Transcripts
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Inhoud
SESSION 1: CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY - AN INTRODUCTION.................................................. 4
1.1 WHAT IS THIS COURSE ABOUT?........................................................................................................... 4
1.2 IMPLICIT THEORIES IN EVERYDAY LIFE................................................................................................... 5
1.3 WHAT IS SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY? ....................................................................................................... 6
1.4 FOUNDING FATHERS ........................................................................................................................ 7
1.5 SOCIOLOGY IN THE MODERN INDUSTRIAL AGE ....................................................................................... 9
1.6 LINKING CLASSICAL TO CONTEMPORARY THEORIES ................................................................................ 10
1.7 THE SOCIOLOGICAL THEORETICAL FIELD .............................................................................................. 11
1.8 AIMS AND CLAIMS OF THIS COURSE ................................................................................................... 13
SESSION 2: BERNARD MANDEVILLE (1670 – 1733) AND ADAM SMITH (1723 – 1790) ........................ 14
2.1 THE FABLE OF THE BEES .................................................................................................................. 14
2.2 THE INVISIBLE HAND ...................................................................................................................... 16
2.3 THE DIVISION OF LABOUR ............................................................................................................... 18
2.4 THE WEALTH OF NATIONS ............................................................................................................... 19
2.5 EXCHANGE AND SELF-INTEREST......................................................................................................... 21
2.6 SOCIAL STRATIFICATION .................................................................................................................. 22
2.7 THE IMPORTANCE OF ADAM SMITH ................................................................................................... 24
SESSION 3: AUGUSTE COMTE (1798 – 1857) .................................................................................... 25
3.1 RELIGIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE ............................................................................................. 25
3.2 THE LAW OF THE THREE STAGES OF THE HUMAN MIND .......................................................................... 27
3.3 SOCIOLOGY AS A MEANS TO ESTABLISH SOCIAL HARMONY...................................................................... 28
3.4 THE LAW OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENCES ..................................................................................... 30
3.5 RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AS STARTING POINT ........................................................................................... 31
3.6 COMTE’S RELIGION OF HUMANITY .................................................................................................... 33
3.7 EARLY FUNCTIONALISM .................................................................................................................. 34
3.8 THE IMPORTANCE OF AUGUSTE COMTE .............................................................................................. 36
SESSION 4: ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805 – 1859) .......................................................................... 37
4.1 TOCQUEVILLE AS A PRECURSOR OF MODERN SOCIOLOGY ........................................................................ 37
4.2 AN ARISTOCRATIC PERSPECTIVE........................................................................................................ 39
4.3 ON DEMOCRATIZATION .................................................................................................................. 40
4.4. THE DOMINANCE OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS ........................................................................................... 42
4.5 THE DANGERS OF CENTRALIZATION ................................................................................................... 43
4.6 GRASSROOTS POLITICS AS THE HEART OF DEMOCRACY ........................................................................... 45
4.7 ‘REVOLUTIONS WILL BECOME RARE’ ................................................................................................. 46
4.8 TOCQUEVILLE’S PREDICTIONS ........................................................................................................... 48
SESSION 5: KARL MARX (1818 – 1883) ............................................................................................. 49
5.1 THE UNEXPECTED FORCE OF SOCIAL THOUGHT ..................................................................................... 49
5.2 ECONOMIC CHAINS OF INTERDEPENDENCY .......................................................................................... 50
5.3 HOMO FABER .............................................................................................................................. 52
5.4 ALIENATION ................................................................................................................................. 54
5.5 CLASS STRUGGLE........................................................................................................................... 55
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5.6 CAUGHT IN THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM .................................................................................................. 57
5.7 CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS .................................................................................................................. 58
5.8 MARX’S PREDICTIONS .................................................................................................................... 60
SESSION 6: ÉMILE DURKHEIM (1858 – 1917) .................................................................................... 61
6.1 ESTABLISHING A NEW SCIENCE ......................................................................................................... 61
6.2 MECHANIC AND ORGANIC SOLIDARITY ............................................................................................... 63
6.3 SOCIAL FACTS............................................................................................................................... 64
6.4 SUICIDE, A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY ...................................................................................................... 66
6.5 EGOISTIC AND ALTRUISTIC SUICIDE .................................................................................................... 67
6.6 ANOMIC AND FATALISTIC SUICIDE ..................................................................................................... 68
6.7 THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE ....................................................................................... 70
6.8 THE SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF RELIGION ................................................................................................. 71
SESSION 7: MAX WEBER (1864 – 1920) ............................................................................................ 73
7.1 VALUE-FREE SOCIOLOGY ................................................................................................................. 73
7.2 UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL ACTION ..................................................................................................... 74
7.3 THE IDEAL TYPE ............................................................................................................................ 76
7.4 METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM ................................................................................................... 78
7.5 THE FOUR IDEAL TYPES OF SOCIAL ACTION .......................................................................................... 79
7.6 THE THREE IDEAL TYPES OF AUTHORITY .............................................................................................. 81
7.7 RATIONALIZATION ......................................................................................................................... 82
7.8 THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM ........................................................................ 83
SESSION 8: NORBERT ELIAS (1897 – 1990) ....................................................................................... 85
8.1 THE LAST OF THE GREAT CLASSIC SOCIOLOGISTS ................................................................................... 85
8.2 INTRODUCTION TO THE CIVILIZING PROCESS ........................................................................................ 86
8.3 THE SOCIAL CONSTRAINT TOWARDS SELF-CONSTRAINT .......................................................................... 88
8.4 THE CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION..................................................................................................... 90
8.5 THE IMPORTANCE OF NORBERT ELIAS ................................................................................................ 91
8.6 A BASE FOR CONTEMPORARY STUDIES ............................................................................................... 93
8.7 FIGURATIONAL PROCESSES .............................................................................................................. 94
8.8 CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES: A FOCUS ON LONG TERM TRENDS ..................................................... 96
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Session 1: Classical Sociological Theory - An Introduction
1.1 What is this course about?
Ladies and Gentleman, dear students,
A warm welcome to you all. This is a Massive Open Online Course, entirely devoted to
classical sociological theory. The title covers the subject matter conveniently, but it fails to
convey the relevance of the theories that will be presented here, and to be honest, it sounds
a bit boring. This is misleading, because the books that I will present are still very important
for anyone who wants to research or just better understand contemporary societies. How did
human societies develop, how are they structured, what are the opportunities and the
challenges, where are the most urgent problems located and can those problems be solved,
at least in part, by conscious human intervention? If you think that these questions are
interesting, then this might be the course for you to follow.
To answer these questions, we have to research into the history and the structure of present
day societies and we have to read what the best experts can tell us about our own world –
not only sociologists, but historians, social anthropologists, political scientists, economists,
and also journalists and literary authors with a sensitivity for the sociological aspects of
human existence.
But there is also another very important source of insight and that is the body of articles and
books, written by the precursors of modern social science, who for the first time tried to
grasp and develop theoretical insights about the great transformations that took place during
their lifetimes. You could think of 18th Century moral philosophers like Mandeville and
Smith, 19th Century intellectuals such as Comte, Tocqueville and Marx, and 20th Century
sociologists like Durkheim, Weber and Elias, as the thinkers who sketched the first
conceptual frameworks that helped their contemporaries and the generations after them to
make sense of the seemingly chaotic and bewildering social developments they were
confronted with. Their pioneering breakthroughs were so innovative that we still feel their
power. They were the first to catch entirely new social realities in their theoretical fishnets
and although we have moved beyond some of their insights, they still offer us bold
conjectures about modernity.
My sincere enthusiasm for these classical theories has been my main motivation in teaching
sociological theory at the University of Amsterdam over the past forty years. My name is
Bart van Heerikhuizen and since I began to study sociology in 1967, I never stopped being
amazed by the depth of those theories, discovering ever new aspects that I want to share
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with my students. Of course, there always was and still is the didactic challenge: how to
make the writings of authors who lived under very different social conditions and who wrote
in a style that is far removed from our own readable for contemporary students. During the
past forty years I have learned how to do this in front of a lecture hall with 150 students or in
a seminar with 25 students, but today that experience does not help me much. Here I am, all
alone, in front of a camera, talking to you through this microphone, and I really do miss your
immediate feedback, an expression of surprise, a smile, or even just a raised eyebrow. This
is new to me and what I experience right now is what Karl Marx would have called
alienation. But the possibilities for disseminating the core ideas of the classical sociologists
are so impressive that I will do anything I can to make this MOOC a successful tool for
academic education.
1.2 Implicit Theories in Everyday Life
We all use theories constantly, even classical sociological theories. But we do this in a very
implicit way. When somebody at a party, for example, says that the rise of atheism is
threatening social cohesion, he or she is invoking a theoretical idea that can already be
found in the works of early 19th Century thinkers. If you believe that we live in a class-based
society and that the dominant group is suppressing the members of the poorer classes,
even influencing their way of thinking, then you have internalised, maybe without even being
aware of it, some theoretical ideas that can be found in the books of Karl Marx. And these
theories have practical consequences. When you step inside the voting booth, your choice
between the candidates is in large part guided by theories that you may be only dimly aware
of. Theories about social justice, economic inequality, bout liberal values, the role of religion
or the fair weight of taxes. In that small secluded space you are in fact juggling a multitude of
theoretical notions. And even your vague idea of what it actually means to be a voter in a
democratic political system can be traced back to the study of democracy in the United
States by a 19th Century aristocrat. You cast your vote under the influence of ideas
developed by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who witnessed the French upheavals of
1830 and 1848. As you get older, classical sociological theories become so important in
daily life that it is worthwhile to think about them in a more reflexive way and to study their
origins, their propagators and their critics. Understanding the intellectual roots of ideas that
half consciously float through your mind may be an illuminating experience.
This course is intended to make implicit theories explicit, to help you reflect on them, to
study them from many different angles. You may have very strong opinions in your social life
or in the political sphere, and that is as it should be. But it may be a good idea, when
following this course, to try to take a more detached position, for the time being. My advice is
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to give every author that we discuss here the benefit of the doubt, but also the honour of a
critical approach. Take, for example, the theory of Marx, whom I just mentioned. Maybe you
call yourself a Marxist, and in that case you probably think that Karl Marx was one of the
greatest social thinkers that ever lived. My suggestion here is to put that thought on hold for
the duration of the course and to look at Marx’s theories with a critical eye, even to look out
for flaws and errors. On the other hand, if you strongly dislike Marxist thinking, try to give
Marx the benefit of the doubt for at least the length of the week that is dedicated to him. Try
to approach all the theories presented here with an open mind, critical but without bias or
prejudice – as far as possible, of course. Try to look at the subject matter with an attitude of
curiosity, a bit like Alice in Wonderland.
If you can do that, there is something that you will receive in return. Having completed this
course, you will see the whole social world in a different light. You will be drawn to articles in
the newspaper that never before attracted your attention, you will observe people doing
things that you never noticed before, you may even discern sociological connections where
in the past you only saw coincidence. In other words, you will become a slightly different
kind of person. Let me warn you right from the start: in this course, we are going to mess
with your mind.
1.3 What is Sociological Theory?
What is sociology? Contrary to what is often thought, that is not such a difficult question to
answer, though it is easy to assemble hundreds of definitions and make it all seem
extremely complicated. Sociology is the science that has human societies as its subject
matter. As simple as that. For the time being, it is enough to say that sociologists are
interested in the history and structure of the large configurations that are formed by human
beings. The scientific study of human societies became an institutionalised discipline, taught
at universities, at the end of the 19th Century, and that implies that some of the classic
sociologists that we discuss here were not university professors at all. Some of them never
called themselves sociologists: they were amateurs, amateurs in the best sense of the word.
The fact that their study of social life was done in non-institutionalised surroundings had its
advantages. There is something fresh and innocent about the books of Tocqueville, who
never had to worry about tenure, whose chapters were never scrutinised by academic
committees or peer reviewers. A disadvantage may have been that some authors got
carried away by their own arguments, because they lectured and wrote for people who
worshipped them, as was the case of Marx or Auguste Comte, who clearly missed the
objections of a critical audience.
The classical sociologists were not just interested in human societies, they were focusing on
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problems attending the fundamental social change that was taking place in Europe at the
time of the Industrial Revolution.
They studied what has been called the Great Transformation, the transition from agrarian to
industrial societies, from traditional to modern societies, the growing influence of the modern
sciences, the rise of the modern metropolis, the process of secularisation, the development
of new political arrangements such as modern democracy but also modern totalitarianism,
and also the more general tendencies such as the process of rationalisation described by
Max Weber or the process of civilisation as theorised by Norbert Elias. The first sociological
theories were proposed by intellectuals who were struck by the brand new developments
that they were witnessing for the very first time in the history of the human species. One of
the reasons why we still experience their theories as illuminating is that today we live in the
aftermath of processes that became noticeable for the first time during their lifetimes.
That being said, we still have to realise that the thinkers who are canonised as the founders
of modern sociology constitute a very one-sided group: they are all men, they are all
Europeans, and with the exception of Tocqueville, they are all middle class.
When studying their theories, it is good to ask yourself from time to time what difference
would it have made had they been women, born in Asia or in Latin America, stemming from
the very rich classes of society or from the very poor. There may be a gender bias, a class
preference and maybe even a bit of ethnocentrism at work in the composition of the canon
of the greats.
And there is a possibility that some important thinkers have so far been overlooked by the
historians of the social sciences and that maybe in the future they will be given a welldeserved place in the pantheon of the great classic sociological thinkers.
1.4 Founding Fathers
There are excellent reasons for saying that the Greek philosopher Plato should be
considered the founding father of sociology. He developed, for example, utopian models of
the perfect society, ideal types that he could then use as a measuring rod in order to analyse
and criticise his own society. So we could say that at least some aspects of sociological
thought can already be found in the year 400 before the Common Era. That is one way of
looking at it. Completely opposed to that position is the idea that serious academic theories
about human society, anchored in methodologically sound research, are not to be found
before the Second World War. This idea holds that sociology as an empirical science came
of age in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, with sociology professors such as
Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton being the first rigorously scientific theorists. When you
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have a look at the large collection of handbooks or readers devoted to sociological theory,
you will discover that the extreme positions I just mentioned are not shared by contemporary
authors. It is much more common to begin the story of sociological theory somewhere in the
18th Century, for example with the Scottish moral philosophers.
Sociologists disagree about many things, but there is a broad consensus about where the
story of sociology really starts: that is in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Let's begin with a
somewhat trivial observation. Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew who the person was who coined
the word sociology and if we knew in what year he or she used that word for the very first
time? Well, it may come as a surprise, but we do know his name and we do have a date.
The wordsmith was the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who singlehandedly welded
together the Latin word socius, meaning companion, and the Greek suffix logos, meaning
the knowledge of something. Comte published a book in the year 1838 in which the word
can be found in print for the very first time. He had actually used another term before to
denote the same thing, the science of society, referring to it as la physique sociale, social
physics. But when he discovered that another author had stolen his term, or at least he
believed that his intellectual ownership had been injured, he invented the term sociology,
stressing over and over that this was the word that he personally had given to the world.
Many new words were invented in that same period for new phenomena that had to be
given a name, such as industrialism and socialism, and even the word altruism, another
term coined by Comte, who needed a term denoting the opposite of egoism.
As an institutionalised academic enterprise, a discipline taught by university professors
appointed to teach the brand new science, sociology had to wait to the end of the 19th
Century, when Albion Small became a professor of sociology at the new University of
Chicago. But as a way of studying the social implications of the great transformation towards
modernity, sociology is older than Comte. His term was not the start of the discipline, it is in
a way the outcome of an intellectual movement that culminated in the growing acceptance of
the word. If we follow the idea that substantially, sociology is the science that takes as its
subject matter the rise of industrialised societies in the West, then it makes sense to say that
it was born in the course of the 18th Century. Anybody interested in following the intellectual
river further upstream may come up with interesting precursors, like the North African
scholar Ibn Chaldun, or Machiavelli or Montaigne, or the great Dutch humanist Erasmus. But
in this course we begin our overview of classical authors with Adam Smith, who witnessed a
new type of division of labour, who wrote about relatively modern manufactures, who was
amazed by the increase of the output of workers and who studied the social implications of
these huge changes. That is where our story begins.
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1.5 Sociology in the Modern Industrial Age
Maybe some of the more familiar names in this course will surprise you. Adam Smith?
Wasn’t he the founding father of the ideological current of thought called liberalism? And
Karl Marx? Wasn’t that the man who gave us socialism and communism? Is this a course
about great sociological thinkers or is it more about the thinkers who constructed those
influential ideological currents of liberalism, socialism and conservatism? These three ways
of looking at modern society still exist today. And yes, it is true that Smith is seen by modern
liberals as one of their heroes and that on the first of May the military parades in communist
countries take place in front of enormous portraits of Karl Marx and his friend and
collaborator Friedrich Engels.
The intellectuals that we discuss in this course tried to understand the great transformation
that was taking place in front of their eyes, they were trying to make sense of it, but at the
same time they were trying to discern what may be progress and what may turn out to be a
dangerous development. They discerned ugly potentialities in modernity and they all
depicted them in dark colours. They also tried to come up with solutions for these problems.
Tocqueville was afraid that equality in the United States could lead to the dictatorship of the
majority, but he also thought about ways to avert such dangers. It might help, for example,
to have a free press. But when these intellectuals pondered the dangers of modernity and
the possibility of finding solutions, they never hid their moral position. On the contrary, they
were rarely reluctant to show their ethical preferences and their political predilections. So
yes, in a way the precursors of the social sciences were neither cool nor detached; rather
they were very, very concerned.
Liberalism is the ideological current that stresses the ties between people who freely engage
in what they hope will turn out to be mutually profitable relationships. Socialism accentuates
the ties between dominant and dominated groups, it is about the differences in economic
and political power. Conservatism lays a heavy accent on the ties of tradition, religious rules,
family, language, and the integrative force of a broad social consensus on norms and
values. These three fundamental answers to the question of how human societies remain
glued together over a longer period of time can be found in political discourse, but also in
the writings of the founding fathers of modern social science. In fact, there was a lot of
interaction between the ideological debate and the discussions amongst the proto
sociologists, when the discipline had not yet become an institutionalised and respected
university science.
It is only in the 20th Century with Weber and Elias that social scientists tried to differentiate
between statements about how the world is and how the world should be. Max Weber wrote
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in a very abstract way about the necessity for the social scientist to try to control his political
preferences, at least when he is teaching and might be tempted to abuse his superiority as a
professor in the classroom to force on his students some of his own political opinions.
Norbert Elias said that every social scientist is confronted with problems of involvement and
detachment. We should realise, he says, that what we hope and wish for may hinder us in
observing what is actually happening. So in the 20th Century, sociological thinkers became
more aware and more prudent when dealing with their own ethical and political preferences,
even their half conscious prejudices. This does not mean that social scientists who believe
that it is their duty to take a position in current political debates have completely
disappeared. On the contrary, they are still there; a minority, but a vocal one. Yet the
innocence of those 19th Century theorists who, without much reflexivity, mixed their
scientific
statements with
ideologically coloured
statements,
that
innocence
has
disappeared.
1.6 Linking Classical to Contemporary Theories
Almost every sociology track begins with the classical sociological theories. Of course, that
is not the only subject that new students have to delve into. They are also taught research
methodology and given courses providing all kinds of empirical information about their own
society, in the present and in the past. But in many universities in the world it has become
almost a didactic ritual to start off with a course on sociological theory, beginning not, as one
might expect, with the most recent theorists, the state of the art, but with the classics. Have
a look on the internet, compare the different sociology courses that universities all over the
world are offering, and you may even come to the conclusion that the more prestigious
universities are also the ones that devote most attention to the classical theorists. This
MOOC can therefore also be seen as one of the elements of an introductory sociology
course.
But when you come to think of it, that is actually a bit strange. When you study physics, your
first class is certainly not about Newton. When you study chemistry, your professor will not
begin the new academic year with Lavoissier. It has even been said that a science that
hesitates to forget its founders is lost. If that were true, it would be bad news for sociology.
On the other hand, if you study philosophy, there is a good chance that you will start with the
pre-Socratic thinkers. Different types of knowledge seem to take a different attitude towards
their predecessors. Is it a bad sign for sociology when its practitioners seem to find it difficult
to break away from the great thinkers of the past?
Well, the case of sociology is actually a bit complicated. On the one hand, we can observe
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scientific progress; we have in many ways moved beyond the theories of Comte and Marx.
Their theoretical articles, however important they may still be, would probably not be
accepted by a contemporary peer reviewed sociological journal. On the other hand, we are
still wrestling with theoretical dilemmas that were formulated for the first time and often in a
crystal clear way by the classical thinkers. These old theoretical concepts were forged at the
dawn of modernity and the fact that these classical thinkers were the first to theorise about
that great transformation seems to have imbued their writings with interesting ideas about
modernity that deserve to be studied until this very day. Every ten years, a young sociologist
writes an article proudly declaring that now the time has come to finally leave these old
fashioned classics behind. But I am reminded of the dinosaurs of rock, the Rolling Stones or
AC/DC. In spite of all the criticisms, they just don’t go away.
Contemporary theorists use the concepts of the classical authors in new ways, but they
cannot circumvent them. It is hard to understand Pierre Bourdieu if you are unaware of the
insights of Marx and Weber. It is impossible to really understand Giddens if you know
nothing about Durkheim. And it may be illuminating to see that a theoretical line of thought
that appears to be typically 21st Century was already proposed in the middle of the 19th
Century and that it was then already the object of criticisms that resemble the critical
comments levelled against it today.
So there is an ambivalence in sociology here and this reflects the position of the science,
situated as it is, somewhat uneasily, between the natural sciences and the humanities, the
Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. In the so-called hard sciences, the
theories dating from the 18th and 19th Centuries are seen as beautiful antiquities, relics that
interest the historian of science or the sociologist of science, but not the first year student. In
the humanities, the precursors are very important. Schopenhauer does not make Kant or
even Plato obsolete, and he himself would completely agree with that. But in sociology, we
have to live with the fact that there is both continuity and discontinuity between the classical
and modern theories.
Sometimes we want to take our distance from the classical predecessors and at other
moments in time we still find in them a source of inspiration that we really cannot do without
when we try to make sense of the social universe in the 21st Century.
1.7 The Sociological Theoretical Field
There may be a good reason why sociologists find it difficult to break away from the classic
tradition. There is a big difference between sociology and in fact all of the sciences of the
human species on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other. Sciences that take
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as their subject matter human beings, whether it is psychology or political science or
sociology, produce knowledge that is, so to say, assimilated by their subject matter, human
beings, and that subject matter changes as a result. Jellyfish do not change their behaviour
under the influence of a book written about them by a brilliant biologist, but humans change
their behaviour when a certain psychological or sociological theory becomes part of public
knowledge.
Take, for example, that funny little song in the musical West Side Story by Leonard
Bernstein and Steven Sondheim. In that musical, which became famous worldwide when the
movie was made of it, you can hear a group of criminals who defend themselves by saying
that they are sociologically sick. The librettist here pokes fun at the sociologists of the 1950s
who said that criminals should be understood in their own social context, and who
sometimes appeared not only to understand the criminals very well but also to excuse their
behaviour. Or that is what many people thought. We even see in this song the appearance
of a psychiatrist with a strong German accent, who explains the bad behaviour of a young
gangster by referring to his unhappy childhood.
Sociological theories are not studied by the general public, but a kind of watered down,
trivialised version of them may become very popular, and when that happens it may actually
influence behaviour. When sociologists in the 1950s wrote about typically male and female
role expectations and role behaviour, they laid the foundations for the feminist wave of the
sixties and seventies. When you hear that social scientists believe that in our type of society,
it is expected of women not to have a job or to earn money, but to stay at home and take
care of the children, the reaction may be: if that is so, why not change it? If you want to
stand up against what can be seen as an injustice, you first have to become aware of its
existence, and sociologists have often made their own subject matter aware of something
that they had only vaguely been aware of before.
The fact that human beings read the scientific stuff that is written about them and that they
may collectively decide to change the routines that are described and analysed in those
studies is not at all a weakness of the social sciences. It is a fact of life, something we have
to reckon with, an inescapable element of our work that the student of jellyfish never has to
worry about.
This circular or spiralling element is typical of the sciences that are concerned with human
beings and it is one of the reasons why there is such a deep and fundamental difference
between the human sciences and the natural sciences. We study a subject matter that
listens to us, even talks back to us.
And this may also be one of the reasons why in sociology we always return to the classic
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theories. Human societies change, they also change under the influence of the social
sciences themselves, and that causes a kind of instability in the knowledge we gather about
human societies. But one thing remains stable and that is the body of knowledge that we call
classical theory. This is an enormous reservoir of knowledge that has been time-tested, that
we can always refer back to. Where the theoretical field is so unstable and fluid, the classic
theories offer something to hold on to.
Sociology is a discipline with deep uncertainties, with disagreements between its
practitioners, with a proliferation of theoretical approaches. But there is one thing that all
sociologists, all over the world, agree about, and that is the importance of the books of
Durkheim or the greatness of the theoretical universe of Max Weber. The American
sociologist Jeffrey Alexander once wrote that there is a functional necessity for classical
theory: we need these theories because they constitute our common ground, this is what we
all agree about. And that is true: when you finish this course, you can communicate with
sociology students in Tokyo or in Mumbai. If you are really well versed in classical theory,
you have mastered a kind of lingua franca, a sociological universal language that will help
you to feel at ease in the company of sociologists in New York or Amsterdam. It may even
give you a feeling of solidarity based on a shared intellectual heritage with sociologists all
over the world.
