Jannick Demanet

Tuesday, October 19th, 2021

Societies
Lesson 2 part 2
Classical Sociological Accounts
- Thesis vs anti-thesis eventually leads to a resolution as the synthesis which becomes
the new thesis and for Hegel this is how ideas develop.
- Dialectics are always two opposing sides
- Marx also recognizes dialectics, but he is a materialist not idealist. He applies it to
the structure. This part of Marx’s theory is dialectic materialism. He believes in
change through technology and economy. Marx is considered an economical
determinist.
Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)
- Historical materialism is a snapshot
- Society is always built like a house: you make a foundation and build from there. If
you change the foundation, so does the rest of the house.
- Karl Marx refers to this example as the infrastructure (forces and relations of
production) and the superstructure (political, legal and morals under ideology and
consciousness). The former being the foundation and latter the ‘house’. This implies
that every institution is built to maintain the current state of the economy
- Marx says that if everyone is aware of the conspiracy theories, people will start
attacking the society – False consciousness. People are not aware to the pyramid of
society.
Class Conflict in Capitalism
- Based on ownership means of production: the industrialists (also known as
capitalists) and the working class (also known as the proletariat)
- The distinction between is whether you own the machinery or not
- What makes us human for Marx? Praxis – the ability to make things
- Praxis is sold in a capitalist society - capitalists own means of production and it’s
what they can sell to feed themselves. If you don’t have that you won’t get by if you
don’t sell it. So, to live you must sell your praxis. It is what puts food on your table.
- Capitalists have to fight against each other to have the highest profit
- The only way to make more profit is steal from workers – exploitation
- Raw material +labor = price Labor has two levels – sustenance & surplus
- There is no revolt because of the false consciousness
- Alienation is also part of the reason. People felt emotionally separated
o from act of work (they aren’t working for themselves; it is something they
need to do rather than what they want to do)
o from products (there is no passion since it’s not their business)
o from other workers (they’re fighting each other and even
o from themselves (rather than working for their own good, pleasure, rather
than fulfilling their own desires they work to eat, to live)
- They revolt eventually because they have weak ties to capitalists’ class
- The capitalist class is not a unified class, there is ongoing competition for higher
profit
 - Class Consciousness: A class in itself to a class for itself
Max Weber 1864 - 1920
- Very opposed to Marx because Marc ignores the way people think
- The start of a cultural thinking – he was more of an idealist
- Focused on beliefs, norms, morals, and values
- Action is always purposeful - done for a reason, behavior isn’t
- Social action is when the purpose of the action is directed to someone else
- There are four types of social action
- Ideal types are the measuring rulers. You will never find it in reality
- Weber makes concepts and he takes them out of the closet to measure and then
puts them back
- Traditional social action – action that is done simply cause it has been always been
done that way
- Value/belief oriented - because we inherently believe in the moral value of it
- Affectual oriented – emotionally driven
- Instrumental oriented – we do something because we expect something in return
- Most social actions span over more motivations
- Theory for social change for him is based on ideas. he claims societies are shifting
from traditional social action to instrumental social action
- In pre-industrial societies
- Industrial societies -instrumental rational action. More and more of it leads to a
rationalization of society. We want to do things in the most cheap/efficient way
possible
Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism
- Predestination – once you’re born God already knows where you go
- Protestant Ethic – people started working hard to see whether they are successful or
not. Success equals high profit. Having a lot of money and buying things is sinful, so
they reinvest their money back into their business. They can
- The protestant ethic was replaced by instrumentality
- For Weber religion is metaphysical & not part of scientific understanding
- Iron cage (stahlhartes Gahause) something rigid
- Max Weber says that we lose the “magic” in the world if we only cling on to
efficiency.
Emile Durk
- A structuralist looks at the structures of people
- Social facts – what we make together
- Living in the transition from a gemeinschaft to gazelleschaft
- He wants to study social cohesion – sees elements in pre & postindustrial societies
- Pre-industrial society - In a mechanical solidarity, it occurs automatically. People
think the same because they are the same. A collective consciousness exists.
- In an industrial society, there are more classes, more differences – it’s based on
solidarity from interdependence. There is a division of labor & that’s what helps us
attain out goals

Watch first 20 min of class