The Sociologists Durkheim and Weber

mile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler and others made judgments about humanity
that they considered knowledge. mile 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 a
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.

Max Weber (1864-1920)

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 antipositivism." 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 his is
accustomed to live and to earn as much as in 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 others 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 Tnnies 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.