1.8 Aims and Claims of this Course
In a serious academic course, the teacher has to make clear what to expect from the
program, explain its didactic organisation in the light of its academic goals. Often, the aims
and claims of the course are presented in formal language with boring lists with bullet points
that the experienced students have learned to skip as soon as they appear. But please bear
with me when I want to say just a few words, very informal words, on the subject.
My children were born here in Amsterdam and as a responsible father I had to teach them
how to ride a bicycle, because that is our main means of transportation here. In the
beginning, you are running next to the bike, trying to catch your kid every time they threaten
to lose their balance and fall in the grass of the Vondelpark. But after a few days of lightly
bruising their arms and knees and maybe after a few tears, they discover surprisingly quickly
the trick and at the end of the week you see them disappear between the trees in the
distance.
Seeing them drive away, still a bit unsure, that, for me, is the best part. You know that from
now on they can do it without you. That one week of bicycle lessons captures what it is to be
a parent, steering your children to independence.
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What I really do hope to achieve here is that you will be able to read the original texts of the
great thinkers of social science and that you will understand them and can use them in your
own work, whether that is the work of a sociologist or a journalist or a creative writer or a
civil servant or maybe the minister of a church. And I hope that in time you will find it so easy
to read some of these authors that you will experience genuine pleasure in doing so, the
intense satisfaction of being intellectually challenged and stimulated by the intriguing
thoughts of some of the sharpest minds in the history of mankind, living in another social
world and yet so close to us.
That is what I really want for you: to learn the techniques to understand a text written by
some early sociologist. And maybe one day you will discover a few treasures in the works of
an author whose contribution was not mandatory reading for this MOOC, let’s say Georg
Simmel or George Herbert Mead. If you can read them all on your own, you have acquired a
new and very important skill. That is our main aim for this course.
The second aim is that we want you to become acquainted with a certain style of reasoning,
a way of approaching the subject matter of sociology: the dynamics of human societies.
Although our authors differ from one another, they share something: the passionate wish to
scientifically study all aspects of social life. They want to anchor their arguments in hard
data, seemingly uncontested facts. They have many differences, some are devout Catholics,
some were raised in the Jewish faith, others are outspoken atheists, but they all share the
wish to explain social life without having recourse to heavenly interference. Here we see the
beginnings of a principled empirical attitude, we recognise an early version of sociology as a
new academic science.
And the third and final goal of this course is to raise your sensitivity to the relationship
between theories and empirical research. We intend to show you how new data inspired the
great thinkers to come up with new theoretical options and how, on the other hand, new
theories led to new testable hypotheses and to the collection of data that were not
considered interesting before because they appeared to have no theoretical relevance.
Well, there is still something else that I would like to achieve, but which is a goal that you will
not find in the official lists. I hope that this course will be an interesting and maybe even an
exciting journey for you. I hope that this course will make you happy.
Session 2: Bernard Mandeville (1670 – 1733) and Adam Smith
(1723 – 1790)
2.1 The Fable of the Bees
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Adam Smith, whose ideas we will discuss now, did not start from scratch, of course. He was
influenced by many people, philosophers and intellectuals in Scotland and in Paris, but also
by thinkers who lived before him. Take, for example, one of the expressions that made him
famous: the division of labour. Those words can be found on the first page of his most
important book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, and it became, as we will see, a
core idea with wide ranging implications, stretching out to the books of Marx and Durkheim,
and still important in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Smith borrowed that expression, the
division of labour, from an interesting precursor who I want to briefly introduce here: Bernard
de Mandeville, the author of a book with the title The Fable of the Bees, really a fascinating
book.
Bernard de Mandeville. The name sounds French, but you should pronounce it the English
way, Bernard de Mandeville, because he worked as a doctor in London and it was in that
city that he wrote his best books. But in fact, Mandeville was of Dutch origin, born in the city
of Rotterdam in 1670, a student at Leyden University in the Netherlands, who moved to
London in 1699 to marry his English bride. But it is not out of chauvinism that I talk about
him here. Well, maybe a little bit… But what is more important is that if you follow the river of
sociological ideas upstream to discover its sources, you will surely come across this
wonderful book with its surprisingly modern insights.
The Fable of the Bees, its first edition appearing in 1714, is a strange book because it has
the form of a commentary on a poem, a poem that had been written by Mandeville himself a
few years before in 1705.
His fable, a thinly veiled critical pamphlet about the society he lived in, had been
misunderstood, or so he thought, and in this book he tries to defend himself against his
detractors and explain what he had actually wanted to say.
The poem it all began with is called The Grumbling Hive, and yes, it is a fable about bees. It
tells us about the most prosperous society of bees that, once upon a time, could be found in
the woods, feared by its enemies, admired by its friends. But that does not mean that there
were no problems in the hive. At this point, Mandeville begins to tell his readers about the
criminals, the scoundrels, the doctors who prescribe expensive medicines that do not work,
unlicensed priests, corrupt politicians, soldiers that never fight, and the reader begins to
understand that this fable about bees is in fact a political satire that takes pleasure in
describing in every ugly detail all that was corrupt and criminal in England at the time.
Mandeville says: “thus every part was full of vice, yet the whole mass a paradise”. But then
the story takes an unexpected turn. The bees begin to grumble, they start to complain: why
are there so many wrongdoers, why can’t we be honest and good, why is it so difficult to get
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rid of the criminals in our midst? When the gods in Heaven hear about the complaints of
beings that they had overwhelmed with gracious gifts, they become very angry and decide
to punish the unthankful bees. Their punishment? It is very simple. The bees get just what
they had been asking for. The next morning, every bee has been turned into a one hundred
percent honest insect. The results are devastating. All members of the police force, all the
lawyers and judges, become jobless overnight. The architects building the prisons have
nothing to do. Mandeville, who was a doctor in London, writes how the members of the
medical profession begin admitting to their patients that they really do not know how to heal
them, which was more true in the 18th Century than today, and stopped doing what they did.
The good hearted bees do not want to show off their riches to their neighbours, so there is
no more work for painters and sculptors. Well, in short, the hive collapses, most of the bees
go away and the few that remain live in a hollow tree. The story ends with two people
walking through the woods, observing a few bees buzzing around a tree, and one of them
says to the other: Do you see those poor little creatures? Can you imagine that once they
belonged to the most powerful tribe to be found in these woods? The moral of the fable is
printed on its first page: private vices, public benefits. The bad behaviour of certain individual
members of a group may lead to the greatest prosperity for the collectivity as a whole.
That was the thesis that the author wanted to get across to his audience: the sins for which
we pretend to feel ashamed may contribute to the foundations of a flourishing society. Every
society (and of course we are talking about human beings here and not about bees) needs a
certain degree of deviance, illegality and crime to work smoothly. This is an aspect of the
human condition that everybody who seriously studies human societies must recognise,
whether we like it or not.
The poem was considered by many contemporaries an apology for crime, a terrible
pamphlet in defence of immoral behaviour. But that was not at all the intention of Mandeville.
So after writing The Grumbling Hive, his funny poem of just thirteen pages, he wrote The
Fable of the Bees, hundreds of pages in which he explained in detail and with many
interesting illustrative cases why he believed that human societies cannot prosper without a
certain degree of undesirable behaviour – private vices, public benefits.
2.2 The Invisible Hand
What I find so interesting in Mandeville is that he brings to light the discontinuity between the
level of the individual and the level of society as a whole. What is unpleasant behaviour in
the case of one single human being may turn out to be, at the collective level, very positive
for the entire society. It is a line of reasoning that you will often encounter in sociology. You
find it, for example, in the functionalist analysis of Robert Merton, developed in the 1940s
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and 50s. In certain situations, the illegal activities of certain groups of people contribute to
the integration of society as a whole.
These latent functions may be completely unintended and unrecognised by the participants,
but still the outcome is that society works more smoothly, that collective goals are reached
with more ease.
This concept of latent positive functions is something that Mandeville has a feel for. He does
not want to praise sinful behaviour, but he wants to show that when you find sinful
behaviour, you should not expect it to have only negative consequences; you should also
look out for its eventual positive effects.
In Adam Smith you may recognise a similar argument, but put in more careful words, less
extreme and therefore also easier to defend. Smith does not write about sin or vice, but he
does write about people who keep their eyes on their well understood self-interest. In the
terms of Auguste Comte, human beings are driven more by egoism than by altruism and
that is not something we should regret. Smith, just like his predecessor Mandeville, likes to
point out that our moral indignation about selfishness is not very helpful when we try to
observe the actual consequences of such behaviour. In fact, the actions that are primarily
motivated by self-interest may at the social level become interwoven in such a complex way
that they mysteriously contribute to an advance in prosperity for everybody. This element of
mystery can be found in that famous expression about the invisible hand. All of those
individual acts that are motivated by the wish to make a better life for yourself and maybe
also for the members of your family are knitted together into a kind of network that is
profitable for everybody. But it is not steered by a powerful person, an enlightened prime
minister, a wise philosopher-king or even a god. No, it is the outcome of an anonymous
social dynamic that we do not quite understand.
Adam Smith does not say that the baker is a bad person, filled with vice, because he wants
the hungry to pay for the bread that they need in order to survive. But he does say that the
baker has a keen eye for his own interest and that you should take advantage of that fact
and not ask him to always give away his bread to feed the hungry. This is how Smith puts it:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our
dinner, but from their regard of their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their
humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their
advantages”.
The butcher, the brewer and the baker… In a time when it was often safer to quench your
thirst with beer than with water, these three alliterating professions took care of the primary
necessities: meat and bread to eat, beer to drink. Don’t put your trust in their friendliness,
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their Christian love for their neighbour, but rest assured that they will always keep their own
interests in mind. There seems to be an element of cynicism at work in Mandeville and
Smith, they throw a cold eye on the social world. But their point is that the moral intentions of
the participants are not very relevant here. They may be important for the moralist or the
theologian, but not for the philosopher. All that matters is the objective outcome, and in an
unexpected and surprising way the objective outcome of this myriad of egoistic actions is an
outcome that is to everybody’s advantage.
The expression ‘the invisible hand’ suggests that even Smith himself did not quite
understand how it worked, but he was convinced that it was something that every member
of human society, also those who were completely unaware of it, profited from. That is also
why he believed that we should not interfere with it. The social processes are self-regulating,
they work best when we leave them alone.
2.3 The Division of Labour
The most important book that Adam Smith wrote is called An Inquiry into the Nature and the
Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The question of this book is fairly straightforward: Why has
England become such a wealthy country? How can we explain why we have become so
rich? Is it because our farmers work harder, making longer days? Or is it because we can
now exploit goldmines and diamond mines in our colonies? Adam Smith comes up with an
entirely different answer in the very first pages of his book and it is here that he employs the
expression I mentioned before: the division of labour. It is in fact the title of the first chapter:
On the Division of Labour. In the modern manufactures, the precursors of modern industrial
factories, we see that the work is divided and sub-divided in a very peculiar way and that
was the cause of a spectacular rise in productivity. This is what Smith says in the first
sentence of his book: “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the
greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgement with which it is any where directed, or
applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.”
He then takes the reader by the hand and has him enter a factory where pins are made. He
tells us that making these little pins is a complicated business and that somebody who is not
used to it might produce one pin a day, while somebody who has learned the trick might
make maybe twenty pins a day. In the pin factory that we visit, ten workers are doing their
job, so you might expect them to produce altogether at least ten pins a day and in the best
case scenario two hundred pins per day. But that is not the case. These ten workers in fact
produce, day in, day out, 48,000 pins per day. Forty-eight thousand! How is that possible?
The answer is this: they divide their labour in a very clever way.
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Smith describes the process in detail: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a
third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head, to make the
head requires two or three distinct operations…” and so on. By dividing the relatively simple
task of producing a pin into several sub-tasks, the labour productivity explodes. Smith tries
to understand why this is the case.
First of all, everybody’s dexterity is improved. When you have nothing else to do but simply
cut small parts from a wire, you can train yourself to do it very quickly and meticulously.
Smith marvels at the rapidity of the hands of the workers in these manufactures. He says
that people who have never seen them at work cannot imagine that human beings are
capable of developing such dexterity. The people he addresses are of course the readers of
his book and Smith is here a kind of journalist who gives his audience a look behind the
walls of a modern factory, a place that they are not likely to visit. Maybe Adam Smith did not
observe a real pin factory firsthand, but it is likely that he read about the social organisation
of the pin factory in the famous French Encyclopédie by Diderot and d’Alemberty, Volume
Five, the chapter on the pin, l'Epingle.
The beautiful illustrations in that book offer us even today a good impression of what Smith
describes.
Secondly, the workers save time because they do not have to pass from one type of task to
another. They can stay all day long in the same place, in the same room, behind the same
machine, and remain completely focused on their simple task.
And then there is a third advantage. Workers who are completely focused on one kind of
work all day long may discover even better ways of doing the job more efficiently. Smith
believed that many of the smart inventions that he found in those manufactures were
developed by the people who worked there, who came up with clever suggestions that made
the whole process still more efficient.
2.4 The Wealth of Nations
Smith takes as his example a manufacture that produces simple, identical, small objects that
are easy to quantify. It is a didactic masterstroke to take a pin factory as an example. But
Smith is convinced that what happens in a factory producing pins can also be observed in all
of the other manufactures in England. The principle of the division of labour is similar
everywhere and the rise in what he calls the productive power of labour is in those other
places just as spectacular. It is, he says, the multiplication of the production of all the
different arts that had caused the new opulence. This was why England had become so
wealthy and was still in the process of becoming richer and richer. It did not have much to do
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with South African goldmines or hard working farmers, it was the outcome of a fundamental
change in the social structure of workplaces all over the country, the consequence of a
fundamental sociological change.
The first thing that contemporary readers will be reminded of when they read these pages is
that the work in such a factory must be very boring for the workers, to say the least. We are
immediately reminded of what Karl Marx called alienated labour, the kind of work where the
repetitive task of the proletarian labourer has become completely detached from the finished
end product. These workers do not derive any kind of pride from their work, they may not
even know what the product that comes out of the factory looks like.
Adam Smith, writing some seventy years before Marx, was not unaware of this problem. He
says that somebody who has to perform the same task over and over again, month after
month, may become as stupid and as ignorant as it is possible for a human being to
become. He even thought about ways to offer factory workers some kind of education to
compensate for the monotony of their work.
But for Smith, the most important outcome of the rise of productivity was what he called the
universal opulence that extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. He sincerely
believed that everybody would profit from the new wealth: the rich would become richer, but
the poor would also become richer. Or to quote him: “a general plenty diffuses itself through
all the different ranks of society”. This of course was contested by Marx, who wrote that the
profits go to the capitalist entrepreneurs and that the workers are exploited and
impoverished. This brutal image of the appropriation of the surplus by the owners of the
factories on the one hand and the pauperisation of the workers on the other is very far
removed from the more harmonious world of Smith. Smith applauds enthusiastically the
rising productivity, the growing wealth that leads to more beautiful cities, more theatres,
broader avenues, elegant concert halls, better universities, in short, to an advance in
civilisation.
Fundamentally, the sociological view of Adam Smith is optimistic, radiating the happy glow
of the enlightenment.
It is not difficult to criticise Smith as over-optimistic, but let us not forget that he wrote his
book at a moment when the process of industrialisation was at its first stages and its darker
sides were not as clear as in the days of Charles Dickens a century later. Smith was, in fact,
very early with his penetrating thoughts about the changing structure of the manufactures,
because the phenomenon that he describes was recent. It took the detached position of an
outsider, a university professor who was interested in the mundane world of pin factories, to
discover the principles of the new productivity.
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One of the things that Smith noticed, but did not elaborate on, was the fact that the new
division of labour created tasks that were so simple that an unschooled worker or even a
child could perform them. The dexterity that these tasks demand is acquired on the job and
anyone can learn it in a few days. This was something that Smith noticed. But he did not
devote his attention to one of the consequences: when the owner of the manufacture is not
dependent on the craftsmanship of his labourers, when replacing one worker with another is
the easiest thing to do, the power relation between employer and employee changes in
favour of the boss.
This became a theme in the sociological research into labour relations in the 19th and 20th
Centuries and is still an important issue today.
2.5 Exchange and Self-interest
In the second chapter of his beautiful book, Adam Smith tries to explain the origin of the
division of labour. It is not the result of human wisdom, he says. Nobody planned it, nobody
foresaw its beneficial effects. Smith believes that it naturally grew out of an earlier general
principle that can only be found in human societies, a principle that he calls the human
propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.
This argument is rooted in a more general image of man, a view of human nature that is
characteristic of the Scottish moral philosophers such as Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith.
Human beings are social through and through. They cannot survive in isolation, they can
only live in groups, in hordes, in tribes, in collectivities. Humans are fundamentally
interdependent: when you send one specimen away into the desert he or she will probably
die, because we are essentially social creatures, bound to each other with all kinds of ties.
We cannot survive without the assistance of other human beings, but we also cannot count
on the benevolence of our fellow humans. This is a key problem in human societies. How
can we solve it? It is at this point in his book that Smith introduces the butcher, the baker
and the brewer. As I just explained, these three specialists who take care of what we eat
and drink can be very reliable, but only if we appeal to their self-interest. They are willing to
bake our bread and to brew our beer, but only if we can offer them something that is
valuable for them in return. And so human beings are glued together by trade. They
exchange one thing for another, they buy and they sell, they bring objects to the
marketplace. One guy may have a talent for making bows and arrows, another one is good
at constructing huts and tents, and when they exchange the items that they so diligently
produce they are stimulated to continue their process of specialisation. This is how human
societies are structured and become more and more differentiated. Each member of the
group becomes a specialist in producing one type of thing or one type of service, but in the
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end everybody receives everything he or she needs as a result of what Smith calls the
human propensity to truck, barter and exchange. The extremely detailed division of labour
that we can observe in contemporary manufactures, such as the modern pin factory, is the
present day manifestation of this general principle that has governed the human species
since it appeared on the face of the earth.
It has often been noticed that this argument bears a certain resemblance to 20th Century
exchange theories and rational actor theories. And it is true that this stress on exchange and
well understood self-interest can also be noticed in these more recent theoretical
approaches. But I am also personally more impressed by the similarity between the Smith
view of human nature and the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias, whose ideas we will
discuss at the end of this course. Elias always starts from the premise that human beings
are mutually interdependent, and that it is a methodological error to conceptualise the
human individual as an entity that can exist all on its own, without any contact with other
humans. In the fall of 1970, I had the privilege to follow at the University of Amsterdam a
series of lectures by Norbert Elias, who was not as famous then as he is today. One of his
lectures was devoted to Adam Smith, who it became clear our professor felt a kind of
intellectual kinship with. He spoke about him as if Smith was a contemporary, a friend, a
professor who could step into the lecture hall and add some thoughts to what Elias had
already said about his ideas. That was an important moment for me. I felt that this was the
way to present an author who has passed away centuries ago but whose thoughts are still
so alive today.
2.6 Social Stratification
Interdependent human beings exchange things for other things and in that process they tend
to specialise, to become experts in the production of one type of object, which can be
exchanged for all of the other objects that they need. This is how the early forms of the
division of labour began to develop. In the course of time, this division of labour became
more stabilised and it conquered new territories. In this connection, Smith, almost in
passing, surprises the reader with an interesting idea. He says that in many cases, the
different talents that people exploit in their different professions are not so much the cause
as the effect of the division of labour. That he is referring to social stratification and social
inequality becomes clear when he gives as an example the dissimilarity between the
philosopher and the common street porter, meaning a man who carries travellers’ luggage.
He wonders about how similar the two of them must have looked when they were both
young kids. For the first six or eight years of their lives, they were perhaps very much alike,
their parents or friends would not have noticed much difference.
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But then the division of labour begins to do its differentiating work and one of them is sent to
the university to become a professor and the other embarks upon a career that ends in
carrying other people’s luggage. And then, at the end of the process, Smith says, the
arrogant professor does not acknowledge any resemblance between the two of them.
This is an interesting point coming from a professor who was already very famous during his
lifetime. He seems to say here: If I was born in the cradle of that common street porter, I
might have ended up as a somebody carrying the other people’s bags, and had he been
born in my place, then he might have become a university professor. The division of labour
is not the outcome of the different talents of human beings. Rather, it is in many cases the
breeding ground of different careers that leads to the development of different talents.
In older theories, social stratification is often explained by pointing at the different talents that
people possess. Some are physically strong but not very clever, others are intellectually well
endowed, etcetera, and that is what explains the social distance between the ranks of
society, the differences in power and in wealth. Smith goes in the opposite direction. People
are born into a society with a pre-existing division of labour. Their social location in that
stratified social universe determines in many cases the talents that they will develop later on
in life. Smith even goes so far as to say that human beings differ less from one another than
dogs do.
Let me quote him again: “by nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so
different from a street porter as a mastiff, that is a kind of dog, is from a greyhound and a
greyhound from a spaniel”.
When my students read these lines, they are often surprised. They think that Adam Smith is
this diehard liberal admired by many conservative thinkers, and here he says that the man
who is carrying the suitcases of the famous professor is not so different from the professor
after all. Sometimes one of my students says: But Sir, that is so unfair! Isn’t it a terrible
injustice that the street porter could never develop his talents, because he was born on the
wrong side of the tracks, so to say, whereas the guy who is born with a silver spoon in his
mouth is given every opportunity, even if he happens to be not extremely talented?
But Smith does not draw this conclusion. There is no a hint of indignation in this paragraph.
He just observes an interesting fact, he does not suggest that it is a flaw and that we should
do something about it. And yet this paragraph tells us a lot about the detached sociological
scholar and also about this friendly man, filled with sympathy and empathy. I can see him,
climbing out of his coach in Paris, walking behind a man who is carrying his suitcases. He
looks at his back, he notices the holes in his coat and he realises that this man, who seems
to be the same age as him, might have become a famous professor in moral philosophy had
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he been born in a different social situation. Let’s not forget that this is the second half of the
18th Century, the French revolution is not so far away.
2.7 The Importance of Adam Smith
Teachers often say in an apologetic way: sorry guys, there is so much more to tell you about
Adam Smith, but hey, end of class. Maybe they say that because in the back of their heads
they can feel the presence of a competitive colleague, a specialist who criticises what they
left out. In this case, I have restricted myself to what Smith tells us in the very first pages of
his masterpiece and I know that there is so much more… But it is enough to give you an
idea of his way of reasoning and it is also in these pages that you encounter the hardcore of
ideas that have remained so influential in the centuries that followed.
Here I want to say just a few words about the question of how we can explain the fact that
this Scottish philosopher developed these very interesting and important ideas about
modern industrial societies. The characteristics of the new socio-economic world were still
barely visible, but Smith, with the eye of an eagle, zoomed in on them and captured them in
phrases that were so crystal clear that now everybody can notice them. How did he do it?
In sociology, we have this tendency to first look at the social context, the intellectual
influences, the economic and political situation. But let me start by saying something that
does not sound very sociological: Adam Smith was a genius, period. It does not explain
much, but this is where we should begin. When you talk about Johann Sebastian Bach, who
was a contemporary of Mandeville, or about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was a
contemporary of Smith, you should never lose sight of the fact that the brains of these men
were wired in a very, very special way.
But it is also important to remember that Smith lived and worked in Scotland, under very
peaceful circumstances, not bothered by censors or by bigots trying to hinder the publication
of his books or the dissemination of certain ideas, as was the case with so many of his
contemporaries who suffered under governments that did not allow freedom of the press.
Of course the things he describes had become visible. A good observer could have noticed
the rise of the new manufactures, the new way of dividing and subdividing labour in a more
efficient way. But it certainly helped that Adam Smith did not own a pin factory, did not work
in a pin factory and had nothing to do with the production of pins. It is hard to notice a
mechanism when you stand too close to it. One has to take some distance, be reflexive,
compare the phenomenon with other things, walk around it, so to speak. For his income,
Adam Smith depended on the university, on the government, and sometimes even on the
financial support of private persons, but he did not depend on the profits of those
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manufactures that he studied. That helped him to become the detached analyst who
discerned connections that nobody else had theorised before.
But there is something else. This famous professor of moral philosophy, who writes about
the ideas of great thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, takes the reader by the hand and
leads him into the workspace of a band of ten pin makers. He tries to share with us his
enthusiasm about the clever inventions that make the machines work more efficiently,
inventions that he believed the workers had come up with all on their own. He writes in a
very respectful way about the kind of people who were looked down upon in this stratified
society, where the professor in his vanity does not see any resemblance between himself
and the common street porter. Just like the authors of the French Encyclopédie, and of
course inspired by them, this man who was the adviser of members of the political and
economic elite wanted to find out how the process of pin making was organised. What we
see here is the merging of two realms of knowledge. On the one hand, the abstract
theoretical knowledge of the philosopher, the proto economist, the proto sociologist; on the
other, the everyday knowledge of the common people who work in the factories, their
dexterity, their practical insights, their clever inventions. When these two knowledge files are
merged, the theories and the pedestrian empirical data, when the separation is lifted
between the high class knowledge that is taught in universities and the lower class
knowledge that the workers in the manufactures share, then we see the appearance of a
new kind of knowledge, we witness the rise of modern social science.
