Society is a religious entity: what is venerated in religion is actually society.
The question of meaning in Durkheim is related to collective representations. A society does not exist without collective representations (something that is in collective consciousness).
Collective representations are things that grant us access to meaning; eg. to believe that we live in a democracy is a lens through which we can understand that we actually live in a society.
In many premodern societies, religion plays the role that society plays in our society; they are two sides of the same coin.
A system of classification is a set of terms used to classify things in the world according to certain features. This system is what allows us to communicate; fundamentally, this is what culture is about; they are systems of classification, and thus different cultures will interpret and give meaning to the world in different ways, they subdivide the world differently.
Religion is the basis of classification:
The basic way to classify objects in religion is to distinguish them from being either sacred or profane.
Sacred objects might not be touched, eaten, or played with but a profance object on the other hand might be either provoke disgust or be allowed to do what you will with.
Everywhere where we can see this distinction, there is a kind of religion.
”the real characteristic of all religious phenomena is that they always suppose a biprartite division of the whole universe, known and knowable, into two classes which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude each other. Sacred things are those which the interdictions protect and isolate; profane things, those to which these interdictions are applied.”
Hume: categories are rooted in experience
Kant: categories are a priori
We are not born with categories nor are we taught them entirely from the world; different societies have different systems of classification and we need to explain why different societies have different ways to classify. Categories are collective representations and nothing else.
Durkheim claims that there is a causal relation between the social order and the conceptual order. (However he also presents a weaker version of that argument, arguing also that sometimes it is just correspondence).
Ie. it mirrors the structure of society; the subdivisions of eg. clans in a society would also be reflected in the system of classification. For example, every kind of good thing in English is related to ”work” and one can only wonder why.
Logical discipline has its roots in the social discipline.
”The most essential notions of the human mind, notions of time, of space, of genus and species, of force and causality, of personality, those, in a word, which the philosophers have labelled categories and which dominate the whole of logical thought, have been eleaborated in the very womb of religion.”
Cults and rituals also function to reinforce social cohesion; the question is again what role social beliefs have in society, what function they play.
”the effect of the cult is to recreate periodically a moral being in which we depend as it depends on us.”
Every society has a religious dimension: ”there is something eternal in religion.”
Function and functional analysis:
Functional explanation became important in the first half of the 20:th century: the notion of function was borrowed from the life sciences. Just as each organ has a function to the whole, and we can explain the body, in functional terms, by showing what is the function to each organ and what it contributes to the organism as a whole.
Functionalists are interested in what structures maintains the order.
Does this make sense?
When we focus on the functionality of everything, then we already presume an order to things which might not be the case. Thus we might become blind of the dysfunctional dynamics to society.
But furthermore, what does functional explanation itself do?
There seems to be a confusion between cause and effect.
It situates the cause of religion having a positive effect on society, but it is also the cause of society, thus it seems like a vacuous point from the get-go.
Durkheim, differently from most functional analysts adopts a more nuanced position however: religion is functional for society, it reinforces certain social values, and thereby contributes to the maintenance of social cohesion.
It cannot explain why religion emerged, but explains only how religion continues society.
Society is a strange type of object that does not really have a direct cause and effect chain, eg. Marx would argue that it is dialectic, there is a kind of circle, everything affects everything and vice-versa, there isn’t really a first cause, there is a kind of mutuality instead and Durkheim would agree with this though he puts it in terms of social facts determining social facts.
Another critique of Durkheim is that his categorisation between sacred and profane was what really made society into a God, ie. Religions are conceptualised as having both the sacred and profane but this is in itself a cateogrisation and thus its own religion and the idea becomes circular – Evans-Pritchard.
Collective effervescence: the collective emotion and passion groups experience when they are together.
Weber
Weber is writing in the German tradition relating to the Geisteswissenschaften from Dilthey (whilst Durkheim was writing in relation to Comte’s positivism).
In Germany after Hegel, History was the most important science over all. The world unfolds itself in history and thus it became the most important to study.
Neo-Kantianism was taking up after Hegel in the 19:th century however with Rickert and Dilthey.
Rickert: culture is a system of values, irreducible to physics.
Dilthey: metod = interpretation, empathetic understanding of an actor in history. He introduced the concept of Verstehen as a specific hermeneutical key to making history. You have to answer for someone about what their intentions were when doing a historical act. When I do something generally, I am working of a Verstehen (noun) and empathetically understand the meaning of the objects around me, the horizon is clear. The historical world is a world full of meanings.
