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Max Weber was another German, and unlike Marx he largely stayed there, teaching at Freiburg and Heidelberg; in 1919, he founded the first German department of sociology. Despite some serious mental health issues (he suffered from what were then called “nervous collapses”) and a troubled personal life (he married his second cousin, and while that made them kissing cousins, they probably didn’t do much more than that), he had an amazing work ethic. By the time of his death in 1920, he’d written many important books and articles that, as with Marx, took decades to be translated and published for the benefit of a global audience.
Both Marx and Durkheim had grand views of history; they both presented the march of history as more or less inevitable. For Marx, class conflicts had inevitably led to capitalism and would inevitably lead, in the end, to communism. For Durkheim, developing technology and growing population had inevitably led to functional differentiation. For Weber, history was more like a game of Clue: We know how society turned out, but it takes some detective work to figure out who made it turn out that way, and when, and how. None of those answers can be taken for granted.
So how did society turn out? According to Weber, modern society is marked by rationalization: Most things are organized according to standard rules and systems that are meant to apply to everyone, with society meant to run like a well-oiled machine. In your job, for example, you don’t have the responsibilities you have and get paid the amount you do just because you’re you — those things go with the job, and if you quit, the next person to take your job would perform the same tasks and get paid the same amount.
This is exactly the capitalist system that got Marx so riled up, and although Weber didn’t quite share Marx’s desire to overturn the whole system, it did make Weber a little uneasy. He referred to modern society as an “iron cage,” where for better and for worse we’re locked into well-defined roles.
And how did we get here? The development of rationalized industrial capitalism wasn’t inevitable, said Weber, pointing out that Europe had taken that path whereas other societies that had been around even longer —for example, China — had not. The development of a set of religious values (specifically, Calvinist Protestant values) that promoted hard work and savings had worked, said Weber, like a “switchman on the tracks” to ensure that European society would turn in that direction — and when the train went down that track, there was no going back.
Sociology in the 20th Century
In the first years of the 20th century, Durkheim was still trying to make the case for why a discipline called “sociology” needed to exist; today, sociology is one of the biggest and most frequently-studied subjects at colleges and
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universities around the world. As I explain in Chapter 2, sociologists do important work in a wide range of jobs.
Sociology was born in Europe, but much of its explosive growth in the 20th century happened in the United States. In this section, I highlight the most important events fueling that growth.
Taking it to the streets:
The Chicago School
The first sociology department in the United States was founded at the University of Chicago in 1892. That department became home to several of the most important sociologists of the early 20th century, whose arguments and studies are collectively known today as the Chicago School of sociology. (“School” being used in the sense of “a school of thought.”)
The concerns of the Chicago School were strongly influenced by the fact that the University of Chicago is an unmistakably urban campus, located near south Chicago neighborhoods that were — and remain today — dense and diverse, with people from all walks of life interacting at close range. It’s not the wealthiest section of town, and those neighborhoods also have more than their share of conflict and crime.
If you’ve found yourself thinking that sociologists like Marx and Weber, with their grand arguments about the sweeping forces of history, were getting a little out of touch with the reality of everyday life, you’re not alone! The members of the Chicago School urged their students to close their books, get out of the classroom, and plunge right into the social Petri dish they were sitting right in the middle of. They emphasized the importance of on-the-ground research methods like ethnography and participant observation (see Chapter 4 for more on these methods). Although Durkheim dismissed individuals as outside sociology’s area of concern, sociologists in the Chicago School — and in America generally — preferred to study society from the bottom up, from the perspective of the individual in society.
Chicago, similar to the rest of America, was in the midst of a massive wave of immigration, and the Chicago sociologists saw people from completely different social backgrounds learning to interact together. Besides putting race, ethnicity, and immigration among the top concerns of American sociologists (as you may have noticed, those subjects weren’t at the top of most European sociologists’ research agendas) the sociologists of the Chicago School popularized the study of symbolic interactionism — the study of the way individuals interact through a (more or less) shared understanding of words, gestures, and other symbols. (See Chapter 6 for more on symbolic interactionism.)
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Mass society: Are we, or are we not, sheep?
In 1954, for the first time ever (and, so far, the only time ever), a sociologist made the cover of Time magazine: David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd. Although Riesman taught at the University of Chicago, he wasn’t a member of the Chicago School. His focus was on the big picture.
In The Lonely Crowd, Riesman argued that Americans had lost their inner compasses and become “other-directed” — in other words, instead of following their own moral values, they just did whatever everyone else was doing. This is still a concern often voiced about America (and other countries) today, and it particularly resonated in the Ozzie and Harriet era, when it seemed like everyone was moving to the newly-built suburbs to buy a house that looked just like every other house on the block and have the same 2.2 children as every other family on the block.
Riesman’s compelling book introduced sociology to an unprecedented popular audience — it remains the all-time bestseller in sociology. But among academics, Riesman’s influence was not as great as that of a man named Talcott Parsons. Parsons shared Riesman’s interest in mass society, but unlike Riesman, Parsons thought that it was by and large a good thing.