Session 3: Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857)
3.1 Religious and Scientific Knowledge
Auguste Comte is one of the most interesting thinkers in this course. That at least is my
conviction, but I am afraid that I am in a minority here. All sociologists admire Durkheim and
Weber, but many think that Comte is a bit of a maverick, although, of course, we owe him
our gratitude for coming up with the word sociology.
There are at least three reasons why I believe that Comte can still teach us important things.
First of all, he theorised about something that we all experience today: we live in an age
where the scientific view of the world becomes more important every day and where
religious interpretations are more and more contested, often because of what modern
science teaches us.
Comte wondered what the sociological consequences might be of this development, this
process of secularisation, as it is called today, that he noticed already two hundred years
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ago. He developed different ideas about it and sometimes he seems to be not very
consistent, but his suggestions are always thought provoking.
Comte sometimes seems to be a descendant of the Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th
Century. One is reminded of them when one reads that we live today in a period where the
positivist, that is the scientific way of interpreting the world around us, has become dominant
and that the theological or religious way of understanding the world has become old
fashioned, outdated, outmoded.
But just when you begin to think that this is the view of an atheist thinker, you come across
another argument where he suggests that the Catholic religious worldview produced in
medieval France a kind of intellectual consensus that worked as social cement, and we
cannot be certain whether modern science will fulfil this integrative function in contemporary
society.
These arguments are not outdated at all. They are about French society in the 1830s, but
we still struggle with them today.
The stressful relationship between religious knowledge and scientific knowledge has not
become less interesting or less important. You could say that it is one of the most important
issues in the world today and it is not a very risky prediction to say that it will be important for
a very long time to come.
The second reason why I think Comte is worthwhile is that he tries to understand how
scientific knowledge slowly but surely emerged out of pre-existing religious knowledge, and
he implies that the religious imagination is a necessary precondition for scientific knowledge
to develop. Our contemporary scientific insights are constructed upon ideas that started off
as religious worldviews, without empirical proof, unfounded conjectures. This is a
sociological observation that is far removed from the world of Voltaire: scientists do not
develop their ideas in a fight against religious delusions, but by extending, amending and
thoroughly testing ideas that started off as religious revelations.
The third reason why Comte is still relevant for us is that this philosopher recognised for the
first time that the division of labour between different sciences has its disadvantages. The
ongoing differentiation between the sciences makes it hard to keep an eye on the
relationship between them, we lose sight of the whole. If we want the sciences to fulfil
functions that were once fulfilled by the well integrated religious vision of the holy church,
then we should try to construct a well rounded scientific vision that integrates all scientific
discoveries. But what actually happens is just the opposite. Science seems to fall apart in
unrelated disciplines. What we need in the first place is a kind of model that helps us to
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understand how the sciences are related to each other. Comte set himself the task of doing
just that.
3.2 The Law of the Three Stages of the Human Mind
Comte believed that human history is propelled forward by human ideas, for example by
new scientific inventions, intellectual breakthroughs, and more generally speaking a series
of radical changes in how we interpret the world around us.
When you compare him to Marx, the difference is striking. Marx, who is often called a
materialist thinker, starts from the premise that human history is moved forward by changes
in the way we produce the goods we need in order to survive: food, shelter, clothes. Comte
could be called an idealist in the sense that he thinks that human history is pushed forward
by a transformation in the realm of human ideas, a fundamental change in how we interpret
reality. On closer inspection, however, the opposition between these two thinkers is less
clear-cut than appears at first sight, because Comte was aware of the social conditions
underlying the intellectual changes: positivism could not develop without the rise of industrial
society.
Nevertheless, the way Comte looks at the social world is in many ways the negative of what
we see from the position where Marx stands.
For Comte, societies are integrated first and foremost not by the mode of production, as
Marx would have it, but by their position in the long-term development of human ideas, the
process that he describes as the law of the three stages or the three states of mind, la loi
des trois etats.
I guess you have already heard about this famous piece of Comtian theory. In the first stage,
people interpret the world around them in a religious way, this is what Comte calls the
theological stage. Then the human mind develops into the philosophical or metaphysical
stage. And finally we witness the rise of the scientific way of interpreting the world and that is
what he calls the positive stage or the stage of positivism.
This is a little bit of classical theory that sociology students all over the world have to learn
by heart and should be able to reproduce in their exams. But what exactly does it mean?
Comte belongs to that breed of theorist who loves threefold divisions. Everywhere in his
books he divides phenomena into a model of three classes. But I have the feeling that the
theory of the three stages is in its essence a theory about two stages only: the religious way
of looking at the world and the scientific way of looking at the world, with the metaphysical
phase a kind of transitional period. The important point here is that in phase one, people
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hope to find answers for their deep metaphysical questions. Why are we here? Who made
the universe? Where do we come from? Where do we go to? Is there life after death?
Religious doctrines answer these questions. The priests repeat the answers in their
sermons, children have to learn them by heart in catechism classes. In the third and final
stage, where the scientific spirit begins to dominate our intellectual quest, people accept the
fact that many of these broad questions simply cannot be answered and that we should
content ourselves by finding answers to questions that can be put into a testable,
researchable form. The metaphysical second phase can thus be seen as a transitional
phase, because in this period people still want to have their very general questions
answered, but they no longer refer to the intervention of one or more gods. Rather, they try
to come up with pre-scientific conjectures, for example the hypothesis that a substance that
the human senses cannot register glues the whole universe together. You could say that
Comte’s law of the three stages, through which all human knowledge has to pass, is a
movement in the direction of intellectual modesty. The human race discovers that many of
their most pressing questions cannot be answered and may never be answered. But then
again, there are a lot of very important and interesting questions that we can try to answer
with the help of science.
Comte believes that we should found our knowledge on solid rock, the absolute certainty of
tested, doubly tested, triply tested hard scientific evidence. Uncontested facts.
This is why he uses the word positive. When you ask an English speaking person whether
he or she is really, really sure, they may answer: I am positive. That means something like:
there is not the slightest doubt in my mind, I am one hundred percent certain, I am positive.
This is what Comte believes is the case with contemporary scientific generalisations. They
are not based upon religious revelations, unfounded beliefs; they are built on rock solid
empirical evidence, knowledge that can be checked and checked again.
We, today, postmodern relativists that we are, may have our doubts and hesitations about
the certainties of Comtian positivism. But if you want to understand Comte, if you want to
enter his world, forget those subtleties and try to accept, albeit for the time being, his proud
claim that science offers us interpretations that are based on facts beyond a reasonable
doubt.
3.3 Sociology as a Means to Establish Social Harmony
Comte believed that in his day people were living in a time of crisis. This has a familiar ring
to it in the ears of someone who reads him in the 21st Century.
But Comte was working in the city of Paris, which was at the beginning of the 19th Century
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in a very unstable situation indeed. On the one hand, there were those who believed that the
project of the French Revolution had not yet been finished and that there was still a lot of
work to do in bringing about more freedom, equality and democracy. On the other hand,
there were conservatives who had been appalled by much of what had happened during the
aftermath of the French Revolution, and who were not at all convinced that the human
intervention into the vulnerable fabric of French society had produced anything positive.
They dreamed of a return to the time tested institutional arrangements, the norms and
values of good old France, the ancien régime. These two political camps opposed each
other not only in parliament or in the newspapers, but from time to time also in the streets of
Paris, where barricades were erected and repetitions of the French Revolution on a smaller
scale took place, resulting in an ever changing balance of power between the inheritors of
the spirit of the Revolution and their conservative opponents. This was the deep structural
crisis that Comte witnessed and that, according to him, was ultimately the result of a crisis in
the intellectual realm.
Comte thought that a well ordered society must be integrated by a unifying set of ruling
ideas, a kind of integrative consensus. Medieval France had been well integrated because
the Catholic Church gave each and every member of society a set of ideas about the world,
moral codes, ethical goals worth striving for, ideas that united everybody into an organic
social structure. But he witnessed how this religious source of unity was losing its grip on
people. Comte asks: every day we experience the symptoms of the crisis, but what lies
beneath these phenomena? Parts of the population were still devout Catholics, their minds
still in the stage of theological thinking. Other groups interpreted the world in a pre-scientific
way, their minds in the metaphysical stage. And then there was a kind of avant garde group
containing many people who played an important role in scientific life and the industrial
world, whom he called positivist thinkers. The problem that he saw in his day was that the
scientific ideology did not yet reign supreme. In fact, all of the different types of interpretation
were co-existing, and this created social chaos. When there is confusion in the intellectual
sphere, the entire society is in turmoil.
When Comte was still young and worked as the secretary of the philosopher Henri de SaintSimon, who developed many of the ideas that we now ascribe to Comte, he believed that
the best scientists of France should get together and create a new scientifically founded
system of ideas that might serve as the foundation for a new intellectual and social harmony,
comparable to what the Catholic Church had done for medieval society.
But when Comte discovered that the scientists were not very interested in such an
enterprise, he set himself the task of presenting, first in a series of lectures and later in an
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ambitious series of books, an overview of the state of scientific knowledge in his day and
age.
This became his famous book called Course on Positive Philosophy, published in Paris in
seven volumes in the years stretching from 1830 to 1842. The fourth volume appeared in
1838 and that, by the way, is the book where one could read the word sociology in print for
the first time. It has been said that Comte may have been the last member of the human
species who could survey all of the scientific knowledge of his own time and write
authoritatively about such fields of study as mathematics, physics and biology in a way that
the specialists recognised as offering an excellent panoramic view of what was happening in
their field of study.
Today such a task would be impossible, and let’s admit that even in Comte’s time this was
an extraordinary accomplishment. But this ambitious philosopher with his encyclopaedic
knowledge loved a challenge.
3.4 The Law of the Classification of Sciences
In his magnum opus, the Course on Positive Philosophy, Comte presents a well ordered list
of all the sciences, starting with the most fundamental and independent science and ending
with the most encompassing science, the one that is entirely dependent on all the others.
For Comte, the foundational science, the uncontested basis of everything else, is
mathematics. The science crowning the list, the science that depends most on all the other
sciences, is sociology. And in between, from the bottom to the top, Comte discerns
astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology. The sciences located lower on the ladder are
less complex than the sciences that you find higher on the ladder, and that is why he calls it
a hierarchical classification. This is his law of the classification of the sciences, from simple
to complex, from general to specific, from independent to dependent. The science on top of
his construction, sociology, is therefore the most dependent science; it needs all the other
sciences, and lacks the generality of, for example, mathematics. But because it is the
science that we find on the highest floor of his building, he calls sociology the queen of the
sciences, and of course later sociologists have been grateful for this expression.
In this way, Comte tries to bring intellectual order to what seemed to many a hodgepodge of
scientific branches and sub-branches. For the first time, a scientist drew a map on which you
could locate the main sciences and indicate who influenced whom and in what ways.
There is, according to Comte, another important difference between the sciences, and that
is the speed with which they pass through the different stages, starting from the theological
way of thinking and eventually all arriving in the positivist phase.
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According to Comte, the lower level sciences, such as mathematics and physics, arrive
earlier to the positivist stage than more complex sciences such as sociology. In this way,
Comte, who had started his career as an engineer, built a bridge between his law of the
three stages and his law of the classification of the sciences. What he says here is very
interesting. He seems to imply that there is a kind of cultural lag between the sciences,
some of them moving fast, others staying behind for a longer time.
He observed that while in physics and chemistry scientific research may have been well
developed, sociology was still in the metaphysical stage and had a long way to go. When I
read those words for the first time, I was reminded of national socialism in Europe in the
1930s and 1940s. The scientists who worked for the Nazi state were very advanced when it
came, for example, to developing missiles that could fly to London and deliver their lethal
load in the heart of the city. But when it came to explaining why Germany was in a crisis
situation socially and economically, the Nazis fell back on the kind of scapegoat theory that
had worked well in the middle ages: everything that goes wrong is the fault of the Jews, so if
only we could get rid of them the health of the nation would be restored. You could say that
in Nazi Germany, the sociological interpretation of what was going on in the country was
filled with pre-scientific superstition, whereas the natural scientists belonged among the best
in the world. What Comte helps us to understand is that the co-existence of two realms of
thought that differ so strikingly in their scientific rigour is what made national socialism so
dangerous and so deadly.
Comte believed that social harmony can only be achieved if there is intellectual harmony,
and this will only happen when all the sciences have entered the phase of positivism. This
process is completed when sociology, the final science, has arrived in the last stage of
development and has become a completely positivist enterprise.
And then the new scientific knowledge will have to be distributed, everybody should be
instructed on what modern science can teach mankind. In the end, everybody has to accept
the encompassing new scientific vision of the universe. By giving his lectures and writing his
books and articles, Comte wanted to contribute personally to this development.
3.5 Religious Thought as Starting Point
In the first pages of his book Course on Positive Philosophy, Comte confronts the reader
with a kind of riddle. He says that in order to develop a good theory, one has to observe the
hard facts. Science has to build on positive knowledge, uncontested knowledge about what
is actually the case, and every description of reality must always start from unbiased,
straightforward observation. You could call this the creed of inductivism: one has to begin by
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observing reality with open eyes, unprejudiced, oblivious to what one wants to see or hopes
to see. This is where science begins.
But now Comte sees a serious problem. When you have no theoretically founded indication
of what to look out for, you cannot observe anything at all. Without any kind of guideline, just
the slightest suggestion of what to pay attention to, you are doomed to remain blind. You
can only observe something if you have an expectation of what you might find.
So this is the riddle: If observation without theory is impossible and if a theory must always
be founded on observation, how can we ever get out of this trap? How did the human race
escape from this paralysing situation? This is how Comte puts it: Between the necessity of
observing facts in order to form a theory, and having a theory in order to observe facts, the
human mind can become entangled in a vicious circle. How can we solve this problem?
This is in fact why Comte came up with the idea of the theological stage in human thinking.
Mankind has, of necessity, to begin its journey towards scientific knowledge with an
interpretation that is not founded on observation, but is the outcome of a hunch, a
conjecture, maybe a religious revelation. When we have developed such an unfounded
theory about the world, then the members of later generations may begin to use this idea to
better observe the world around them, to test the idea and maybe to falsify it or transform it
into something that is not so easy to falsify. In fact, when I read Comte here, I see in him the
precursor of the 20th Century philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper, who said that we
always have to use bold conjectures that we then try to refute. Science starts with somebody
who has an unfounded, brilliant, spectacular, illuminating new idea, something that he
cannot prove at all.
But then comes the task of collecting the empirical data that may falsify this new insight, or
not, or not yet.
Comte has been described as an inductivist, somebody who believes that in science we first
have to collect our data, an enormous mountain of well observed facts that we can be
certain about, and only after having done that can we begin to develop a theory. Comte, the
man who gave us positivism, is often seen as rather naïve in his old fashioned inductivism,
typical of the period in which he lived. I hope to have made clear that this is not quite true.
Comte, even in the first pages of his book where he summarises his own theoretical
approach, has something more interesting to say that cannot be labelled as either
inductivism or deductivism.
What he stresses is that collecting facts without a theory to guide you is impossible and that
we therefore need something to begin with. This is why Comte believes that religious
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interpretations of the world served a very important goal in the past. It was only out of such
theological worldviews that mankind could develop modern scientific theories. Had the
priests not broken the vicious circle, scientific knowledge might never have gotten off the
ground. The human species would today be as blind and helpless as it was ten thousand
years ago. So in a strange way, Comte admired religious thought, and this becomes much
more evident in the latter part of his life and work.
3.6 Comte’s Religion of Humanity
Sociologists who do not want to be associated with Comte and who consider him a bit of a
maverick, as I just indicated, have good reason to keep their distance from the man who
gave us the word sociology. Later on in life, Comte became a little bit strange.
My students are taken aback when I tell them that Comte later on in his tormented life
arrived at the conclusion that mankind needs a completely new kind of religion and that he,
Auguste Comte, was to become the high priest of that new church. The older Comte
became disillusioned with what science could achieve and he returned to a kind of Catholic
religion, but he sketched a modern version of it, adapted to the age of science and
industrialism, a religion that was not the enemy of science but more a kind of complement:
science is all about the intellect, about rationality, but his own brand new religion was about
emotion, about the universal love that can never be proved by a scientist but that the human
race cannot live without.
Students in the lecture hall begin to laugh a little when I tell them that Comte worked on a
calendar with days devoted to the saints of humanity: not the saints of the Christian calendar
of the Catholic Church, but scientists such as Copernicus and James Watt, great
philosophers such as Adam Smith and David Hume, and even holy artists like Shakespeare
and Mozart. They laugh a bit louder when I tell them that the elderly Comte devoted his time
to designing the clothes of the clergy of his church. He even wrote a positivist catechism that
children should study in order to become familiar with the principles of his church, the
Church of Humanity.
The further development of Comte’s religion, the impact it had, strangely enough, in the
country of Brazil, is quite another story, a topic that I have to skip here. You can find a lot
about his positivist religion on the internet. And if you want to know more and you happen to
visit Paris, don’t forget to go to the small museum there in the house where Comte lived,
number 10 Monsieur le Prince, just a five minute walk from the metro stop Odéon.
But what I find very interesting in Comte’s peculiar life story is that it seems to be the
reflection of a dilemma that we all still struggle with. Comte was not the only sociological
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thinker who believed that human societies need some kind of religion to create a certain
social unity, an emotional and intellectual consensus that lays the foundation for structural
unity. Early on in his life, Comte believed that the theological way of looking at the world had
become outdated, an antiquity, now that science fulfilled the functions that were fulfilled in
the past by religion. But when he became older, he distanced himself from that position and
began to acknowledge that religion still served an important function in stabilising society.
But he was also convinced that modern industrialised societies need another kind of religion
than agrarian societies, and he believed that the Catholic Church lacked the kind of flexibility
to adapt itself to the new exigencies. So what should be done?
Comte had been brought up to become an engineer and so he did just what you would
expect an engineer to do: he constructed, meticulously and with an eye for detail, his own
brand of religion, a kind of do-it-yourself Catholicism. Of course, this was a very strange
road to take, but it was the consequence of his own line of reasoning and Comte was not
the kind of man to shy away from the consequences of his own reasoning.
When one studies his fascinating life, one may wonder why Comte’s students or his fellow
professors never pointed out to him that he had taken a very strange direction here. But
Comte had no students. He had an audience of admirers who drank in every word he said.
Comte did not have critical fellow professors who put question marks in the margins of his
manuscripts, because he was never affiliated with a university. He practiced sociology at a
time when the discipline was not yet taught within the walls of the Sorbonne.
The disadvantage of working in the pre-institutionalised phase of sociology is that he lacked
a critical forum of colleagues to tell him about the weaknesses in his arguments. This is
something that was noticed by Lewis Coster in his beautiful book Masters of Sociological
Thought. The case of Comte makes clear that science is a collective effort.
When an isolated thinker tries to contribute to science without a critical sounding board, he
might easily be led astray, following the drumbeat of his own music.
3.7 Early Functionalism
Let me return to Comte’s masterpiece, the Course on Positive Philosophy. I restrict myself to
his best work, not so much to defend him, but because in his earlier work he is so much
more interesting and relevant than in his later work.
In the hierarchy of the sciences, Comte makes an interesting division between two types of
science. The sciences at the bottom of his scheme are those that study objects that are
completely separate from one another, but the two sciences on top of the list, biology and
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sociology, study objects that are interrelated, organised, structured.
The cells of the biologist and the human beings of the sociologist can only be observed in
large structures and we have to study these structures if we want to understand the small
particles that compose them.
Comte presents it as a kind of methodological rule. If you want to be successful as a
physicist, you begin with the smallest objects, the atoms, and from there you try to construct
larger entities. You must start with the parts that form the whole.
But this does not work well if you try to understand living bodies or social entities. The
sciences of biology and sociology share the fact that they work just the other way around: in
order to understand the part, one has to start with the whole. If you want to understand how
the heart works in a human body, you begin by studying the entire body and then you try to
find out what contribution the heart makes to the health of the body as a whole. If you want
to understand the role of the church in a certain society or the role of the bishop in that
church, you must start by studying the entire society and then you can find out what
contribution to society comes from the religious institution, and within that institution what the
role of the bishop may be. So you start with the whole and then you zoom in on the parts.
This is an interesting idea. First of all, we see here an early example of organicism in social
thought. Comte places biology close to sociology, because in both sciences we pay
attention to what contribution the parts make to the whole. How does the heart pump our
blood through our bodies, transporting, for example, oxygen to the brain?
In a similar fashion, the sociologist wants to know what contribution the economic
institutions, for example the manufactures of Adam Smith, make to the wealth of the nation
as a whole.
Later on in the 19th Century, and especially in the work of Herbert Spencer, who we will not
discuss in this course but who is a very interesting author in his own right, the organicist
metaphor becomes more important. But in Comte, you can already feel this tendency when
he isolates biology and sociology from the other sciences, because they both work their way
from the whole to the parts.
But more importantly, Comte is here a precursor of functionalism. Because in essence,
these are typically the questions of a functionalist sociologist: What functions does religion
fulfil? What functions does the political sub-system fulfil? What functions does the family fulfil
in contributing to the well being and equilibrium of the whole social system of which it is a
part?
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In this terminology we can also rephrase what Comte had to say about religion. What
functions does religion fulfil in modern society? And if the traditional religions fail to fulfil
these functions, can we discover functional alternatives, maybe in the form of new religions?
One could even say that Comte’s own brand of religion, the Religion of Humanity that he
developed later in life, was a kind of functional alternative to the Catholic Church, which,
according to Comte, could no longer fulfil its functions in modern society.
The terminology of functionalism became a cornerstone in the theory of a French sociologist
who admired Comte so much that he wanted a statue of him to be erected in front of the
Sorbonne. This was Emile Durkheim and he was successful: the statue can still be seen in
the heart of Paris, not far from where Comte lived. But more importantly, Durkheim’s
functionalism, which became so important for 20th Century sociology, was inspired by
Comte’s early insights.
3.8 The Importance of Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte was the an who gave us the word sociology. As I already explained, he
believed that another author had stolen his expression la physiqe sociale, social physics,
which is why he created a new word, la sociologie, that nobody could use without paying
homage to the man who had personally invented it. So the word sociology is the outcome of
a conflict over a priority claim. Intellectual ownership, copyright. To this very day this is a
battlefield, outside the world of science but also in science, of course. But there is a bit more
to it.
By using in his books, from 1838 onwards, the word sociology, Comte made something else
very clear. The new science of human societies was not just a new branch of physics, it was
something entirely different. The approach of the science of physics that studies discrete
and unorganised particles could not and should not be applied to the study of human
societies. In the science of sociology, the science that searches for the logic of the social
world, we do our job in a very different way. We use another methodology, we approach our
subject matter in a way that is different from what has been so successful in the natural
sciences.
Comte was not just the man who gave sociology its new name, he was also a philosopher of
science with a keen eye for what makes sociology different, a science with its own field of
study, its own approach to that field, even its own methods for collecting data. Like the
practitioners of the hard sciences such as physics and chemistry, sociologists should also
use observation and experimentation as their methods. But that is very difficult and
sometimes even impossible when you study human beings.
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Therefore the method par excellence in sociology is the comparative approach, where we
compare the different societies that we find at a certain point in time. But we can also
compare societies of the past with societies of the present, and you can compare the
structure of a certain society at different points in its history. Such an historical overview may
enrich our understanding of human societies. This reliance on the comparative-historical
method is typical of the way sociology approaches its field of study and it is one of the
reasons why this science is different from the other sciences and should not be seen as a
sub-genre within one of the existing sciences.
Here we see how Comte was one of the first theorists who made a claim for the relative
autonomy of the science of sociology, to borrow an expression from Norbert Elias. Maybe
Comte was really the very first thinker who saw that we, today, are in need of a new type of
science in order to study society, a science that is not patterned after the natural sciences,
but that has its own ways of collecting data, its own methodology, its own explanatory
principles, even its own kind of theory. And again, Comte’s innovative suspicion was later
elaborated in the works of 20th Century sociologists like Emile Durkheim in his book on the
rules of sociological method and Norbert Elias in his book with the title What is Sociology?
Comte’s insistence that we should never forget the importance of the historical approach led
to a sentence that is often referred to as one of his most famous maxims. In his Course on
Positive Philosophy, Comte wrote: On ne connaît pas complètement une science tant qu’on
n’en sait pas l’histoire.
Every sociologist teaching the history of sociological thought loves to quote this phrase and
yes, so do I. You cannot completely understand a science if you don’t know its history.
Session 4: Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859)
4.1 Tocqueville as a Precursor of Modern Sociology
In 2013, I retired from the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam. Reaching
the age of sixty-five is considered here, in the Netherlands, sufficient reason for firing
somebody on the spot, a crude case of ageism, if you ask me.
On the day of my farewell party, my students offered me a present. Not the desktop
computer, as is common, nor the ugly painting, but a vacation in the castle of Alexis de
Tocqueville in Normandy, France, one week for my wife and me. So, in October 2013, we
spent six days in that beautiful château near the city of Cherbourg. very morning I wrote my
emails, sitting behind Tocqueville's desk in his study room, and I must admit that I
sometimes even rested my head on the pillow of the bed in which he was said to have slept.
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Of all the people that we discuss here, with the exception of Norbert Elias of course,
Tocqueville is the author I like most. ociological thinkers can be difficult to read, think of Max
Weber. They can be very cynical in their analysis, Mandeville is a good example. And very
often they are fierce polemicists, as Marx often demonstrates. But Tocqueville is a very
different kind of writer. He always approaches his readers in a friendly way, he never bullies
them.
