Sociology

Karl Marx was a major activist in the times of the Industrial Revolution.  He  believed that the deficiencies of the government and the financial sector, both public and private, were full of social, economic and human injustices and that these injustices would lead to the society moving from a capitalist to a communist society.  While that still has not happened, he did make a point in his Communist Manifesto where he stated the history of all hither to existing society is the history of class struggles. Even in todays world this seems to hold true.

Marx broke down the capitalist economy by distinguisher between class in the terms of the bourgeoisie, proletariat and the workers.  The bourgeoisie were high men on the totem pole in that they were the business owners that were benefiting from the ownership of commerce.  The proletariat group was ex-business owners that had lost their businesses and were now part of the workers, but being of higher education tended to rally the workers in attempts to try to gain a bigger share of the trade and profits.  The workers were the lowest echelon.  They sold themselves for wages, that often times barely covered their existence of the existence of their families.

The way in which Marx created his class system was to first define class.  The economic classes consisted of groups of people that held common beliefs and common work or trade values.  For the worker, class was nothing more than the dehumanizing factor of work for wages.  However, only the business owners and some of the proletariat group benefit from the manufacturing of the product.  The worker gets nothing more than his wages.  This dehumanization was called the alienation of workers in Marxs theory.  While the business owners benefited from the exploitation of their workers.  However, until the lowest group understood the differences in the classes and created a class consciousness across the board, they would continue to be exploited and the capitalist economy would continue to live on human costs.

Chapter 3 Emile Durkheim Summary
Emile Durkheim also looked at the way in which capitalist economies but through a different view.  His first focus was on the social facts in which he analyzed the outside influences that motivate and determine the actions of the individual and the group of which he is a part. Durkheim believed that the only way to truly understand the social facts was to gather raw data and evaluate and analyze the data to uncover exactly how those influences motivated the individual to act in specific ways.

From the social facts came the social solidarity and the organic solidarity of groups.  The social solidarity is defined by the common interests that bind a group of individual and tie those individual to a specific social group or community.  The organic solidarity focuses on the evolution of the society and the way in which the society moves during its evolution.  More or less how the parts make a whole and how the whole functions in relationship to the parts.

Durkheim also looked at the concepts of the collective representation and the collective consciousness that consists of the common interests of the citizens of a society and the way in the society works with the individuals to create a dynamic, living societal community within the confines of a socially solid society in question. Collective representation is the same concept, but given a different name at a later date.

The collective consciousness, Durkheim believed, used ritual, symbols and the sacred and profane to control and stabilize their society.  The rituals bound the individuals to the society through routine actions.  The symbols are the collective understanding of meaning by the society as a whole.  The sacred is those actions and events that are considered above the ordinary, while the profane are the mundane rituals of the society.  Through all of this Durkheim explained society in its most basic terms.

Chapter 4 Max Weber Summary
Max Weber initially created the ideal types of social actions in which to define and analyze societies, which included the instrumental rational action, the value rational action the traditional action and the affective action.  Within the instrumental rational action, Weber concluded that the goals of the society were assessed in the manner of advantages and disadvantages to the achievement of the goal.  The value rational action is the decision making process that assumes the best action to achieve a specific goal that was considered in the prior action.  The third is the traditional action that focuses on the traditional behaviors and beliefs of the society that are used to decided the action of the group.  The last is the affective action which is a base motivator that focuses on emotion and spontaneity as the decision making factors, rather than the rational behavior of the other three categories.

He used these classifications as a base line when studying societies, communities and groups of people.  He called them ideal not because some are good and bad, but because of the specific parts of the social life that is being examined by the sociologist researcher. Through the classification he was also able to determine the casuality of the group which created the probability of a specific action creating a specific effect.

Eventually Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic as a discussion of the austere ideals that were considered part of the Protestant religion as it dealt with economic and social practices of the group.  This belief led to another theory, Weber called rationalization which leads to bureaucracy.  He believed that through rationalization the society would become more methodical creating procedures and process to run the group more effectively. Within this rationalization the individual were often motivated to interact, and Weber called this the calling in which the society acts in particular to gain the specific ends.

He also believed in the charisma of the leaders of the groups.  The charisma Weber defined was not the charisma of the modern day.  In fact, the charisma was more in line with the ability to gain the society or community support of the changes or ideals of the government of the group. Of course the group had to understand the concepts and the beliefs otherwise there would be no support and there would be no changes.