Durkheim and Weber on Sociology

The Sociological Method The sociological method was viewed very differently by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. One focused on objectivity, the other on subjectivity. The consequences of their different methodological principles in terms of each author’s understanding of society can be found in how people today view, discuss, think about and manage the development of society.

Durkheim’s methodology helped lead to the establishment of the use of statistics in social analysis and the management of what the Frankfurt School would go on to call the culture industry, as the prime dictator of social facts.

Adorno and Horkheimer were more influenced by Weber’s antipositivism, however, and Weber’s methodology helped lead to the formation not only of the Frankfurt School but also of the Austrian School of economics, which acknowledged the problem of accurately determining the relative value of goods for which reason no centralized planned economy could ever work efficiently in an organized society.

In other words, Durkheim’s methodology led to a focus in the social sciences on ways to control society by studying objective facts, while Weber’s methodology led to a focus in the social science on why society could only be understood in terms of people’s perceptions and could only be regulated by a pure bureaucracy, which was however unlikely to ever really or truly be developed. For Durkheim, sociology was the science of society and the study of social facts.

For Weber, sociology was the interpretation of the subjective understanding of social action. Weber aimed to identify the cause of social perspectives—how points of view were formed. Weber (1904) stated that “all knowledge of cultural reality.. is always knowledge from particular points of view.” By this he meant that one cannot understand “social facts” because they are entirely predicated by subjective experiences that have to be understood as personal subjective experiences—not as objective realities like fossils in the earth.

He argued that “an ‘objective’ analysis of cultural events, which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science is the reduction of empirical reality to ‘laws’, is meaningless.” Weber viewed it as meaningless primarily because “the knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality but is rather one of the various aids used by our minds for attaining this end.” Durkheim viewed society as consisting of people who were one part will and one part of the collective conscience.

The will tends to self-interest, while the collective conscience tends towards creating constraints to limit the destructive propensity of the will. By looking for social facts, Durkheim did not take into consideration the subjective experience of people and how that experience altered a thing once it was looked at by another. Instead, he looked at society in the same way an ornithologist might look at birds.

Durkheim believed society could be understood objectively, that human beings could be considered as predictable cogs in a machine, which, if programmed correctly, would yield predictable results in society. The outcome of Durkheim’s methodology in terms of how he viewed human society was that he could identify the social facts that predicate human behavior.

Durkheim (1895) stated, “A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint; or: which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations.” Durkheim thus understood society to be a system that could be studied using the scientific method: theories and hypotheses could be developed based on observations and education.

These hypotheses could be tested, just as one tests a new drug before it reaches the market to see if it is effective in addressing the problem it was designed to address. One could address the ills or problems of society by observing social facts, developing theories of human behavior, testing the theories, and evaluating the results. Durkheim’s methodology could be said to have influenced the behavioralists in so far as they sought ways to determine and manipulate human behavior.

Weber, on the other hand, viewed society as only perceptible via one’s subjective experience. His methodology was predicated on the idea that human society could not be studied using the scientific method but rather only by way of attending to the phenomenology of experience. As an interpretivist, Weber sought only to look for meaning in the ways individuals interact in society. Through their individual experiences one could distill or discover a sense of the context in which their subjects were situated.

This was essentially what the Frankfurt School did by studying the culture industry and asking the question why the working class never bothered to rise up and overthrow the owners of the means of production. Their interpretation of the working classes was that they had submitted themselves, heart, mind and soul, to the culture industry, which was run by the ruling class and programmed to keep the working class distracted and disconnected from their own working class and ethnic cultures.

Weber’s focus on interpreting the meanings of social interactions led to intense qualitative analysis. Durkheim’s focus on social facts led to intense quantitative analysis. Weber was interested in understanding the causation of social action—the reason or motive for why people did what they did, believed what they believed, organized the way they organized, lived as they lived.

He examined all the influences of society—religion, economics, politics, culture—and interpreted these examinations in ways that shed light on the human experience and opened the door for still further discussion and interpretation. Weber’s aim was to understand. Durkheim was interested in knowing what people in society were doing, what the facts were, how the collective conscience was manifested in a set of shared beliefs, attitudes and ideas.

He wanted to examine the pull and tug between the individual and the collective, the back and forth between self-interest and the common good. By identifying the facts via the scientific method, Durkheim could deduce potential theories with practical applications for society in order for them to maintain their integrity and wholeness. Weber was ultimately interested in the same thing and even involved himself in politics towards the end of his life in Germany, hoping to steer the Weimar Republic away from Revolution and back towards sanity.

His rational-legal model of society was based on purely ideal characteristics or principles of a working bureaucracy: for example, Weber called for “political neutrality” in a working bureaucracy—which is like calling for fish to swim in something other than water. For all his study of human nature, it appears that Weber never abandoned his German idealism.

Durkheim, on the other hand, was full of French secularism and sought a way to see society perfectly regulated so that all parts related to one another with unity, cohesiveness and coherence. Neither seemed amenable to accepting the mystery at the heart of human society—the mystery of inspiration, love, life, music, laughter and the soul. There was something distinctively mechanistic about their methodologies that limited their ability to view society most fully.

Durkheim especially wanted sociology to be viewed as a science rather than as an art, while Weber wanted to understand society via the subjective experiences of people and yet still clung to his belief in the pure bureaucracy—i.e., the pure organization of people in a system that would regulate human behavior as though people were pistons in an engine that could be kept well oiled by other people.

Both Durkheim and Weber were ultimately up to the same thing—not seeking only to understand but also a way to improve. Yet neither accepted the mystery and its role in human life, in human understanding. Both examined religion, both discussed the influence of religious culture—but neither had a.