When he is adamant about an argument, he does not hammer it in, he never uses rhetorical
tricks. He tries to prove his point as best he can, leaving it to the reader to decide whether
he or she agrees with him or not. He wants to find out how social and political institutions
really work, but he does not suggest that he has all the answers. This is a man who has no
axe to grind, there is no spite or anger in his writings. o when I discuss the ideas of
Tocqueville in my class, I begin to smile. hat is what my students noticed and what prompted
them to offer me those six days on the Tocqueville estate, which is still in the possession of
the Tocqueville family.
Americans pronounce his name as Toakv’l, but I will use the French pronunciation, TocVeal,
not out of snobbishness, but simply because that’s what I am used to saying. And like the
French, I drop the article, so I will speak about Tocqueville and not about de Tocqueville.
Tocqueville has always been a household name amongst political scientists and historians.
In political science classes, he is treated as one of the founding fathers of their discipline
because of what he had to say about the phenomenon of democracy... And in the history
department he is admired because of his book on the conditions leading up to the French
Revolution of 1789. Sociologists have, for a long time, been a bit reluctant to grant him
entrance into the Hall of Fame of the great theorists of the past. But everything changed in
1967 when the French sociologist Raymond Aron published his watershed book Les Étapes
de la Pensée Sociologique, translated as Main Currents in Sociological Thought, still a very
reliable study, in which he presents Tocqueville as a precursor of modern who can be
rightfully placed next to Comte, Marx, Weber and Durkheim.
His chapter on Tocqueville was so convincing that from that moment on the French theorist
belonged to the pantheon of sociology’s greats.
Tocqueville, like Adam Smith or Karl Marx, never thought of himself as a sociologist or a
political scientist. He saw himself as a politician: he was a member of parliament, and even
became France’s minister of foreign affairs. But he was a politician who loved to write
interesting essays in his spare time, and later in his life, when he had retired from public life,
it became his main occupation.
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But make no mistake: this modest amateur historian, amateur political scientist and amateur
sociologist was one of the most brilliant social thinkers of the 19th Century.
4.2 An Aristocratic Perspective
Another reason why sociologists have embraced Tocqueville as one of their venerated
precursors may be that the United States has become over the past decades the heartland
of sociology, whether we European sociologists like it or not. The English language has
become our lingua franca, as I am demonstrating right here: a Dutch sociologist speaking to
you from Amsterdam in my imperfect English. And as the United States dominates the
discourse in the social sciences, it is to be expected that more attention is given to this
French intellectual who took the boat to the US to study how the democratic system worked
on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. o this very day, Americans love to quote Tocqueville,
who two centuries ago seemed to understand them better than they understood themselves.
Tocqueville is not only an important name inside the social sciences and the humanities, he
is also well known outside of the university.
One of the reasons is that he wrote so well that any interested reader could and still can
follow his arguments, whether educated at the university or not.
He is especially admired by conservative thinkers, and that is understandable because he
often writes about how the great cultural values and virtues that used to knit French society
together have become contested under conditions of modernity. he fact that he was
fascinated by this question has a lot to do with his own social background.
Most early sociologists were middle class men. If they had no relationship to the university,
they would work as engineers or freelance journalists, or sometimes they would earn money
by giving lectures, and they often found it hard to make ends meet. Think of the poverty of
Karl Marx’s family in London. ut Tocqueville was an aristocrat, a member of the highest layer
of society, born in a family with prestige, power and wealth. The sociological view of
Tocqueville is different from what we are used to in sociology. This is not a man who looks
at the people in power from the outside, this is an author who could analyse power from the
inside, drawing from his own experience.
Many 19th Century intellectuals, such as Karl Marx, were admirers of the French Revolution
of 1789, when the privileges of the nobility were curbed in the name of freedom, equality
and fraternity. This enthusiasm is conspicuously missing in the writings of Tocqueville.
The Tocqueville family had lost many of its members during the French Revolution, and at
birthday parties little Alexis witnessed the moment when his uncles and aunts burst into
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tears, remembering innocent relatives who had been decapitated. Tocqueville certainly
recognised the liberating aspects of a revolutionary transition, but his background and
temperament show a much more careful analysis and evaluation of such a brutal and often
bloody event. ne of the great things about democracy is that one ruling elite may be
replaced by another one without killing or wounding people.
This aristocratic perspective is also evident when Tocqueville writes about democracy. ost of
us are so used to cheering democracy that sometimes we may be taken aback by
Tocqueville. In many contexts, he recognises the advantages of democracy, but his
approach is full of subtlety and nuance, and sometimes he asks penetrating questions such
as this one: In a system of majority rule, who will protect the minorities? In aristocratic
societies, persecuted minorities might find shelter, a safe haven, under the protection of a
powerful segment of the ruling class. But what happens to threatened minorities when the
people who win the elections are always dominant and unchallenged? Where will they then
find shelter when they need to be protected?
Another observation that is typical of the aristocratic gaze is that cultural values, which were
in former centuries in the safe hands of the aristocratic elite, may come under heavy fire in
modern mass society. Why spend money on orchestras or ballet groups when you can use
that money to feed the hungry? Who will defend excellence in the arts and sciences when all
the important decisions are made by majority vote?
We, who live in a somewhat McDonaldised social world, two centuries after Tocqueville,
recognise that some of his observations were rather prophetic. or a social thinker to be able
to notice the darker aspects of the generally admired democratic system, it helps to have
internalised, early on in life, the habitus, the perceptual scheme, of the old aristocratic class.
No wonder then that conservative thinkers believe that Tocqueville is one of the most
penetrating commentators of modernity.
4.3 On Democratization
It is tempting to tell you all kinds of interesting things about the life of this adventurous man,
but here I must restrict myself to just those few biographical facts that you need to know in
order to situate the book that I will focus on: On Democracy in America, De la Démocratie en
Amérique.
After the revolution of 1830, Tocqueville, who had finished his law studies, decided to work
in the service of a government that was controlled by the progressives, backed by the new
rising middle class. In a way, this was a choice against his own family, and later he said that
this was a black day. But he believed that the fundamental changes in French society were
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inevitable and that people from the old aristocratic classes should offer their services to
develop a new democratic France that retained some of the best elements of its feudal past.
And then this young ambitious lawyer was given a very interesting assignment. He was
invited to study the penitentiary system in the United States and find out if there were
aspects in the treatment of criminals over there that might be adopted in France. So from
May 1831 until February 1832, the 26-year-old Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de
Beaumont travelled through the United States, visiting prisons, talking to judges and
lawyers, and preparing their official report. Back in France, they published the outcomes of
their research in a book on the penal system in the United States and its applicability in
France. I can testify here that a copy of the first edition of that study is still in the drawer of
his desk at the castle.
But during his trip, Tocqueville had noticed and studied so much more than courtrooms and
prisons, and in 1835 he published the first volume of his two volume masterpiece On
Democracy in America. The book was an instant success and from that moment on
Tocqueville was a name to be reckoned with in Paris’ intellectual circles. The second volume
of the book appeared in 1840. One year before, Tocqueville had become a member of
parliament, representative of the district of Vologne, where the village of Tocqueville can be
found.
His book is about democracy, or maybe it is better to say that it is about the process of
democratisation, a development that unfolded in the United States so much quicker than in
France that Tocqueville sometimes thought that a French visitor could see in the US what
the future had in store for France. There was a kind of futuristic ambition: let us study the
American democratic system, its assets and also its darker aspects, in order to better
understand what lies ahead for us in Europe.
Democratisation, he argued, does not only refer to political processes. This change in
politics is part of a more general movement in the direction of more equality between the
members of society. The social conditions under which the members live become more
similar. The most striking inequalities between the social layers begin to dwindle away,
people become more alike, not only in the economic realm but also in their habits, their
lifestyles. In America, Tocqueville observed that the differences were less flagrant than in
France. For many people in the US, there was a similarity in, for example, the schools they
sent their children to, the houses they lived in or even the punishments they could expect
when they had committed a crime. Although the French prided themselves on living in the
country of liberty and equality, in the United States Tocqueville observed a degree of
equality that had not been achieved in France. Well, that is to say, the French were not there
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yet, but may have been moving in that direction.
Tocqueville observed social mobility, the possibility to move from social layer to social layer,
in both an upward and sometimes downward direction. The Americans all hoped that their
children would climb the social ladder in the country of great opportunity, but at the same
time they were scared to death when they thought of the possibility that their offspring would
end up even lower on the ladder. A society with social mobility offers opportunities, but it
cannot guarantee the children of the rich that they will remain just as wealthy as their
parents. Modernity comes with a certain fear of falling, as was spelled out by Alain de Botton
in his beautiful book called Status Anxiety.
4.4. The Dominance of the Middle-Class
Although I have not yet presented the ideas of Karl Marx, it may be helpful to compare his
models of social stratification with Tocqueville's model.
As we shall see, Marx tried to analyse modern societies as consisting essentially of two
classes. ither you are a member of the proletarian class of people who have no choice but to
labour, or you belong to the capitalist class of people who earn their living by exploiting the
members of the working class. Those are the two classes that Marx saw in his time had
come to dominate the social world. The members of the middle classes of small
shopkeepers, peasants or school teachers were doomed to fall down into the ever growing
class of proletarian factory workers. And in the end we can expect a struggle between these
two classes who have diametrically opposed and incompatible interests: bourgeoisie and
proletariat.
In Tocqueville we see a different model of stratification. It is more gradual, the differences
between the social groups are not so clear-cut, t is easier to move from one class to
another, the separations between social classes are not like walls made out of stone but are
membranes, partly permeable. The middle class, according to Tocqueville, will not
disappear. On the contrary, it will become more and more important. The members of the
middle class will begin to dominate social life, cultural life, the economy, the political
arrangements, we will live in a middle class society.
Tocqueville did not see indications of a polarisation between the very rich and the very poor,
where the rich become richer and the poor become so desperately poor that they have
nothing to lose but their shackles. On the contrary, revolutions will become rare because
everybody will have a little bit of property to lose and are therefore protective of what they
own.
You may have noticed that each one of the early sociologists has a kind of keyword to lay
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bare the mechanisms of modern society. For Adam Smith, that keyword was the division of
labour; for Auguste Comte, the key was the rise of the scientific worldview, attended by a
process of secularisation; Marx would focus on the fundamental transition in the mode of
production. But for Tocqueville, the keyword here is democracy. Democratisation, taken in
its broadest sense, the rise of a new kind of equality between the members of an ever
growing part of the population. This, Tocqueville believed, is what we should study in the
first place if we want to really make sense of the fundamental changes in economic, cultural
and especially political arrangements that we witness in contemporary society.
According to Tocqueville, the trend towards the equalisation of the living conditions of
people in the Western world can be traced back to the late Middle Ages. In some societies
of the Western world, this has gone faster than in other societies, but it is a universal
movement and it is irreversible. The French Revolution, with its curbing of the privileges of
the rich and mighty, was not the start of this process; t was nothing but a brief acceleration
in a process that had already been underway for centuries. The rise of the new
entrepreneurial middle class in France was the outcome of a process that had been in the
making for several centuries. And the results were there for all to see, not just in America but
also in Europe. In the industrial world, for example, the relationship between employer and
employee is more egalitarian than, for example, the feudal relationship between a landowner
and a serf or peasant.
So the process cannot be halted and this may explain why Tocqueville allied himself with the
progressives, even though this did not quite correspond with his own temperament. e was
convinced that he was witnessing an inexorable tendency and instead of opposing it in vain,
we had better find out how to adapt to it, how to bend it in such a way that its potentially
harmful outcomes could be avoided.
4.5 The Dangers of Centralization
You might ask what is so dangerous about this movement towards greater equality. Isn’t it a
good thing when all kinds of privileges, enjoyed by a small elite, now become available for a
larger part of the population? Isn’t the grand ideal of social equality that we find on the
facade of every French public school or every town hall – liberté, égalité, fraternité –
something that we can all easily sympathise with?
Tocqueville, maybe because of his aristocratic background, had a special sensitivity to the
dangers attending the democratic tendency. I already mentioned the problem of how to
protect threatened minorities, for example religious minorities, who may find it hard to
maintain their position in a system with majority rule. How to defend the arts and sciences if
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the majority is not interested in such expensive extras that we can seemingly easily do
without?
This lawyer knew only too well that sometimes a majority of the population would like to
punish a man severely, whose guilt has not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. What
to do when majority rule turns into majority despotism?
The fundamental problem behind all these examples is that there seems to be a kind of
inherent irreconcilability between two core ideals of the French revolution: liberty and
equality. Sometimes the drive for equality may stand in the way of freedom. And sometimes
the defence of iberty is hard to combine with the quest for equality.
And then there is this other deep social current that is like a twin brother of the process of
democratisation: centralisation. This process is every bit as fundamental, it has been visible
over many centuries, and it is also unstoppable.
In fact, it is intimately interrelated with the democratic trend. When a wave of equality rolls
over the land, many countervailing powers that in the past could stand up against the centre
are destroyed.
This was one of the characteristics of the French Revolution, when the prerogatives of the
aristocracy were crushed, when the power of the Catholic Church was diminished, when the
independent power of the cities outside Paris was curtailed. Where equality is on the rise,
centralisation follows in its wake, and the result is that the powers in the centre, for example
in the governmental and administrative services in the capital of the country, become so
overwhelming that the ordinary citizens begin to have a feeling of impotence.
Who will listen to us, who is interested in what we have to say? And the combination of a
very powerful central government with a somewhat apathetic population is a recipe for the
gradual dismantling of civil liberties.
In the sphere of political democratisation, Tocqueville had a very sharp eye for demagogy,
the habit of politicians in search of power to please the populace, appealing to their
prejudices, hoping to be elected or re-elected. In a monarchy, if you want to get ahead, you
have to flatter the sovereign. That means that you have to please the king or his friends or
his wife or maybe his mistress. But in a democracy, the sovereign is the people. When the
elections are approaching, we can see, and this is still true today, that all of a sudden the
democratic politicians can be seen at soccer matches or pop concerts and they are the
biggest fan of a movie or a book that is a commercial success. Tocqueville did not witness
the rise of radio, television or internet, but the mass media democracy that we are living in
may remind you of his shrewd observations.
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What Tocqueville tried to find out is how to steer the unstoppable process towards more
equality in such a way that civil liberties, something that we also cherish, remain protected.
He believed that the Americans had found some solutions here, they had pioneered some
arrangements that the Europeans could learn from and partly apply in their own countries.
Let’s have a look at some of them.
4.6 Grassroots Politics as the Heart of Democracy
Tocqueville was worried about the process of centralisation because it destroys
countervailing powers, it places too much power in the hands of the politicians in the centre
of the political network. In America, he marvelled at the separation of powers between the
legislative, the judiciary and the executive branches. Of course this was a French invention,
the famous trias politica, the tripartite system advocated by Montesquieu, whose work
Tocqueville admired. But what struck this French intellectual most was that the Americans
did not just talk the talk, but walked the walk. Their judges really were independent: they did
not follow political instruction, and they jealously defended and protected their own relative
autonomy. The president was a very powerful man who preserved, protected and defended
the constitution, but he did not make the laws and he was permanently being controlled by
congress. If he wanted to be re-elected, he had to listen carefully to the people who voted
for him. If you want to safeguard civil liberties in an egalitarian society, you need a
completely free press. All the news that is fit to print, as it still says every day on the front
page of the New York Times. No censorship, no government involvement in what journalists
should or should not write. A free press is an independent force that the people in power
have to take very seriously. When they are involved in machinations that do not see the light
of day, when they are corrupt, as sometimes is the case in the world of politics, they have to
fear the bloodhounds of the free press who, with their investigative journalism, will try to
track them down and publish without mercy about their fraudulent behaviour. And this may
destroy their chances of re-election.
Tocqueville was sometimes impressed by what we would call today grassroots politics:
ordinary people getting together and organising a pressure group or a lobby in order to get
something done, let’s say to have a school in their village. They put pressure on their local
politicians, threatening not to vote for them next time if they do not listen to their demands.
Of course, a condition for this kind of behaviour is the complete freedom of association. This
right of assembly was religiously respected in the US, which stood in stark contrast to the
practice in France. A multi-party system makes it even easier to lobby, because every
politician is afraid that his voters will abandon him and vote for the opposition next time. And
these tricks of the political trade are already taught in a playful way in the schools, where
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American children are taught their civil rights and civic duties. Grassroots politics is the heart
and soul of a democratic system. It is the best way to fight the apathy that so often
accompanies the process of centralisation. In fact, local politics is the best antidote to the
danger of an imbalance in power between the centre and the periphery.
One source of countervailing power that Tocqueville observed as still being very important in
America was religion. In France, the Catholic Church had been gradually losing its powerful
position in public life over a long period of time, with a strong push during the French
Revolution, and that process was still continuing. But in America, the Christian churches
were, and still are, taken very seriously by the politicians, and the religious leaders were a
force to be reckoned with, also in the political debate. They reminded everybody, and that
included the men in political positions, of the deeper values, the moral foundations of
society. Sometimes it is easier for a politician to temporarily ignore the ethical component of
a political decision, and then it is important that the people of the church force them to
rethink their proposals in terms of the fundamental values that may be at stake. Far from
criticising the Americans for giving their ministers of the church such an important role in the
public debate, Tocqueville applauded them for it. Even the federal system in America, where
the power of the politicians in Washington is always circumscribed and limited by the power
of the different states that vigorously defend their own autonomy vis-à-vis the federal
government, was an instructive case of how to combine democratic equality with freedom.
What it all amounts to is checks and balances, countervailing powers: institutional
arrangements and cultural habits that counteract the tendency towards centralisation. When
politicians have to monitor the critical reactions of their constituency, of the newspapers, of
the churches, of other politicians working at other levels and in different branches of the
system, then there is hope for a democratic practice that does not crush the freedoms of
individual citizens. This was one of the lessons that Tocqueville said we can learn from our
friends cross the ocean.
4.7 ‘Revolutions Will Become Rare’
In the second volume of his book, Tocqueville directs his attention towards the sociological
implications of the process of equalisation. Here his arguments are more about the ideas
and the feelings in a democratic society. Tocqueville has, for example, this very interesting
idea that in a democracy people believe in progress. They trust that history will calmly
evolve in a way that will lead to more wealth, more happiness, less violence. The reason is
that in democratic societies every individual can in principle reach the highest positions in
society, regardless of the social class in which she or he was born. The example of Adam
Smith is no longer true: the son of the guy who has to carry other people’s luggage can now
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become a professor, if he is talented and works hard. This is an ideological position that we
can still recognise in America today, where it is called the American’s Creed or the American
Dream. When many people believe that this is true for individuals, they begin to think that
this also may be true for the collectivity, that the American people as a whole can follow the
roads that lead to a bright future. Equality suggests the idea of indefinite perfectibility.
This is an interesting thought, because it is one of the first examples of a branch of
sociological studies that later became known as the sociology of knowledge. Tocqueville
here constructs a relationship between the structure of a society, in this case a relatively flat
system of social stratification, and the ideas that people strongly believe in, for example their
ideas about the future of their society. In the 20th Century, the sociology of knowledge was
heavily influenced by the Marxist approach, where the economic infrastructure determines or
conditions the world of ideas. But Tocqueville, who was Marx's contemporary, started from a
different point of departure to develop a theory about the relationship between social
structure and intellectual constructions.
Although the Americans believed in progress, they were, according to Tocqueville, not very
enthusiastic about revolutionary change, even though their country was created in a
revolutionary struggle for independence. Tocqueville was convinced that revolutions would
become rare in the United States. That is a bit unexpected, he admits, because this is a
country where everything seems to be permanently in a state of rapid change. But
Tocqueville has an interesting argument here: revolutions take place when people suffer
from social inequality. But when everybody has some small possessions that they protect
carefully, and when there is not much to take from the others, then there is no revolutionary
impulse. On the contrary, the large majority of the population, the middle class, are afraid of
revolutions because they threaten their property. There is a very perceptive observation
here: people who own some property, but not very much, stick to the little that they have
with more fanaticism than the people who are extremely rich and who may even be bored
with their huge fortune. So the members of the middle class just don't see what they could
possibly win in a revolution, and they have a very sharp eye for what they might lose. But
here Tocqueville makes a very important reservation. This is what he says: “If ever America
undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on
the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to equality, but to
the inequality of condition”. He was not just angry about the racism that he witnessed, he
was also very afraid of the terrible consequences it might have in the future.
When I read these pages on the unlikelihood of future revolutions, I am constantly reminded
of the sufferings of the Tocqueville family during the French Revolution. The author does not
stress it in his book, but it is not too far-fetched to think that the argument that revolutions
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would become less likely in a democracy was an element that had, for this author, a special
significance. Democracy reduces the chance of innocent people being killed on a massive
scale, and that is one of its assets.
4.8 Tocqueville’s Predictions
We live in the 21st Century and it is instructive to discuss which of the many predictions that
we find in Tocqueville’s book have turned out to be correct and which were wrong. There are
some very striking remarks about future developments, for example in the chapter where he
says that two powers will become dominant in the world of tomorrow: Russia and the United
States. Let me quote a few lines from the very last page of Volume One: “Today there are
two great peoples on earth who, starting from different points, seem to advance toward the
same goal: these are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. (...) Their point of departure is
different, their pathes are varied; nontheless, each one of them seems called by a secret
design of Providence to hold in its hands one day the destinies of half the world”. Now this is
a stunning prediction at a point in time when nobody could have foreseen the dominance of
Russia and the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries. But there are other chapters
that are more debatable, with the wisdom of hindsight. One of them is Tocqueville's
conviction that the arts and sciences could not flourish in America. He says that among the
civilised people of today, there are few where the advanced sciences have made less
progress than in the United States, and who have produced fewer great artists, illustrious
poets or celebrated writers. He was not convinced that this was a necessary consequence
of the democratic spirit, but rather it may have something to do with other elements of
American culture. The readers of this book could safely conclude that Europe had no
competition to fear from the United States when it came to music, painting, poetry or those
sciences whose practical applicability is not clear at first sight.
Today, America is one of the leading countries in, for example, modern painting or sculpture
or ballet. New York is the Mecca for artists and art collectors alike. When Tocqueville
travelled across America, he could not find the equivalents of the great French and German
composers, but in the 20th Century it was the United States that gave us not only very
important serious music, from John Cage to Philip Glass, but also the great gift of jazz
music, with such geniuses as Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. And America has become
a superpower on a world scale when it comes to popular music, of course.
As for the sciences, it is safe to say that the United States has become dominant in almost
every scientific discipline. It is the land of the best universities and some of the most
excellent research institutes. It is no accident that first year students in Amsterdam who
study sociology or anthropology, history or political science, have to read in their first year
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books in the English language written by American professors. And when these Dutch
students prove to be excellent, they are allowed to follow a special master program that is
often taught entirely in the English language, even if the large majority of the students and
their teachers have the Dutch language as their mother tongue. And here I am, a Dutch
sociologist, speaking to you in English, because that has become for sociologists today the
Esperanto of the social sciences. And very reluctantly, even the French have had to accept
this linguistic subjection. Now all of this was not foreseen by Tocqueville. He did not have
the slightest suspicion. And it is a very interesting question why even this sharp mind could
not foresee this worldwide dominance of the United States in the arts and sciences. But this
is not a criticism. On the contrary, it only shows that we are still engaged in a lively
discussion with this profound thinker, whose crystal clear and polite style of writing can still
bring on the face of his readers a smile of happiness.
Session 5: Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)
5.1 The Unexpected Force of Social Thought
Every time I speak about Karl Marx in front of a live audience, the atmosphere in the lecture
hall feels more charged. Smith, Comte andTocqueville are interesting authors, ok, but Marx,
hey, that is something else. Everybody who is interested in the social sciences has heard of
him, whether they are well acquainted with his theory or not. And often people already have
an opinion about him, in many cases a very strong opinion. They agree with his vision or
they disagree, but whatever is the case, they are outspoken about it. But there is also
another position.Students sometimes tell me something like this: my mother was always
talking about this great guy Karl Marx and when I was a kid I was impressed by all those
books he had written, standing there on her bookshelf, but actually I have never understood
what that was all about,so I am happy that in this class you will help me to get an idea of
what Marx actually had to say. Maybe that is the best attitude to start with.
It cannot be denied that Marx is very different from any other theorist that I discuss here.
Durkheim or Weber were never as influential in social, economic, political or cultural life than
Marx.Social democratic parties, socialist and communist parties in European countries like
France, Germany, Sweden, Poland or the Netherlands always made it clear that their
political programme rests on the firm foundation of the thoughts of Marx and his friend and
collaborator Friedrich Engels. Maybe some social democratic leaders would prefer their
potential voters to forget this intellectual origin, but then again,there are always members of
these left wing parties who urge the leadership to remember and honour their intellectual
roots.
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There is a bigger problem. Completely innocent people have been killed on a massive scale
by regimes whose leaders said that they were inspired by Marx and Engels, that they were
only putting intopractice what these thinkers had preached. This happened in the Soviet
Union under Stalin, in Maoist China, and in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge, some of
whose leaders had studied Marxism at Western universities, slaughtered millions of people.
Now you may say that this is not at all what the great humanists Marx and Engels had
intended by writing their books and articles,that their arguments were abused by ruthless
dictators and their cruel henchmen. This may be true, but still there is this ugly line
connecting the interesting things that 19th Century Karl Marx had to say with 20th Century
mass murder. This is a problem we should not shy away from. One of the important
questions here is whether there are elements in Marx's thought that made it less difficult to
interpret him as somebody who justified violence.
