Compare And Contrast Durkheim, Marx, and Max Weber on the basis of their methodologies, concepts, and theories.

In this work I will compare and contrast three sociologists; Durkheim, Marx, and Weber on the basis of their methodologies, concepts, and theories.

Marx, Weber, Durkheim.

For Durkheim, Auguste Comte’s description of sociology is unclear and speculative. That is why Comte couldn’t describe sociology with bases it on science. Durkheim says that we have to study social life objectively like the objects in nature. According to him, we have to study social facts as things.

One of Durkheim’s theories is the Theory of Division of Labor in Society.

For him, there are two types of development of the Division of Labor in Society. The linear and automatic development. The linear model is more simple. But the automatic one is complex.

He is saying that cooperation, I mean solidarity does not collapse. It is just changing. Organic Solidarity to Mechanic Solidarity.

Durkheim’s Theory of Social Integration and Regulation and his Study of Suicide

Earlier studies associate suicides just as ethical problems or psychological problems.

But according to Durkheim, we can not determine who is going to suicide individually people but we can determine the number of people who might commit suicide in a year.

Durkheim observed that there are differences in the number of suicide between countries. But the number of suicide is stable in the county.

He is also saying that suicide is not only about psychological problems but also it is about climate, religion, career, marital status of a person, etc. For example, he determined that unmarried people are more attended to suicide than married people, or the people who do not have kids have more suicidal tendencies than the people who have kids. For him, if individuals act to service social interest, they will find the meaning of life and the number of suicide is going to fall. Durkheim called that theory: The Theory Of ‘Egoistic Suicide’.

He also mentioned three more theories except for ‘Egoistic Suicide’. One of them is Altruistic suicide. It can be defined as suicidal behavior to self-sacrifice. Like suicide bombers. Another theory is Fatalistic Suicide. It’s about the society that determines your fate. Society makes pressure on the person and it leads you to suicide. The last theory of suicide is Anomic suicide. The name of Anomic comes from Anomos that also comes from Geek. It means lawlessness, so anomie means a lack of moral standards, or a sense of lawlessness, or sometimes the anxiety that comes from being in a lawless place. People think that there is no one who controls her so the person goes astray and it leads to suicide.

Marx’s Method is Historical Materialism or the ‘Materialist Conception of History:’

According to Marx social change is not because of the development of the ideas. It is because of the development of materials which bases on the economy and society. Marx reconstructs Hegel’s Idealist Dialectic. The Dialectical Materialism that Marx talked about; there is three Dialectic. One of them is the Unity of Opposites. Unity of Opposites Dialectic is about the contrast. If one of two does not exist, the other one does not exist too. For example, if there is no slave it means there is no master either. The other Dialectic is Thesis — Anti-Thesis — Synthesis. Every Anti-Thesis is also the beginning of a new Thesis. He also said that quantitive change leads to qualitative changes. For example, if the power of the working class increases, it can lead to revolution.

Marx has a theory about The Concept of Production Articulation of Relations of Production & Forces of Production. The mode of production divided into two. Relations of Product and Forces of Product. In Relation to the product, there are owners of means of the product (lands are an example of means of products) and direct producers. Forces of Products are divided into Objective and Subjective. Objective one is the means of production. Like lands, tools, machinery.

There are many The Mode of Production models that Marx talked about. Like Primitive Communism — Communal Labor Ancient Mode of Production — Slavery, Asiatic Mode of Production — Free Peasants and Centralized State, Feudal Mode of Production — Serfdom, Capitalist Mode of Production — Wage-Labor, Socialist or Communist Mode of Production — Socialized Labor/Classless Society. All of them are about the same thing actually. Simply; according to Marx, culture is not playing a role in Society. Everything is about production activity and who has the production tools. Society forms with the owner of the surplus. And the owner of the surplus is resorted to various ways for not sharing this surplus with others. One of them nationalism(today’s democracy). Or the owner of the surplus can also use the religion too. But MaxWeber, on the contrary, says that this is not true. Although influenced by Marx he defended that nations, beliefs, culture, or religions can affect production activities too. Not only production activities make the culture. As it constitutes cultural production activities, it creates a more organic society. That’s why an ideology that just about production activities cannot be a solution for humanity.

