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Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing

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One of the challenges in ‘being sociological’ is ‘thinking ourselves out of this mind-set so as to see society as ‘a plurality of interdependent people’.

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Page 1: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

Being Sociological

Chapter 3Modernizing

Page 2: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

Individualism• One of the defining characteristics of

modernity.• One of its important components is ‘an

intense personal self-experience’.• People mistakenly believe that ‘society’

revolves around ‘me’. • This view sees ‘society’ as a mass of

‘separated, autonomous people’.

Page 3: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

One of the challenges in ‘being sociological’ is ‘thinking ourselves out of this mind-set so as to see society as ‘a plurality of interdependent people’.

Page 4: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

Functions and Bonds• The jobs that people do are mostly

functions that they have for other people, i.e. a taxi driver, an airline pilot, a doctor, an electrician.

• In these interrelations people are bonded to each other.

• Three different types of bonds: economic, political and affective.

Page 5: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

…each individual person…is bound by living in permanent functional dependence on other people; he is a link in the chains binding other people, just as all others, directly or indirectly, are links in the chains which bind him…it is this network of the functions which people have for each other…that we call ‘society’. (Elias, 1991: 20)

Page 6: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

The development of ‘social science’

• Political economy developed (prior to sociology) in the latter part of the 18th century;

• Most famous early founder in Britain was Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776);

• In France, a group called the Physiocrats described themselves as économistes.

Page 7: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

Generally, the work of these writers revolved around:•The circulation of income around the three main classes of pre-industrial society: landowners, agricultural labourers and merchants/artisans; •Sources of wealth; •Variations in the distribution of the national income. Importantly, they all used empirical evidence to demonstrate that there existed self-regulating ‘laws’ of an economic kind. Furthermore, these writers showed the laws to be working across the country as a whole.

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Today in sociology, laws would not be regarded as an appropriate term in this context. This should not blind us to the significance of the political economists’ perception of the existence of autonomous social regularities of an economic kind.

Page 9: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

Changes in the meaning of the word ‘economic’

In pre-industrial times ‘economy’ meant the ordering of a person’s household. It referred to balancing one’s income and expenditure and living within one’s means. Today this meaning survives in the verb ‘to economise’. In the late eighteenth century, there was a decisive change. The primary meaning of economics shifted from the household to the problems of managing the income and expenditure of the nation. Hence, Adam Smith titled his book The Wealth of Nations, not the Wealth of Households.

Page 10: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

Importance of the early economists

• They established empirically that there were economic processes which operated in a law-like way outside the immense power of the ruling kings and ministers of the time, that is, independent of governments;

• Therefore, rulers had to take the advice of the economic specialists about those processes, as part of the art of government, in order to better rule: hence the emerging field was called ‘political’ economy.

 

Page 11: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

Human beings as ‘socius’ or ‘sociae’

• In The Wealth of Nations, Smith also set out the idea of a human being as a socius, a person who can sympathetically reflect upon the effects of his or her actions on others.

• The most important point to carry forward about the breakthrough achieved by the political economists is that, in their work, the phenomenon of ‘the social’, as processes surpassing the actions of individuals, was first recognized and given systematic theoretical expression in the form of economic regularities operating at the level of the country as a whole.

Page 12: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

The Enlightenment (18th century)• Europeans at this time were caught up in a

vortex of social transformations which laid the foundations of modern society. Sociology was part of those processes; it was ‘part and parcel of the discovery of the phenomenon of ‘society’ as such’ (Berger and Kellner, 1982: 10

• The philosophes of the Enlightenment had great respect for science: the new middle class ‘drew their self-image and self-awareness from their belief in modern science’ (van Dülmen, 1992: 133)

Page 13: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

Science was no longer subordinate to theology or metaphysics, which were associated with the power of the church and the ancien régime generally…Science had enabled human beings to achieve increasing control over nature which gave them the potential to broaden this power to include ‘man’s capacity to achieve moral and social progress’ (Sampson, 1956: 40). The idea of progress was central to the Enlightenment…all these ideas formed a scientific, secular, anti-clerical and reformist world-view, which influenced the emerging social sciences.

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The emergence of sociology

• Sociology emerged as a discipline in the early 19th century.

• Its emergence was greatly influenced by both the French Revolution (1789) and the Industrial Revolution.

Page 15: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

The French Revolution• Ended the ancien régime of aristocratic rule and marked

the coming to power and influence of the middle classes (Dülmen, 1992: 133);

• Many of the revolutionaries were officials, jurists, physicians, clergy, professors and journalists who met in reading and debating groups and in secret societies. Enlightenment ideas were discussed and disseminated through these groups;

• Amongst many issues discussed and demanded were: freedom of the press, free speech and the democratic rights of citizens of all social ranks;

• The French thinkers and others sympathetic to them wanted an end to the absolutist rule of kings and queens and the power of the church upon which it depended;

• They demanded liberation from feudal obligations and political control, as well as the sexual repression and authority of religious revelation which went along with those restrictions (Porter, 1990: 56-8);

• From this period onwards, forms of parliamentary government became the order of the day in many European countries;

• It spelled the beginning of the end of feudal hereditary privilege and kinship patronage as the sole criteria for social advancement.

