To understand what sociological theory is, we must
distinguish it from other explanations of social life. Sociological theory or
explanation relies on evidence from the senses and from the social world itself
to arrive at its conclusions. Another important distinction is between
sociological theory and ideology. Ideology involves value judgments about what
is good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse. We will discuss how many
theorists also have ideologies, although they may not state them explicitly.
Social ideology, as in politics and other aspects of social life, include
liberal, conservative, and radical. A theorist who argues, that society is held
together by agreement on the rules and by our mutual need for one another is
very likely basing her or his theory on the conservative ideology that “what
is, is good.”
Social theory
or Sociological theory
Sociological theory is the aspect of sociology that
students often find the least compelling. Although some sociological theory can
be accused of unnecessary complexity and abstraction, it is theory that
underpins the “interesting” sociological discussions. In essence, theory is
nothing more than sociologists’ generalization’s about “real” social
interactions and the everyday practices of social life.
Theorizing is and always has been a part of everyone’s
way of thinking. Every time you try to guess why a group of people act in a
particular way, you are theorizing about a social phenomenon on the basis of
your own knowledge of reality.
Let us discuss what sociological theory in
understanding with different concept:
The Contours of Sociological Theory
All human beings attempt to make sense of their
world and their place in that world. It does not simply react to our
situations in the world, we theorize about them. We reflect upon,
interpret, and most important, represent symbolically our actions and
interactions.
As Karl Marx
pointed out, bees construct complex dwellings, but what distinguishes the “poorest
architect” from the “best of bees” is that the architect constructs the
building in his/her imagination before constructing it in reality.” Sociological
theory is an abstract, symbolic representation of, and explanation of,
social reality. Sociological theory talks about guidelines for thinking in a
disciplined manner about the social world.
Deductive and Inductive Reasoning
The sociological theorist may start with an idea, or
theory, about the nature of society and social behavior and proceed to
construct in relatively abstract, symbolic terms some sort of model that can
explain social life. That is, the sociologist may theorize as follows –
Deductively
is a proceeding
from the general to the particular. Alternatively, the sociologist may observe
some interesting but puzzling feature of social life and, examining the social
context of the puzzling feature, derive a general explanation, or theory, about
this particular social puzzle. The theory formulated by this procedure is
arrived at inductively.
Ideology and Objectivity
Ideology is commonly
thought of as a set of ideas that justifies judgments about good/bad,
superior/inferior, better/worse. Furthermore, when applied to individuals or
groups, ideology is thought to assert or legitimize the power of some group
over another. On the other hand Ralf
Dahrendoft asserts the problem of ideologies within sociology is endemic to
the sociological project. From the beginning, sociology had “two intentions.”It
was supposed to help us to understand society by using objective, “scientific”
methods; at the same time, it was supposed to help individuals achieve “freedom
and self-fulfillment.”
Karl Mannheim
(1929) characterized the difference between these two aspects of ideology as
the difference between particular and total ideologies.
Particular
ideologies involve systems of knowledge that deform
or conceal facts.
Total
ideologies are systems of knowledge tied to the
social/historical place and time of the individuals who espouse them,
irrespective of good or bad intentions. The belief in the inherent superiority
of a particular race as the basis for the organization of social relations is
an example of a total ideology.
Sociological Subjects
Max Weber stated that objectivity was an “impossible
obligation” but one that sociologists must assume. The problem is in good part
a result of the fact that sociologists themselves are both subjects and objects
of sociology. As subjects (sociological theorists), they aspire to a detached
or objective view of society; as objects (human beings), they are rooted in a
particular society and have personal beliefs about it.
Research Traditions
Sociological research
traditions make assumptions about how the social world is organized and how it
operates and how human beings can know that world. Generally, sociologists can
be classified as positivists, idealists, or critical theorists. In practice,
however, aspects of two or three research traditions may be combined in the
work of any particular theorist.
Positivism.
Early in the development of sociology, some
theorists assumed that the social world could be studied in the same manner as
the natural world and that social laws could be formulated much like the laws
formulated in natural science to describe the behavior of physical phenomena.
This approach is usually called positivism.
Idealism.
The positivist tradition is often contrasted with idealism.
The idealist is less concerned with searching for universal laws than with
understanding or interpreting meaning. In addition, the idealist assumes that
meaning is not an immutable law but is historically changeable.
Critical
Theory. The third tradition, critical theory, is
far more antagonistic to positivism than to idealism. Critical theory rejects
altogether the idea that knowledge can be objective—that is, abstracted from
human interests and practices. Whereas positivism can reveal how to reach
certain goals but is morally indifferent to the goals themselves, critical
theory aims to reveal what those goals should be and how they can produce a
better society.