I am convinced that there is something very totalitarian in Comte's positivism that does not
leave any space for criticism once the positivist truth has been scientifically guaranteed.But
Comte had the good fortune that nobody used his ideas in defence of censorship or of
prosecuting the critics of positivist thought. Marx was less lucky in this regard. Bloody tyrants
in the West and in the East appropriated his arguments, alienated them from his body of
work, and put them to use as an apology for their murderous projects.But however
undeserved that is for Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels, there are lines in their books that lend
themselves to being used in such a way and we should pay attention to this aspect,
because it may teach us something about the unexpected force and the dangerous potential
of social thought in generalThe uses that have been made of the ideas of Karl Marx should
at least liberate us from the idea that social theory always remains without consequences.
It is such a common cliché: all those deep social thinkers, guys like Comte, Tocqueville and
Durkheim, writing those great books that nobody but their fellow thinkers care to read, what
influence did they really have? The question is meant to be rhetorical.
Apart from the fact that this is not true at all and that, for example, Emile Durkheim had an
important influence on the French educational system, the best way to show that this really
is an ill-founded cliché is to reply by simply saying: and what about MarxSo, to talk in a more
or less detached way about what is interesting and still worthwhile in the ideas of Marx, no,
that is not at all an easy task.
5.2 Economic Chains of Interdependency
Why do sociologists today still refer to Marx so often? Well, in the first place because he
brought something to light that we are still trying to fully comprehend... His important idea
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that human beings are not a collection of abstractions, living on the inside of every individual
body, but that they are, in actual fact, the ensemble, the totality of all the social relationships
that tie them together.
This is the idea that 27-year-old Karl Marx scribbled down in 1845 as one of his theses on
the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach.
You may remember his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, where Marx says that the
philosophers have only interpreted the world in many different ways, but that now the time
has come that we should actually change the world. But I really believe that thesis number 6
is more important, because that is where he says that the essence of a human being is not
located in his individuality, but in the social network of which she or he is a part.
This is the idea that Marx in one of his later books formulated in a sentence that became
very famous: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the
contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”.
What people think is influenced by the social context of which they are a part. This idea has
given rise to some of the most important branches of sociological research. The way in
which the social context influences the artistic impulses and products of human beings is
studied in the sociology of art, the sociology of literature, the sociology of music, even in the
sociology of the cinema.
How the social surroundings may influence behaviour that is, in a certain society, considered
punishable is studied by the sociology of law and also by the sociology of deviant behaviour
and the sociology of crime or criminology. How the social structures may influence our belief
systems is studied by the sociology of religion.The social influences on how people think,
how they reason, is studied by a very important sub-discipline called the sociology of
knowledge. I could go on and on with this list, but let me mention only one more. Today, we
do not believe that scientific thought develops in a social vacuum.
We now can see that even in science the flow of ideas is influenced by social developments
and this is the intriguing field of study that is called the sociology of science.
So, how people think and feel and act is profoundly influenced by the networks that they are
enveloped in, maybe I should say the networks that they are.This is an extremely fruitful
insight, something that became a cornerstone in the sociologies of Emile Durkheim and
Norbert Elias. But then Marx narrows it down a bit. He believes that the most important
interdependencies between human beings are those that have to do with survival, for
example the gathering of the food you need in order to stay alive,dividing the economic
tasks in such a way that the group, the collectivity, may live and procreate. The networks
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that people form when they wrestle from surrounding nature the essentials that they need to
survive
are
called,
in
Marxian
terminology,
the
productive
relations,
Produktionsverhaeltnisse, and they are fundamental. The other relationships between
people, for example their cognitive ties or their political relations, are all derived from what is
the heart of it all: their economic chains of interdependency.
Another way of expressing this is that the infrastructure, that is the economic base of
society, determines the superstructure, which contains politics, law, religion, the arts and
sciences. Marx spoke in the German language about the Unterbau and the Ueberbau, which
is in fact an architectural metaphor.The Unterbau is the part of the house that is hidden
underground. You don't see it, but it is the foundation of the building. What you see is the
Ueberbau, the walls, the front door, the windows, the roof. But if you want to buy that house,
you are well advised not to pay too much attention to what catches the eye, but to take the
little staircase into the cellar under the house and try to see if there are cracks in the walls
that may predict the collapse of the whole construction in the future. If you want to
investigate the strength of a society, don't look at the things that are easy to notice, the
beautiful artworks, the great universities, the inviting avenues, the smart political debates,
but try to see what goes on in the less visible economic basement of that society. Because
the eventual collapse of the whole system may be visible when you study the contradictions
and oppositions that already today strike the eye of anyone who is trained to study the
economic undercurrents.
5.3 Homo Faber
Specialists in Marxist thought are still debating the question of whether Marx really was an
economic determinist, someone who believed that when all is said and done economic
relations are always the most important ties between human beings. In many paragraphs,
Marx sounds like a determinist, but here and there he, and also his friend Engels, seem to
be less outspoken. But whatever the outcome of that debate is, it cannot be denied that
Marx, in the middle of the 19th Century, took a direction that was far removed from, for
example, Comte. In Comte, the driving force of history is after all the transformation of ideas,
the shift from religious thinking towards scientific thinking. And he was not the only
philosopher who believed that history is essentially driven by the rise and fall of intellectual
interpretations of the world.
Marx is completely opposed to that idea and he is often characterised as a materialist who
did not agree with the kind of idealism that he associated with one of the heroes of his
student years, the German philosopher Hegel. By pointing at the trivial everyday necessity
of making ends meet, by hammering, mercilessly, on that argument, again and again and
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again, Marx helped to push the social sciences in a new direction. He forced the sociologists
who came after him to take this hard-edged view into account. Max Weber, for example,
believed that Marx was too one-sided in stressing how economic factors determine religious
imagery and he showed that there is also an arrow of causal influence pointing just the other
way, that is from religious convictions towards economic ideas and practices; an interesting
criticism. But after 1890, nobody could look away from what Marx had said, his impressive
body of work was here to stay and everybody was now forced to take a position vis-à-vis the
theory of Marx, whether against it or in favour of it.
Marx's stress on economic ties has deep roots in his philosophy and in his image of man.
For Marx, the human animal is essentially a worker.
It is in our labour that we unfold our innermost possibilities, that we develop our talents to
the fullest, that we leave our very personal imprint on the world. Marx favours a very peculiar
image of human nature: man is homo faber, a working, labouring, productive, constructive
being. It has been said that this conception of man reflected the values of his own middle
class family, where hard work was considered a virtue. Marx, as a person, was actually a
workaholic, a man who sometimes neglected his family and his friends because he was
completely immersed in the task of writing what he considered to be a very important book.
And today many people will agree with him that work is what gives human beings their
dignity.
But as we shall see, this image of man as being essentially ennobled by his ability to
express himself in his work is only one of many ways of looking at human beings. There are
other views of human nature and the one that Marx favours is just one of many possibilities.
Starting from this vision of man, Marx is worried that labour, the activity par excellence in
which man realises his deepest potential, is perverted, turned into something ugly, just a
commodity, a thing to be sold. Here it may be helpful to refer to the famous distinction
between use value and exchange value, Gebrauchswert and Tauschwert in German. All the
goods that we find on a market have a certain use value, they satisfy human needs. But
when a commodity is brought to the marketplace, nobody cares about its use value, this
intrinsic possibility to satisfy human beings, but everybody is focused on its exchange value,
how much money they can make with it, what they can get when they sell it. Now let me skip
here Marx's interesting but rather antiquated labour theory of the exchange value of
commodities. You can look that up on the internet. But what is important is that Marx says
that not only objects like bread or watches can be exchanged and have a certain exchange
value, but that human labour can also be turned into a commodity that you can buy and sell
in the marketplace.
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Marx is appalled by the fact that this most beautiful potential that all human beings share,
their ability to express themselves in their work, becomes defiled, polluted, when it is turned
into a mere commoditywith a price tag attached to it, an object that you can sell in the
marketplace. In his youthful manuscripts, many of which were published only after he
passed away, Marx referred to this as the outcome of a process of alienation.
In what follows, I will dig a little deeper into this concept of alienation.
5.4 Alienation
Sometimes, the German terms Entfremdung or Verfremdung are translated as
estrangement, but here I will stick to the word alienation. Marx must have picked it up when
he studied the philosophy of Hegel, but he adapted it to serve his own aims. You could say
that he alienated the concept from philosophy and turned it into a critical sociological term
with critical implications.
Let's take, for example, a clocksmith, a specialist in constructing beautiful and precise
clocks, who is very proud of his elegant products, and let's compare this man with a boy who
performs a monotonous, boring, repetitive action all day long in the pin factory of Adam
Smith. Now you begin to have an idea of what Marx means by alienation. The man working
in the pin factory may not even realise in what way his simple task contributes to the final
product, the fine pin that leaves the factory. And if he did, he couldn't care less. The
clockmaker loves his clocks, the pinmaker does not feel any kind of pride for his pins. In a
way, he has been cut loose from his product, he does not recognise his own work in the
material outcome of all his labour. In short, his product has been alienated from him, he
experiences it as something alien, a thing that he does not recognise as his own creation.
And in a broader sense, the whole productive process has been robbed from him. He has
been robbed of his dignity as a factory worker, he has become a kind of robot, a cog in the
machine, being coerced to make the same bodily movements over and over again, all day
long, and also the next day and the day after that. Not only has the product of the work been
alienated from him, in fact the whole labour process has been alienated from him. He does
his job in a completely mechanical way, he is not interested in the meaning of his actions,
his contribution to the goods that may serve the needs of the people who buy them. The
only thing he cares about is his pay check and nothing else.
This new way of working in a modern factory in a capitalist system has also severed the ties
between workers. In the past, they were proud craftsman, exchanging amongst each other
the tricks of the trade, sharing the secrets of their profession, relishing in the pride of their
accomplishments. But now that capitalism has forced everybody to divide their labour and
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work in this repetitive fashion, alienated from their products, alienated from the labour
process, the workers also gradually become alienated from their fellow workers. They lose
the sense that they are, as a collective, responsible for the stream of products that leaves
the factory. They do not know one another, they become strangers to each other. They do
not feel and they do not need to feel any kind of sympathy or loyalty to the factory, no pride
for its products, no sense of solidarity with one another, they are now completely
individualised, atomised. In the modern factory, with its fragmentation of labour, with jobs
that most people can learn in just a few hours, where craftsmanship is not valued anymore,
the workers are not interested in what the other guy is doing, there is no common interest,
no sense of sharing a common fate.
Marx hoped that overarching class consciousness, uniting the workers in many different
factories, uniting workers all over the country, uniting factory workers all over the world,
would create a new kind of solidarity, a sense of belonging to an important collectivity. But
for the time being, they are separated from one another, they have been effectively
alienated from each other.
This is all very bad, but the worst part has yet to be mentioned. In the course of this process,
human beings become more and more alienated from themselves. This follows from Marx's
conception of man. When it is in his work, and only in his work, that man realises his
deepest potential, when only in labour can he realise his innermost talents, a potential that
before he may not even have been aware of, then alienating his work from him means that
he has been alienated from his innermost self.
Marx dresses this argument in very philosophic language and sometimes he says that under
capitalist conditions, man is alienated from what defines him as a member of the human
species, alienates him from his Gattungswesen, a German word that is translated as
species-being.
What he wants to convey to the reader with this old fashioned word is that all these types of
alienation boil down to this: the members of the human race are robbed of everything that
differentiates them from brute animals, they are stripped of their humanity.
5.5 Class Struggle
So far I have not yet spoken about that one word with which Marx became an inescapable
presence in the science of sociology. No, I do not mean the word capitalism or the word
alienation, and not even the word revolution. For us sociologists, Marx is the man who gave
us the word class. He must have picked it up in left wing intellectual circles in Paris when he
was living there in the 1840s.
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One of the big themes in sociology is social inequality and especially social stratification, the
formation of a social ladder, a classification from low to high. It is interesting to observe that
everywhere in the world people associate poverty, bad education, lack of power and poor
living conditions with a low standing on an imaginary ladder, and a high salary, an excellent
education and a life of luxury with being on the highest rungs of this ladder. Maybe this highlow metaphor is universally convincing because everybody has experienced in their
childhoods the fact that adults, who are taller than children, have more money to spend,
know more and are more powerful. In theories of social stratification we use terms like caste
or estate or social layer, but Marx introduces a term that has become a household word in
the social sciences, and also in the political arena and in everyday life: class. Most people
are no longer reminded of Karl Marx when they read in the newspaper that a new class of
very poor people seems to be growing in the urban ghettos of the modern metropolitan
cities, but it is interesting that the problem is framed in Marxian terminology, using the word
class.
In his more journalistic articles, Marx sometimes discerns many different classes, but in his
theoretical texts he reduces all of these different classes to two basic ones. These two
classes are not only the two most important classes, they are also the only two that remain
intact when capitalism reaches its final phase. Some members of the middle classes will be
able to move into the dominant class, but most people in the middle classes will tumble
down into the class of the oppressed and the dominated.
On the one hand, there is a class of people who do not own the means of production – the
factories, the machinery in the factories – so they are forced to sell the only thing that they
own and that is their ability to work, their labour power.
On the other hand, we see a class of people who do own the means of production, who are
the captains of industry, controlling the new enormous industrial plants that have come to
dominate the outskirts of the modern cities. These entrepreneurs do not have to sell their
labour power, they can hire the labour power of other propertyless men and women. And
again, Marx uses French words that he may have heard during his years in Paris to give
names to these two classes: the factory workers are called the proletariat, the capitalists are
called the bourgeoisie. It is a relatively simple two-class model, rooted in the economic
position of the members: one class receives wages, the other class lives off the surplus
value that they extract from the working class.
You may be surprised by the praise that Marx heaps on the heads of the members of the
bourgeoisie in the first pages of the Communist Manifesto. In early capitalism, they were the
ones to blow away the old traditional institutions that hindered progress, they were
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adventurous, they took risks, they brought us modernity and created the possibility of
enormous wealth. But under the conditions of high capitalism, this bourgeoisie class makes
its profits by exploiting the members of the working class. If the proletarians do not accept
the long working days or the low wages, they are told, maybe in a very friendly way, to look
for a better job elsewhere. They are not slaves or serfs, they can look for a good job and
negotiate about their remuneration. But according to Marx, this is a lie. In actual fact, the
modern proletarian has less freedom than a slave in antiquity. And this is because there is
never enough work, so in front of the gates of the factory we see a large group of
unemployed and hungry people who are willing to do anything to get a job. This is what
Marx calls the reserve army of workers. For every discontented worker that leaves the plant,
there are ten men or women or children who are willing to work for very long days and for a
very low wage. So the workers have no bargaining power. And this is the reason why they
can be exploited, which means that the value that they create for the entrepreneurs is
superior to the value of the wages that they receive. They have no alternative but to give this
surplus value away with nothing in return.
5.6 Caught in the Capitalist System
This may be the point where I should stress something that is often overlooked by students
of Marx, and sometimes even Marx seems to forget it when he gives in to the pleasure of
writing a very polemical paragraph. The exploitation of the proletariat has nothing to do with
the evil intentions of the capitalists or their sadistic lust to oppress powerless people. These
capitalists may actually be very friendly people, who go to church every Sunday and who do
not want to impoverish and squeeze their workers. They may give some of their income to
charities or they may support the arts and the sciences. The problem is that they are
captives of this system that forces them, whether they like it or not, to exploit their
employees. Because they are members of an extremely competitive network of factory
owners who are all focused on one goal only. No, this goal is not to make as much money
as they can, but to make in a systematic way more money than their colleagues, to stay
ahead of the competition. The penalty for not staying ahead is terrible: whoever lags behind
will go bankrupt, the factory will have to close and the owner and the members of his family
will fall into the class of the proletarians and from that moment on they will have to sell the
only thing they are left with, their labour power, sell it to their former fellow entrepreneurs. All
their actions are motivated by the burning fear that this might one day happen to them. In
this respect, but in this respect only, Marx reminds me of Tocqueville: in a class system with
a lot of mobility, everybody is scared to death of falling from a high class to a low class. But
of course Marx is the opposite of Tocqueville in his prediction that the middle classes will be
eaten up by the remaining two classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat.
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In fact, the system is so stable because it does not depend on evil intentions, on bad
characters. In a way, it is capitalism itself that is taking care of its own continuation. This
again is an element in Marx that sociologists admire: social systems may have a dynamic all
of their own, they develop according to laws that individual people cannot influence, even if
they understand these laws, even if they have studied the books by Marx and Engels.
This is how it works in the short run. But in the long run capitalism goes slowly but surely in
the direction of its own destruction. And the strange thing is that the entrepreneurs who profit
most from this system are also the ones who are instrumental in its downfall. Forced by
cutthroat competition, they compel their labour force to work harder and harder, to make
longer working days, to accept lower wages. The workers become so poor that their wives
have to work in the factory to make ends meet, and if that is not enough their children have
to do the simple repetitive tasks that we remember from the pin factory, adding their meagre
wage to the family income. But the owners of the factories are forced to continue to squeeze
the labour force, so that the workers do not have enough to eat, their houses are very
unhygienic, the roof is leaking, they become ill, they see their children die and then, one
day, they realise that things cannot get worse, that their situation has become so terrible that
the conclusion becomes inevitable: they have nothing to lose but their shackles. The
capitalists have created a class of people that will bring capitalism to its end, they have
raised their own gravediggers.
But for this to happen, the workers have to become aware of their objective situation, they
have to develop class consciousness. All of a sudden they see through the ideological
myths about the wonderful world of modern capitalism that the politicians, industrial leaders
and parish priests propagate day in, day out. They break away from this spell, they open
their eyes and confront reality. And then they may develop a feeling of solidarity, a deep
sentiment that they share their fate with the members of their own class and not with the
members of the class that exploits them. Then they conclude that the only road to a better
future is to rise up against their oppressors, all together, in one huge movement. This is the
moment when revolutionary consciousness takes hold of hearts and minds, and from this
moment on a revolution is inescapable, the means of production will be torn away from the
former owners and given to the collectivity and from then on all the wealth that has become
possible in modern industrial society will be distributed in a fair and honest way among the
members of this new society.
5.7 Class Consciousness
What sociologists like in this theory is that a class is not only defined in economic terms, but
also in socio-psychological terms. A class is not just a group of people who share certain
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economic characteristics. It may under certain circumstances transform into a group of
people who are aware of the fact that they are a class, a collective with its own interests that
they should defend as a group. Or to put it in the Hegelian language that Marx liked so
much: under certain conditions, a class may become conscious of itself. It is transformed
from a Klasse an sich, a class in itself, into a Klasse fuer sich, a class for itself.
The idea of a social category, be it a class or another kind of entity, becoming reflexively
aware of itself is a very interesting notion. Take, for example, a generational group. We may
talk about the group of people who were born between 1980 and 2000, and we may call
them the generation who experienced during their adolescence the rise of the personal
computer and the internet.
We may ascribe all kinds of characteristics to them, but the question that is most interesting
is this: do they share a sense of solidarity, does this generational cohort entertain a kind of
we-feeling?Although Marx is interested in the socio-psychological aspect of class, he has
often been criticised for his one-sidedness in focusing too much on the economic aspects of
class.
But 20th Century sociologists have proposed that classes may also be defined in other
ways, for example with regard to educational level or political power or prestige or lifestyle.
Max Weber tried to broaden the idea of class. And at the end of the 20th Century, French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote books, especially one study called Distinction, in which he
tried to show that we should not only take economic capital into account but also social
capital, the power of the network that somebody can mobilise, and cultural capital, for
example the knowledge of the arts and sciences that enables somebody to confidently
interact with the members of the dominant classes. Bourdieu and Weber are not Marxist
sociologists, but they were inspired by Marx when they developed their own sociological
approach, sometimes adopting elements of his work, at other times correcting him or
completely rejecting him when they thought he had it all wrong.
Which brings us to the much debated question of whether Marx, very generally speaking,
was correct in his analysis of capitalism and its future or not. Marx made his theory very
vulnerable by making explicit predictions about the future of capitalism. It would in the long
run fall victim to its own inherent contradictions, Marx believed. Capitalism as we know it
would ultimately self-destruct. And Marx was very clear about one thing: the revolution
would take place in the most advanced, the most industrialised, countries, in England,
France or Germany, where capitalism had developed furthest. Marx did not specify the
moment this would happen, but when in 1871 the Paris Commune was on the front pages of
every European newspaper, Marx clearly believed that what he had predicted was now
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really beginning to take shape.
You could say that Marx was right when he prophesied that capitalism as he knew it was
bound to disappear. The long working days were shortened, the factory workers became
richer, their housing conditions became better, the middle classes grew larger, laws were
introduced to forbid the employment of children in factories. Enterprises completely
controlled by the members of one family, who were not only stock owners but at the same
time directed the factory as managers, became rare, property and management were
collectivised and often separated. Some of these developments were predicted by Marx. But
one thing has been conspicuously absent in the highly developed industrial societies of the
West: the revolution did not occur and capitalism did not disappear.
5.8 Marx’s Predictions
Maybe Marx did not have an eye for the flexibility of capitalism as a new socio-economic
formation. Marx never dreamed that capitalism could be so elastic, that it would adapt so
easily to new circumstances and create solutions for all of the obstacles that he had so
expertly described. If capitalism threatens to be undermined by the poor health of the
members of the working class, then it will save itself by developing an efficient new system
of health care. Capitalism is never rigid, stiff, averse to change, it is constantly moving and
adapting to new challenges. Marx knew perfectly well that this is one of the most formidable
assets of modern capitalism. And yet this is the element that he may have underestimated.
But it is also possible to look at the problem of Marx's predictions in a completely different
way. You could defend the idea that Marx is still important today, but only when you
transpose his theory to the scale of the entire world. If you accept the idea that capitalism
has transformed from the level of the nation to the level of the world, that it has globalised,
then you can still defend the idea that today we are witnessing the culmination and the
eventual collapse of capitalism. Capitalism, some sociologists say, has stretched its lifespan
beyond anything that Marx ever expected, because it was extremely good at broadening its
playing field until it encompassed the whole globe. Some of the raw materials for our cell
phones are harvested in mines in Africa. Those beautiful small computers are assembled by
people in Asia who receive wages that nobody in the United States or Europe would accept.
The finished products are sold to the rich people living in Western societies. But today we
see that capitalism has become so successful that, for example, in Japan, South Korea and
also in China new layers of society have the purchasing power to buy these expensive
luxury products that everybody loves. The division of labour within capitalism has now
enveloped the whole world and if you want to see proletarian poverty, don't look for it in
Germany or Japan but go search for it in Sub-Saharan Africa. The mechanisms that Marx
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describes can still be found, but you have to take the entire planet as your study object. The
American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has been explaining to his students and
colleagues over the last forty years or so that the biggest error of sociology has been to stick
to the level of the nation state and not to take the interdependent world system as its object
of study.
The same social scientists who look at the problem in this way also tend to predict that a
revolutionary change is imminent. By globalising, the capitalist system could stretch its
lifetime. But for all its elasticity, it has now reached its final stage, where stretching it even
further has become impossible. In the zones where the very rich and the very poor live close
to each other, as is the case in the near east – think of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or Egypt – we
see that revolutionary energy is heaped up in a frightening way.
Nobody can foresee where this process will lead us. Not many people share the optimistic
expectations that Marx had entertained about a post-capitalist society. His prediction that
once capitalism has disappeared we will all become the happy members of a friendly
communist society, where we can devote ourselves to fishing and hunting and reading
Shakespeare, is met today with a wry smile. We have become too cynical to believe that.
And strangely enough, this kind of cynicism was brought into the world by some hardnosed
social theorists like Karl Marx, who look at human society from a disillusioned, materialist
perspective. Marx taught us to stop believing in fairytales. Today, many of us see his dream
of friendly post-capitalist communism as the kind of fairytale that is not very helpful if we
want to understand our social world.
Session 6: Émile Durkheim (1858 – 1917)
6.1 Establishing a New Science
You should not forget that I am the son of a rabbi. This is a sentence from a letter written by
French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who was a university professor around the year 1900.
Durkheim was very interested in teaching, in the functions of education, not only for children
or adults but also for society at large. Before his academic task was expanded to teaching
sociology, Durkheim was a professor of education and his interest in education may have
something to do with his rabbinical father and his other ancestors. This small sentence
about his father may also help us understand why Durkheim had this lifelong fascination with
religion, culminating in his final book that was entirely dedicated to religious life. He was the
son of a rabbi, the spiritual leader of a religious minority group in a small village in northeastern France, and this, among other things, must have stimulated his sociological interest
in group formation, group identity, the moral consciousness of a collectivity; it certainly
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triggered his lifelong interest in group cohesion.
Of course, Emile Durkheim is important for the sociological theories that he offered us, but
we should not forget his role in institutionalising sociology. Before Durkheim, sociology was
practiced outside of the university, by amateurs and aristocrats, revolutionaries and
freelance journalists, but it was not yet an academic discipline. After his death in 1917,
sociology became a science that students could choose to study, starting with an
introductory course, ending with the graduation ceremony. But Durkheim belongs to a
generation of thinkers who brought sociology into the university and transformed it into an
academic discipline. That was not at all an easy task, because the professors of other
sciences were sceptical about the newcomer.