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The Industrial Revolution

• Factories were springing up rapidly in many European cities in a relatively ‘unregulated’ fashion;

• Agricultural workers came from the countryside to work for factory owners for wages, so this was partly a technological revolution and partly an economic one;

• Machines were introduced into the productive process to take the place of hand tools, which enabled more efficient production…resulting in spectacular rises in productivity and wealth;

• The working conditions in factories were harsh and living conditions in industrial cities such as Paris, London, Manchester and others were infamously squalid (see Friederich Engels, 1845);

Page 17: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

• Workers did not own the factories in which they worked and had only their labouring capacity to sell, thus they were vulnerable should their employment be terminated by factory owners;

• At the same time, the factory owners needed the workers in order to ensure their factories were productive, and so ensure their profits;

• The plight of wage labourers caused widespread humanitarian concern, amongst liberal politicians as well as in the ranks of the socialists and communists. A wide gap had opened up between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’.

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The radical doctrines of socialism and communism arose at this time in opposition to economic individualism, as workers began to fight collectively for the improvement of their working and living conditions (Evans, 1951). Some workers’ groups were seeking to improve conditions through protests, negotiation with employers and the threat of strikes. Others, including communists and anarchists, were openly revolutionary, particularly in France, demanding the forceful overthrow of the new ruling class of industrial entrepreneurs and factory owners and a more equal redistribution of wealth.

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The Impact of the Industrial Revolution

• Brought in changes so monumental in their inception and consequences that the new industrial society that replaced feudalism and political absolutism has been likened in historical importance to the transition from hunter-gathering societies to sedentary agriculture in prehistoric times (Kumar, 1988: 5).

• Understandably, European peoples were bewildered and fearful, realising they were experiencing the birth pangs of a new ‘industrial system’ (Henri Saint-Simon, 1821, quoted in Ionescu, 1976: 153) but they were still uncertain of its direction.

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The emergence of MarxismOut of this economic and political crucible came the influential theory of class struggle developed by Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. Marx’s commitment to the workers’ cause inspired him to try to make scientific sense of the rapidly emerging industrial society and to discern the ultimate direction of social change. He drew on the only developed social science available to him: political economy.

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Marx contended that: • People at the time were living through the transition from feudalist production to bourgeois or capitalist production, and that this was the source of the inequality, discontent and conflict of the time. • These were not permanent features of human life: in the future there would be an inevitable transition to another, collective mode of production – socialism – brought about by the political victory of the workers over the industrial ruling class, the bourgeoisie (Kumar, 1988, ch 8).

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How did this lead to the development of sociology as a

discipline?People sensed they were on the threshold of a new world: society was going through a critical phase, which was widely interpreted as a crisis. It produced much fundamental and sweeping social critique, in which utopian thinking was to play a prominent role (Koselleck 1959).

Page 23: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

• The thinkers who began to study society in the early nineteenth century were a mixture of philosophers, theologians, diplomats, jurists and political thinkers of different ideologies. At that time there was no profession or discipline of sociology.

• These writers all had very different moral and political beliefs… Nevertheless, driven by those differing interests, they were all united in a common ambition to go beyond the field of static economic regularities described by political economists.

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Conservatives, Socialists and Liberals

• The conservatives…wanted the restoration of traditional values and forms of authority which they saw as crumbling. They saw society as the result of a slow, organic historical development over the generations, which it would be perilous to change (Nisbet, 2002: 11-16).

• The socialists and communists…wanted radical and sometimes revolutionary change with the goal of achieving social equality.

• The liberals…wanted to safeguard individual liberty and self-expression in the face of the growth of large- scale economic and state institutions (Bramsted and Melhuish, 1978).

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The dynamic approach of sociology

• Focussed on a more ambitious range of questions to do with the longer-term development of humankind and its fate, including the impact of modern society on the nature of knowledge itself.

• The stock-in-trade of the early pioneers included the processual concepts of development: stages or phases, progress, evolution, tendency and similar ideas.

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The increasing ‘impersonality’ of society

• Traditional, face-to-face social relations of kinship, family and village were being supplanted by the relatively fleeting, nameless contractual relations of wage labour and buying and selling on the market;

• The already recognised phenomenon of ‘society’ became increasingly identified with this form of social relations.