The Philosophical Precursors of Sociology
Recognition of the dual role of sociologists
resulted from the idea that society itself could be the subject of scientific
scrutiny. This idea had its origins in the eighteenth century and led, in the
nineteenth century, to the establishment of sociology—a term coined by Auguste
Comte (1798-1857).
Sociology differed from these other accounts was in
recognizing that society is a separate, discrete entity, that it is amenable to
scientific investigation, and further, that it is an entity constructed by
human beings and therefore subject to variations and change.
At the onset of Western modernity, various
intellectuals promoted the positivist idea that the social world could be understood
in the same terms as the physical world of nature because of the human capacity
of reason. Understanding the social world through the exercise of human reason,
they assumed, would reveal the social laws to be followed to achieve social
progress and human perfectibility.
These intellectual developments were connected with
various transformations of the traditional social world to a modern world,
which became particularly evident in Western societies starting in the
eighteenth century. In essence, sociology emerged as a way of explaining and
dealing with the problems and dislocations accompanying the gradual
transformation to modernity in Western society. Social observers were
particularly concerned with such characteristics of modernity as capitalism,
industrialization, bureaucratization, the division of labor, urbanization,
nationalism, imperialism, democracy, and individual rights and freedom.
Tradition and Modernity
In the Western medieval, feudal world, the
interconnections of material, human, and divine existence were expressed in the
idea of the Great Chain of Being. This idea, endorsed and promoted by the
Church, ranked the physical, the human, and the divine in a hierarchy, with
rocks at the bottom, God at the top, and “man” occupying the space just below
the angels.
The first tentative changes in this view began in
the Renaissance of the fifteenth century, with a shift from the idea of God as
the supreme creator of nature to the idea of God expressed in the laws of
nature. Many intellectuals came to believe that these laws could be discovered
by human beings through mathematics. This idea had profound implications for
science as well as art.
Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers known as
the philosophes used this new wealth of comparative data on societies to
construct a theoretical basis for a decisive challenge to traditional socio-religious
theory and ideology. As a twentieth-century observer noted, “the advance of
knowledge, whether devout Christians liked it or not, meant the advance of
reason”.
The Philosophes and the Enlightenment
Enlightenment thinkers put society and social
relations under intense scrutiny. Their central interest was the attainment of
human and social perfectibility in the here and now rather than in some
heavenly future. They considered rational education and scientific
understanding of self and society the routes to all human and social progress.
Such progress was assured because all human beings have the faculty of reason.
Reason need only be educated and exercised without any arbitrary restraint,
whether of tradition, religion, or sovereign power. As you will see later,
however, some human beings were still excluded as less rational than others and
therefore in need of control. The excluded were generally women, nonwhites,
children, and the lower orders or classes. Nevertheless, the philosophes claimed
that educated individuals would exercise their critical reason for their own
happiness and, by extension, the happiness and welfare of society as a whole.
Political Revolutions
Enlightenment social and political thought paved the
way for revolutionary ruptures in traditional social relations. From the
Renaissance on, western European societies acquired modern characteristics, but
Enlightenment ideas and the American, French, and Industrial revolutions
ushered in some of the definitive characteristics of modern capitalist society.
The profound upheaval of the French Revolution, in particular, highlighted some
of the problems and issues of concern to prerevolutionary Enlightenment
thinkers. These became the problems and issues of the “new science,” sociology,
at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Subjects and Citizens
Both the American and the French revolutions were
possible in part because subjects had gradually been transformed into citizens.
In traditional societies, all members are subjects of the ruler, who
derives authority from custom and tradition, usually divine custom and
tradition. Resistance to any particular ruler is difficult because power
resides in the institution of rulership. Consider the phrase “The King is dead,
long live the King.”
Resistance to traditional authority became more
possible with the dissemination of the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke,
Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Their work
contributed to the gradual transformation of subjects into self-governing citizens.
Thomas
Hobbes (1588-1679)
He view,
human beings are governed by a selfish and “perpetual and restless desire for
power after power” (1651:49). This lust for individual power continues until
death. Anarchy—”every man against every man”—is curbed only by the fact that
men fear death. As all men are rational, they may be convinced to adopt “convenient
Articles of Peace” in order to avoid social anarchy and death.
