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Conclusion
Sociology as a discipline is a product of modern society. Sociological theory, therefore, endeavours to account for modern society. This is true for all the classical statements about the emergence and transformation of human society more or less between the period of the French Revolution of the later half of the eighteenth-century and the end of Word War I. It was a period that saw a dramatic change in people's lives and social living. A liberal, modern, bureaucratic nation-state grew in this period in the West, breaking away from the rural, conservative, theology-inspired feudal States. Classical sociological theory is exclusively an intellectual response to theorize on the problems and issues associated with the emergence of the modern period.
Beyond the classical period sociological encyclopedic theory moved away from grand theorization to the task of applying the insights drawn from the great classicists to address more contemporary issues. Here, the question of self and methodology figured prominently. Various schools of thought have prospered, being inspired by contesting traditions of sociology, which carry forward the task of authorizing the practice of sociology as an autonomous discipline. More and more finer methodological issues have been deliberated upon, yet the core concern of all sociological theory continue to revolve on the question of individual–societal relationship. The nature of social organization and the place of an individual in such an organization continue to be the rallying point for sociological theories. The root of such theorization lies, as we have noted before, in the socio-historical context of the origin of the discipline. The new way in which the subjects viewed the social world and their place in it, was first stimulated by the events of the late eighteenth-century. And it continued for more than a century whereby all the salient features of a modern age were fully established. The changing subject-position vis-à-vis the social world, however, continued with the proliferation and dramatic changes of technology along with widespread societal changes which mark contemporary social life. Modern theories are just logical responses to such a scenario.
The spirit of science governed the embryonic stage of sociology. The classical theories reflect, however, that such theorists have simultaneously tried to make sociology both objective and value-orienting. This is best exemplified by the works of Max Weber. But to start with the foremost theorist Karl Marx, we understand that although he was not a professional sociologist, his profound thought has been the most important influence on the subsequent emergence of sociology as an academic discipline.
INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY
The idea of progress and the role of individuals in the development of society dominated classical thinkers like Marx, Durkheim, Weber et al. The idea of progress and seeking for a more appropriate social order took shape to counter the dwindling individual–social ties, growing pauperization of industrial workers, social disorganization and problems associated with the decline of traditional religious ways of life. Marx with his unique method of dialectically applying materialism saw the historical process as one created by active human beings. A predetermined state of being is refuted in favour of human agency. Capitalism for him was a necessary step forward in human history. Marx related the enforced and dehumanized division of labour to the question of material ownership of means of production. Progress for him was transcendence from such a state of society to a state marked by social ownership of means of production and socially directed division of labour.
Dialectical thinking is the essence of Marx's writings; while asserting the creative potential of individual beings he held that freedom can only be accomplished within the confines of particular and historically variable types of society. Demystifying the illusion of freedom offered by capitalism, Marx tried to drive home the conception of the individual as a being who could attain self-determination only in association with others at particular junctures of history, defying the logic of private appropriation.
For Marx, alienation was integral to the expansion of the division of labour and he treated the abolition of it as synonymous with the abolition of private property relations. According to Marx, emergence of class societies in history is dependent upon the growth of the specialization of tasks made possible by the existence of surplus production. In contrast, for Durkheim, the growth of the division of labour represented the integrating consequences of specialization rather than in terms of the formation of class systems. Durkheim, too, recognized the alienating character of the division of labour, but his proposals for the eradication of this dehumanization of the worker were based upon the moral consolidation of specialization in the division of labour.
As a direct bearer of the spirit of positivism as formulated by Comte and Saint-Simon, Durkheim advanced the idea of scientific study of social facts. Subsequently, he suggested that human progress was directly linked to the successful discovery of the laws found in society. As against pathologic and anomic conditions of division of labour, for Durkheim a normal solidaristic social system in modernity would require norms and laws which would define the relational conditions of reciprocity and cooperation among differentiated elements in the larger social context.