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Dualisms  Traditional society Modern society

Societal types    Auguste Comte (1798—1857) military industrialKarl Marx (1818—83) feudal bourgeoisHenri Saint-Simon (1760-1825) 

religio-military scientific-industrial

Herbert Spencer (1820--1903) militant society (centralised) industrial society (decentralised)

Social bonds    Otto von Gierke (1841—1921)

unitary bonds 

contractual bonds 

Henry Sumner Maine (1822—1888)

status contract

Lewis H. Morgan (1818—81) societas civitasFerdinand Tönnies (1855—1936)

Gemeinschaft Gesellschaft

Émile Durkheim (1858--1917)

mechanical solidarity organic solidarity

Max Weber (1864--1920) traditional authority legal-rational authority

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Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Ferdinand Tönnies, 1887)

• Gemeinschaft (community): the social bonds typical of communities, families and kinship. These are enduring relations with a high degree of emotional depth, moral commitment, closeness and unconditional loyalty.

• Gesellschaft (association or society): the relatively fleeting relations of economic exchange, sometimes called ‘the cash nexus’, whereby we acquire goods or services from people we do not know in the public arenas of the market place in its various forms. Commitment is only to the extent of the conditions laid down implicitly or explicitly in the contractual relationship, in which each person in the exchange keeps an emotional distance from the other. People are linked with each other solely by the economic function that each performs for the other.

Page 29: Being Sociological Chapter 3 Modernizing. Individualism One of the defining characteristics of modernity. One of its important components is an intense

• Tönnies compared the emerging commercial world with the communal rural life of his native Schleswig-Holstein, bound together by age-old ties of kinship and shared customs, a formation he called Gemeinschaft. The two types of social bond were intended partly to show the historical trend towards Gesellschaft, and partly as a general theory of ‘sociation’ (Cahnman and Heberle, 1971: xi).

• Gemeinschaft bonds were the primary human bonds of which Gesellschaft was a derivative form.

• He insisted, though, that he did not know of any society in which ‘elements of Gemeinschaft and elements of Gesellschaft are not simultaneously present’ (quoted in Cahnman, 1995: 182).

• Thus a two-sided development was under way: as Gesellschaft bonds grew, so Gemeinschaft diminished, in a shifting balance.

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Tönnies was one of the first sociologists to point out that it is characteristic of ‘modern’ social relations of the contractual kind that separate, atomised people only involve themselves in the encounter with part of their self, not with all of their self as in the Gemeinschaft-type of bonding (Shils, 1972). As Norbert Elias (1939 [2000]) has shown, the kind of self-controlled people who are able to compartmentalise themselves in this way are a product of modern societies, which are internally pacified and integrated at the macro level of the nation-state as whole.

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The complex interdependencies of these societies constrain people to behave with greater all-round self-restraint and foresight. People capable of this kind of conduct are best adapted for surviving successfully in modern social relations. They are also capable of a wider range of emotional responses, including committed familial relations and more detached associations in the public arenas of modern market societies.

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The significance of Tönnies• As Werner Cahnman and Rudolf Heberle

(1971: xiii) point out, we ‘should do away with the notion that Tönnies thought of Gemeinschaft as “good” and Gesellschaft as “bad”’.

• Tönnies was realistic enough to see that a return to an idealised medieval world was neither possible nor desirable.

• Tönnies struggled to balance his role as a detached sociological observer of society with the moral and political preferences derived from his inevitable participation in that society. Norbert Elias referred to this dilemma as the problem of involvement and detachment (Elias, 1956 [2007]. It still remains a basic challenge for sociologists in the modern world.

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Discussion Point 1: Social Development and Social Forces• The early sociologists lived in a world

‘perpetually in revolution’ (Salomon, p. 92). The vortex of events and social conflicts was startling, unsettling and difficult to comprehend. Changes were occurring which could no longer be explained entirely by the plans and intentions of people one could actually name or point to - specific monarchs or ministers or the powerful courtly aristocrats of former days.

• Sociologists sought to identify the patterns, processes and directions of change.

• It was hoped that humanity would liberate itself from poverty and war, that the future would be better.

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• Do we still live in a world defined by never-ending change?

• Do you think that humanity has been able to free itself from nature?

• Does the idea of social progress still make sense? Has humanity perfected itself?

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Discussion Point 2: Science and Sociological Knowledge

• Inspired by the Enlightenment, the early sociologists took it for granted that the methods and procedures found in the prestigious natural sciences provided the model for how to acquire reliable knowledge in any sphere,

• Marx, Saint-Simon, Comte and Spencer all thought of themselves as scientists who could liberate mankind from myths, religious revelation, theology, superstition, magic and other illusions.

• This new discipline of sociology would produce the kind of knowledge appropriate to the new secular, industrial society (Thompson, 1976, pp 37-84).

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• Have we liberated ourselves from either superstition or religion?

• Is sociology a science?• Has sociology lived up to its promise? If

not, why not?