In Durkheim's days, for example, the scientists who were interested in the psychology of
mass behaviour believed that they covered the field of social phenomena and that a new
science was superfluous. Durkheim's theories should therefore also be understood in the
light of his project to give the science of sociology academic respectability. His studies were
aimed at showing the importance of sociology. Durkheim, for example, was very interested
in the phenomenon of suicide. One of the reasons was that he believed that suicide figures
make clear why we need sociology to understand the problems of modern society. Suicide
seems to be the most personal act that you can imagine, often prepared in utter loneliness,
an act of desperation and isolation. But when you look at large numbers, you can see that
suicide is a social phenomenon and that the sociologist can predict the number of suicide
cases in a certain year, a certain region, a certain age cohort, a certain professional group,
even a certain religious group. So even in choosing his topics, Durkheim never forgot his
intention to show the value and the relevance of sociology as a new science that can help
us to understand and solve social problems that are typical of modernity.
When I present Durkheim here, I will look at his work from the vantage point of his selfimposed task to fight for the introduction of sociology as a university discipline, a new
science with its own brand of theories and methodologies and therefore also a science with
its own faculty members, its own professors and teachers, its own handbooks and journals.
And let us not forget that he was very successful. He was the first European professor of
sociology in 1913, he created the first sociological journal, l'Année Sociologique, in 1898, he
wrote a kind of sociological handbook, The Rules of Sociological Method, in 1895. In short,
he was very instrumental in the process of institutionalising and professionalising sociology.
But in order to achieve this goal, you need a sound theoretical argument to show that people
in modern Western societies really need such a new science. Durkheim developed
arguments that we still use today when we speak about the science of sociology.
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6.2 Mechanic and Organic Solidarity
Durkheim is sometimes seen as a sociologist whose ideas are similar to the core ideas in
the conservative ideology. For example, his concepts of social cohesion, social regulation,
the role of the church, the function of the family. But Durkheim cannot be pigeonholed so
easily. In his first major study, On the Division of Social Labour, De la Division du Travail
Social, a title that reminds us of Mandeville and Smith, he begins with an argument that is
directed against the complaints of conservative and romantic admirers of traditional
societies. Durkheim says that in the societies of the past, everybody resembled everybody.
People were similar and this similarity was, as it were, the social cement. Think of a
medieval small city where everybody shares the same religion, where people are not yet
highly specialised, they are not yet working in very different branches, because the division
of labour is still in its early stages. Such societies, he says, are glued together by
mechanical solidarity, the individuals that constitute such a society are pretty identical, like
the cogs in a large machine.
Now conservatives complain that in modern society this kind of cement is crumbling to
pieces. In a way, Durkheim agrees, but it does not alarm him because a new type of
solidarity is now taking shape in front of our eyes. Yes, it is true, he says, that people in
modern cities are not similar anymore, that they believe in different gods, that they have jobs
that are so very different that one craftsman does not have the slightest idea of what another
craftsman does. But that should not lead us to believe that these people show a lower
degree of solidarity. On the contrary, now they are bound together by different kinds of ties.
The more people differ from each other, the more they need one another, the more they are
dependent upon one another. The differentiation and specialisation between jobs,
professions and social functions has reached such a high level that human beings and
groups of human beings have become extremely interdependent, they need each other,
they cannot survive without one another. This is clearly not the old type of interdependence
through similarity; it is more the opposite, interdependence through dissimilarity.
Heterogeneity breeds interdependence. This is the kind of social glue that Durkheim calls
organic solidarity. In the great tradition of organicist sociological thinkers like Herbert
Spencer, Durkheim compares here societies with biological entities, living bodies.
In primitive organisms, the body parts may be very similar, but in higher organisms the
organs have differentiated to such a degree that the body as a whole cannot survive unless
these interdependent organs work together in a perfect fashion. We cannot think, we cannot
have consciousness, without the oxygen that the heart pumps through a stream of blood
from the lungs into the brain. The differentiation of the organs in the bodies of these higher
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organisms has created new possibilities, but also new vulnerabilities; it is the reason why the
units within such a body are very interdependent, it is the reason why these well integrated
organisms cannot survive if one of the vital organs does not work the way it should. It is the
same with modern societies. They cannot survive if you take away, for example, one
professional group, let's say schoolteachers or train drivers. This organic interdependence is
a new source of solidarity. So the conservative thinkers who are afraid that the
disappearance of solidarity through similarity is the reason why modern societies will fall to
pieces have missed this important new source of solidarity.
I have the impression that Durkheim wants to attract the attention of his audience by using
his terms in a non-intuitive fashion. Conservative thinkers have a tendency to describe
traditional societies as organic wholes, where every part was related to every other part in a
more or less natural way, and to describe modern societies as broken into bits and pieces
by mechanical forces that dominate in the age of the machine. Durkheim turns this
terminology upside down: traditional societies are kept together by mechanical solidarity,
modern societies by organic solidarity. Durkheim must have been an excellent teacher:
someone who knew that when you use your terms in a way that goes against the
expectations of your listeners or your readers, they may be shocked out of their habitual
ways of reasoning and then they may pay attention to the unconventional insight that you
want them to understand.
6.3 Social Facts
Durkheim's most important idea, the kernel of everything that he wants us to understand, is
that social facts, the phenomena that we observe and try to explain when we study human
collectives, can and should never be reduced to the level of the individual human beings that
belong to such a collective. If you do that, if you reduce a social fact to an individual fact, you
make an inexcusable scientific error. Social facts can only be explained with reference to
antecedent social facts. The sociologist should always remain on the level of social reality
and should resist the seduction of reductionism. This is a difficult argument that Durkheim
sometimes put into words, and which gave ammunition to his critics. He loved to use a
sentence that he borrowed from one of his own philosophy teachers: the whole is more than
the sum of its parts. This expression made it a bit too easy for his opponents to ask how a
group of people can be anything else than just the people composing that group. If we
ascribe to that group a little something extra, for example a group Will or a group Mind, then
we mystify reality, we fall victim to what Comte called metaphysical thinking. This is what his
critics wrote. But this is not at all what Durkheim intends to convey to his readers. The point
he wants to make is that when human beings are woven together in larger social entities,
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these collectives possess peculiar characteristics that cannot be found in the individuals that
constitute them.
The social group may have a certain density, we may discern a degree of regulation, a
certain amount of cohesion, we may even speak of its birth rate or of its suicide rate, and all
these characteristics are attributes of the entire social formation, they cannot be found in the
individual members, they rise up, they emerge from the structure as a whole. Durkheim had
to confront the professors of mass psychology who believed that sociology was a
superfluous science because they were already studying the things that sociologists said
they were going to study. When the psychologist of individual human beings really
understands what goes on in the brain of one single man or woman, then it is not too
difficult, they said, to understand what happens when one thousand of those people form a
group. Durkheim disagreed completely. When human beings get together in larger social
entities, the process of association creates entirely new phenomena that cannot be found in
the elements that compose them. The social facts that emerge from the association of
individual human beings belong to a class all of their own, or, to use the Latin expression
that Durkheim often employed, they are phenomena sui generis. And no, there is nothing
mystical or metaphysical about this, he says, and he tries to make his point with a
comparison from the world of biology. We all believe that a living cell consists of nothing but
molecules. But if these molecules are ordered in a certain special way, then we may see at
the level of the living cell as a whole a completely new phenomenon springing forth from the
associated parts, the wonderful thing we call life.
It is, of course, impossible to say that life can be found in one of these molecules. It is their
very peculiar association that creates something new, a phenomenon that is studied in a
science that stands apart from the sciences that, like physics and chemistry, study
molecules, and that is, of course, the science of life: biology. Well, in the same way, the
association of human beings creates new phenomena, social facts, which should be studied
not by the sciences of individuals, such as psychology, but by the science that is dedicated
to the study of social facts and nothing but social facts: sociology. You can find this
argument in a small book that Durkheim published in 1895, The Rules of Sociological
Method, not a methodology book in the strict sense of the word, but a book about the
philosophical and epistemological foundations of sociology. In this book, he says that social
facts are, in the first place, characterised by being outside of each and every individual, they
are external to the individual, and that, in the second place, they exert a certain pressure on
every individual, they are coercive, we experience them as a power forcing us to think and
feel and act in certain ways. This is an important point with far reaching consequences, as
we will see when we discuss his sociology of religion. But the heart of the matter is that
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social facts are phenomena sui generis, they can and should never be explained by
reducing them to the level of individual human beings.
6.4 Suicide, a Sociological Study
From this point of departure follows a simple methodological prescription: explain social
facts by relating them to antecedent social facts; never leave the level of social reality when
you try to make sense of the social world. This is exactly what Durkheim does in the book
that he published only two years later, in 1897, under a title that sounds a bit like a battle
cry: Suicide, A Sociological Study, Le Suicide, Etude de Sociologie. Let me first say a few
words about this disturbing subject matter. Sociology teachers love to show their students
the elegant arguments and the clever classifications that Durkheim employs in this book;
they may even become so spellbound by his reasoning that they forget for a second that for
many of the students this is not a subject that they approach with the detachment of the
professional sociologist, but something that reminds them of painful events in their private
life. Many people have known somebody who has tried to take his or her own life and this
subject may bring back sad memories.
I am aware of this, but in sociology there are many topics that need to be discussed,
although some students may be hurt. Think of ugly topics such as rape, torture or genocide.
Sociology is not just about consensus, harmony and cooperation, it is often about conflict,
oppression, violence and pain. Durkheim’s arguments may sound detached and technical,
but he had actually witnessed a case of suicide from nearby. His cool approach is not at all
the result of a lack of empathy, it is the outcome of his conviction that in order to study
something that strikes you emotionally, you have to try to take some academic distance.
And remember, when he wrote about suicide, Durkheim was not a value free sociologist,
because he also hoped that his study could suggest some measures that might lower the
suicide rates, at least in some sectors of society where they were, in his eyes, pathologically
high. The incidence of suicide is surprisingly predictable when you look at large numbers of
cases. Durkheim was certainly not the first one to point this out. Since the middle of the 19th
Century, statisticians who collected and analysed demographic figures and crime statistics
that were being collected with more and more precision were amazed by the regularity of
suicide rates.
On the first of January they could predict within a small margin of error how many people in
the coming year would take their own life, how many in a certain district of the country, in a
given profession, how many men and how many women, how many young people and how
many of the elderly. Of course, one cannot say beforehand who will do it, but one can
describe the characteristics of the people who will do it, even before they do it. This was a
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source of wonder for philosophers, moral statisticians, criminologists and proto sociologists.
There were even philosophers who believed that this demonstrated that there is no such
thing as free will. But this was not the kind of argument that Durkheim was interested in.
Durkheim wanted to better understand the regularity of the suicide rates and to do that he
first had to get rid of all kinds of arguments that he thought pointed in the wrong direction. Of
course, these arguments very often involved reduction to the level of the individual, the kind
of explanations that he considered fundamentally wrong, as we have seen.
He tries to show, using a large amount of quantitative data, that suicide rates have nothing
to do with the supposed mental illnesses of certain individuals or a proclivity towards
depression that might run in certain families or that are supposed to be more pronounced in
certain human races or sub-races. A theory that he may have thrown away a bit too hastily
is the theory, defended by one of his adversaries in the department of mass psychology, that
sometimes suicides are propagated by processes of imitation. Climate theories are
discarded and speculations about the influence of the position of the stars and the planets
are rejected as well, always on the basis of an analysis of the suicide statistics. Having
destroyed all these rivalling theories, Durkheim has cleaned the slate, so to speak, and now
he can develop his own sociological theory of suicide.
6.5 Egoistic and Altruistic Suicide
Durkheim tries to convince his readers that correlations with the positions of the heavenly
bodies or with the temperature or with the presence in the population of certain European
sub-races were all spurious, on closer inspection of the figures. But then again, there were
also a few correlations that remained intact. There is an undeniable relationship between
religion and suicide rates, there is a relationship between being married or being single and
suicide rates, there is a relationship between the stability of your economic position and
suicide rates, and there also is a relationship with the sector of society in which people are
working. These correlations cannot be explained away, he says. Although we should not
forget that the technical means that Durkheim had at his disposal to analyse these
correlations were still primitive. Building on these observations, Durkheim now constructs his
own sociological explanation. The suicide rate is a characteristic of a social collective, it is a
social fact, and if you want to explain this social fact you should look out for other social
facts. Now social cohesion, the strength of the social web, may explain some of the
regularities in the figures. Why are the suicide figures for married people lower than for
singles? Married couples are bound with stronger ties to society than single people. A
similar argument can be used in explaining differences between religious groups. The social
cohesion amongst Jews is higher than the social cohesion amongst Protestants, let alone
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atheists. So it comes as no surprise that we find a higher suicide rate amongst non-believers
than among people of the Jewish faith, the faith of Durkheim’s ancestors.
The rise in suicide rates that is attended by a gradual lowering of social cohesion is called by
Durkheim egoistic suicide. I do not like this term at all, it is quite misleading. Sometimes
people say that somebody who commits suicide did something very selfish, very egoistic,
they did not think of the pain of those they left behind. Whether you sympathise with this
kind of argument or not, this is not at all what Durkheim had in mind when he used the term
egoistic suicide. It is a technical term to classify the rising suicide rates that we find in
modern societies where social cohesion becomes relatively weak. Remember that in his
book on the division of social labour, Durkheim defends the idea that modern societies do
not lack social solidarity, that it is only created in another way: organic solidarity is the
outcome of the interdependence that comes with more differentiation and specialisation. But
in the latter part of this early work, Durkheim already begins to subtly change his tone and
now, in the book on suicide, he seems to take his distance from the argument in his first
book. He now states that social cohesion is low in modern Western societies and that this
tendency makes it very difficult to protect the people in these societies from the type of
suicide that he calls egoistic.
Durkheim may have been afraid that his readers would conclude from this argument that we
should always strive for the highest degree of social cohesion imaginable. He wants to
convince us that he favours optimum cohesion, not maximum cohesion, and to do this, he
says that when social cohesion becomes extremely strong, this might also lead to a rise in
suicide rates. He calls this altruistic suicide, using a word that was invented by Auguste
Comte, altruism. And again, this is a bit of a misleading term. An example here is of the
soldier sacrificing his life in a suicide attack because he can no longer conceive of himself as
a separate individual; his personality seems to have dissolved into the group. Durkheim says
that this kind of behaviour has almost disappeared from modern Western Europe, where
most people have a strong sense of individuality. So altruistic suicide is a small category. In
fact, Durkheim is mainly interested in the so-called egoistic suicide because it is so closely
tied up with the rise of modernity in Western Europe. But there is also another type of
suicide that he considers very important: anomic suicide.
6.6 Anomic and Fatalistic Suicide
All my life, I have been surrounded by cats. When I feed my cats, they eat as much as they
like and then they stop, they have had enough. Human beings are different. You give them
five dollars and they regret that they did not ask for ten. They earn an extremely high salary
and they fight to have a super-bonus at the end of the year. They have a large car, but they
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dream of a bigger one. Human beings differ from every other animal in that they cannot be
satisfied, they just never have enough. This could be a guarantee for unhappiness, it even
could explain why cats are happy and humans are destined to remain unsatisfied. But
according to Durkheim, there is a solution to this problem. The limits of what we may desire
are not given by our biological makeup, as is the case with other animals, but they are given
to each of us early on in life by society. It is society that takes care of this kind of regulation,
society imprints in our mind that we should harmonise our desires with our means, it tells us
what we can hope to achieve and what we should recognise as unreachable. When
everything works well, we internalise these limits on our aspirations so well that we don't
even realise that they are not simple inevitabilities but that actually social facts, external and
coercive, force us to desire only what we may one day realistically achieve.
Now in modern societies this mechanism has come under heavy pressure and the resulting
situation is an absence of rules and regulations, which Durkheim calls a situation of anomie.
This explains the rise of suicide rates when the economic expectations of people are in a
state of crisis. A stable middle class position protects just as well against suicide as a stable
position amongst the poor. But when the economy becomes very volatile, when people may
lose all their money overnight or when very poor people may all of a sudden become
extremely rich, then the whole population is touched by a general atmosphere of anomie.
Under these circumstances, people do not internalise any kind of limit anymore and they
become dissatisfied beyond repair. And then again we can observe a rise in suicide rates
that is most noticeable amongst the groups who suffer most acutely from the economic
uncertainties, for example the people who work in the financial professions and the people
who experience the most extreme changes in their economic situation over a relatively short
period of time.
This is the type of suicide that Durkheim calls anomic suicide and it is, just like egoistic
suicide, typical of modern Western societies with their unstable economies and the
frightening uncertainty, for many people, about their economic future. Here again, Durkheim
devotes a few lines, in fact not more than a footnote, to the exact opposite of what he has
just analysed, in this case anomic suicide. When regulation is extremely high, he says,
suicide rates will also rise, and this is the type of suicide that he calls fatalistic suicide. Here
he gives the example of a slave in an exotic society or in classic antiquity who kills himself
after the death of his master. Durkheim chooses here a rather far-fetched example and
again this type serves first of all a theoretical purpose: he wants to demonstrate that he is
searching for the optimal degree of regulation and not for the most intense regulation that
you can imagine. So Durkheim is especially interested in egoistic suicide and anomic
suicide, but it is not so easy to keep the two apart. They both are characteristic of modern
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Western societies with a low degree of cohesion and a low degree of regulation. But it is
hard to imagine a society with a high degree of cohesion attended by a low degree of
regulation, so the two do not vary completely independently. Still there is some sort of a
difference. Egoism-altruism have to do with social structure, the strength of the ties that bind
people, the robustness of the network, whereas anomie-fatalism have to do with culture, the
effective internalisation of social prescriptions. But then again, the difference between
structure and culture is not always as clear-cut as it seems.
6.7 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Durkheim’s most beautiful book appeared in 1913: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
It is presented as a study of the most distant origins of religious beliefs and practices.
Durkheim used anthropological or ethnographic material. He was, for example, very
interested in field studies about a tribe of Australian aboriginals whose religion was
supposed to be one of the oldest types to be found on Earth. Durkheim investigated these
clan societies and tried to prove that this kind of totem religion must be the earliest primitive
manifestation of religiosity in human societies. But I think the book is especially relevant
today because it touches on some other core questions in the sociology of religion. Let me
begin with Durkheim’s methodological principle that the sociologist should always take the
words of the subject of his or her investigation very seriously. Even if they tell you about an
experience that seems to be very irrational or even crazy at first sight, do not doubt their
honesty: the experience that they tell you about is a deep reality for them. So if you notice,
for example, that somebody treats a seemingly very ordinary object with a strange kind of
awe and reverence, try to understand what is going on.
Don't mock the aboriginal who seems to be strangely impressed by what appears to be an
ordinary stone on the ground, don't react with a smile when a Catholic prays to a small
wooden statue, don't criticise a patriotic citizen who experiences pain when he sees that his
flag is burned. Try to understand them, try to imagine what their world must be like for them.
The first thing that you may notice is that the stone, the statue and the flag are in their eyes
no ordinary everyday object; they are different, they are charged with a special energy that
sets them apart. Durkheim says that for these people, there is a clear distinction between
the profane and the sacred, between the mundane world and the religious world, between
the ordinary and the extraordinary. If you ask a religious person what it is that she
experiences when she participates in a religious ritual or is confronted with an object that
she believes to be sacred, then she of course has to search for words, but she will often
suggest that she can feel a strange power that at the same time frightens her and comforts
her.
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It can be frightening at times, because it forces you to do certain things and to refrain from
other things, and if you do not obey you will be punished; so it is a coercive force. But it also
is a source of strength, because in times of grief and distress it will support and comfort you,
you can rely on it when you mourn the loss of a loved one, it will catch you when you are
falling. Durkheim says that somebody who has participated in a religious gathering may say
that she or he feels strengthened, energised, emboldened, empowered. And again, this is
not something that they imagine, it is something real. Maybe it is a feeling that Durkheim
remembered from the time when he still went to the synagogue. This power is so
overwhelming that the believers are convinced that it already existed before they were born
and will exist long after they have passed away. It is something that is not inside the
believers, it is external to them, superior to everybody, it envelopes and unites their whole
religious community.Durkheim is convinced that everything we are told is true, that the
believers are honest people who tell us what they feel, but he interprets these facts in a
different way that is far removed from the interpretation of the believers. This coercive and
external power, he says, can be nothing else than the power of society. It is society that
forces us to act in certain ways. It is society, our own social network, that supports and
comforts us in time of trouble and grief. It is society that gives that special feeling of strength
and energy. Society existed long before you were born and it will continue to exist long after
you have died. It is society that is external to us, something that overarches our lives, but at
the same time binds us together. Religious imagery is seen here as a kind of proto
sociology, a metaphorical way to speak about something that is very difficult to imagine and
to comprehend when the science of sociology did not yet exist, the idea that, from the
moment of our birth, we are all inextricably woven into the tissue of society.
6.8 The Social Functions of Religion
Religious objects are so impressive for the believer because they appear to emanate a
power that, according to Durkheim, cannot be anything else than the power of society. We
can observe how this power is produced during religious meetings. Here people are
gathered, they are close to each other, they may dance or sing together, and then, all of a
sudden, something spectacular may happen, they may collectively reach a state of
euphoria, a kind of ecstasy or rapture, which he calls a state of effervescence, a kind of
collective foaming. They feel uplifted and this is the moment when the feeling of social unity
is created and reinforced. And it is no accident that this can only happen in a collective ritual,
it is the outcome of accumulated group energy. Religion is not only a product of society, it
also fulfils functions for society. Durkheim was one of the first thoroughly functionalist
thinkers, a man who always tried to discern what sociological functions a certain social
phenomenon fulfilled, for example in contributing to the social cohesion of the larger social
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system. He stressed that this search for functions is completely different from the search for
cause and effect.
We saw that Comte was a precursor of functionalist thinking, but Durkheim was the man
who used functionalist analysis in a more systematic way and who programmatically wrote
about this way of reasoning in the science of sociology. One of the many functions of
religion is to repair the ties between people when they have been harmed. For example, in
mourning rituals, the networks of relationships between people who have suffered from the
passing away of one of their group are glued together again. In this way and in many other
ways, religion has important functions to fulfil. It strengthens social cohesion, it supports
social regulation, it is a powerful antidote to egoism and anomie, those negative tendencies
behind the rising suicide figures. But here Durkheim is confronted with a problem. He also
witnessed the advent of a process of secularisation; he himself, the son of a rabbi who
became an agnostic professor of sociology, was living proof of this process. So where are
we heading, if religion becomes less important in modernity? When it comes to religion as a
source of sociological orientation, you could say that the modern social sciences may adopt
some of the cognitive functions that in the past were fulfilled by religion.
Where the image of society in religious imagery is still blurred and vague, in sociology it has
become not only clearer but also easier to criticise and discuss, without having to fear the
risk of being treated as a heretic. But what about the more emotional aspects of religion?
What about its strengthening power, what about its functions as a source of social
cohesion? Here Durkheim says something very interesting. The gospels, he says, are not
immortal and mankind will always write new ones. We may develop completely new
institutions and belief systems that fulfil the functions that traditional religions fulfilled in the
past. Durkheim even mentions nationalistic gatherings of citizens who celebrate their
membership of their beloved nation and to the moral principles that they all share. The
reader is reminded of the French when they celebrate liberty, equality and fraternity on the
fourteenth of July or the Americans on Independence Day. The example I just gave of the
outrage that a nationalist person experiences when she must watch the burning of the
national flag was in fact not an example taken from the world of religion, but from the world
of nationalism, making clear that a flag can be as sacred as a cross.
Sometimes my students tell me that they believe that large pop concerts or international
soccer matches also fulfil religious functions. When I speak about effervescence, they tell
me that moving with hundreds of people to the repetitive beats of electronic dance music
may have that same effect, attended by a deep feeling of unity with everybody present. And
when a large company announces the appearance of a new cell phone and we all feel
united with the people all over the world who stand in long lines to buy that elegant small
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computer, we may experience a kind of semi-religious feeling that transcends national
borders, a kind of global solidarity. But now I am moving away so far from Durkheim that I
should stop here. No, one more thing. This book on religious life, these arguments about the
sacred and the profane, about effervescence and about the functions of religion, still offer us
today a very impressive theoretical framework that can help us to understand our own
societies, and for that we should thank the son of the rabbi.
Session 7: Max Weber (1864 – 1920)
7.1 Value-Free Sociology
Max Weber, the German social scientist who wrote his best books in the first two decades of
the 20th Century, is considered by many sociologists the unsurpassed genius of their
discipline. You might say that this sheds a strange light on sociology. Isn’t is a bit worrying
when the towering figures already passed away one century ago? But then again, think of
Einstein or Picasso, Wittgenstein or Stravinsky, Freud or Proust. Sociology does not stand
alone amongst the arts and sciences in honouring somebody as one of their greatest, who
did his best work more than one hundred years ago.
When I said that when Durkheim wrote about suicide, he was not at all a value free
sociologist, you probably knew vaguely what I meant. Durkheim made his personal values
very clear, he did not hesitate to say that suicide rates are pathologically high and that we
should try to lower them. But what you may not have known is that the expression value
free, or in the German language wertfrei, became a household term in sociology because of
Max Weber. He treated that subject in a fundamental way. Weber’s ideas about value free
research are still debated today, but you simply cannot go around them, Weber forces every
social scientist to think about this problem and to take a position that he or she can defend.
