SOC755 General Sociology
19 September 2017
Dilemmas
I. Social problems and sociological problems
II. Sociology and common sense
III. Subject and method
IV. Platonic and value-free sociology
V. Nomothetic sociology and idiographic sociology
I. Social problems and sociological problems
• P.L.Berger: Invitation to sociology
• Sociology vs. Normativity
• Everyday life as an object of doubt, of study
• Georg Simmel (1905): How is society possible?
• Pierre Bourdieu: „epistemic radicalism“
II. Sociology and common sense
Sociology
• Rules of a responsible discourse
(reliability, openess, critique)
• Beyond individual biography
(biography + history)
• Against particular worldviews
(not from individual viewpoints)
Common sense
• Explains but is not explained
(confirms itself, is not subject to
doubt)
III. Subject and method
• E. Durkheim: The subject of
sociology are social facts
• Super-individual
• Have power over individuals
• M.Weber: The method of
sociology is understanding
• Action carries meaning
• Understanding (Verstehen) of it
IV. Platonic and value-free sociology
• Auguste Comte: A science of
society will allow us to
understand social mechanisms
and therefore govern the society
in the right way
• Max Weber: Sociology is valuefree.
It does not comment on
the normative status of its
results.
V. Nomothetic and idiographic sociology
• General laws and common
features
• Individual, specific, historically
contingent
Émile Durkheim and the
collective in society
SOC755 General Sociology
3 October 2017
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)
• The collective has primacy over the individual
• Society can be studied scientifically
• „man is less a point of departure than a point of
arrival“ (Ritzer on Durkheim)
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)
• Social facts: external, coercive, constructed
• Material and non-materiál
• Collective consciousness and collective
representations
• Mecanical and organic solidarity
• Unification and difference
• Division of labour
• Law and crime
• A functional view of crime
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)
• Suicide: regulation and integration
• Egoistic, altruistic, anomic, fatalistic
• Anomie = lack/mismatch of norms and values
• The sacred and the profane
• Religion, society as transcendence
• Symbol and ritual
Max Weber
and the theory of action
SOC755 General Sociology
10. October 2017
Max Weber (1864-1920)
• Methodology of social science
• Meaning and verstehen
• Ideal Types
• Social Action
• Means-ends (instrumental) rationality
• Value rationality
• Affectual action
• Traditional action
• Value-free sociology: facts vs. values
Max Weber (1864-1920)
• Power, domination and authority
• Rational (legal)
• Traditional
• Charismatic
• Bureaucracy = the purest form of rational authority
1. Continuous organiztion of offices bound by rules
2. Each office has a sphere of competence
3. Hierarchy
4. Technical qualifications for office
5. Staff do not own the means of production
6. Positions not personally appropriated
7. Actions, decisions and rules recorded in writing
Max Weber (1864-1920)
• Rationality and rationalisation
• Formal rationality
• Heritage of enlightenment
• Disentchantment (Entzauberung)
• Religion
• As a factor of economic development
• Protestant ethics and spirit of capitalism
• Vocation/calling, ascetism
• Rational and systematic pursuit of profit
• Effectiveness as a virtue; planning, calculation
• Iron cage of rationality
Georg Simmel, modernity
and forms of the social
SOC755 General Sociology
17 October 2017
Georg Simmel (1858-1918)
• Formal sociology; forms are an object of study
• Forms as resutls of central conflict (Fashion,
stranger, seduction)
• Money in modern culture
• Money as a layer between person and object
• A new relationship of dependence vs. independence
• Means and ends; the vulgarity of money
Georg Simmel: Conflict of modern culture
• Conflict of modern culture: life
vs. Forms
• Life exists only through forms
• The attempt to escape forms
Conflict of modern culture
• „perpetual struggle between life, with its fundamental restlessness,
evolution and mobility, and its own creations, which become
inflexible and lag behind its development. Since, however, life can
take on external existence only in one form or another, this process
can be clearly identified and described in terms of the displacement
of one form by another.“
Conflict of modern culture
• The mania for originality in so many young people of today (…)
Originality is only the ratio cognoscendi, so to speak, which
guarantees that life is purely itself and that no external, objectified,
rigid forms have been absorbed in its flux, or its flux in them. We may
have here a more general underlying motive for modern individualism
Conflict of modern culture
• It is the nature of life to produce within itself that which guides and
redeems it, and that which opposes, conquers and is conquered by it.
