Sociology 101 Midterm

"The Alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. (...) It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself."

Alienation Marx

"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

Base & Superstructure Marx

"The decisive reason for advanced bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with non-technical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration."

Bureaucracy Weber

"Charismatic rule on the basis of affectual surrender to the person of the lord and his gifts of grace, in particular magical capabilities, prophecies or heroism, spiritual powers and oratorical powers. (...) The type of person who commands is the leader. The type of person who obeys is the 'disciple'."

Charismatic Rule Weber

"The main principle, however, which must guide us in the selection of a vocation is the welfare of humanity, our own perfection. One should not think that these two interests combat each other, that one must destroy the other. Rather, man's nature makes it possible for him to reach his fulfillment only by working for the perfection and welfare of his society."

Choosing an Occupation Marx

"Economic conditions first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests."

Class 'in itself' & Class 'for itself' Marx

"One might say, therefore (with a certain amount of oversimplification), that 'classes' are formed in accordance with relations of production and the acquisition of wealth, while 'status groups' are formed according to the principles governing the consumption of goods in the context of specific 'life-styles'."

Class vs. Status Weber

"There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities."

Commodity Fetishism Marx

"For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."

Communism Marx & Engels

"We live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense. (...) Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another. What is hard for modern man, and especially for the younger generation, is to measure up to everyday existance. "

Disenchantment Weber

"No sociologist (...) should think himself to good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed."

Empirical Social Research Weber

"At some point the atmosphere alters: the significance of viewpoints used unreflectively becomes uncertain, the path becomes lost in the twilight. The light cast by the great cultural problems has moved onward. Then even science appears to shift its ground and change its conceptual apparatus so that it might regard the stream of events from the heights of reflective thought. It follows those stars which alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labor."

How to Use Ideal Types? Weber

"[An ideal type] is formed by a one-sided accentuation of one of several perspectives, and through the synthesis of a variety of diffuse, discrete, individual phenomena, present sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes not at all; subsumed by such one-sided, emphatic viewpoints so that they form a uniform construction in thought. In this conceptual purity this construction can never be found in reality, it is a utopia."

Ideal Types Weber

"Legal Rule on the basis of enactment. (...) Its fundamental idea is that any law can be created and any existing law can be changed by enactment that is decided by formally correct procedure. (...) It is not the person who is obeyed by virtue of his own right but the enacted rule, which is therefore decisive for who obeys the rule and to what extent."

Legal Rule Weber

"[It] cannot be the intention to substitute for a one-sidedly 'materialist' interpretation of cultural and historical causes an equally one-sidedly 'spiritualist' interpretation. Both are equally possible, but are of equally little service to the interests of historical truth if they claim to be, not preliminaries to enquiry, but its conclusion."

Materialist vs. Idealist Explanations Weber

"The plebiscite has often historically taken on he character of an election by the ballot. Thereby, the charismatic claims appropriate to a chosen ruler is made into the elected official of the ruled according to their will. (...) So long as the leader enlists the trust of the voters by his success, he acts throughout according to his own discretion (this is leadership democracy)."

Plebiscitary Leadership Democracy Weber

"'Classes' are properly at home in the economic order, 'status groups' in the social order, that is, in the sphere of distribution of status (...). Parties, on the other hand, are primarily at home in the sphere of power. (...) It is not necessary for a party to be purely representative of either a class or a status group: mostly, parties are such only in part, and often not at all."

Political Parties & The State Weber

"The member of the sect (...) had to have qualities of a certain kind in order to enter the community circle. (...) In order to hold his own in this circle, the member had to prove repeatedly that he was endowed with these qualities. They were constantly and continuously bred in him, For, like his bliss in the beyond, his whole social existence in the here and now depended upon his 'proving' himself."

Protestant Sects and Social Control Weber

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

Religion as False Consciousness/Religion as Ideology Marx

One of Weber's leading questions in the Protestant Ethic was the genesis of a rational and methodical conduct of life on the basis of the idea of a calling and innerworldly asceticism. He argued that different religions produced different forms of conduct of life. Confucianism is described as the exact opposite to Protestantism, since here "life could not allow man an inward aspiration toward a 'unified personality,' a striving which we associate with the idea of personality. Life remained a series of occurrences. It did not become a whole placed methodically under a transcendent goal."

Religion of China Weber

"By 'action' in this definition is meant human behavior when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful (...). By 'social' action is meant an action in which the meaning intended by the agent or agents involves a relation to another person's behavior and in which that relation determines the way in which the action proceeds"

Social Action Weber

"The lofty hopes placed, in the Communist Manifesto, in the collapse of bourgeois society have been replaced by much more prosaic expectations. Amongst these is, first, the theory that socialism is by its very nature the next phase in evolution, since the productive activity of the economy is becoming increasingly 'socialized.' What this means is that the individual entrepreneur is replaced by the joint stock company with its appointed managers, and that enterprises are being established by the state (...). Above all, what this form of socialization means is a proliferation of officials, that is, of office staff with their specialist commercial or technical training (...). It is the dictatorship of the official, not that of the worker, which, at present anyway, is on the advance."

Socialism Weber

"Traditional Rule is based on the belief in the sanctity of orders and powers of rule which have existed since times immemorial. (...) In the place of official duty or office discipline, the personal loyalty of the servant prevails within the relational organization of the administrative staff."

Traditional Rule Weber

"Social action, like any kind of action, may be (i) rational in the sense of employing appropriate means of a given end (...), (ii) rational in the sense that it is an attempt to realize some absolute value (...), (iii) affectively (and in particular emotionally) determined, that is, the result of current emotional impulses and states of feeling, or (iv) traditional behavior, the expression of a settled custom." Max Weber (1921-1922): Economy and Society (Source of today's text on "The Nature of Social Action")

Types of Action Weber

"Seen in their pure form, there are only three grounds for the legitimacy of domination."

Types of Legitimate Rule Weber

"It is said, and I agree, that politics is out of place in the lecture-room. (...) To take a practical political stand is one thing, and to analyze political structures and party positions is another. When speaking in a political meeting about democracy, one does not hide one's personal standpoint (...). It would be an outrage, however, to use words in this fashion in a lecture or in the lecture-room."

Value Judgments in Social Science Weber

"The Puritan wanted to be man with a calling; we are compelled to be. For when asceticism was transferred from the monastic cell to the life of the calling and moral concern with this world began to predominate, this helped to created the powerful economic world, bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanical production, which today shapes the way of life of all who are born into it (...). In Baxter's view, concern for external goods should lie on the shoulders of the Saints only like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate has allowed that cloak to become a casing as hard as steel."

Vision of Contemporary Society Weber

"'Sociology' is a word used in many different senses. In the sense adopted here, it means the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces."

What is Sociology? Weber

"I hope to have collected more than sufficient evidence of the fact, that - be their words what they please - the middle-classes intend in reality nothing else but to enrich themselves by your labour while they can sell its produce, and to abandon you to starvation as soon as they cannot make a profit by their indirect trade in human flesh."

Working Class Point of View Engels