Weber saw rationalization as leading to an “iron cage” of rationalized systems. Such a cage makes it increasingly difficult for people to escape the process. This gives a clear sense of his negative opinion of rationalization.
Such a negative view of rationalization and its constraints and socially harmful effects has persisted. It is frequently portrayed in popular entertainment, including George Orwell’s novel, and later movie, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), as well as movies such as Brazil (1985), V for Vendetta (2005), the Hunger Games series (2012–2015), and television programs like The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–present) and Black Mirror (2011–present).
Ask Yourself
Efforts to exploit, alienate, and control us continue to this day. Is only capitalism to blame for this? Are there causes to be found in even larger systems in the modern world? Or are more microscopic sources, such as the nature of human beings, responsible for these efforts?
In sum, while for Marx the key problems in the modern world were the exploitation and alienation that are part of the capitalist economy, for Weber the central problem was the control that rationalized structures such as capitalism exercise over us in virtually all aspects of our lives. Furthermore, while Marx was optimistic and had great hope for socialism and communism, Weber was a pessimist about most things. Socialism and communism, he felt, would not eliminate or prevent the iron cage from enveloping us: “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now” (Weber [1919] 1958, 128).
Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) developed a theoretical orientation very different from those of his peers (Fournier 2013; Milibrandt and Pearce 2011). For Durkheim, the major concern of the science of sociology was social facts. These are macro-level phenomena, such as social structures and cultural norms and values, that stand apart from people and, more important, impose themselves on people. Examples of social facts that impose themselves on you include the structures of your university and the U.S. government. Durkheim felt that such structures and their constraints were not only necessary but also highly desirable.
Émile Durkheim had a number of powerful effects on sociology including focusing on macro-level social phenomena (“social facts”) and doing theoretically informed empirical research.
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Both Marx and Weber had a generally positive sense of people as thoughtful, creative, and naturally social. They criticized social structures for stifling and distorting people’s innate characteristics. In contrast, Durkheim had a largely negative view of people as being slaves to their passions, such as lust, gluttony, and other deadly sins. Left to their own devices, he believed, people would seek to satisfy those passions. However, the satisfaction of one passion would simply lead to the need to satisfy other passions. This endless succession of passions could never be satisfied. In Durkheim’s view, passions should be limited, but people are unable to exercise this control themselves. They need social facts that are capable of limiting and controlling their passions.
The most important of these social facts is the collective conscience, or the set of beliefs shared by people throughout society (Bowring 2016). In Durkheim’s view, the collective conscience is highly desirable not only for society but also for individuals. For example, it is good for both society and individuals that we share the belief that we are not supposed to kill one another. Without a collective conscience, murderous passions would be left to run wild. Individuals would be destroyed, of course, and eventually so would society.
This leads us to Durkheim’s Suicide ([1897] 1951), one of the most famous research studies in the history of sociology. Because he was a sociologist, Durkheim did not focus on why any given individual committed suicide. Rather, he dealt with the more collective issue of suicide rates and why one group of people had a higher rate of suicide than another. The study was in many ways an ideal example of the power of sociological research. Using publicly available data, Durkheim found, for example, that suicide rates were not related to psychological and biological factors such as alcoholism or race and heredity. The causes of differences in suicide rates were not to be found within individuals. Rather, suicide rates were related to social factors that exert negative pressure on the individual. These include collective feelings of rootlessness and normlessness. Suicide also constitutes a threat to society because those who commit suicide are rejecting a key aspect of the collective conscience—that one should not kill oneself.
Suicide has at least two important characteristics. First, the study was designed, like much sociological research today, to contribute to the public understanding of an important sociological problem or issue. Second, and more important for the purposes of this introduction to sociology, it demonstrated the power of sociology to explain one of the most private and personal of acts. Suicide had previously been seen as the province of the field of psychology, and responsibility for the act was most often accorded to the individual. Durkheim believed that if sociology could be shown to be applicable to suicide, it could deal with any and all social phenomena.
Ask Yourself
What do you think led Durkheim to believe that if sociology could explain suicide, it could explain all social phenomena? Do you agree with him? Why or why not?
Durkheim differentiated among four types of suicide. The most important one for our purposes is anomic suicide. Anomie is defined as people’s feeling that they do not know what is expected of them in society—the feeling of being adrift in society without any clear or secure moorings. According to Durkheim, the risk of anomic suicide increases when people do not know what is expected of them, when society’s regulation over them is low, and when their passions are allowed to run wild.
More generally, Durkheim believed that anomie is the defining problem of the modern world. In contrast to Marx and Weber, who worried about too much external control over people, Durkheim, at least in his thinking on anomie, worried about too little control, especially over passions. This broad view appeared in another famous work by Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society ([1893] 1964). He began by describing an early form of society with little division of labor. People there were held together by a type of solidarity—mechanical solidarity—stemming from the fact that they all did pretty much the same kinds of work, including hunting, gathering, and cooking. More important, people in this type of society had a strong collective conscience.
However, as Durkheim demonstrated, an increasing division of labor took place over time. Instead of continuing to do the same sorts of things, people began to specialize as, for example, hunters, farmers, and cooks. What held them together was not their similarities but their differences. That is, they had become more dependent on one another; people needed what others did and produced in order to survive. Durkheim called this later form of social organization organic solidarity. This can be a powerful form of solidarity, but it is accompanied by a decline in the power of the collective conscience. Because people were doing such different things, they no longer necessarily believed as strongly in the same set of ideas. This weakened collective conscience was a problem, Durkheim argued, because it progressively lost the power to control people’s passions. Further, because of the weakened collective conscience, people were more likely to feel anomic and, among other things, were more likely to commit anomic suicide.
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel’s (1858–1918) major importance in contemporary sociology lies in his contributions to micro theory. Simmel believed that sociologists should focus on the way in which conscious