capital would become a fetter upon production until finally “the knell
of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated.”
Marx never claimed to have discovered the existence of classes
and class struggles in modern society. “Bourgeois” historians, he
acknowledged, had described them long before he had. He did
claim, however, to have proved that each phase in the development
of production was associated with a corresponding class structure
and that the struggle of classes led necessarily to the dictatorship of
the proletariat, ushering in the advent of a classless society. Marx
took up the very different versions of socialism current in the early
19th century and welded them together into a doctrine that
continued to be the dominant version of socialism for half a century
after his death. His emphasis on the influence of economic structure
on historical development has proved to be of lasting significance.
Although Marx stressed economic issues in his writings, his major
impact has been in the fields of sociology and history. Marx’s most
important contribution to sociological theory was his general mode
of analysis, the “dialectical” model, which regards every social
system as having within it immanent forces that give rise to
“contradictions” (disequilibria) that can be resolved only by a new
social system. Neo-Marxists, who no longer accept the economic
reasoning in Das Kapital, are still guided by this model in their
approach to capitalist society. In this sense, Marx’s mode of
analysis, like those of Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, or
Vilfredo Pareto, has become one of the theoretical structures that
are the heritage of the social scientist.
(L.S.F./D.T.McL.)
Durkhiem
Childhood and education.
Durkheim was born into a Jewish family of very modest means. It
was taken for granted that he would study to become a rabbi, like
his father. The death of his father before Durkheim was 20, which
burdened him with heavy responsibilities, and the increased rivalrous
tensions between France’s eastern provinces and Germany, may
have contributed to making Durkheim a severely disciplined young
man. As early as his late teens Durkheim became convinced that
effort and even sorrow are more conducive to the spiritual progress
of the individual than pleasure or joy.
His outstanding success at school designated him clearly as a
candidate to the renowned +cole Normale Sup rieure in Paris–the
most prestigious teachers’ college in France. While preparing for the
+cole Normale at the Lyc e Louis le Grand, Durkheim took his
board at the Institution Jauffret in the Latin Quarter, where he
became acquainted with another gifted young man from the
provinces, Jean Jaur s, later to lead the French Socialist Party and
at that time inclined like Durkheim toward philosophy and the
moral and social reform of his countrymen.
Durkheim passed the stiff competitive examination for the +cole
Normale one year after Jaur s, in 1879. It is clear that his religious
faith had vanished by then. His thought had become altogether
secular but with a strong bent toward moral reform. Like a number
of French philosophical minds during the Third Republic, he looked
to science and in particular to social science and to profound
educational reform as the means to avoid the perils of social
disconnectedness or “anomie,” as he was to call this condition in
which norms for conduct were either absent, weak, or conflicting.
(See anomie.)
He enjoyed the intellectual atmosphere of the +cole Normale–the
discussion of metaphysical and political issues pursued with
eagerness and animated by the utopian dreams of young men
destined to be among the leaders of their country. He soon enjoyed
the respect of his peers and of his teachers, but he was impatient
with the excessive stress then laid in French higher education on
elegant rhetoric and surface polish. His teachers of philosophy
struck him as too fond of generalities and of monotonous worship of
the past.
Fretting at the conventionality of formal examinations, he passed the
last competitive examination in 1882, but without the brilliance that
his friends had predicted for him. He then accepted a series of
provincial assignments as a teacher of philosophy at the state
secondary schools of Sens, Saint-Quentin, and Troyes between
1882 and 1887. In 1885-86 he took a year’s leave of absence to
pursue research in Germany, where he was impressed by Wilhelm
Wundt, pioneer experimental psychologist. In 1887 he was
appointed as lecturer at the University of Bordeaux, where he
subsequently became professor and taught social philosophy until
1902.
Analytic methods.
Durkheim was familiar with several foreign languages and reviewed
volumes in German, English, and Italian at length in the learned
journal L’Ann e Sociologique, which he founded in 1896. But it
has been noted, at times with disapproval and amazement, by
non-French social scientists, that he travelled little and that, like
many French scholars as well as the notable British anthropologist
Sir James Frazer, he never undertook any fieldwork. The vast
information he studied on the tribes of Australia or of New Guinea
or on the Eskimos was all collected by other anthropologists,
travellers, or missionaries.
