Download SOCIOLOGY 15

SOCIOLOGY 15
2009
HANDOUT EIGHT: SUMMING UP
I have put together this handout to help you review the course and
organize in your minds what you (hopefully) have learned. Included are
the course goals that I articulated at the outset, the basic questions
presented in the first handout, and some quick reflections on each writer.
GOALS OF THE COURSE
1. Learn more about the ideas of five important sociological
thinkers.
2. Improve our ability to read complex texts closely, articulating the
central arguments, basic assumptions, and important logical connections.
3. Improve our ability to evaluate complex arguments critically.
4. Improve ability to write about these kinds of arguments.
SOME BASIC QUESTIONS
1. What are the important features of modern western society,
according to each thinker? To what extent are they still relevant today,
75-150 years after these guys wrote? Contemporary intellectuals use
words like post-industrial, post-modern, and globalization to describe ways
the world has changed in the past half century. Do these changes render
our authors obsolete?
2. How do human beings manage to cooperate with each other?
Such cooperation may seem obvious to us, but it isn’t. Rational, selfinterested individuals may find strong reasons never to cooperate with
everyone else, even though the long run impact on the group or society is
negative. This is sometimes called the “problem of order.”
3. Societies are not just social orders; they are also fields of conflict.
What are the primary bases of conflict between groups in modern
western societies?
[One important sociological idea relevant to points 2 and 3 is that people
who share common positions and interests tend to associate and act
together and may come in conflict with people who share other positions
and interests.]
4. How can we explain immense social changes like the ones Marx,
et al. confronted? Is there some logic to how societies change? Most of
our authors see some overall pattern of change; they do not believe that
social change is haphazard.
5. How are individual human beings shaped by the societies in
which they live? Most of our writers accept some variant of the following
idea: What we do (e.g., work) and with whom we affiliate shapes who we
are.
SOME QUICK REFLECTIONS ON ALL OF THEM
Marx
The logic of capitalism is still with us, even though it didn’t lead to
where Marx said. We see it in globalization, the search for cheap labor,
and a commodity culture.
Sociologists Erik Wright and Michael Burawoy talk about two ways
that sociologists incorporate Marxism into their thinking, “Using Marxism”
and “Building Marxism.”
Many sociologists use Marxism by adding Marxist ideas to those of
others. There is a kind of “common-sense” sociology today that focuses
on issues of inequality and conflict, which combines the ideas of Marx with
those of Weber and many others. You can see this in theories of social
movements and collective action, for example, Charles Tilly’s From
Mobilization to Revolution.
Some sociologists commit themselves to building Marxism as a
distinct theory of society, history, and social change. Accepting the fact
that socialist revolution hasn’t occurred in capitalist society and is unlikely
to, many Marxists over the last eighty years or so have focused on the
“social reproduction” of capitalism. This means looking at the
mechanisms that mitigate the contradictions of the system and dampen
tendencies toward militancy. The work of Gramsci and several
generations of critical theory are devoted to this. Other Marxists have
focused on capitalism as a world system, in which contradictions and
inequalities play out between core and peripheral societies. Still other
Marxists have worked at unpacking the idea of socialism and coming up
with specific changes in capitalist societies that might counter the logic of
the market and exploitation
The specter of Marx also haunts most other radical theories of
society, which often begin as a critique of Marxism, especially is societies
like France where Marxism was once so powerful.
Tocqueville
Tocqueville lives on in research on how to build democracy as a
political system and the role of “civil society” therein. See Putnam,
Making Democracy Work.
He also lives on in research on American culture. The idea of
individualism is the starting point for many attempts to capture what is
distinctive about American society. See Bellah, Habits of the Heart.
Clearly Tocqueville was wrong in important ways: After all, we are
not a society of small farmers, merchants, and artisans. Nor has there
been any simple trend toward equality of conditions. Overall,
inequalities of income and wealth probably increased in American
society through the 1920s, fell between the 1930s and 1960s, and
increased again generally from the 1970s to the present day. However,
inequality may still elicit individualism and individual striving, if there is
enough social mobility and if the rewards at the top are sufficiently large.
Weber
Weber’s analysis of inequalities has been incorporated into the
sociological synthesis like Marx’s has. His concepts of class and status
suggest multiple dimensions of inequality in society and thus anticipate
the work of Bourdieu in particular.
The idea of rationalization has been central to critical reflections on
contemporary societies. Critical Theory, though nominally Marxist,
probably owes as much to Weber, especially with regard to the idea of a
“totally administered society. Foucault’s work too is all about
rationalization, except that he looks at its effect from the bottom up, in the
everyday workings of institutions like mental hospitals, prisons, and the
professions.
Durkheim
Durkheim’s idea of the division of labor was incorporated into
functionalist theories of society as “structural differentiation,” the idea that
as societies develop, specific societal functions become the province of
specific institutions which tend to reshape themselves to perform those
functions better.
His voice is also heard in the work of those who look at how specific
groups in society develop and maintain shared beliefs.
The concept of anomie, perhaps re-defined a bit, became one of
the most important concepts in the sociology of deviance for several
decades.
Freud
Freud has informed sociological work in so many ways. Sociologists
of all kinds have used Freud to understand how individuals are
incorporated into a social order.
Most strikingly, Freud lives on in many radical theories of society.
Freud’s idea of the asymmetry in the childhood experience of boys
and girls (because a woman is usually the first nurturing figure for both)
was taken up by Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering. It
also finds an especially interesting application in Christine Williams’s
Gender at Work, a study of the different experiences of women marines
and male nurses.
Critical theorists have worked at synthesizing Marx and Freud, most
notably in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.
Foucault, in A History of Sexuality takes on Freud and would be
synthesizers of Marx and Freud in a different way. He argues that the last
few centuries have witnessed not an increase in sexual repression but an
explosion of discourses about sexuality.