• For Karl Marx (1818–1883), social classes are determined according to the relations of production. In a capitalist society, the relations of production are defined by the ownership of the means of production. Thus, we distinguish the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, from the working class. The former owns the means of production, while the latter has only its own labor power which it sells to the bourgeoisie. This “objective” situation in production relationships defines a “class in itself”. But the awareness of common interests between the workers constitutes it in “class for itself”. Consequently, it enters into the fight against the bourgeoisie in order to put an end to its exploitation.
• For Marx, the division of society into hierarchical groups is based only on social classes. For Max Weber (1864–1920), social classes are only one dimension of social stratification. They bring together individuals who experience the same economic situation, that is to say with identical chances of obtaining goods (classes of possession) and having the same economic interests (classes of production). However, unlike Marx, social classes, for Weber, do not constitute real communities. Individuals belonging to the same social class are not aware of belonging to this class. For Weber, social classes are the first dimension of social stratification. The other two dimensions are the “status group, which relates to social honor or prestige,” and the party, which refers to access to political power.

A small comparison chart with their works

Some of Max Weber’s ideas on Social Change are below:

Max Weber remains an analyst of society at the end of the 19th century. He seeks to understand and explain the evolution of societies and the characteristics of modernity, which is defined by two major features:

• Rationalization. Social activities become governed by a principle of rationality. It is necessary to formalize the goals to be reached and to adopt the most suitable means to achieve its ends, those which will allow the objective to be achieved at the lowest cost. This movement goes hand in hand with the intellectualization of social life. Rationalization also causes the decline of religious practices and more generally of beliefs. The excessive procedure leads to a form of bureaucracy. Rationalization which aims only to be rational would lead to tyranny. To be viable, the rationalization of societies must continue to be guided by values.
• The disenchantment of the world. Rationalization causes a weakening of moral values. The actions of individuals are no longer conducted under the impulse of passions and beliefs but under that of rationality. A new paradigm intervenes to judge reality, that of science. The gradual elimination of magic is a way of answering the questions and suffering of the world as well as a loss of meaning regarding the meaning and direction of life. The complexity of society takes away from each individual the control of his environment.

The rationalization and disenchantment of the world produce new forms of social life that Weber endeavors to describe. He distinguishes two ways of constituting a society, that is to say of creating a link between individuals:

• The first is called: “community”: Individual actions are driven by routine, emotions, or even rationality in value. Custom is the engine of social regulation. Social order is based on religious beliefs, faith in values ​​, and the abandonment of the leader. Legacy solidarity develops because of the sharing of a certain interconnectedness. It characterizes the essence of inter-individual relationships.
• The second way of creating a bond between individuals, of constituting a society, is called “member”. It is characteristic of modern societies. We belong to a society in the economic sense of the term, that is to say, that contractual relationships are established between individuals. The latter is no longer called to found a group by tradition or belief, but rather because of their free will and the feeling that they have of achieving their ends by this means. Individual actions are directed by rationality in the end. The dominant social relationships are covered by mutual and voluntary commitment. Social regulation operates through the specific interests of individuals. Order is guaranteed by convention, law. It is legal rationality since it follows the law.

Weber brings three essential ideas about education:

• Structural homology (the same character in two different species — common point) between Church and school, both located in spheres of relations based on domination. The school is a hierarchical structure that legitimizes the dominant culture.
• The distinction between three types of education; charismatic, humanistic, and specialized which corresponds to three forms of domination (charismatic, traditional, and legal founded and legitimized by the laws).
• The relationships between school and bureaucracy. The latter contributes to the development of special education.

What is contested by some at Weber is the concept of rationality. The actors never adopt the most rational behaviors. They proceed from a “limited rationality” circumscribed to their knowledge of the situation and which is never total.

3 Important Quotes from Marx, Weber, and Durkheim

Three quotes from Max Weber:

1. It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.
2. In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, ‘Now shut up and obey me.’ People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.
3. The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

Three quotes from Karl Marx:

1. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
2. The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
3. The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.

Three quotes from Emile Durkheim:

1. When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
2. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
3. Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.

Conclusion

For Weber, an individual can have a high position on one axis (being a wealthy industrialist for example) and a low on another (not having valued cultural practices). For Weber, members of a class, therefore, do not necessarily have class consciousness and are not necessarily mobilized in the struggle.

Weber’s conception is nominalist: a social class is a collection of individuals gathered by the sociologist, a classification tool. Marx, for his part, develops a realistic analysis of social classes: he considers that they are real social groups in conflict.

Marx and Weber do not have the same approach to social classes, which has consequences for their analysis of the structure of society.