Sociological imagination currently plays a role in my presence at Sacred Heart University. Goffman does not deny what traditional symbolic interactionists argue. Additinally, this model gives the state has a degree of autonomy in order to maintain class hegemony; however, its primary role is to serve the interest of the dominant group. Finally, if the dialectic model is deemed as applicable if the following conditions are in place: a process of social institutions, that expel what is beneficial to dominant classes, b evidence of latent class conflict, divergent interest, or observable class.
Comte believed that only by really understanding society could we begin to change it. Wright Mills wanted to understand how transformations in our society or around the world could affect our everyday lives. He believed one of the key ways people could understand society and social change was to apply this social imagination.
We as people normally think of our own problems as being a private matter of character, chance, or circumstance, and we overlook the fact that these may be caused in part by, or are at least occurring within, a specific cultural and historical context. Rather than looking at a social system overall, such as the total population of a country, interactionism focuses on a smaller-scale social interactions, such as the interactions between characters or small social groups.
Interactionism in sociology focuses on the way that we act, or make careful choices concerning our behaviours that continue from how we understand situations. In other words, humans are not only reacting to social provocations; we are social actors and need to alter our behaviour based on the actions of others. Interactionism in sociology reviews how different social actors make sense of or understand the behaviour of those surrounding us.
That is, as the soul is conceived as having a sacred character and that which is sacred is the Totemic principle and its affiliates the soul must, therefore, be the Totemic principle incarnate in the individual.
This becomes analogous to the mana of the exalted member of the tribe and, subsequently, the moral paradigm of society. We can now see how these two models come close to convergence. An external, social factor, imprints on the human mind and creates within it the obligation to live in a certain way relative to the other individual members of the group in question. Freud believes that these obligations result in a repression of the libidinal instinct, the id and, therefore, religious thought is in fact a neurosis which can and should be cured; religious believers are akin to children who have not understood all that they have been told and are afraid of behaving otherwise until they know it is safe to do so.
This, arguably is why, today in our increasingly secular age, we find ourselves united with our fellows in societies, clubs etc. Even though the judgements of these two theorists remain apart there is considerable overlapping in the processes which they describe. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognise our own voices… it expresses something within us that is 17 Freud, S.
They also, for Freud form the super-ego, that layer of the mind which is filled with external influences, especially gained through our parental relationships and Oedipal experiences, and suppresses the libidinal instinct of the id.
Criticisms of Durkheim have often focussed on his disregard for the believer as a distinct entity and now, with the help of the Freudian method which can, in fact, be reconciled with sociology, we can bring the individual back in to Durkheim.
In what ways, though, does society act upon the individual in an observable way? The Elementary Forms. With the discovery of the very early Kouretes hymn to Zeus on the island of Crete Harrison20 realised that the belief in the Olympian father-god grew out of the initiation rites of the young men of the island. If we now turn to the Dionysiac celebration, the Tragedian festival, we can see that in this extremely social rite the participants not only reaffirmed their shared, communal identity, it also served to reaffirm the Freudian notion of repressed libido requiring catharsis.
New York. Edinburgh University Press. The Poetics. Part vi. The individual mind which is disenfranchised in Durkheim is brought to the fore in Freud and through a combined interpretation of the soul and ritual we can see that the origins of religion are to be found in the innate conflict in humans between their predisposition to live in societies and their libidinal desire to dominate their surroundings; this, arguably, is equally true in familial units and tribal communities.
Bibliography Allen, N. J et al. American Journal of Sociology. Bopp, F. Burkert, W. University of California Press. DiCenso, J. Durkheim, E. Evans-Pritchard, E. Fields, K. Theory and Society. Translate PDF. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels.
How do individualism and social solidarity coexist? With Marx as a theoretical backdrop, this essay examines how Weber and Durkheim conceived of the problems of modern society by underscoring the dualities that are reflected in autonomy, authority, rationalization, and other dimensions of structure inherent within social organization and interdependence. Modern society gave people more freedom to pursue individual self-interests, but the nature and forces of productive technology and its impersonal, interdependent relations problematized solidarity and moral life.
Marx believed that capitalism and its recursive system of commodification was the central defining feature and crisis of modern society. Yet, for Weber, the development of modern society is best measured by the emergence of bureaucratic administration, the formal rationalization of top-down systems of domination enacted by administrative staff.
This staff, in turn, becomes the impersonal cog-like appendages to a bureaucratic apparatus whose primacy is rationalized domination and control.
Another duality of the division of labor aside from its intrinsic fetter to capitalism is how it undermines the solidarity of at times obligatory collective beliefs and practices, i. The collective is evermore immanent within the individual, for it is the very maker of the consensus to exalt the individual over the community.
But how does one coalesce the part and whole into congruous aims? It is thus internally consistent that, just like alienation of labor is crucial for understanding andcriticizing capitalism, alienation of self-consciousness plays an equally important part "thecriticism of religion is the premise of all criticism" p. In this context, religion is defined as"opium of the people" providing temporary, false relief and keeping them "in their place" , aswell as a form of social control as an expression of the ideas of the dominating classes in a givenhistorical phase pp.
Either way, religion is dependent on the material base,and it is not an independent force of social change it is important to note that Marx does notdistinguish between or within religions, as this is not important for his argument. The only place where Marx appears to allow religion a principal, rather than secondary part is in"On the Jewish Question. In thisdiscussion, Judaism seems to play a role similar to that played by Weber's Protestantism in thedevelopment of capitalism, although not via the work ethic path, but through the emphasis it lays on money capital and commerce.
In this analysis, the Jewish "spirit", aided byChristianity, seems to play an important part in the development of modern capitalism pp. Unlike Marx, Weber assumes and does not attempt to explain the religious instinct; he merelytries to understand how it determines human action [religious action] from the actor's point ofview. By excluding other possible explan. Home Documents Comparing Marx and Weber.
Post on Dec 33 views. Category: Documents 4 download. Tags: historical context modern capitalism case of historical historical sociologist historical circumstances weber writes spiritof capitalism marxs analysisof capitalism. The following lists all responses to the assignment in the order in which they were posted.
Weber: The Role of Historical Analysis In our first paper on The Protestant Ethic, my group wrote in our thesisparagraph: "Unlike Marx, Weber does not intend to pursue a path ofdeterminism; instead, the goal of his project is to understand the spiritof capitalism within a historical context. In Capital, writing of theindividuals who exploit the working class, and providing case studies ofworkers who have endured such exploitation, Marx humanizes what he termshis "dramatis personae" by endowing them with specific individual characteristics.
The Dynamics of Time and Space in Sociological.
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