(SPENGLER, DURKHEIM and WEBER – continued)
SPENGLER, DURKHEIM and WEBER (2 of 2)
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler and others made judgments about humanity that they considered knowledge. Émile Durkheim held to a different approach to knowledge. He was a French sociologist (1858-1917) and philosophically a positivist – as had been the founder of sociology, Auguste Comte. Durkheim was rigorously empirical, recognizing as knowledge only that which he could see and measure. In his social research he pursued facts disconnected from the matters of spirit that Spengler held dear. Spengler was more of a man of the past, despite being younger than Durkheim by 22 years. Durkheim was of influence on the future that Spengler thought in decline. Durkheim has been described as establishing sociology as an academic discipline and as having refined the positivism of Auguste Comte.
As a sociologist, Durkheim was interested in what was happening with society at large rather than the specific actions of individuals. Or one could say he was interested in individuals as products of their society's culture and institutions. In his view, social science should be holistic. Durkheim was a "structural functionalist." He examined the interconnectedness of various aspects of society such as cultural norms and institutions and built his ideas on observable specifics rather than poetic or intuitive hunches. He pursued science in the form of empirical data, hypothesis and mathematical deduction. He gave many lectures and published numerous sociological studies on subjects such as education, crime, religion, and suicide. He tried to be objective in his examination of society, despite his prejudices.
Durkheim was a supporter of France's Third Republic – opposed to France's monarchist reactionaries. He is also described as having had "sympathy towards socialism," putting himself at odds with Nietzschean elitism. And he was Jewish, which also put him at odds with Rightists, especially those who saw modern intellectuality and socialism as a Jewish conspiracy. The Dreyfus affair of 1894 is said to have strengthened his activist stance.
Durkheim was concerned about French society holding together while diverse in values, ethnicity and religion. He saw some remedy through education and knowledge.
Marxists would see Durkheim's work as too atomistic and too limited. They disliked Durkheim's lack of an overview of historical development and lack of support for the labor movement.
Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (pronounced Veyber) was six years younger than Durkheim. His father was a wealthy politician belonging to Germany's National Liberal Party – a centrist party that supported Bismarck's foreign policy and the interests of big business. By the age of fourteen, Max had written about the course of German history, history in general and what he knew of Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Livy, Goethe, Spinoza, Kant and Schopenhauer.
As a sociologist Weber rejected the positivism of France's Compte and Durkheim. He was following the German philosophical tradition of hostility toward positivism. In its place, with a German colleague Georg Simmel, he established "methodological anti-positivism." They wanted to describe society drawing from history, reason and their own sensibilities – not far from their fellow German Oswald Spengler, sixteen years younger than Weber. Weber's most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was published in 1905, thirteen years before Spengler's Decline of the West.
Weber wrote of sociology as "a science that attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects." Webers anti-positivism was a proposal that research concentrate on cultural norms, values, symbols.
In his book Economy and Society, published posthumously in 1922, Weber had a chapter titled "Bureaucracy." He wrote:
Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. Bureaucratic administration... in so far as it can... hides its knowledge and action from criticism
Weber claimed that Adam Smith was wrong about economic attitudes of people being inherent or of nature. Weber claimed these attitudes to be a product of the society and time in which they lived.
Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that, "A man does not by nature wish to earn more and more money, but simply live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose."
In the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he argued that religious differences affected the way that Western societies and Eastern societies developed. "
Weber was close to the Vienna School of Economics. He complained that workers in a socialist society would still be working under a hierarchy, made worse by its fusion with state power. Weber claimed that collective ownership of the means of production would abolish any kind of efficient calculation and produce gross inefficiency. Weber and the Vienna economist Ludwig von Mises were acquainted and shared an admiration for each other’s work.
Marxists were unimpressed. At the time of Weber's death, in 1920, Lenin and his party were hoping to create an economy that would eventually function under an authority that was collective similar to hunter-gatherer societies. Weber's fellow German colleague Ferdinand Tönnies invented the view of two types of human association – a view hostile to Marxism. Hunter-gatherer societies functioned communally because they were small and integrated, and such communal functioning did not work in a modern, complex society. Hunter-gatherer societies he labeled Gemeinschaft (community). Modern social organization he labeled Gesellschaft.
Copyright © 1998-2018 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
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