This was not, in Durkheim’s case, due to provincialism or lack of
attention to the concrete. He did not resemble the French
philosopher Auguste Comte in making venturesome and dogmatic
generalizations and disregarding empirical observation. He did,
however, maintain that concrete observation in remote parts of the
world does not always lead to illuminating views on the past or even
on the present. To him facts had no meaning for the intellect unless
they were grouped into types and laws. He claimed repeatedly that
it is from a construction erected on the inner nature of the real that
knowledge of concrete reality is obtained, a knowledge not
perceived by observation of the facts from the outside. He thus
constructed concepts such as that of the sacred or of totemism,
exactly in the same way that Karl Marx developed the concept of
class.
In truth, Durkheim’s vital interest did not lie in the study for its own
sake of so-called primitive tribes, but rather in the light such a study
might throw on the present. The outward events of his life as an
intellectual and as a scholar may appear undramatic. Still, much of
what he thought and wrote stemmed from the events that he
witnessed in his formative years, in the 1870s and 1880s, and in the
earnest concern he took in them.
The Second Empire, which collapsed in the French defeat of 1870
at the hands of Germany, had seemed an era of levity and
dissipation to the earnest young Durkheim. France, with the
support of many of its liberal and intellectual elements, had plunged
headlong into a war for which it was unprepared; its leaders proved
incapable. The left-wing Commune that took over Paris after the
French defeat in 1871 led to senseless destruction, which appeared
to Durkheim’s generation, in retrospect, as evidence of the
alienation of the working classes from capitalist society.
The bloody repression that followed the Commune was taken as
further evidence of the ruthlessness of capitalism and of the
selfishness of the frightened bourgeoisie. Later, the crisis of 1886
over Georges Boulanger, minister of war, who demanded a
centralist government to execute a policy of revenge against
Germany, was one of several events that testified to the resurgence
of nationalism, soon to be accompanied by anti-Semitism. Such
major French thinkers of the older generation as Ernest Renan and
Hippolyte Taine interrupted their historical and philosophical works,
after 1871, to analyze those evils and to offer remedies.
Durkheim was one of several young philosophers and scholars,
fresh from their +cole Normale training, who became convinced that
progress was not the necessary consequence of the development of
science and technology, that it could not be represented by an
ascending curve, justifying complacent optimism. He perceived
around him the prevalence of “anomie,” a personal sense of
rootlessness fostered by the absence of social norms. Material
prosperity set free greed and passions that threatened the
equilibrium of society.
These sources of Durkheim’s sociological reflections, never remote
from moral philosophy, were first expressed in his very important
doctoral thesis, De la division du travail social (1893; The
Division of Labour in Society), and in Le Suicide (1897; Suicide).
In his view ethical and social structures were being endangered by
the advent of technology and mechanization. The division of labour
rendered workmen both more alien to one another and more
dependent upon one another, since none of them any longer built the
whole product by himself. Suicide appeared to be less frequent
where the individual was closely integrated with his culture; thus, the
apparently purely individual decision to renounce life could be
explained through social forces.
Effect of the Dreyfus affair.
These early volumes, and the one in which he formulated with
scientific rigour the rules of his sociological method, Les R gles de
la m thode sociologique (1895; The Rules of Sociological
Method), brought Durkheim fame and influence. But the new
science of society frightened timid souls and conservative
philosophers, and he had to endure many attacks. The Dreyfus
affair–resulting from the false charge against a Jewish officer, Alfred
Dreyfus, of spying for the Germans–erupted in the last years of the
century, and the slurs or outright insults aimed at Jews that
accompanied it opened Durkheim’s eyes to the latent hatred and
passionate feuds hitherto half concealed under the varnish of
civilization. He took an active part in the campaign to exonerate
Dreyfus. He was not elected to the Institut de France, although his
stature as a thinker suggests that he should have been named to that
prestigious, learned society. He was, however, appointed to the
University of Paris in 1902 and made a full professor there in 1906.
(See Dreyfus, Alfred.)
More and more, the sociologist’s thought became concerned with
education and religion as the two most potent means of reforming
humanity or of molding the new institutions required by the deep
structural changes in society. His colleagues admired Durkheim’s
zeal in behalf of educational reform. His efforts included participating
in numerous committees to prepare new curriculums and methods;
working to enliven the teaching of philosophy, which too long had
dwelt on generalities; and attempting to teach teachers how to teach.
