The Sociological Method
The sociological method was viewed very differently by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. One focused on objectivity, the other on subjectivity. The consequences of their different methodological principles in terms of each author’s understanding of society can be found in how people today view, discuss, think about and manage the development of society. Durkheim’s methodology helped lead to the establishment of the use of statistics in social analysis and the management of what the Frankfurt School would go on to call the culture industry, as the prime dictator of social facts. Adorno and Horkheimer were more influenced by Weber’s antipositivism, however, and Weber’s methodology helped lead to the formation not only of the Frankfurt School but also of the Austrian School of economics, which acknowledged the problem of accurately determining the relative value of goods for which reason no centralized planned economy could ever work efficiently in an organized society. In other words, Durkheim’s methodology led to a focus in the social sciences on ways to control society by studying objective facts, while Weber’s methodology led to a focus in the social science on why society could only be understood in terms of people’s perceptions and could only be regulated by a pure bureaucracy, which was however unlikely to ever really or truly be developed.
For Durkheim, sociology was the science of society and the study of social facts. For Weber, sociology was the interpretation of the subjective understanding of social action. Weber aimed to identify the cause of social perspectives—how points of view were formed. Weber (1904) stated that “all knowledge of cultural reality... is always knowledge from particular points of view.” By this he meant that one cannot understand “social facts” because they are entirely predicated by subjective experiences that have to be understood as personal subjective experiences—not as objective realities like fossils in the earth. He argued that “an ‘objective’ analysis of cultural events, which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science is the reduction of empirical reality to ‘laws’, is meaningless.” Weber viewed it as meaningless primarily because “the knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality but is rather one...
Sociology Nazi Germany and how it would be analyzed by Karl Marx, Max Weber and/or Emile Durkheim Max Weber, born in 1864, is one of the best-known and most popular scholars of 'sociology', as well as of 'economic work'. One of his best contributions to the cause of economics as well as to sociology is his work entitled "Vertstehen" or what is also known as the theory of 'Interpretative Sociology' and his
While in Durkheim's concept of moral density, competition is a pre-existing condition, rationalization and social change in Weber's terms is determined by the enhancement or development of humans in their ability to adapt to their social environment. Competition, although a factor in the individual's social environment, did not become the focus of Weber's process of rationalization, as compared to Durkheim's conceptualization. Marx's dialectical materialism is likened to Durkheim's concept
Durkheim called the unfortunate mental state produced by modernity "anomie." Anomie is best expressed as the state of alienation felt by the modern urbanite, dwelling far away from traditional family structures and religious rituals. "Anomie is impossible whenever interdependent organs are sufficiently in contact and sufficiently extensive. If they are close to each other, they are readily aware, in every situation, of the need which they have of one
Weber, on the other hand, did not agree that social and political class could really be considered one and the same. For him, the material inequality observable in society was the source of power and stratification, and not merely the result of the system (Davidson 2009). While still uniting the concepts of ideology and materialism, Weber's view can in some ways be seen as a reversal of Marx's; the material
Sociology: Changing Societies in a Diverse World (Fourth Edition) George J. Bryjak & Michael P. Soroka Chapter One Summary of Key Concepts Sociology is the field of study which seeks to "describe, explain, and predict human social patterns" from a scientific perspective. And though Sociology is part of the social sciences (such as psychology and anthropology), it is quite set apart from the other disciplines in social science; that is because it emphasizes
" Nowadays, students have to choose between different academic disciplines: maybe one student prefers to be a psychologist rather than a physician. And then once the student has decided on psychology, he must choose, for example, to be a psychology major, as opposed to a physician major. Further more, there are even different categories within disciplines: social psychology, organizational psychology, clinical psychology, educational psychology etc., each with its own concepts, terminology
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