Max Weber, on the other hand, represented an altogether different tradition in sociological thought. Weber carried the neo-Kantian idealist tradition in his sociological theorization. He adopted a historical and ideographic approach in order to grasp the subjective realm of human society, to be precise, the cultural reality. Weber had an overriding interest in the unfolding of the rational modern order, but he theorized the overarching forces of instrumental rationality as a deterrent for any realization of human freedom. He studied the rationalization of culture and of everyday life by emphasizing that rationalism was the defining feature of contemporary Western civilization. He went on to conclude that there is an inherent ambivalence and tension in the modern world. Modern societies have replaced substantive meanings by formal rationality. The formal rationality being empty of any orientations towards things of ultimate significance relies on only instrumental effectiveness.
The emergent modern world for Weber is an ensemble of pursuits of instrumental efficiency. Hence, despite the feeling of mastery over the world, contemporary modern individuals would contemplate a universe that has become indifferent to humanity and lacks meaning. Weber was not different from Marx in conceiving the fate of the individual under advanced industrial societies. But he, unlike Marx, did not envision a possible form of social arrangement where the individual and society could exist in perfect harmony. The predicament of the modern individual was located in the encompassing techno-rational bureaucratic order. Unlike Marx, Weber could not theorize an emancipatory condition of the inhuman rationalizing trends.
Vilfredo Pareto, too, adopted a pessimistic view about the individual's place in a modern society. He saw a growing incapacity of the individual to take rational control of destiny. In his sociology, human nature is seen as relatively immune to the effects of social and historical change. Taking an anti-Enlightenment stand Pareto refuted the progressive march of human society in terms of rationality principle. The dead weight of sentiments, essentially psychologically derived, was Pareto's central emphasis in theorizing upon the stability of society.
The events of World War I, too, impacted upon sociological theory. Apart from the rise of Marxian practice across the world, the emergence of the United States as a global power led to an accompanying development of its sociology departments. The leading figure in this initiative was Talcott Parsons who treaded the tested path of the great European thinkers to develop a grand theory of society in systemic terms. As against the revolutionary overhauling of post-War societies inspired by Marxist theories of change, Parson's theory tried to synthesize the classical sociological theorists of Europe to reconcile social action and social structure. The idea was to offer a view of society as a system, the stability of which is ensured by an underlying pattern of value consensus that was beyond individual choice.
Under the leadership of Parsons, functionalism tried to understand society in terms of its systemic features. The integration of individual beings with the social system was theorized in terms of an interacting and inter-penetrating sub-system of personality, culture and society, each considered as quasi-autonomous systems. In terms of motivations, orientations and situational constraints Parsons used his general theory of social action to highlight system equilibrium. The image of society developed thereby rested on a macro-analysis of the parts of society and the various actors. The place of individual human agency and the scope for social change was minimally treated, although subsequently Robert Merton attempted to make the perspective more dynamic. But the emphasis on structure neglected the dimension of process in such structural–functional theorizations.
As against the consensual view of society inspired by the functional school of thought, the mid-twentieth-century saw a rise of conflict approaching the society. Theorists like Coser, Mills and Dahrendrof advanced an alternative image of society. That society is coordinated as a result of power struggles and power differentials. The existence of power differentials and interest groups make conflict an inevitable feature for all societies to come. If the consensus theorists exaggerated on the shaping of a normative order, the conflict theorists went to the other extreme of explaining only the constraining aspects of a society always caught in power struggles.
The central position of the individual in sociological theory, without ignoring the social structure was accorded by symbolic interactionist school, while the social exchange theorists posited an image of individual who is rational in calculating pleasures, profits and pains. Hence, a society is the result of such interacting individuals. However, group structure and corresponding interactions are theorized more at a micro-level ignoring large-scale structures. Symbolic interactionists like George Herbert Mead, on the other hand, analysed how the individual ‘Being’ and the ‘Self’ result from social processes. Focusing on the aspects of the symbolic order it is being shown how an individual is fitted into the large patterns of social interaction. To be fair, these perspectives throw less light on society, and instead engage us rigorously on understanding human behaviour. In an emergent world of growing exchanges between variously placed cultures such micro-perspectives on human behaviour and social exchange are useful to study how people use different non-verbal signs and align themselves spatially in different ways during interactive situations.