A series of courses that he had given at Bordeaux on the subject of
L’+volution p dagogique en France (”Pedagogical Evolution in
France”) was published posthumously in 1938; it remains one of the
best informed and most impartial books on French education. The
other important work of Durkheim’s latter years dealt with the
totemic system in Australia and bore the title of Les Formes
l mentaires de la vie religieuse (1915; The Elementary Forms
of the Religious Life). The author, despite his own agnosticism,
evinced a sympathetic understanding of religion in all its stages.
French conservatives, who in the years preceding World War I
turned against the Sorbonne, which they charged was unduly
swayed by the prestige of German scholarship, railed at Durkheim,
who, they thought, was influenced by the German urge to
systematize, making a fetish of society and a religion of sociology.
(See “Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The”.)
In fact, Durkheim did not make an idol of sociology as did the
positivists schooled by Comte, nor was he a “functionalist” who
explained every social phenomenon by its usefulness in maintaining
the existence and equilibrium of a social organism. He did, however,
endeavour to formulate a positive social science that might direct
people’s behaviour toward greater solidarity.
The outbreak of World War I came as a cruel blow to him. For
many years he had expended too much energy on teaching, on
writing, on outlining plans for reform, on ceaselessly feeding the
enthusiasm of his disciples, and eventually his heart had been
affected. His gaunt and nervous appearance filled his colleagues with
foreboding. The whole of French sociology, then in full bloom
thanks to him, seemed to be his responsibility.
Death and legacy.
The breaking point came when his only son was killed in 1916,
while fighting on the Balkan front. The father stoically attempted to
hide his sorrow, but the loss, coming on top of insults by nationalists
who denounced him as a professor of “apparently German
extraction” who taught a “foreign” discipline at the Sorbonne, was
too much to bear. He died in November 1917.
Durkheim left behind him a brilliant school of researchers. He had
never been a tyrannical master; he had encouraged his disciples to
go farther than himself and to contradict him if need be. His nephew,
Marcel Mauss, who held the chair of sociology at the Coll ge de
France, was less systematic than Durkheim and paid greater
attention to symbolism as an unconscious activity of the mind.
Claude L vi-Strauss, who occupied the same chair of sociology and
resembles Durkheim in the way he combines reasoning with
intensity of feeling, also offered objections and corrections to
Durkheim’s views. With Durkheim, sociology had become in
France a seminal discipline that broadened and transformed the
study of law, of economics, of Chinese institutions, of linguistics, of
ethnology, of art history, and of history.
(H.M.P.)
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collective behaviour
Individual motivation theories
Among the analytic theories that seek to eschew evaluation, the
most popular ones stress individual motivation in accounting for
collective behaviour. Frustration and lack of firm social anchorage
are the two most widely used explanations for individual
participation in collective behaviour of all kinds. In the psychiatric
tradition, frustration heightens suggestibility, generates fantasy, brings
about regressions and fixations, and intensifies drives toward wish
fulfillment so that normal inhibitions are overcome. Since most forms
of collective behaviour promote thoughts that are otherwise difficult
to account for and that breech behavioral inhibitions, this is often a
fruitful source of explanation.
In the sociological tradition of +mile Durkheim, absence of firm
integration into social groups leaves the individual open to deviant
ideas and susceptible to the vital sense of solidarity that comes from
participation in spontaneous groupings. Drawing upon both the
psychiatric and the sociological traditions, Erich Fromm attributed
the appeal of mass movements and crowds to the gratifying escape
they offer from the sense of personal isolation and powerlessness
that people experience in the vast bureaucracies of modern life.
Extending Karl Marx’s theory of modern man’s alienation from his
work, many contemporary students attribute faddism, crowds,
movements of the spirit, and interest-group and revolutionary
movements to a wide-ranging alienation from family, community,
and country, as well as from work. (See Marxism.)
According to the approach suggested by the U.S. political scientist
Hadley Cantril, participation in vital collectivities supplies a sense of
meaning through group affirmation and action and raises the
member’s estimate of his social status, both of which are important
needs often frustrated in modern society. Eric Hoffer, a U.S.
philosopher, attributed a leading role in collective behaviour to “true
believers,” who overcome their own personal doubts and conflicts
by the creation of intolerant and unanimous groups about them.
Crowds
A thin line separates crowd activities from collective obsessions.
The crowd is, first, more concentrated in time and space. Thus a
race riot, a lynching, or an orgy is limited to a few days or hours and
occurs chiefly within an area ranging from a city square or a stadium