Dilthey emphatically argued for the clear cut difference between the Naturalenwissenschaften (natural sciences work with explanation, Erklaren) and the Geisteswissenschaften (which work with Verstehen). The natural sciences and the ”spiritual” (meaning) sciences. Strictly speaking, in the Geisteswissenschaften, repetition does not occur. There is never pure repetiton, even if there is a kind of repetetive happening, it still happens with the baggage left over from it happening before also. Every event is entirely unique. You have to study every historical event in its pure uniqueness (Einzigkeit). Every historical event is influenced by a horizon of previous meaning in which we stand (Geist).
There was also a clear anti-naturalism at this time.
One does not write history by establishing causal relations (though some do now in the analytic tradition). Writing history is writing a story.
Officially Weber thought of himself as an economic historian and not a sociologist.
However, in the end he did basically sociology.
His grounding theory relies on social acts.
He develops a number of distinction, eg. between behaviour and action. Behaviour lacks specific meaning, whilst action is intended and thus has specific meaning.
(In Marx there is a focus on the conditions of action, of which individuals could be unaware, thus this distinction is not; in Durkheim meaning itself is social.)
Furthermore, he talks of social action, sociology is a science that ”concerns itself with the intepretative understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences” Economy and Society
Social action is meaningful action oriented to the other. This is what sociologists should study.
We have to answer what someone’s intentions were in relation to a certain action done in society.
(Marx didn’t really unpack the notion of action but focused on the conditions of them, Weber is doing something completely differently.)
For Weber, action has a subjective intention.
Once we have understood the subjective intention of an actor, we can start to see that they in their own way functioned causally.
We have to understand an agent by understanding the Verstehen of an agent. We have to understand their understanding of the situation. What were the meanings they saw attached to certain things.
eg. Worker’s strikes: there seems to be a link between employment and strikes. In Durkheim we would say that they are two social facts which we can gather data about and thus do a kind of mass psychology about. For Weber, we have to understand the reasons, intentions and motivations of people, about what they were thinking in relation to beginning a worker’s strike. Maybe they had a different interpretation about what unemployment could mean for them than for example their work-buyer, they could have good reason to strike from their position.
This is called methodological individualism; social phenomena are the consequence of individual action.
”When a referens is made ina sociological context to a state, a nation, a corporation […] or to similiar collectivities, what is meant is only a certain kind of development of actual or possible actions of individual persons.”
Collective unities are not real things, but are made of up actors working in unison to some goal, who does make actions in regard to that goal.
In Weber, there is almost no referens to society as a whole at all.
In Marx and Durkheim there is either a society or a mode of production, but in Weber this sense of unity is not present.
In Weber there are 4 (5) types of social actions to study.
Affective action: guided by emotions.
Traditional: done out of custom or habit, the result of repetition.
Instrumental rational action: ”Determined by expectations as to the behaviour of objects in the environment and of other human beings; these expectations were used as ’conditions’ ir ’means for
the attainment of the actor’s own rationally calculated ends’.”
Focuses on the means of actions in relation to an external world.
Is about efficiency. To organise one’s action efficiently. It means we are focused on the inputs to which we invest in order to get higher outputs in relation to that.
Eg. Corporations (or rather their leaders) don’t really have a specific value-goal, but rather have a pre-given kind of goal, ie. To optimise the outputs economically of the company. They don’t really exist for any other reason. (It can be said, rather to be an ever-prevailing kind of rationality, it is the rationality that governs our current society). Everything in society turns around optimisation by actors (Weber does not like this, we are sick with optimisation).
Value-rational action: ”Determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behaviour, independently of the prospects of success.”
Not oriented to an external goal: the action is an end in itself.
Focuses on the ends of actions.
Eg. modern day vegetarians who organise their life according their value of vegetarianism, which is an end in itself.
(Real actions = a combination of all).
How can we who conceptualise everything understand every unique phenomena for itself?
This become an epistemological problem.
The solution that Weber develops, is the theory of Ideal Types.
Ideal Type
Not a hypothesis, but it helps to formulate hypotheses
Not a description but a means of description
A unified ”analytical construct” (Gedankenbild – a construction of thought), a rational synthesis for heuristic purposes. Instruments or tools to study certain phenomena. They are constructions which we don’t consider anything but constructs.
They don’t exist in reality, but offers a way for us to approximate reality, in its individuality.
”The ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view, and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena whcih are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasised viewpoints unto a unified analytical construct. In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found anywhere in reality. It is a utopia.”
Kind of like a mental hammer with which we can hammer together a proper interpretation of social actions.
Eg. Weber’s types of legitimate domination or the above 4 types of social actions.