sociology midterm

Lecture 9

I Marx focused on slavery as an earlier mode of production than capitalism.

I Du Bois focused on the fact that capitalism and slavery coexisted and reinforced each other.

I Du Bois agreed that enslaved people were exploited. But he did not believe that wage labor was the same as enslaved labor.

I In addition to being exploited, enslaved people could be forcibly separated from their families, were subjected to the arbitrary will of another person, and were themselves capital. I The goal of people who enslaved others was to profit. They used an ideology of racial inferiority to justify slavery.

I The U.S. South was composed of a small number of slaveowners and much larger numbers of enslaved people and poor whites.

I Why didn’t poor whites and enslaved people recognize their common interests and form an alliance to overthrow the slaveowners?

I Slaveowners offered poor whites intermediate jobs like being an overseer or patroller and the promise of status and presumed superiority to enslaved people. Du Bois called this a “psychological wage” that compensated poor whites for their low actual wage.

I Some poor whites held out hope that they too could one day own enslaved people.

I If racial ideology could be used to divide poor white and black southerners, a different kind of ideology could unite them.

I Ideology can affect the economic base.

Review

Review

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Marx’s model

Superstructure Culture, Ideology (Philosophy, Religion)

⇑ Legal System, State

Base Relations of Production (classes)

Forces of Production (technology, nature)

Max Weber (1864 - 1920)

Biography

I 1864 Born in Erfurt, Prussia

I 1889 Earned his law doctorate

I 1897 Suffers a mental breakdown that leaves him unable to work for five years

I 1904 Travels to the United States

I 1905 Publishes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

I 1919 Gives the speech, “Politics as a Vocation” at Munich

University

I 1921 Economy and Society is published after his death in 1920

Power

I “In general, we understand by ‘power’ the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action” (180)

I “‘classes,’ ‘status groups,’ and ‘parties’ are phenomena of the distribution of power within a community” (181)

It’s not just about class

I “The way in which social honor is distributed among a community between typical groups participating in this distribution we may call the ‘social order”’ (181)

I “The social order is of course conditioned upon the economic order to a high degree, and in its turn reacts upon it” (181)

I “The social and the economic order are not identical” (181)

It’s not just about class

I “That men in the same class situation regularly react in mass actions to such tangible situations as economic ones in the direction of those interests that are most adequate to their average number is an important and after all simple fact for the understanding of historical events. Above all, this fact must not lead to that kind of pseudo-scientific operation with the concepts of ‘class’ and ‘class interest’ so frequently found these days, and which has found its most classic expression in the statement of a talented author, that the individual may be in error concerning his interests, but that the class is infallible about its interests” (184-185)

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I “We may speak of a ‘class’ when (1) a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances, in so far as (2) this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and (3) is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets” (181) I “The term ‘class’ refers to any group of people that is found in the same class situation” (181)

I “‘Property’ and ‘lack of property’ are, therefore, the basic categories of all class situations. It does not matter whether these two categories become effective in price wars or in competitive struggles” (182)

I “to the extent to that one’s fate is ‘determined by the chance of using goods or services for themselves on the market,’ one belongs to a class” (183)

I “The class situation and other circumstances remaining the same, the direction in which the individual worker, for instance, is likely to pursue his interests may vary widely”

(183)

I “however different life chances may be, this fact in itself, according to all experience, by no means gives birth to ‘class action’ (communal action by members of a class). The fact of being conditioned and the results of the class situation must be distinctly recognizable. For only then the contrast of life chances can be felt not as an absolutely given fact to be accepted, but as resultant from either (1) the given distribution of property, or (2) the structure of the concrete economic order. It is only then that people may react against the class structure not only through acts of an intermittent and irrational protest, but in the form of rational association”

(184)

I A person’s class position does not determine how they will act. I People may organize as a class, but only if they subjectively understand themselves to have class interests.

I This does not happen automatically.

Class

Class

Class

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I “‘status groups’ hinder the strict carrying through of the sheer market principle” (185)

I “In contrast to classes, status groups are normally communities” (187)

I “We wish to designate as ‘status situation’ every typical component of the life fate of men that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor” (187) I “In content, status honor is normally expressed by the fact that above all else a specific style of life can be expected from all those who wish to belong to a circle” (187)

I “It may be that only the families coming under approximately the same tax class dance with one another” (187)

I “But status honor need not necessarily be linked with a ‘class situation.’ On the contrary, it normally stands in sharp opposition to the pretensions of sheer property” (187) I “Both propertied and propertyless people can belong to the same status groups, and frequently they do with very tangible consequences” (187)

I “Where the consequences have been realized to their full extent, the status group evolves into a closed ‘caste.’ Status distinctions are then guaranteed not merely by conventions and laws, but also by rituals. This occurs in such a way that every physical contact with a member of any caste that is considered to be ‘lower’ by the members of a ‘higher’ caste is considered as making for a ritualistic impurity and to be a stigma which must be expiated by a religious act” (188) I “In general, however, the status structure reaches such extreme consequences only where there are underlying differences which are held to be ‘ethnic’” (189)

I “Ethnic coexistences condition a mutual repulsion and disdain but allow each ethnic community to consider its own honor as the highest one; the caste structure brings about a social subordination and an acknowledgment of ‘more honor’ in favor of the privileged caste and status groups” (189) I “Even pariah people who are most despised are usually apt to continue cultivating in some manner that which is equally peculiar to ethnic and to status communities: the belief in their own specific ‘honor’” (189)

I “If mere economic acquisition and naked economic power still bearing the stigma of its extra-status origin could bestow upon anyone who has won it the same honor as those who are interested in status by virtue of style of life claim for themselves, the status order would be threatened at its very root” (192)

I “All groups having interests in the status order react with special sharpness precisely against the pretensions of purely economic acquisition” (192)

I “Where stratification by status permeates a community as strongly as was the case in all political communities of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, one can never speak of genuinely free market competition as we understand it today” (193)

I “With some over-simplification, one might thus say that ‘classes’ are stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods; whereas ‘status groups’ are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special ‘styles of life’” (193)

I “Every slowing down of the shifting of economic stratifications leads, in due course, to the growth of status structures and makes for a resuscitation of the important role of social honor” (194)

Status

Status

Status

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Party

I The text breaks off before Weber gives a complete definition I “Their action is oriented toward the acquisition of social ‘power,’ that is to say, toward influencing a communal action no matter what its content may be” (194)

I “Party actions are always directed toward a goal which is striven for in a planned manner. This goal may be a ‘cause’ (the party may aim at realizing a program for ideal or material purposes), or the goal may be ‘personal’ (sinecures, power, and from these, honor for the leader and the followers of the party).” (194)

I “Parties are, therefore, only possible within communities that are societalized, that is, which have some rational order and a staff of persons available who are ready to enforce it” (194)

Party

I “parties may represent interests determined through ‘class situation’ or ‘status situation,’ and they may recruit their following from one or the other. But they need be neither purely ‘class’ nor purely ‘status’ parties....They may represent ephemeral or enduring structures” (194)

State

I “A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (78)

I “a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i. e. considered to be legitimate) violence” (78)

From the perspective of rulers, what are the legitimate reasons that people would obey those in power?

I “there are three inner justifications, hence basic legitimations of domination” (79)

Traditional domination

I “the authority of the ‘eternal yesterday,’ i.e. of the mores sanctified through the unimaginably ancient recognition” (79)

Charismatic domination

I “the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, and other qualities of individual leadership.” (79)

Legal domination

I “domination by virtue of ‘legality,’ by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional ‘competence’ based on rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in discharging statutory obligations.” (79)

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