One of the things that Weber was adamant about is that a professor at the university who
advocates his political preferences abuses his position. He has been appointed because in
a certain field he is considered to be one of the best, but that does not give him the right to
tell his students how they should vote in the next election. When it comes to value
judgements, when the question is not how the world is, but how the world ought to be, then
the most learned professor is not more trustworthy than the guy next door. And if the
professor pretends that his scientific excellence enables him to say with authority which
political party deserves our support, then he is just a fraud. The universities have struggled
for many centuries to break free from the control of religious, economic and political
establishments, so please, dear colleagues, do not give up that relative autonomy by turning
your academic classroom into a political convention hall.
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It is an interesting position, but some disagree. It has been argued, for example, that a
sociologist who is very knowledgeable in his field should not refrain from giving some
empirically supported pieces of advice to politicians. They live on taxpayers’ money, after all,
so why not give society something back in return? Weber died before Hitler rose to power,
but was it such a good thing that most social scientists in Germany hesitated to speak out
against National Socialism, either inside or outside of the university? And something else:
isn't it better sometimes when a professor is completely transparent about her political
preferences, so that you can judge for yourself whether she is really as value free in her
teachings as she pretends to be? So Weber's position, however laudable, can also be
criticised.
When it comes to doing research, Weber does not say that values play no role at all. On the
contrary. He knows very well that value judgements drive a student to the university, to a
certain discipline, and maybe also to a certain problem field within that discipline. There is
nothing wrong with studying racism when you believe that racism is ugly. But when you are
doing the research, when you are collecting and interpreting your data, then you should try
to be as cool and detached as it is possible to be. Don't force the data in such a way that
they produce the conclusion that you hoped to achieve when you began your research
project. You may have all kinds of strong opinions, but when you are collecting the data, just
shut up, open your eyes and ears, give social reality an opportunity to talk back. You should,
for example, be extremely careful when in your interviews you might, even inadvertently,
suggest certain answers to your interviewee. And when the final results are in, try to check
that you really did not allow your own preferences to create a bias. The best way to do this is
to enlist the help of your peers, who may come from an entirely different political or
ideological background. Let them check and recheck the whole research process in order to
make sure that you did not, probably unconsciously, push in the direction of a conclusion
that you hoped to arrive at.
And if you really cannot suppress this urge to present social facts in a way that serves your
political or ethical goals, don't feel ashamed, but stop pretending that you are a scientist.
You may become a novel writer, a journalist, a preacher or a politician, just follow your own
demons. But you are not a scientist, so stay away from the university.
7.2 Understanding Social Action
Sometimes a thinker writes a book that takes such a central position in his whole oeuvre that
his admirers give it an honorary title, this is his magnum opus. In the case of Durkheim,
there is no such an outstanding book, but with Weber this is an easy one: his magnum opus
is Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Economy and Society, an enormous masterpiece in which
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Weber tries to summarise his whole theoretical enterprise. He passed away before he could
finish the book, but what we are left with contains enough interesting thoughts for many
generations to chew on.
The first word of this book is the word sociology. In fact, Weber begins this study with a
definition of sociology. In this discipline, he says, we study social action. People can reflect
on how they act, they can tell us why they acted in this or that way, they may come up with
motivations for what they did. This is also why Weber did not call this social behaviour,
soziales Verhalten, but social action, soziales Handeln. And the action is social because it is
directed towards other people. A man who tries to cover his head against the pouring rain is
not engaged in social action, but two people on the sidewalk of a street who try not to bump
into each other are involved in social action, they take each other into account. This is the
basic stuff that constitutes the study object of the sociologist: social action.
The first thing you can do is to classify types of social action. You can, for example,
differentiate between social action that is shrewdly calculated beforehand and social action
that is driven by an explosion of emotions. Weber believed that he could discern four very
general ideal types of social action. I will return to this subject in a few minutes when I
discuss Weber’s theory of rationalisation.
The sociologist tries to interpret social action and he or she tries to causally explain social
action. On the one hand, we try to understand why certain individuals or why certain social
groups act in a certain way under certain circumstances, and on the other hand we try to
discern chains of cause and effect. If you agree with the idea that there are two types of
academic discipline, the humanities, like history, and the sciences, like physics, then you
could say that Weber here tries to combine elements from these two broad categories.
Interpretation demands the qualities of the historian, you should try to see through the eyes
of the people you study, you want to see their objects the way they see them, you want to
fight your way into their heads because you want to understand their systems of bestowing
meaning upon the world. When the sociologist tries to shed light on cause and effect, he is
more like the physicist who is always keen on causal relations. It has often been said that
Weber here tries to bridge the gap between what was called in classic German universities
the Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of mind, and the Naturwissenschaften, the
sciences of matter.
Sociologists have a tendency to look up to the natural scientists with their elegant models of
cause and effect. But those scientists must do their job without a possibility that historians,
psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists can profit from. Because they study human
beings who are in many ways similar to themselves, they can try to imagine what it must be
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like to be, for example, the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte or the leader of the Socialist
Party in the Netherlands between the two World Wars. This intimate understanding from
within is called in German Verstehen. Weber thought that it played an important role in all
the human sciences. We can imagine what a famous general must have felt on the eve
before an important battle, but we can also try to understand a member of a certain social
group, let's say a carpenter in a medieval French small city or a proletarian factory worker in
Manchester around 1848. Emile Durkheim tried to understand the religious feelings of an
Australian aboriginal. So Verstehen really helps the sociologist to study social action.
Verstehen must lead to hypotheses about causal relationships and these relationships
should then be tested in a more rigorous fashion, often by using quantitative data, looking
for statistical correlations. Here the research strategies that proved to be so enormously
successful in the natural sciences should also help the sociologist. It is this combination of a
more qualitative approach with a more quantitative approach that characterises the style of
work in sociology. Maybe this is also the reason why all sociologists hold Max Weber in high
esteem, whether they favour hardnosed quantitative proof or feel more at home with a
methodology that was successful in the humanities. Weber’s approach, starting with the very
first sentence in his magnum opus, goes against the tendency to completely separate the
quantitative from the qualitative style, a tendency that, alas, has become so common in
sociology today.
7.3 The Ideal Type
I just said that Weber discerned four ideal types of social action. Again, I will postpone the
presentation of these four types because I must first explain this term, ideal type, that has
become a household term in history, in sociology and in some other social sciences. An
ideal type is not an ideal thing in the sense that it is something admirable, something worth
striving for. You might very well construct an ideal type of fascism and that does not mean
that you find fascism an attractive ideology.
Weber suggests that historians and sociologists should try to get a grip on the chaotic and
stubborn reality that they are confronted with by constructing models in which they include
some aspects of the subject that they study as being characteristic, and omit many other
aspects that may be found in the world out there but that they consider not essential. I like to
compare it with a caricature of a well known politician. Everybody recognises the image, not
because it is a photo-realistic portrait, but because the artist has only stressed those facial
traits that we all associate with this famous political person.
Weber stresses time and again that the ideal typical representation is not reality itself. The
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real world out there is more muddy, less transparent, more chaotic. So in our ideal types we
simplify, we streamline reality. This is in fact what social scientists have always done, but in
the past they were not aware of their own methodological trick. Auguste Comte did not
describe the theological stage in human thought, he constructed his own theological ideal
type. Tocqueville wrote about an ideal typical democracy. Karl Marx did not analyse the
really existing capitalist system, he analysed his own ideal typical model of capitalism. The
error that he and many other social scientists made was that he believed his model to be
empirical reality. Which may explain why the capitalist system that he constructed in his
study room had to ultimately fall to pieces, whereas the really existing capitalism appeared
to be more robust. One of the gravest and most common errors in social science is to ignore
the fact that the ideal typical construction is not the real thing.
Why should we do that? Why build models of reality whose correspondence with what is
actually out there is of necessity imperfect? Here Weber gives an answer that may remind
the philosophically inclined student of the idealism of Kant. There is just no other way, he
says. If you want to come up with an interesting hypothesis about the relationship between
Protestantism and capitalism, you must start by creating your own model of the Protestant
ethic and your model of the spirit of capitalism. In choosing the defining characteristics, you
try to approach a certain degree of objectivity, but there always remains an element of
coincidence. This is not a disaster, as long as you realise that this is just an ideal type, an
instrument that you produced in your own study room, comparable to the ruler that the
carpenter himself has made in order to be able to measure his objects. Ideal types help us,
for example, when we use the comparative method that, according to Comte, is so important
in sociology. If you want to compare the French Revolution with the Russian Revolution or
with the Cuban Revolution, the first thing to do is to construct an ideal type of the revolution.
All over his work, Weber presents classifications and concepts that are, whether he explicitly
stresses it or not, ideal types. Rational behaviour, the bureaucratic organisation, charismatic
authority, value free science, the Protestant ethic, the spirit of capitalism, these are all ideal
types and they have all been extremely helpful in generating interesting hypothetical
suggestions.
Weber says that an ideal type should make sense, it must not be intrinsically inconsistent, it
must be sinnhaft adäquat, everything must fit. You could compare it to what computer
gamers tell us about virtual reality. In a good computer game, the virtual world must feel like
a real world, a universe where you feel at ease, a world that in principle could exist. Now,
when you construct a virtual reality model of the spirit of capitalism and a virtual reality
model of the Protestant ethic, then you can combine them, you can play around with them
and finally come up with an intriguing idea about the way in which they may be interrelated,
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an idea that you then can operationalise in hypothetical statements that can be tested in
empirical non-virtual reality, the actual social world out there.
7.4 Methodological Individualism
Max Weber has often been called a methodological individualist. He believes that in
principle every sociologist should start with the only thing that is really real in sociology:
human beings. It is ok to talk about Protestantism or capitalism, about the economy or the
political system, about the church or the law, as long as you don't forget that these entities
are ideal typical constructions and that the only thing that is real, that is present in the world
out there, that you can observe, touch, interview and listen to, are human individuals. When
all is said and done, society cannot be anything else than just that: all the individuals that
compose society.
In many places in his work, Weber has been outspoken about this. When he writes about
the state, he reminds his readers that the state is nothing else than the chance that certain
individuals will act in this way rather than acting in that way.
I cannot refrain from quoting something that was written by a famous colleague and friend of
Max Weber’s, the sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, who developed his own brand
of methodological individualism and who wrote this beautiful line that I cannot forget:
Groping for something tangible, we found only individuals and between them in a way
nothing but empty space. “Nach dem Greifbaren tastend, fänden wir nur Individuen, und
zwischen ihnen gleichsam nur leeren Raum.”
Sociology teachers have made it their pride and joy to oppose Weber and Durkheim, the
methodological individualist versus the sociological holist. They are handicapped by the fact
that the greatest sociologist in France around 1910 and the greatest sociologist in Germany
around 1910 were aware of each other’s existence, but never reacted to each other’s work
as far as I know. The debate between Durkheim and the French methodological individualist
Gabriel Tarde is as close as you can get. That is, by the way, an interesting observation in
itself. I think that in sociology today this would be quite impossible. These two sociological
heavyweights would see each other in international conferences, they would be invited by
scientific journalists in interviews to comment on each other’s work, they would be forced
into the ring.
The opposition between Durkheim and Weber can be most easily summarised in negative
sentences. Durkheim believes that when a social fact is reduced to an individual fact, this
explanation must be wrong. Weber believes that if a general sociological concept, like
charisma or bureaucracy, cannot be illuminated in terms of the chance that individuals will
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act in a certain way, then this concept should be abandoned.
Maybe the opposition is a bit smaller than it seems, but there is here at least a difference in
style, in what should be given focal attention and how it should be approached. But when
you read the more empirical studies of these two giants, the difference seems to evaporate.
Durkheim cannot escape from being interested in what happens to somebody who is struck
by a general atmosphere of anomie, and his argument about anomic suicide seems so
convincing because we can easily imagine what the world must look like for an individual
person living in a period of anomie. Weber on the other hand cannot force himself to always
keep an eye on the actions of individual human beings and he has become very famous for
his grand analyses of macro-sociological processes, such as the process of rationalisation
or the process of bureaucratisation. These two theorists were far too clever to be imprisoned
by their own methodological prescriptions.
But what about the relationship between individual and society? Well, I guess that Weber
and Durkheim would both agree with these simple words from a literary author, taken from
The Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the
bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another”, Marco
answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form”. Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting.
Then he adds, “Why do you speak to me of the stones?
It is only the arch that matters to me”. Polo answers, “Without stones there is no arch”.
7.5 The Four Ideal Types of Social Action
Max Weber now presents his own classification of the four ideal types of social action. The
first one is called zweckrational, which can be translated as goal-rational or means-ends
rational. This is social action that is motivated by the desire to reach in the most efficient way
a desired end result, which can also be defended with rational arguments. In a calculating,
systematic way, the means are selected that will lead to this goal. However much you would
like to achieve this goal, you should at all times keep your emotions under control, because
they may lead you away from what you want to achieve. Always keep a cool head, that is
the motto of an engineer who designs a bridge or a general at the eve of a the battle,
studying his maps.
The second ideal typical category consists of social action that seems to be irrational,
because it is directed at a value that cannot be motivated by rational terms. Weber calls it
wertrational in German or value-rational social action. In order to achieve this value, the
individual may be just as rational as the person displaying goal-rational action. Most people
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are not saints or military heroes, and for them this may be hard to really understand, but if
you sincerely strive for personal salvation, you may choose the ascetic lifestyle of the hermit,
and if you really want to defend your military honour, you may rationally choose for a social
action that inescapably results in losing your life. These actions can be understood in
rational terms, but only if you accept, without a rational argument, the value they are
oriented at.
Number three is called affective social action and it is motivated by the emotional state of
the actor. When somebody is overcome with anger, he may act in a certain way that maybe
he regrets afterwards, but which was the only possibility in that moment. Weber mentions a
furious parent who beats a child purely out of anger. Maybe a better example that you will
not find in Weber is of a soccer player biting a member of the opposite team. He knows very
well that he will be severely punished, that his team will receive bad publicity plus a financial
penalty, that his social action may have dramatic effects on their position in the competition,
and still, he cannot stop himself from sinking his teeth into the neck of a fellow soccer player.
This is affective social action.
And then there is traditional social action. When you ask somebody why they do things this
way, the answer will be: this is the way it is, in our community we always did it this way, or
ancestors all did it this way, we have been raised to do it this way. An example that you will
not find in Weber, but which I think helps to understand what he means, is eating with a fork
and a knife. There may be hygienic advantages and rational reasons, but you can
experience the strong drive of tradition if you just try to do it, to eat your evening dinner just
for once with your bare hands. You will certainly experience the heavy weight of tradition
that makes it hard for you to actually do it.
These are the four ideal types of rational action. One more time: these categories are ideal
types, so you will never encounter these types of social action in the real world out there in
their purest state. What you will find is often a mixture or at least a slightly contaminated
case. The four types in their pristine form only exist in the world of ideas. But we can
observe all kinds of phenomena that more or less approach, come close to, the types that
Weber constructed.
Now Weber is convinced that the first type, goal-rationality, is gaining territory in modernity.
More and more social action in modern Western societies can be characterised as goalrational and we witness the gradual marginalisation of value-rational, affective and traditional
social action. These types can still be found, but you have to search for them in the
periphery, they are pushed to the margins.
The kernel of Weber’s sociological theory of modernity boils down to this: in modern
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Western societies the realm of goal-rational social action is constantly increasing at the
expense of the realms of the other three types of social action that are constantly
decreasing. This is the heart of the matter. The other aspects of modernity that we will
discuss now are nothing but the consequences of this core development.
7.6 The Three Ideal Types of Authority
When A can tell B what to do and B does it because A is pointing a gun at his head, then it
is clear that A has power over B, it is a matter of Macht. But when A is not threatening B and
yet B is doing everything that A has asked him to do, and B adds that it is only good and
right that A is telling him what to do, then A has authority over B, it is a matter of Herrschaft.
Weber is intrigued by the way in which raw and brutal power is transformed over time into
legitimated authority. It now comes as no surprise that Weber presents here a list of ideal
types of authority. The only surprise may be that this time it is not a fourfold division but a
threefold one. But the three types are clearly related to the four types of social action, as you
will see.
Let's begin with the most famous one: charismatic authority. Weber here uses a word that a
professor of theology had borrowed from a biblical text and had employed to point at a
historical phenomenon. Weber gives it a broader meaning and you can say that he is the
man who gave us the word charisma. Weber says that charismatic authority is founded on
the belief in the extraordinary devotion, the holiness, the heroic powers or the exemplary
lifestyle of the leader. This religious or political leader is perceived to be superior to ordinary
human beings, somebody whose extraordinary qualities demand our obedience. This is the
oldest type of authority between human beings. There is, of course, a clear link between
charismatic authority and affective social action.
The second type of authority, which is a bit more modern, is the pendant of traditional social
action; it is called traditional authority. People willingly obey somebody because they believe
in the holiness of the ancient traditions and in the legitimacy of those who are called by that
tradition to rule. I live in the Netherlands and although this is a constitutional monarchy and
the royal family enjoys a strictly bounded kind of authority, there are many people in this
country, you can find them especially in the Protestant churches, who believe that the
inhabitants of these low countries must be governed by the members of the family of
Orange, a family that has been ordained by God to rule over us.
The third and most modern ideal type of authority is rational-legal authority. When I ride my
bicycle and a policewoman gives me a ticket on the spot because the red light on the
backside of my bike does not work the way it should, I do not protest, I completely and
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wholeheartedly accept her authority. Under the given circumstances, she is the competent
official, this is her job and she is authorised to give me a fine. I do not think that she has any
charismatic quality, I do not obey because the holy tradition instructs me to obey her, it is
simply a matter of her being the official that we have given the task of enforcing the law.
Once again, this is an ideal typical classification and in reality we may come across all kinds
of interesting mixtures. In Dutch politics, for example, we see rational-legal authority all over
the place, of course, but like I just said, there are also elements of traditionalism and some
of our politicians even profit from a certain degree of charisma. But the general direction is
clear: the realm of rational-legal authority is increasing and the realm of traditional and
charismatic authority seems to be dwindling away.
But there is an important exception to this rule. Charismatic authority is the oldest type, but
all throughout history it has had its comebacks, especially in times of crisis. When many
people are disoriented and scared and looking for someone who may lead them out of the
chaos, then all of a sudden the seemingly old fashioned type of charismatic authority may
unexpectedly return, and this is possible even in high modernity, as can be illustrated by
such political personalities as John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela.
7.7 Rationalization
Rational-legal authority can only be realised with the help of a new invention in the
coordination of large numbers of people, the so-called bureaucratic organisation. The
policewoman who fined me for riding in the night through Amsterdam on a bicycle without a
light is an official in an enormous organisation.
The rise of the rational type of social action is impossible without the rise of the modern
bureaucratic organisation that you find everywhere today: not just in the world of politics or
in law enforcing institutions, but also in modern high schools and universities, in modern
hospitals, in the modern army and last but not least in modern capitalistic enterprises.
What is strikingly similar in this wide variety of social arrangements is that the officials have
all gone to specialised educational institutions where they had to follow a long and
demanding professional training. They have been taught their job as an official and they
have had to demonstrate their competence in a series of exams that result in written official
diplomas, a seal of approval by the state. One of the things that the officials-to-be have
learned is that they should separate their private life from their professional tasks. If they
would, for example, give preferential treatment to a member of their own family, this is
immediately labelled as corruption and this kind of fraudulent behaviour is severely
punished. There is also a very distinct division between the time of day that you spend as an
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official and the private time that you spend after leaving the office in your own house.
The rules of the bureaucratic organisation are standardised and codified. You can look them
up in written documents. The officials have to implement them in an impersonal fashion.
They should never make an exception to the rule, because of personal sympathies for
example. If the official sees no other way than to break the rule, he should report this
immediately and if his superiors agree with his innovation, the news is distributed through
the whole organisation because he has created a precedent. From now on, in similar cases
his example will be followed, because it has become an addition to the rules.
The worst thing that the official can indulge in is improvisation, playing around with the rules.
Sometimes it may be very tempting to bend the codes a little bit. This is why officials must
be strictly trained in suppressing their emotions.
It is clear that all of this is only possible in a very hierarchical organisation with a top-down
structure. The officials in the lower ranks have to do exactly and without questions or
objections what the officials in the higher positions tell them to do. An order is an order.
Max Weber believes that the bureaucratic organisation is one of the greatest inventions of
mankind in modernity, a huge social machine that creates the possibility of coordinating the
social actions of hundreds or thousands of people. In the Western world, the school system,
the hospitals or the Internal Revenue Service are all dependent on the principles of the
modern bureaucracy.
At the same time, there is a kind of ambivalence in Weber. He writes about the
disenchantment of modernity, the Entzauberung. The magic is driven out, everything has to
be predictable, every measure must be codified, inspiration is a source of unrest, the
professional should become somebody without a heart. Is this really the world we want to
live in? Weber’s hesitant criticism of modernity is very different from Marx, but the concept of
alienation is always tangible.
But these problems have nothing to do with the rise of capitalism. They are the outcome of a
more general process of rationalisation. The modern capitalistic enterprise is just one of the
many outcomes of the ongoing processes of rationalisation. It is the result of the penetration
of rationalisation into the realm of the economic sector of the social world.
7.8 The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism
So modern capitalism is not characterised by the drive to make as much money as you can,
but by the wish to gradually increase your profits in a controlled, calculated, goal-rational
way. The modern entrepreneur wants to create a predictably increasing flow of profits, and
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he tries to realise this by organising his enterprise in a completely rational way.
Now the strange thing is that this hard working capitalist never enjoys the fruits of his labour.
He may succeed in generating an ever growing stream of money, but he continues to lead
an ascetic life. This surprising combination leads to the expansion of capitalism, because the
profits are pumped back, so to speak, into the enterprise as they are not needed for more
frivolous purposes. This spirit of capitalism leads to a flowering capitalism and it is also
produced by capitalism. But how did this capitalist spirit come into existence in the first
place? We can already find it in Western Europe in the 16th Century, before the serious
take-off of modern capitalism.
Here, Weber presents his famous thesis according to which the Protestant ethic had an
important influence on the spirit of capitalism in its early phase. In the 16th and 17th
Centuries, a new kind of Christian faith made its way into north-western Europe and the
United States, this is the age of the rise of Protestantism. This Protestant doctrine teaches
that we all have to work very hard because God wants us to make the world a better place, it
is our moral duty to leave the world in a better state than we found it. And we should
certainly not indulge in luxury. So here we see, at a moment when capitalism is only just
beginning to take shape, the outlines of a new economic mentality that is consonant with the
capitalist ethos of hard work plus an ascetic lifestyle.
Part of the Weberian argument is concerned with the doctrine of predestination. According
to the strict interpretations in some Protestant churches, there is no way of finding out
whether you belong to the small group of chosen people, the elect who will be admitted into
heaven. The fear of eternal damnation became so violent among the believers that in some
churches this doctrine was softened a bit: if you discover that you are the kind of person who
loves to work extremely hard, if you are very successful in your work and if you do not spend
much of the money you have made, then you have good reason to assume that you belong
to the chosen few. Now this somewhat watered down version led to this striking outpouring
of entrepreneurial energy. You could say that those dedicated Protestant entrepreneurs
were driven by deep metaphysical hopes and fears.
Weber’s thesis is really more complex and subtle than that. My sincere advice is to read his
entire book. It is one of the most beautiful books in the sociological tradition, and among the
books by Weber, this is his most accessible work.
But here I want to devote my last minutes to a comparison between the approach to religion
by Marx and the arguments of Weber. It has become a cliché to say that Weber took Marx's
theory and turned it upside down. Where Marx believed that the arrow of causality points
from the economic infrastructure towards the superstructure, which also includes religious
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belief systems, Weber gives us a mirror image and says that it is in fact the Protestant
religion that produced the mentality that was a necessary condition for modern capitalism to
develop. But that is not quite true. Weber writes that the arrows of causality point in both
directions: there is a mutual interaction between the religious sector and the economic
sector of society. But then he says that Marx has been so very one-sided in stressing over
and over again the importance of the underlying economic elements that now I want to show
that you can also discern a causal arrow that points just the other way. So we should not
see Weber's book as a refutation of Marx's analysis, but more as an extension of and an
addition to the arguments of Marx.
Session 8: Norbert Elias (1897 – 1990)
8.1 The Last of the Great Classic Sociologists
Norbert Elias is in more ways than one the last representative of the classic tradition in
sociology. His most important books, The Court Society and The Civilising Process,
appeared before the Second World War, and although the author wrote many beautiful
books and articles after the war, his fundamental ideas are already contained in these prewar books, which synthesise many of the ideas of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Although he
rarely refers directly to his great predecessors, his books show that he was very familiar with
these ideas and also with the work of Freud. His fundamentally historical approach owes a
lot to Marx and Weber, who always were interested in long-term trends. Many ideas that we
came across so far are combined and integrated in the works of Norbert Elias.
I once noticed that no more than two handshakes separated me from Karl Marx. I often
spoke with Henk Bonger, the son of the first Dutch professor of sociology, Willem Adriaan
Bonger, and Henk Bonger had, as a small boy, often met with the German Marxist Karl
Kautsky, a friend of his father’s, and Karl Kautsky had, as a young man, visited the elderly
Marx in London. So these classical thinkers are closer to us than you might think. But the
only classical sociologist that I personally met, whose seminars I attended, whose lectures I
never skipped, was Norbert Elias, who was a welcome guest lecturer in Amsterdam in the
sixties, the seventies and the eighties, in fact until his death in 1991. I had many occasions
to listen to him and even to engage in personal discussions with him.