John
Locke (1632-1704)
Locke
postulated that individuals were in a “State of perfect Freedom” and a “State
also of Equality” before the formation of the state. This free and equal state
was not a “State of Licence” because it was governed by the law of nature as
embodied in reason. The law of nature, or reason, “teaches all Mankind . . .
that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life,
Health, Liberty, or Possessions”. Because all were free and equal in the
original state of nature, “no one can be put out of this Estate, and subjected
to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent.”
Montesquieu
(1689-1775)
Montesquieu
argued that all human beings are social beings and that to seek the origins of
society in the presocial dispositions of human beings, as Hobbes and Locke had
done was futile. To understand society, one must observe the facts of society,
just as the natural scientist observes the facts of the physical world.
Through
observation, social theorists could find the law-like patterns of social
relations, similar to the laws of cause and effect discovered by natural
scientists. In his preface to his De Vesprit des lois, Montesquieu
remarked, “I have not drawn my principles from my prejudices, but from the
nature of things.”
Montesquieu
distinguished three types of government—republic, monarchy, and despotism—on
the basis of his observations and comparisons of various societies.
Montesquieu,
whose methodology was historical and comparative, is considered a cultural
relativist. He suggested that the laws of nature apply to all, but that
they take on different forms and expressions according to the form of government—as
well as according to climate, soil, the geographical size of the country, the
number of inhabitants, and the social factors of religion, customs, and the
economy. The laws that govern a nation are therefore an expression of the
general “spirit’’ of the nation; they define the “originality and unity of a given
collectivity.”
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-1778)
Rousseau
claimed that private property brought about war, conflict, and thus the need
for a civil state, noting “there is scarcely any inequality among men in the
state of nature.” The inequality “that we now behold owes its force and its
growth to the development of our faculties and the improvement of our understanding,
and at last becomes permanent and lawful by the establishment of property and
laws.”
Mary
Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
Wollstonecraft
opened A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) with the statement
that she would consider women “in the grand light of human creatures, who, in
common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties”. Both men
and women have the faculty of reason, and if women’s reason were not cultivated
alongside men’s, women would “stop the progress of knowledge and virtue”.
Capitalism and Industrial Revolution
The industrial transformations were fueled by
earlier capitalist developments, beginning in the sixteenth century, and
together they generated new social and political arrangements. The urban middle
classes were becoming a significant social force, and “free” wage workers were
becoming the standard in a competitive, largely unregulated marketplace. By
1780, the industrial revolution had appeared in Great Britain. France, the
United States, and later Germany also underwent industrial transformation in
the early nineteenth century.
The “new society” that industrialism produced was
not an overnight phenomenon, but it marked the definitive end of ideas about
the Great Chain of Being and the social order that such ideas represented.
Class relations replaced hierarchies of rank and status in importance, and the
wealth acquired from industry and trade became as significant as land and title
to claims of power and authority. Most important, the middle classes became
more numerous and more important in the political control and direction of the
state.
The forced migration to the cities and wage labor in
factories permanently changed lifestyles. In an agrarian society, household
production and agricultural work generally involved all members of the family,
including children. When men, women, and children went to work in the
factories, however, the family livelihood was no longer a collective
enterprise. Each member of the family was employed and paid as an individual
worker. The situation was particularly difficult for women, who had been able
to make adjustments in their household activities in an agrarian setting to
accommodate child care but could not in the factory context. But everyone
resented the loss of independence, a resentment increased by the overwhelming
power that capitalist employers had gained over employees.
Order and Change
In the midst of the profound social and economic
transitions of the industrial revolution, the American and French political
revolutions occurred. Many social theorists had initially welcomed these
upheavals of the traditional social order, but their zeal for change was
tempered by sober analysis of the disruptions that accompany revolution.
The Enlightenment philosophes all wanted to
see the end of arbitrary, despotic government and the institution of rational
regimes based on law reflecting empirically established social facts. For
example, Rousseau had proposed a more revolutionary solution than Montesquieu,
but both thinkers were convinced that enlightened reason could produce a good
society of free, rational, cooperative citizens. The work of Edmund Burke in
England and Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre of France stands in
conservative contrast to these theorists.
Edmund
Burke (1729-1797)
As a
privileged Englishman, Edmund Burke wanted no revolution in Britain. He considered
tradition, custom, hierarchy, and subservience the basis of good government. He
believed that any reform, or change of any sort, was not to be undertaken
lightly. Like Montesquieu, Burke believed that political authority must be
tailored to the particular social and historical circumstances and that any
changes must be slow and carefully worked out. Politically, Burke considered
prudence the “primary virtue of civil government”. Burke (1790) described his
reactions to the French Revolution as “alternate contempt and indignation;
alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror”. His Reflection on
the Revolution in France (1790) explicitly rejected radical change in favor
of the preservation of traditional hierarchy and customary authority.
