies different arrangements or orientations related to rule, religion, economy, social prestige, family kinship and law in different civilizations. Weber examines the "psychological rewards" and economic implications of religious systems such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, ancient Judaism, Taoism and Confucianism. To speak of religion, he uses the term and idea of magic, emphasizing the historical point where the religious worldview broke free from any connection with magic and became rational so that growth and development could begin in modern economic systems. In short, the development of modern civilization is directly linked to the decline of magic in social life. As Weber pointed out:

Wherever magical and religious forces have inhibited the unfolding of organized life, the development of organized life oriented systematically towards economic activity has confronted broad-ranging internal resistance. Magical and religious powers, and the belief in them anchored in ethical notions of duty, have been in the past among the most important influences upon the way life has been organized. (Weber 1968: 341)

When Weber considers religious phenomena such as sociological analysis and economic consideration, Durkheim is on the contrary that emphasizes religious faith, what are the functions of these collectives and how they are linked to social integration. When we talk about religion, when we remember how Marx, Weber and Durkheim completely concerned secularization. The alienation of Marx's work, Durkheim's pathologies and Weber's iron cage reflect their opinions on the mechanism and secularization in the modern capitalist system. The ambiguity and forecast of Weber and Durkheim configured in their magnum -opussen, would clarify the ideological and methodological distinctive character regarding religion. In Protestant ethics and in the spirit of capitalism, Weber has outlined:

We are interested rather in something entirely different: the influence of those psychological sanctions which, originating in religious belief and the practice of religion, gave a direction to practical conduct and held the individual to it. Now these sanctions were to a large extent derived from the peculiarities of the religious ideas behind them….We can of course only proceed by presenting these religious ideas in the artificial simplicity of ideal types, as they could at best but seldom be found in history…. That great historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world which had begun with the old Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin, came here to its logical conclusion. (Weber 2001: 54-64)

On the other hand, Durkheim argued in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life:

In a word, the old gods are growing old or already dead, and others are not yet born. But feasts and rites, in a word, the cult, are not the whole religion. This is not merely a system of practices, but also a system of ideas whose object is to explain the world ; we have seen that even the humblest have their cosmology…. In every sort of religion, gods are individualities distinct from each other; however, they are conceived, not perceived. Each people represents its historic or legendary heroes in fashions which vary with the time.… It is said that science denies religion in principle. But religion exists ; it is a system of given facts ; in a word, it is a reality. How could science deny this reality? Also, in so far as religion is action, and in so far as it is a means of making men live, science could not take its place, for even if this expresses life, it does not create it; it may well seek to explain the faith, but by that very act it presupposes it…. As a matter of fact, it does not know itself. It does not even know what it is made of, nor to what need it answers. It is itself a subject for science, so far is it from being able to make the law for science! And from another point of view, since there is no proper subject for religious speculation outside that reality to which scientific reflection is applied, it is evident that this former cannot play the same role in the future that it has played in the past. (Durkheim 2001: 322-25)

Individual and Society

Debates and crises surrounding the practice of social theories often refer to Marx, Weber and Durkheim to pose the question, what are social theories? This question led to the sphere of philosophical connection from which theories emerged. In a limited sense, we can see that Durkheim's attempt to understand "the social" in terms of social facts and phenomena was like Weber attempted to understand individual and subjective meanings. Related to this we see Marx's attempt to overthrow Hegel's idealism and proclaim that the true goal of philosophy is to change the world, not just to understand it (Turner 2009: 4).

The philosophical roots and responses are diverse and appear ambivalent when comparing and contrasting Marx, Durkheim and Weber. One of the differences may be that they conceptualize the individual and study society differently than they view the individual and society separately and the interrelationship between the two. Durkheim described the balance between the individual and society from a functional perspective while theorizing about suicide. According to him, suicide results from an imbalance in the relationship of independence or autonomy and occurs in individuals subject to too much or too little social solidarity.