Parsons was a great believer in Durkheim’s view of society, and espoused a view of society that is known as functionalism. In functionalism, social phenomena are explained by reference to the purpose they serve: If a certain phenomenon, such as education or religion, is observed in many different societies, it must be there for a reason. It must do something for society, or it wouldn’t exist. (If this sounds a lot like biological evolution, that’s no coincidence. See Chapter 2 for a description of Durkheim’s “organic metaphor.”)
Parsons was one of the most ambitious sociologists of all time. He believed that the social sciences should be united instead of separate, and with like-minded colleagues in anthropology and psychology, he co-founded a Department of Social Relations at Harvard to bring the disciplines together. His 1951 book Toward a General Theory of Action was his manifesto, a 500page attempt to Explain It All.
Parsons’s theory was outrageously elaborate, and for years many sociologists in America and abroad were occupied trying to explain everything from business to politics to popular entertainment on Parsons’s terms. For a while, it almost seemed like Parsons was realizing Comte’s dream of creating a kind of owner’s manual for society.
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The Power Elite: Marx’s revenge
If the Chicago School had brought sociology down to earth, Parsons brought it right back up into the theoretical stratosphere, with everything explained from the sociologist’s perch on high. In fact, Harvard built Parsons a literal ivory tower — William James Hall, which still stands today — to house his multidisciplinary Department of Social Relations. Parsons’s quest for a grand unified theory of society hit the rocks, though, as an increasing number of sociologists criticized his theory.
Though functionalism is still an appealing way to think about society, most sociologists today think Parsons was misled in seeking to explain social features by way of their functions. Although social institutions such as government and education may be necessary because of the tasks they perform, sociologists today recognize that social institutions are created by people, not by functions — and although people may have society’s interests in mind, they also have their own personal motivations. Plus, even when people do act “for the good of society,” they’re often mistaken in the choices they make.
Because of his belief in social evolution — in other words, survival of the fittest societies — Parsons became a defender of the status quo. There was no country more advanced or more powerful than the United States; in fact, Parsons said, the United States was close to the ideal of social organization.
One sociologist, C. Wright Mills, thought this was completely wrong. Reminding his readers and students that the whole reason sociology was founded was to change society, Mills pointed out that society was still rife with social problems such as poverty, crime, racism, and to say these things were “necessary” or even “normal” was absurd. In his book The Power Elite (another bestseller of sociology), Mills argued that society was run by a small group of wealthy, powerful individuals who basically arranged things for their own benefit.
Sound familiar? If Parsons was a Durkheimian, Mills was a resolute Marxist. The debate between the two — which unfortunately ended with Mills’s untimely death in 1962 — was fiery and fascinating. Both were brilliant thinkers, but they represented completely different approaches to understanding society.
Mills mocked Parsons outright, saying that not only were Parsons’s ideas wrong, they were stated in ridiculously convoluted language that was almost incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t intimately familiar with Parsons’s complex theory. Parsons fired back that Mills himself was empirically wrong, that there was no such thing as a unified “power elite” that somehow secretly conspired to run the world. Someone had to be in charge, said Parsons, and he pointed out that political, economic, and cultural leaders often had different agendas that conflicted with one another.
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The Cold War and the “sociology gap”
Few social thinkers have had the real-world impact of Karl Marx. Marx’s ideas about the evils of capitalism and the redistribution of wealth have inspired political revolutionaries including Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro, thus shaping the lives of billions of people in the communist societies they founded.
From 1922 to 1991, several Asian republics were incorporated as the Soviet Union, a communist nation that became a powerful rival to the United States and its allies. In the decades following World War II, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) waged a “Cold War” in which they battled for economic and military dominance. Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie, Dr. Strangelove, satirizes the panic that characterized that era, with characters taking the real-world concern over a “missile gap” (one country having significantly more warheads than the other) to absurd levels, worrying about a “mineshaft gap” (a gap in provisions to protect citizens underground) and a “doomsday gap” (one country having a doomsday machine and the other not).
It’s not a coincidence that the Cold War era saw a boom in popular interest in sociology.
Though it was known that the Soviet Union was a repressive regime that severely limited certain of its citizens’ freedoms, the U.S.S.R. was a huge and powerful country organized along fundamentally different principles than Western democracies. Though most Americans were staunchly opposed to any adoption of socialist policies — in fact, citizens who had even so much as attended meetings of the Communist Party were persecuted as “un-American” — many became uneasy about the American way of life.
Russians were known (accurately or not) for adhering to a rigorous work ethic and putting their country ahead of themselves; had Americans grown lazy and complacent in the prosperous 1950s? Had Americans lost the drive, vigor, and individual initiative that had made their country great? It was these concerns that helped pique average Americans’ interest in books like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, both of which argued that American society had become marked by a mindless conformity. Both books — especially Riesman’s — are still widely-read today.
Neither Parsons nor Mills “won” the debate — most sociologists today consider themselves neither functionalist nor Marxist — but Mills re-injected sociology with some of the sense of purpose and populism that had marked its founding.
When you read sociological books and articles, look out for sociologists who use convoluted language. C. Wright Mills criticized Talcott Parsons for writing sentences like, “Coordinate with the importance of order as formulated in the hierarchy of control and the place of normative culture in action systems, is the pattern of temporal order imposed by the functional exigencies of systems.” Just because a concept is challenging doesn’t mean it has to be written