The only classical sociologist I encountered personally was a very learned and also a very
friendly man. One of the things he taught me is that it is possible, when one has a lot of luck,
to become very old in a gracious way. Although at the end of his life he had serious
problems with his sight and he had become practically deaf, it was a miracle to see how in
this frail body one of the sharpest minds was still functioning at breathtaking speed. His
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memory remained intact and if you shouted loud enough, you could still receive extremely
interesting answers and even pieces of advice, which the very old professor still loved to
give to his pupils, with the same friendliness with which he did it when he was an assistant
professor in Frankfurt in the year 1930. Just like the Dutch students in the seventies and the
eighties, the students in Frankfurt in pre-Hitler Germany loved him for being so open and unauthoritarian, a stark contrast with many other German academics in those days. This is
what they wrote about him in a Festschrift that was published when he turned 80, and
everybody knew that it was true because he just had not changed a bit.
In 1933, Elias had written in Frankfurt his first very important book, the Court Society. Thirtysix years old, this promising assistant professor now stood at the beginning of what
appeared to be a shining academic career. But then, all of a sudden, everything changed.
The National Socialist Party came to power and Elias, who was of Jewish origin, realised
that his only chance to survive was to leave Germany. He ended up in London and it was
there that he wrote his magnum opus, On the Process of Civilisation. This book was written
in German, it was published by a friendly Swiss editor, but it could not be distributed in the
largest German speaking countries because its author was a Jew. This is one of the many
tragic elements in the life of Elias: his two best books only received the distribution they
deserved at the end of the sixties and in the beginning of the seventies, when German
editions and English and French translations brought his work and their author all of a
sudden into the spotlight. The fact that the enthusiastic reception of his work took place in
the seventies, some thirty years too late, makes it seem as if Elias was a contemporary of
Bourdieu and Giddens, a modern theorist, but this is not at all the case, this is an error. The
outline of his historical-sociological theory was already given in the thirties and his core
contributions were not developed in debate with Parsons or Merton, but in debate with
Durkheim, Simmel and Weber. Elias was the last classical sociologist.
8.2 Introduction to the Civilizing Process
At first glance, the work of Elias is characterised by a striking heterogeneity. It seems as if
this sociologist wrote about every subject that he could lay his hands on. The court of Louis
the Fourteenth, the development of the naval profession, a history of the use of the fork, the
life of Mozart, the tensions between two groups of factory workers in a small English city, the
phenomenon of time. You might even think that somebody with such a broad collection of
topics cannot be taken too seriously. But appearances deceive, because in fact all these
subjects are kept together by one central concept, the concept of civilisation. Elias
developed a very general theory of the civilising process and in order to show his audience
the fruitfulness, the implications and the enormous range of his theoretical approach, he
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applied it to a wide variety of themes, many of which he considered urgent, pressing
problems.
Take, for example, a small and beautiful book that he published in the seventies about the
loneliness of dying. This appears to treat a subject that is entirely different from anything he
had written about so far. But on closer inspection, it is again a book about the process of
civilisation. Sometimes sociologists believe that Elias applauds the process of civilisation,
but this book shows that his position is more detached and that he also recognised some
tragic aspects of the civilising process. When we find it difficult to be in the presence of
people who are going to die, when we hesitate to touch, let alone to wash, our dying fathers
and mothers, this is related to feelings of shame and embarrassment that have emerged in
the civilising process and that are now so much a part of how we think and how we feel that
it is difficult to do the simple kind and friendly things that people with another type of
civilisation consider to be completely self-evident.
One of the problems with the word civilisation is that it has so many moral overtones. Some
ethnologists, for example, think that it is a term with such an ugly history. We are civilised,
they are primitive, they are savages, and therefore they should obey us, we are their
masters. A terminology that has played such a perverse role, for example, in the discourse
of colonial nations should not be given a place in the social sciences. In political debates,
the word civilisation still plays a very moralistic role. When a member of parliament says that
the way we treat our elderly, the way we treat the sick or the handicapped, the way we treat
our farm animals, is an indicator of how civilised we actually are, then the word civilised is
used as a weapon in a verbal fight and here it means the ultimate good thing that nobody
could possibly be against.
But it is also possible to oppose the term civilised to terms like honest, authentic, genuine,
sincere, and then it refers to superficiality, to dishonesty, to hypocrisy. And then there is the
more Freudian way to speak about civilisation, as something that forces people to hide their
innermost impulses, to suppress what they really feel, what they actually would like to do.
Suppression of urges leads in the long run to frustration, and frustration may be the cause of
all kinds of psychiatric diseases. In this discourse, civilisation is seen as something that may
undermine our psychological health. So civilisation carries with it a lot of value judgements,
sometimes positive, sometimes negative.
What Elias now does is not to silence these judgemental overtones – this would be
impossible – but to ask a simple question: is there a possibility to study the process of
civilisation in an empirical way? Can we operationalise this concept, can we observe how it
actually works? His answer is that yes, we can do that. We can, for example, use etiquette
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books that were published over a period of some five centuries, books in which the children
of the higher strata of society are instructed on how to behave when in good company.
These books about, for example, how to behave at the table, when you are having dinner
with a group of high society people, tell us a lot about behavioural standards at a certain
point in time, and when you make a large collection of that genre of books taken from
different periods, you can begin to find out if there is a tendency, a process. This is what
Elias tried to do. When he compared French etiquette books for children of the secular
upper classes in France over the period from the late middle ages until the end of the 18th
Century, one can discern a trend, a movement in one direction. This is the tendency that
Elias calls the civilising process.
8.3 The Social Constraint Towards Self-Constraint
The titles of the chapters in the first volume of this two-volume book are surprising if you
expect to read a work of sociological theory. Let me quote the names of Chapters 4 to 10 of
Part II: On Behaviour at Table, this chapter includes a paragraph dedicated to the use of the
fork, Changes in Attitudes Towards the Natural Functions, this is a chapter on the
behavioural codes surrounding urinating and defecating, On Blowing One's Nose, On
Spitting, On Behaviour in the Bedroom, Changes in Attitudes Towards the Relations
Between Men and Women, On Changes in Aggressiveness. Now, in these chapters you will
read about how to blow your nose in such a way that it does not annoy other people, or how
to manipulate your knife in such a way that it does not seem an aggressive act. Reading
these chapters, overloaded with anecdotal evidence that sometimes will make you blush or
giggle or even laugh out loud, is a pleasure in itself, and for some time this was in fact the
aspect of the book that received the most attention. It is an evocative history of our codes of
conduct, for example when it comes to sexuality and the display of nudity. Some of the
historians who studied sexual habits in the 17th or 18th Centuries were happy with the book
when it became popular, right at the moment when the sexual revolution was well underway.
Elias used all kinds of other sources apart from etiquette books. He looks, for example, very
carefully at paintings and book illustrations, noticing small details that escape an eye that is
not sociologically trained. In fact, Elias is in this book a very interesting methodologist, who
uses sources that were often overlooked. His use of etiquette books is an interesting
innovation.
But this was not the most important thing that the author wanted to do. First of all he wanted
to show that behind all these prescriptions we can discern a general process, a movement in
a certain direction. Now this civilising process is, so to speak, a blind process, it is not
planned by anybody. It is unforeseen, unintended and for a long period of time it remained
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the unrecognised outcome of the actions of millions of people over a period of several
centuries. Still, it has its own structure, its own dynamics. Elias is an atheistic author, he
cannot invoke any kind of heavenly intervention here.
So we are left with two big questions now. The first one is: what is the direction of this
process? And the second one is: assuming that nobody planned this process, how can we
then explain that it went in this direction over such a long period of time, encompassing
many generations?
The process of civilisation is not a process of increasing control over the urges and
impulses, as is often thought. It is not a process of suppressing spontaneous emotions
under all circumstances. In this process, behavioural controls become more generalised,
more stable and more differentiated. People learn how to manage, how to organise their
emotional impulses in a variety of situations. When you sit at the dinner table surrounded by
people from the highest social strata, you discipline yourself in a certain way that is very
different from how you behave when you are in a bar with your friends or when you are in a
classroom at the university or when you are lying on the couch with the one you love. The
civilising process forces people to differentiate their behavioural possibilities more and more,
to take the social circumstances into account, to make an estimation of the type of people
that surround them, to judge the kind of behaviour that is expected in this particular setting,
to reflexively monitor the social context they are in and steer their emotions accordingly.
When you are very good at that, you will receive valuable social rewards; when you make
many errors in this regard, these social prizes are not for you. So it is not so much a matter
of suppressing your impulses but of organising, streamlining them in a way that corresponds
with the social context. You constantly feel an external pressure or social constraint, a
Fremdzwang, that forces you to construct a kind of sociological definition of the situation and
to streamline your behaviour accordingly.
During the civilising process, people are more and more trained to do this and after some
generations it becomes part of their habitus, a kind of self-steering mechanism that becomes
so automatic that you don't even realise what you are doing all the time. That is when selfconstraint, Selbstzwang, begins to supplement external constraints. The internal controls do
not replace social constraints, but the external controls force you to increasingly control
yourself. And if you make a big mistake you will feel shame. And if somebody else makes a
blatant error, you will feel a kind of embarrassment as if you were in his place. And that is
why the restroom is locked, the bathroom is locked, there is a lock on the bedroom of the
parents, because even in living arrangements people now want to avoid anything that could
lead to embarrassment, shame and repugnance. You observe here a tendency to push
potentially unsettling behaviour offstage, behind the scenes, to the wings. This is a metaphor
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taken from we world of the theatre that became very important in the work of Erving
Goffman in the fifties. Goffman, who loved to write about front-stage behaviour and
backstage behaviour, long before he had heard of Norbert Elias.
8.4 The Conditions of Civilization
In the second volume of his book, called State Formation and Civilisation, Elias tries to come
up with an explanation for the civilising process. He tells us how many small territories that
occupied the part of Europe that we today call France slowly but surely united to form a
larger hole. This process of state formation took many centuries before it was completed
with the rule of Louis the Fourteenth, the Sun King, at the end of the 17th Century. Following
Max Weber here, Elias describes this process as a gradual development of a monopoly over
the means of violence by the centralised state and the development of a monopoly over the
means of taxation by the state. Taxpayers’ money is needed to pay the officials who are
entrusted with the means of violence, and these officials are needed to force people to pay
taxes. So the two monopolies presuppose each other, which explains why it took such a
long time for this structure to develop.
It took Elias hundreds of pages to describe the ups and downs in the process of state
formation. Sometimes one is reminded of the ups and downs in the process of the formation
of the European Union in our own days. Episodes when the former antagonists seem to melt
together under the influence of centripetal forces are alternated with periods when the
centrifugal forces become stronger and appear to atomise what began to look like a
structure with some stability. But the end of this long and tortuous process is unmistakable:
we witness the appearance of the French nation state as we still know it today.
One of the outcomes of this process is that the ordinary citizens, that is everybody except
the state officials who are entrusted with the means of violence, are disarmed, are forced
from now on to resolve their internal conflicts in a peaceful way, because the use of violent
force by them is now legally forbidden. The citizens are pacified in a forceful way. And again,
this external force to stay away from violent solutions becomes, after some generations,
internalised; people develop a sort of non-violent habitus. When confronted with acts of
violence, they are shocked, dismayed, they feel embarrassed, ashamed. But maybe I should
add here that for modern people, brutal violence is not only a source of shame, but also a
source of fascination and sometimes, in its simulated forms, even a source of pleasure. Our
contemporary popular culture, the box office movies, the computer games, the most popular
video series, all testify to this ambivalence, a repugnance of violence and also a kind of
fascination with it. But this is certain: in everyday life, people learn to situationally control
their innermost aggressive impulses. They are not allowed anymore to react with violent
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means, but there are so many other and more subtle ways to fight your enemies.
Using the discoveries in his former book on the court society of Versailles, Elias now
describes how the courtiers succeeded in outwitting their adversaries under these new
conditions. The descendants of a warring class, these grandsons of a military elite were now
forced to continue their struggles within the strict rules of a choreography that was enacted
around the king of France. And it is here, at the court of Versailles, that new behavioural
standards are developed. The highest prizes are now reserved for those who know when
you have to hide your aggressive feelings and when you should outmanoeuvre your enemy.
It is like a game of chess, you must foresee the move of your adversary even before he
thought of it, you must be strategic and extremely rational, and most of all you should master
your impulses, you should only play out your advantage when the time is ripe. So at this
court we can see a social constraint towards self-constraint. And over a longer period of
time, these internal controls become automatically operating self-steering mechanisms that
constrain people from the inside.
Now, middle class people observe with admiration the behavioural innovations at the court
and they try to imitate these upper class people, and soon these codes of conduct trickle
down from the highest classes to the lower ranks of society. In this way, the standards that
once were typical of a small segment of society at the top become now more and more
generalised. In this way, models of civilised behaviour circulate in the entire society.
8.5 The Importance of Norbert Elias
When he was an assistant professor in Frankfurt, Norbert Elias worked in the same building
as the members of the famous Frankfurt School. He told us once that often he shared the
elevator with Adorno or Horkheimer, and they very politely said Guten Morgen, but that was
it, there was no further contact. The social scientists and philosophers of the Frankfurt
School tried to integrate the outcomes of philosophy and of the social sciences into one
encompassing critical theory, and in order to achieve this goal they created workgroups
where political scientists, psychologists, historians, and sociologists, to mention just a few
disciplines, collaborated to work on some central problems. It was a huge task for these
great thinkers to synthesise the ideas from these very dissimilar sources.
Norbert Elias, who was not very interested in the work of the critical school of Frankfurt,
went his own way, but he did just that. In his work, you see how elements from Freudian
psychoanalytic theory, elements from Weberian sociology, some building blocks that were
laid down by Marx, a lot of insights from historians, are brought together and integrated in
such a self-evident way that you do not even realise it when you are reading the book. One
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of the reasons is that Elias writes in such an easy way that you just don't notice what he is
actually doing. Let me quote one line from the second volume to show what I mean. This is
what he says: "What changed was the way in which people were bonded to each other. This
is why their behaviour changed and why their consciousness and their drive-economy, and
in fact their personality structure as a whole, changed. The 'circumstances' that change are
not something that comes upon people from 'outside'; they are the relationships between
people themselves" (new translation, Part Two, p. 444).
It is a sentence that the reader can easily overlook and it even seems a bit outdated, with
this reference to the drive-economy, the Triebhaushalt, the way in which our drives and
impulses are organised in our personality. But it is an amazing sentence, because here
psychology and sociology are united, here Freud talks to Marx, here the sociological
emergentism of Durkheim is effortlessly united with Weberian individualism. The changes in
the consciousness of individual human beings, the way they order their urges, their
personality structure, are not just related to the way in which they are bonded to each other.
No, what we should realise is that the so-called social circumstances under which they live
do not exist in a world outside of them, the circumstances are their interdependencies, as a
network of people they are those circumstances. And the only way to see this is to follow
Marx and Weber, who demonstrated that you must study the social changes over a period of
several centuries, you have to start from the fact that human societies are always moving,
flowing and that you must step back and focus on the long-term trends if you want to stand a
chance of understanding how in our own society the way we think and feel and act is
intertwined with the way in which we are bound together in chains of interdependency.
This is why I believe that the theoretical approach of Elias is still very important. A famous
Dutch sociologist, the Amsterdam professor Johan Goudsblom, who has been very
instrumental in disseminating the ideas of Elias in contemporary sociology, has called Elias'
work in 1970 of paradigmatic importance, referring to the concept of paradigmatic change in
that famous book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was very
popular in those days. I think that it is still true that the theory of Elias contains implicit
solutions for the problems that sociology is faced with today. Elias has become a very
important name in sociology. A month ago in Paris I saw that on the bookshelves in the
academic bookstores a lot of space is devoted to the French translations of his most
important books, and that is as it should be. But at the same time, it seems as if the deeper
implications of his theory have not yet followed the downward movement of the models of
civilised behaviour: they have not quite trickled down through the whole body of sociological
thought.
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8.6 A Base for Contemporary Studies
But something else did happen. Many sociologists, anthropologists and historians have used
Elias's theory of the civilising process as their point of departure for their own empirical and
theoretical studies. Let me give you a few examples of studies that could be done and that
have been done.
Elias takes as his example the civilising process in Europe between the late middle ages
and the period around the French Revolution, but one could do a similar study focusing on
ancient Egypt, or ancient Greece or ancient Rome. Elias was very interested in African
culture, but his book focuses on Western Europe; but why not study civilising processes
among the Mayas or among the Aztecs, why not write a study about civilising processes in
Japan?
When we were students of Elias in Amsterdam, we always wanted to know what our
professor thought of contemporary developments. Did he have any ideas about the sexual
revolution that we found ourselves in the middle of, did not he think that the process in which
the naked body had to be hidden was something of the past? Elias was amused by these
questions and he did not shy away from discussing them, but he was reluctant to give
answers. It was a bit too early, he thought, to make judgements here. In a few centuries’
time, sociologists will be able to say what this so-called sexual revolution really meant. But
when we were enthusiastically talking about the nude beach as an empirical case that
seemed to show that the civilising process had come to its end or was even reversed, our
professor was not at all convinced. The people on the nude beaches had a lot of impulses to
control, he believed, they allowed themselves and each other to let go of some of the
traditional behavioural controls, but this process of decontrolling these controls was actually
a very controlled process. These discussions about the applicability of the theory in
contemporary society have led to all kinds of sociological studies. For the Dutch sociologist
Cas Wouters, this was the subject matter of his PhD and of many books that followed, some
of which are translated into the English language.
And then there is this intriguing question of the implications of the civilising process for the
power balances between some social groups. An interesting subject, for example, is how the
higher classes in society in the 20th Century tried to civilise the lower classes. Elias says
that in the period that he studied, the process of civilisation was not organised, not planned,
not steered by anyone. But the Amsterdam sociologist Ali de Regt demonstrated in her PhD
that in the 20th Century, a kind of civilising offensive was organised to force lower class
people to adopt certain behavioural standards, for example regarding hygiene in their
houses and the organisation of their kitchens. But the civilising process has also had an
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influence on the power balance between men and women, and also between older people
and younger people, for example between parents and their children or between teachers
and their pupils. This is also a very interesting subject for research, of course. Even the
long-term changes in the way in which people in the West have been treating non-human
animals is a topic that can be studied, with the help of hypotheses that are derived from
Elias' theory.
Finally, there is the dark subject of the relationship between processes of civilisation or
decivilisation and the occurrence of state violence and the persecution of minorities.
Sometimes I meet people who say that it is such a strange coincidence that Elias was
writing his magnum opus on civilisation, when on the other side of the North Sea, the
National Socialists in Germany were planning the extermination of the Jews. But there is no
coincidence here. Elias, writing in the second half of the thirties as a refugee in London,
wanted to understand civilisation and the conditions under which it may break down. He
studied the forces that produce civilising processes and implicitly the forces that lead to
decivilisation. In a way, his book is not reassuring: however pacified we may become, the
pleasure of killing people is never far away.
I think Elias thought of what was going on in his home country when he wrote this sentence:
“And immense social upheaval and urgency, heightened by carefully concerted propaganda,
are needed to reawaken and legitimise in large masses of people the socially outlawed
drives, the joy in killing and destruction that have been repressed from everyday civilised
life” (new translation, p. 196).
8.7 Figurational Processes
When his books were published in well distributed editions and translated into many
languages at the end of the sixties, Elias feared that his readers might not understand what
he had really wanted to accomplish with them, as they were by that point already three
decades old. So he wrote a new introduction to his book on the civilising process and he
published a small but important book that contains his sociological programme under the
deceptively simple title What is sociology? But also in some other articles and books, such
as his book on problems of involvement and detachment, he tried to clearly locate his own
brand of sociology on the playing field of sociological theory.
Two words that are often used to label his theory are figuration and process. Elias is often
said to be a figurational sociologist or a process sociologist. He was not very fond of these
labels; in fact, he was not keen on being labelled at all.
But in the book What is sociology? the concept of human figurations is an important concept
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indeed. Sociologists should not study individual human beings as the methodological
individualists tell us. Sociologists should not study social structure, as the American
functionalists, following up on Durkheim, pretend to do. The only thing that sociologists
should study are figurations of human beings, those long chains of interdependency that we
find ourselves in from the moment we are born (and even before that moment). Nothing can
be more misleading than this weird opposition between the individual on the one hand and
society on the other, a dichotomy that has been very popular in the social sciences from its
very first days until today. There can be no individuals without society, the isolated,
unsocialised individual does not exist, it is a figment of a philosopher’s imagination, not an
existing entity that can be studied in an empirical science. On the other hand, there can
clearly be no society without individuals. So when we oppose these two concepts, we can
be certain that our theories will lead us into a dead end street. We should therefore start
from figurations of interdependency. These figurations are constantly in motion and in their
changes we can recognise recurring elements, and it is these processes that we should
focus on. This is why figurational sociology cannot be anything else than process sociology,
the study of figurational processes.
We already saw in the description of the civilising process that this is a blind process,
unplanned, unforeseen, unintended. The same thing can be said about the state formation
process or about the process of rationalisation that Weber analysed or about the process
towards organic solidarity that Durkheim wrote about. But the fact that these processes are
not steered by anybody in particular does not imply that they do not have their own
structure. Social processes possess their own structure that can be recognised by the
perceptive and well trained process sociologist, who can describe and interpret and
ultimately explain the structure. If you do not believe this, have a look at the book on the
process of civilisation, where you can see that it is feasible.
But why should we do that, apart from the pleasure of better understanding how human
figurations develop over time? Elias was a bit reluctant to answer this question, but in
discussions with his students he sometimes indicated that these blind processes have
caused much suffering throughout the history of mankind, and that behind the whole
sociological enterprise there is this secret hope that maybe, in the very long run, one day,
we may come to better understand these figurational processes and find a way to steer
them in such a way that it will lead to less human suffering. Maybe we will learn in the far
future how to push figurational processes in such a way that avoidable human suffering will
be avoided.
It was only on very rare occasions that Elias could be seduced into saying something like
this, but I also had the feeling that this was the strongest force in his drive-economy, that
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you could feel it behind everything he said and wrote. It explains why this friendly, soft
spoken German professor was, until the last weeks of his long life, such a devoted, such a
passionate sociologist.
8.8 Classical Sociological Theories: a Focus on Long Term Trends
When we look one more time at the classic authors of sociology, we may now recognise a
lot of overlap and interdependence. In fact, all the authors in this MOOC were studying longterm processes. The invisible hand that Adam Smith wrote about now appears to be a
slightly awkward way of formulating how a blind and unplanned process may produce
unintended outcomes that nobody foresaw but that everybody can profit from. The rise of
science, studied by Auguste Comte, as the new common denominator in modern societies,
pushing religion from its throne, can now be seen as an instance of a more general process
that Weber described as the process of rationalisation. The process of democratisation, and
more generally of the equalisation of living conditions between members of the different
strata of society, that famous topic of Tocqueville, can now be seen as a long-term
figurational trend that nobody had planned beforehand, but that nevertheless continued its
unstoppable course. Marx taught us to understand contemporary Western society by
studying the very long-term trends that led to the present situation, even if this means that
you must study life in the middle ages or even in ancient Egypt or ancient Greece.
But with Marx we also see the beginning of a very dark analysis of modernity, where
alienation from your work and from your fellow workers undermines the human potential to
realise yourself in your labour. From this moment on, sociology becomes very critical of
modernity. We see it in the concept of anomie in Durkheim and in the concept of
disenchantment in Weber. Modern Western societies are seen as having a Janus face.
Processes of industrialisation and rationalisation bring a higher standard of living and an
explosion of innovations and inventions in the arts and sciences, but at the same time many
people in the modern metropolis feel lost and lonely and in search of meaning. This is why
Durkheim is looking out for new meaningful alternatives for religion, for a new source of
effervescence. This is why Weber writes about modern versions of charismatic leadership
that may bring back an element of emotional energy in a social universe that is dominated
by cold bureaucratic arrangements, that gives people the feeling that they are surrounded
by an encasing made of stainless steel. And many of these long-term trends are reworked
and combined in the theory of Norbert Elias about the civilising process, which forces the
members of modern Western societies to constantly monitor the social situation they are in
and attentively observe and use or control their spontaneous impulses in such a way that it
fits the social context.
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And then sociology took a different turn. So far I have only spoken about European
sociologists: Scottish, French and German thinkers. But after the Second World War, North
American sociology became a dominating force in all the social sciences. From then on,
sociology becomes an American science, not only in the United States, but also in Europe
and in fact all over the world. This results in an important change in style. Sociology
becomes more and more an empirical science, relying on breakthroughs in methods of data
collection and in statistical techniques. Sociology also becomes a science that is focused on
the present. The long-term developments that the classic sociologists, without exception,
saw as their most important subject matter, are now abandoned. The sociologists of the
fifties and sixties believed that these long-term historical theories characterise the preprofessional phase of sociology, the era of the now forgotten founding fathers, the
precursors of 20th Century mature scientific sociology. But even then and even in America,
some sociologists did try to continue the classic tradition. One of them is Charles Wright
Mills, who contrasted the sociology of his contemporaries with the beauty of the classical
theories. In this way, classical sociological theory remains a source of inspiration for modern
sociologists, even for those who turn their backs on the classics. I hope to be able to tell you
more about this in a second MOOC, which will be dedicated to modern sociological theory.
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