He further argued that suicide rates differed between different social groups as it depended on how connected individuals were to society and what kind of social support they received. He proposed the balance between independence and individual freedom on the one hand and subordination to the collective on the other. This complexity and the structural mechanism of the individual and society was also elaborated in Durkheim's theories on the division of labor and social solidarity. The individual, for Durkheim, as analyzed by Cuff et al (1979), is a creation of organic solidarity in the sense that a being with individuality is really conceivable and possible only within a certain type of society. The characteristics of the individual derive from the type of society in which he is involved. In this way society creates 'the individual' and not vice versa. (Manchet et al. 2009 [1979]: 67)

Weber emphasized interpretive understanding to develop social action theory and talk about sociological methods. Subjective events are very important to social science research which requires knowledge of the internal or subjective states of individuals. He was also interested in observing how individuals act on their understanding and how this "understanding may be related to their social action in society". Methodologically, the subjective experiences of individuals are essential for him; these inner states serve as a basis for social action. At the same time, to understand society, he offers the idea of \u200b\u200bsocial spheres. A social sphere exists, acts, rationalizes and creates orientation with other social acts and influences other social spheres. He mentions that the legal, religious and political spheres of society are interconnected and change and evolve in a process of overlapping and overlapping. When we see that Marx's capitalist workers or owners eventually fall into the defined class of owners or workers or bourgeoisie and proletariat, Weber extended the dualistic idea of stratification to include the tripartite model of class, status and party. This formulation of social stratification develops perspectives for the study of individual position in social structure and interactions. Marx views the individual and society through the prism of economic materialism. Durkheim and Weber both subscribe to this by legitimizing all systems of knowledge and capitalist authoritarianism in relation to the individual and to society, but they reject the comparison with Marx to develop their own arguments. Weber shows us how culture is socially constructed and offers a sociology of knowledge and a sociology of organization. Durkheim extends the idea of social order and social structure to include how unlimited individual desires would be controlled by social regulation.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed the basic sociological concepts conceived in the theoretical propositions of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Weber, like Durkheim, continued Marx's exchange of ideas, but they are by no means successors. His critique of Western modernity and capitalism provides new and original theoretical underpinnings that have been widely hailed as classics in the social science discipline. However, the connection and lineage of the ideas and concepts of these three founding fathers would not be ignored. Like Cuff et al. (1979) noted that Weber's sociology is much closer to that of Marx than that of Durkheim, and coming from a very different philosophical background to that of Marx, Weber was more closely associated with neo-Kantian than with the Hegelian tradition of German thought. In terms of influence in sociology, Durkheim's influence in the period immediately following World War II appears to be significant and more enduring than that of Marx or Weber. (Cuff et al. 2009[1979]: 35-58)

In terms of the sociological imagination, they all offer new leads on which we have found a rigorous methodological and conceptual basis. These three figures covered the historical, economic, socio-political, cultural and religious elements of human existence. Considering a particular school or sub-discipline of sociology, say economic sociology has its historical roots primarily in Marx, Weber and Durkheim. The structuralism of Marx and Weber and the structural functionalism of Durkheim form the philosophical basis of modern social science. To outline the foundations of social theory in relation to the Enlightenment and the classical trend, Gérard Delanty (2009) asserted that Marx established a tradition in social theory around the rise and transformation of capitalist society, whereas his social theory is in critical fashion. In his early works, however, the Aristotelian concept of "practice" dominated, which he combined with his main themes of alienation and developed Hegel's idea.

After Marx, social theory split into three classical traditions, a legacy continuing with the critical tradition of Marx, one stemming from Comte, represented by Durkheim, and another going back to Kant, of which Weber is a part. Trained in French philosophy, Emile Durkheim can be considered the first social theorist to establish social theory as a social science enterprise. As a social theorist, however, Weber set out to explain the modern world. Like Durkheim, he was interested in explaining the moral foundations of society, but unlike Durkheim, he emphasized cultural meanings and the process of rationalization. Both Weber and Durkheim offered a general social theory of modern capitalist society, supported by new methodological approaches to the social sciences. As with Marx, the themes of the crisis were the same for both. (Delanty 2009: 24-8)

This thematic module of comparing and contrasting the positions of Marx, Durkheim and Weber would broaden our understanding of human society and help us address their specific theories. It also allows us to critically analyze the specific conceptual position they provide. In order to encounter and conceptualize social forces in modern society, this comparison and contrast would help us as a key tool. To have a critical approach to a sociological problem when we rely on this comparative discussion, it can inform us about the fundamental variables used by Marx, Durkheim and Weber in their analysis of society. Marx received nature, psychology from Durkheim and religion from Weber as his basic assumption. As founders of social theory, they established a formal and systematic social science analysis of the modern capitalist condition.

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