Away from the project of classical sociological thinkers, more and more sociology during the later half of the twentieth-century delimited its scope to the micro aspects of social living. Given the growing scepticism with objective mode of analysis of varied social phenomena, more rigorous attempts were made at the methodological issues. The ethnomethodologists attempted to probe into human behaviour by examining the methods that people themselves employ to make sense of their world. As against traditional sociology, which studies society as reality without and a priori, the ethnomethodological perspective tried to construct an image of society through the everyday practices of the people who constitute such a society. Phenomenologists in a somewhat similar vein made the conscious experience of individuals as its subject matter. The everyday taken-for-granted approach that people invoke in their perceptions of the social world is the primary focus of such sociological theory. Such perspectives are to be credited in making Sociology a reflexive science of society.
The events leading to World War II and the failures of orthodox theories of progress and human emancipation resulted in the appearance of the critical school of sociological theories. The experiences of totalitarian dictatorship enjoying popular support created a great disillusionment with the promises of modernity. The age of overwhelming bureaucratic control and dominance of mass media prompted thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer and others to indict capitalist modernity. The social and psychological dimensions of suffocating individual self-expression and personality were probed to unmask the techniques of mass deception and manipulation. Reinvesting individual consciousness with critical creative agency, critical theories foresaw the coming of post-modern theory. In essence, critical theory offered a view of modern society in which growing rationalization turned against reason. It laid threadbare the face of such society which reduces human choices to consumer options, and in turn lacks the capacity to transform and liberate social institutions.
The debacle of the promise of rationality and reason in organizing a just and fair society led to an altogether rejection of modernist thinking by post-modern thinkers like Lyotard, Baudrillard and others. With multi-faceted development of contemporary societies in the post-industrial phase of development, the idea of a single coherent reality is being questioned. No longer is a foundational theory of society tenable for such a post-modern society. Hence, all the grand theorizing and narratives that mark traditional sociological theories are led to rest in favour of a theory that insists on continuous deferrals of meanings and ever shifting positions of individual identity in a world designed more by a virtual reality. Here the society is bereft of the ‘social’, and is instead bombarded with a hyperreality at the behest of the mass media. Amidst such pronouncements of the eclipse of the ‘social’, post-structuralist thinker Pierre Bourdieu offered a methodologically strengthened understanding of the relation between human agency and social structure. Adopting an idea of relationality, Bordieu depicted an image of society where cultural production and its products are situated as well as constituted in terms of a number of processes and social realities. By using the concept of habits he showed the objectification of social structure at the level of individual subjectivity. Thereby, he attempted to resolve the perennial debate between subjectivism and objectivism in sociological theory.
Finally, theory is not an axiom. It is a continuous process of seeking explanation of events surrounding respective theorists. Sociological theory has gained from ideas from the ancient world, thoughts of great philosophers of antiquity and observations of a great many social reformers. Only in the nineteenth-century sociological theory gained autonomy and as such, its subject matter kept on evolving with twists and turns in tandem with the metamorphosis of human society. It might have started with a mission to seek for ‘laws’ of society but such ‘laws’ are at best tendential in character. All sociological theories are built or inspired upon preceding thoughts, ideas and theories, which actually make them provisional in spirit and aspiration. What is constant in the history of the discipline is the quest for understanding the intricate relation between individual and society. Related to this central query is the question of settling the issue of creative human agency vis-à-vis the stable social structure. From time to time, sociological thinkers have attempted to answer this fundamental issue of social life.
SUMMARY
Sociology as a discipline developed in the historical context of fundamental changes in society affecting the social (class), industrial, political and cultural relations. The decline and rise of social groups, and changes in the economic and social structures were accompanied by complementary cultural changes. Classical sociological theories attempted to explain such sweeping changes. The initial theorizations on the relationship between individual and society by and large resulted in the theoretical treatment of the relationship between action and social structure. The overbearing importance of social structure continued in sociological theories, till a substantial shift from structural matters to cultural matters allowed a new theoretical development. The new focus has been on areas of identity, communication and consumption. Such a shift in subject matter changed the very discipline of sociology in the last few decades of the 20th century. The impact and influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism on sociological thinking, one can say, is a result of a fundamental alteration in the very image of society.