THE SOCIOLOGY THEORISTS PAPER

The Sociology Theorists Paper

The Sociology Theorists Paper

Introduction

Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, acting at times as sociologists, economic theorists, and above all, social critics, each take pains in their writings to identify key flaws inherent in the capitalist system that had begun to dominate modern industrial society in the 1800s. In the increasingly urban, industrializing world of the nineteenth century, the socio-political landscape in Europe was characterized by a deepening, widening class struggle. Whether revolutionary or reformist, these thinkers felt obliged to address this struggle and to consider the role that capitalism had played in bringing it about. Ultimately, Marx, Durkheim and Weber each provide differing accounts regarding the ways in which the urban society of the 1800s was deficient, and what would be needed to fix it. Essentially, it is an underlying assumption about human nature and the nature of human society that affects each thinker's analysis of capitalist society.

Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim

Marx, more than any other theorist, concentrated his ire and directed his fury at the capitalist system. The structures of capitalism, for Marx, were responsible for creating all of the problems of modern life. As such, the only way to solve these problems was to topple the structures. Unwilling to accept that certain "evils"--exploitation, alienation and endless expansion--were necessary components of the modern industrial system, Marx endeavored to overhaul the consciousness of the day by bringing into sharp relief the pernicious conflict between capitalists and workers. Hence, Marx, though not a paradigm sociologist by any means, was nothing if not a revolutionary as it pertained to social theory (Ritzer 20-23).

Marx was horrified by the capitalist system because it exploited the common worker by alienating him from the benefits of his only property, his labor. On Marx's analysis, the capitalist, in pursuit of the almighty profit, will pay his workers only what they require in order to survive; in this, each individual worker's labor is systematically undervalued, as that labor is worth more to the capitalist than it is to the laborer. The surplus value of the labor is retained by the capitalist and reinvested in the system, allowing that system to expand and in turn exploit more workers. This phenomenon, called the labor theory of value, provides the foundation for bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat working class (Gregory & Stuart 69). The alienation of the worker is near-total. As explained by George Ritzer, the worker becomes alienated not only from his "productive activity", that is, his labor, but also from the product of that labor, from his fellow man, and from his own potential as a conscious human being (51-52). So complete is this alienation that the worker forgets that it is his labor that gives a commodity its value in the first place (called by Marx the fetishism of commodities); the worker wrongly assumes that the market produces value, and the "social character of private labor, and the social relations between the individual producers" is thus concealed (Marx ...