Louis
de Bonald (1754-1850) and Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821)
Like Burke,
Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre viewed the French Revolution as a
disaster and viewed social, political, and economic relationships in the
aftermath of the Revolution as destructive to social order and harmony. De
Bonald and de Maistre’s conservatism was, however, different from that of
Burke. Whereas Burke wanted to conserve the status quo, de Bonald and de
Maistre, living in postrevolutionary France, wanted to bring back the “good old
days” of monarchy and religious authority. De Bonald believed that the
development of modern industry and capitalism had undermined the divine social
order, and he regarded medieval society as the ideal society. Both de Bonald
and de Maistre saw modern life as especially destructive of the
traditional—that is, patriarchal—family, which they believed formed the
cornerstone of a stable, ordered state. De Bonald was opposed to what he
regarded as the anarchic individualism.
De
Bonald and de Maistre considered that society was made by God not men. The
divine link and the long historical chain of tradition and custom had established
the superiority of society over the individual. The basic social institutions of
the Church, the state, and the patriarchal family were all based on God’s will,
and therefore the individual should subordinate self to these institutions and
to the traditions associated with them.
Science and Ethics
Conservative reactions to the momentous changes in
social life were in large part reactions to the perceived absence of
traditional moral standards in society. The secularization of society,
conjoined with a faith in science and objectivity, did produce a problem for
intellectuals: how to secure an ethical basis that could guide practical
actions. Key issues for classical sociologists were determining the basis for
notions of the “good society” and determining the essence of human nature that
prompts individuals to act ethically. Efforts by philosophers Immanuel Kant and
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to deal with these questions form an important
background to the work of early sociologists. Their theories also inform
contemporary debates about the sociology of knowledge.
Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804)
How the
rational, autonomous individual could be a moral being without appealing to
some external divine connection was addressed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
He was influenced by Rousseau but disagreed with Rousseau’s idea that the
essence of human nature could be discovered in the pre-social state of nature.
Human nature, in Kant’s view, is defined by the ability to transcend and oppose
nature through the exercise of both reason and moral standards.
The man
of reason and morality becomes a sovereign subject and is free, Kant believed,
whereas “natural” man is an object determined by sensory experience and is
unfree. As he stated in his essay “Was ist Aufklaäring?” (“What Is Enlightenment?”),
“All that is required for this enlightenment is freedom; and particularly
the least harmful of all that may be called freedom, namely the freedom for man
to make public use of his reason in all matters”. As both natural beings
and rational subjects, human beings are therefore free to be immoral or moral.
Although society may encourage moral action, it cannot determine or guarantee
such action, because human beings have free will.
Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Individual
progress toward pure reason and absolute freedom is accomplished dialectically,
in Hegel’s view. That is, as individuals reflect upon themselves and their
situation, they are able to contradict and go beyond what has been acceptable
in the past and thus reach a new level of understanding. More important, in the
pursuit of freedom or emancipation, individuals achieve an understanding that
demands social change. Because of this dialectical process of give and take, a
person’s ethics come to reflect those of the larger society and, at the same
time, shape society’s ethics.
Hegel’s
idealism was an important corrective to the belief that the social world could
be understood scientifically in the same manner as the natural world. Reason to
him was not an impersonal, a historical force but an historically situated
product of human reflection. His legacy for sociology was the idea that society
and human beings cannot be studied as objects like the objects of natural
science. Sociologists need to understand the subjective meaning of social actions,
bearing in mind that sociologists bring their own a priori understandings to
the inquiry. That is, sociologists cannot help but have evaluative or normative
stances regarding the topics they study; they cannot avoid ideology.
Final Thoughts on the Philosophical Precursors
According to both reactionary conservatives seeking
to bring back the “good old days” and radicals wanting to overthrow the status
quo in favor of a better future, the revolutions of the eighteenth century had
introduced a host of problems into the social world: disorder, alienation,
insecurity. However, other social theorists were more sanguine about the
revolutions, believing that they had brought scientific rationalism and
autonomous individualism, which were the bases for individual freedom and the
construction of an equitable society. The status quo conservatives believed
that this post-revolutionary, modern society was self-corrective; the liberals
believed that it was good but could be improved through conscious effort.
Sociology emerged out of these theoretical and
ideological debates as a science that could explain modern social life. In
fact, the Enlightenment discovery of “society” as an independent,
scientifically understood entity with a reality apart from its individual
members was the fundamental concept that led to the development of the
specialization that Comte called sociology.
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