It sustains and enhances itself by way of its own products. The fact
that these products confront it as independent judges is the very
foundation of their existence, their modus vivendi. The opposition in
which they thus find themselves to the life which is superior to them
is the tragic conflict of life as mind. This conflict is now, of course,
becoming more perceptible with the growing awareness that it is in
fact created by life itself, and is therefore organically and ineluctably
bound up with life.
Conflict of modern culture
• What we are is, it is true, spontaneous life, with its equally
spontaneous, unanalysable sense of being, vitality and purposiveness,
but what we have is only its particular form at any one time (...) Life is
ineluctably condemned to become reality only in the guise of its
opposite, that is as form.
Georg Simmel (1858-1918)
• Metropolis and mental life
• „Blasé attitude“
• Disengagement and rationality
• Metropolis and money
Michel Foucault: power,
surveillance and control
SOC 755 General sociology
20 November 2017
Pierre Bourdieu
• Symbolic capital
• Monopoly of the state
• Habitus
„To exist means to exist socially.
And to exist socially means to be
perceived as distinct“
Michel
Foucault
(1926-1984)
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its
outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death (...)
Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it
under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to
death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is
forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock
the door of each house from the outside; he takes the key with him
and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant keeps
it until the end of the quarantine.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Every day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is
responsible; stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear
at the windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be
allocated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they
may show themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs himself
as to the state of each and every one of them
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration:
reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the
magistrates or mayor. At the beginning of the ‘lock up’ , the role of each
of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by one; this
document bears ‘the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his
condition': a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to the
office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily
roll call.
„Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read
the haunting memory of ‘contagions', of the
plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage,
desertions, people who appear and disappear,
live and die in disorder.“
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
• Plague and its allocation: disciplinary society
• Leprosy and its segregation: clean society
• A political dream of disease; a model of power and discipline
Panopticon
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
• Prison vs. Panopticon
• Directness of power
• Power: visible, untraceable, universal
• Functional spread of the panopticon
• From extraordinary situation to everyday situation
• Panopticon today?
Ulrich Beck and
individualisation
SOC755 General sociology
28 November 2017
Ulrich Beck (1944-2015)
• Risk society: towards a new
modernity (1986)
• Second („reflexive“) modernity
• Risk society
Ulrich Beck (1944-2015)
• Two phases of individualisation
• Old individualisation (18th-20th century)
• New individualisation (20th-21st century)
• Family, work, class
• Family
• Changing structure of family
• „standard biography“ vs. institutions
• Changing male and female roles (life expectancy, nuclear family, motherhood,
divorce rate, equal education chances)
• Education for women vs. Labour market for women
Ulrich Beck (1944-2015)
„On the one hand, the labor market demands mobility without regard
to personal circumstances. Marriage and the family require the
opposite. Thought through to its ultimate consequence, the market
model of modernity implies a society without families and children.
Everyone must be independent, free for the demands of the market in
order to guarantee his/her economic existence. (…) This contradiction
between the requirements of a relationship and those of the labor
market could only remain hidden so long as it was taken for granted
that marriage meant renunciation of a career for women, responsibility
for the children and 'comobility' according to the professional destiny
of the husband. The contradiction bursts open where both spouses
must or want to be free to earn a living as a salary earner.“
Ulrich Beck (1944-2015)
• Family
• Institutional (structural) contradiction, but private solutions!
• („the personal is political!“)
• Cultural factors
• Rise in the importance of relationship
• Rise in the value of children
Ulrich Beck (1944-2015)
• Work
• Axis of industrial (first) modernity
• Contract, place and time of work
• Flexibilisation of work (blurring of the formal-informal border)
• Inflation of diplomas, escalator effect
• Return of the personal criteria: education has lost its function of distributing
social statuses
Ulrich Beck (1944-2015)
• Class
• Class structure loosening: hierarchisation, diffentiation
• Working class and labour unions
• From class problems to individual problems
• From production to consumption
• From materialism to postmaterialism?
Ulrich Beck (1944-2015)
• Private biography = political problem
• Structural problems – individual solutions
• Individualisation of reponsibility
„Nor only that pedagogy and medicine, social law and traffic planning
presume active 'thinking individuals', as they put it so nicely, who are
supposed to find their way in this jungle of transitory finalities with the
help of their own clear vision. All these and all the other experts dump
their contradictions and conflicts at the feet of the individual and leave
him or her with the well intentioned invitation to judge all of this
critically on the basis of his or her own notions.“