Weber & Durkheim Different Views

Weber & Durkheim Different Views of Modernity, Similar Fears of Modernity -- Durkheim and Weber It was common during the 19th and early 20th centuries to speak of the progress of humanity, as if each new innovation in modern technology and living was an act of positive moral advancement. However, two of the foremost sociologists of this period both took a dim view of this entirely optimistic notion of modernity.

The first analyst of modern bureaucracy, the Industrial Revolution and the technical age, Max Weber despaired of what he called the iron cage of rationality. The student of ancient humanity, Emile Durkheim, bemoaned the condition of modern angst or estrangement from traditional, more communal ways of life, known as anomie. These two men both feared the tendency of modern life to curtail the better aspects of human nature, rather than to reinforce what each saw as the essential purpose of humankind.

Progress might be great, economically and technologically, but the impact upon human society and the human soul of progress was questionable. Weber's central concern was that the iron cage of rationality would hem in human creativity rather than foster human growth. In Weber's view, the evolving modern capitalistic system had elements of alienation, bureaucracy, and constraint built into its structure that curtailed, rather than facilitated human freedom. According to Weber, all of society was becoming increasingly rational and bureaucratic.

"Discipline" had inexorably taken over "ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized. This universal phenomenon more and more restricts the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct." (Weber, p. 1156, cited by Elwell, 1996) As society becomes more efficient, the element that makes human beings 'human,' the human desire to produce meaningful and unique vibrant culture becomes difficult to express in the face of the standard operating procedures required by the modern state and economy.

Once people produced personal thoughts and handicrafts within their family and kin structures -- now the modern media tells persons what to think and what to buy. One of the seductive aspects of such industrial rationalization is that it apparently makes society more efficient through scientifically determined steps designed to create a better functioning world. That is why it is an iron, or man-made cage, for although human beings made the cage, once the bars of the cage are welded in place the cage is difficult to escape.

"From a purely technical point-of-view, a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it.

It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks." (Weber, p.223, cited by Elwell, 1996) But should efficiency, however, be the highest aspiration of human life? In modern life efficient rationality is pursued to a near pathological degree, Weber believed.

Following the rules in government and in business had become even more important than serving the persons the bureaucracy was put in place to serve, the persons who created the system of capitalism itself. Rational calculation had turned human beings into cogs. Emile Durkheim, writing somewhat later than Weber, also speculated upon the emotional and moral impact upon human life of modernity.

Durkheim also examined the daily life of persons living in a modern and industrial bureaucratic state and working for the supposedly rational administrative and economic systems created by capitalism. Durkheim called the unfortunate mental state produced by modernity "anomie." Anomie is best expressed as the state of alienation felt by the modern urbanite, dwelling far away from traditional family structures and religious rituals. "Anomie is impossible whenever interdependent organs are sufficiently in contact and sufficiently extensive.

If they are close to each other, they are readily aware, in every situation, of the need which they have of one another, and consequently they have an active and permanent feeling of mutual dependence." (Durkheim, p.184, cited by Dunman, 1996) In contrast to Weber, rather than fearing too many constraints as a result of industrialization, Durkheim believed that the dangers of alienation lay in having no connections or confines within accepted laws of family, culture, and traditional governance.

(Dunman, 1999) Durkheim felt that a lack of societal limits on behavior in an anonymous, modern society led to sadness and despair, which he saw as two of the central pathologies of the modern condition. Industrialization took persons away from existing norms and the naturally evolved rhythms of life and family, and forced them to create their own laws in estranged and anonymous cities, a nearly impossible task.

Human beings required human connections to function, according to Durkheim -- but connections, according to Weber, that were created by bureaucracy controlled human behavior to rigid degree that these chains hurt rather than helped human beings in their desire to live a better existence.

Despite the radical differences between these two theorist's views of the modern condition, Weber's despair of the constraints enforced by bureaucratic rationalization and Durkheim's fear of the dangers of the freedom in a world without tribal law, one might suggest that both sociologists were paradoxically correct in determining the pathologies of the modern age. The average office worker today lives by the clock of businesses, from morning to night, trapped in a cubicle.

He or she is always limited by time constraints, the surveillance of an employer fearing 'time theft, an anonymous government that forces him or her to pay taxes on a schedule, and a social world that requires conspicuous consumption.