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An ,Overview of Theories

The relationship between individuals and the society in which they are embedded has been conceptualized in diverse ways and has given rise to very different understandings of how social reality is maintained and reproduced over time. This chapter presents an overview of maj or contemporary approaches to sociology, their assumptions, and the differences and similarities among them. Their comparative strengths and limitations are examined through critical questions that sociologists, inspired by different approaches, have directed toward each other. Different perspectives start with different problems, ask different questions, see and ignore different things. It is import- ant to try to see how they complement each other, to learn to cMUenge the contradic- tions, and thus to explore for the truth. However deep the differences between approaches, all share the same fundamental concern with developing our knowledge of the character of social life.

The Origins of SOCiology

In one respect, sociology has always been done, since people have always questioned the nature ofthe social world. But as a separ- ate scientific discipline, sociology emerged in the eighteenth century. Social upheavals that occurred during this era brought such profound transformations that most hitherto taken-far-granted assumptions about society and social relations were thrown into doubt. A democratic revolution occurred in America in 1776 as immigrants to the new world fought for independence from the colonial domination of Britain and then sought to found a society based on new principles of equality. In 1789 the old feudal structures of European society were shaken by the French Revolution. This revolution was especially significant because it represented the delib- erate overthrow of a traditional social order. Landless peasants and industrial labourers revolted against the rule of the landed

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aristocracy and the clergy. Many thousands of people were guillotined before some semblance of a new order was established. These revolutions prompted a new view of society, a secular view. Social order was no longer seen as ordained by God and main- tained by divine right of kings. It was struc- tured by people and therefore could be changed by people.

The Rise of Capitalism The eighteenth century also saw the advent of another form of revolution that was destined to change irrevocably the old order of things. This was the transformation from feudalism to capitalism in agriculture. These terms refer primarily to how produc- tion was orgallized and to the relationship between people and the land on which they depended for their livelihood.

Under the feudal system, which pre- dominated in Europe until around the begin- ning of the eighteenth century, most people had some direct access to land, either as lords or as serfs and peasants. This rela- tionship to land was established through hereditary right rather than through purchase. The nobility managed the vast estates and directed the work of the labourers. Generations of labourers were tied to the land that their ancestors had worked. They owed their labour to the lord of the estate but were entitled to fixed shares of the harvest to meet their own subsistence needs. In addition, they had plots of land on which to grow vegetables or to raise animals for their personal use. The lords had an obligation to maintain their serfs. Beyond this, the lords extracted what surplus they could, to sell in exchange for luxury items and a limited range ~f manufactured goods. The system was very inegalitarian, but it did ensure that the majority of people were able to produce most of what they needed to sus- tain themselves and their. families, with relatively limited dependence on the

AN OVERVIEW OF THEORIES III 13

purchase or sale of commodities in markets. The capitalist revolution in agriculture

fundamentally changed this pattern of pro- duction. Within a relatively short period of time, the majority of labouring people lost their hereditary right of access to land and, with it, their ability to produce for their own subsistence needs. They had to work for wages in order to purchase what they needed. Land came to be the private property of the lords.

How did this come about? The impetus for change in Europe came

from expanding markets, particularly for wool and meat and some specialized cereal crops. It became advantageous for feudal lords to shift the focus of production from mixed produce for local consumption to sheep for sale in the markets. Huge estates were divided into smaller, enclosed fields, suitable for sheep pastures. But with this change, the labour of serfs on the big estates became superfluous. It takes relatively few people to manage large flocks of sheep. The feudal obligation of the lord to support serfs became increasingly .onerous, and so they began to break the serfs' hereditary right to live on the estates. This came about through a long and bitter struggle. Feudal lords, in effect, became private landowners. They forcibly drove the serfs from the land and further undermined their means of livelihood by restricting the serfs' rights to graze animals and to forage for timber on common lands. The few who remained on the estates became hired labourers, paid for their work with wages. Beyond payment of wages, the land- owners had no obligations to provide for the subsistence needs of workers or their families. Those who were driven off found themselves reduced to landless labourers, able to survive only by selling their labour power for wages with which to buy food, clothing, and shelter.

Capitalism is the term used to describe this pattern where the means of production

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are privately owned, where production is for profit rather than immediate consumption, and where workers depend on wage labour and commodity markets for subsistence'. Marx describes a particularly vicious exam- ple of enclosure in Scotland (Clegg and Dunkerly 1980, 48). The Duchess of Suther- land conspired to turn all the lands in Sutherland County into a sheep walk. Be- tween 1814 and 1820, she systematically drove out the 15 000 members of the Gael clan who lived there, burning their villages and turning all the fields into pastures. British soldiers enforced this mass eviction. One old woman who refused to leave was burned to death in her hut. The Duchess appropriated 794 000 acres of land that had belonged to the clan. The land was divided into 29 huge sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family. The evicted people were given a total of only 6000 acres of barren land along the seashore, about two acres per family, and were forced to pay rent. They had to eke out a living on the rocky coastline by fishing. Even this livelihood was later taken away from them as London fishmongers smelled a profit in fishing. The Gaels were driven out again, and the seashore was rented to the London fishmongers. The peo- ple were thus forced into Glasgow and other manufacturing towns to take whatever work they could find as factory labourers. Others joined the waves of immigrants who came to Canada.

The Industrial Revolution The transition from feudal to capitalist agriculture was critically important to the growth of industrialism because it gave rise to a plentiful pool of landless people who flocked to the towns in search of employment as wage earners. These peopl-e provided the labour force needed in the expanding manufacturing towns. The Industrial Revolution first occurred roughly between 1780 and 1840 in England and rapidly

spread throughout Europe, North America, and parts of the colonized world. People who had become wealthy as merchants, land- owners, or adventurers began to invest in manufacturing industries. They purchased machines and factories and hired wage labourers to produce products for sale in the marketplace. This process was essentially capitalist in nature: it was geared to produc- tion for profit rather than for personal sub- sistence, and it presupposed a fundamental division of people into those who owned the machines and factories and those who had to work for wages in order to survive.

The other prerequisite for the Industrial Revolution was the expansion of the physical sciences. During the eighteenth century, intellectuals in search of the truth increasingly turned, not back to ancient scriptures or to the authority of elders, but to science, testing theories about the physical world against observations by using experi- mental methods. In essence, scientific method seeks to establish arguments on the basis of factual knowledge that can be verified by others and that is potentially refutable by contradictory observations. In the late eighteenth century, this scientific approach began to be applied systematically to society. This application was not easy, but the first important step had been taken with the assumptions that the scientific study of society and people was possible and that science rather than theology held the key to understanding .

. Early theories of society were inspired by the idea of progress. If society was created by people, it was therefore changeable and could be made better. In principle it was perfectible yet, at the same time, industrial- ization and political revolt spread disrup- tion, misery, and terror. Revolution was both destructive and creative, both feared and welcomed. People trying to come to terms with the social upheaval were forced to grap- ple with basic questions concerning the nature of humankind.

Thomas Hobbes (1588--1679).

Thinkers who feared the revolutions tended to focus on the uglier aspects of unrestrained human nature and to stress the conservative values of maintaining law and order. They drew upon the classical work of the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in his famous treatise Leviathan. Hobbes focussed on the funda- mental question of the basis of order in society. He reasoned that order is possible only because society constrains nature. Life in the state of nature, Hobbes surmised, might well be nasty, brutish, ugly, and short, degenerating into a relatively permanent state of aggression among people. Life as we experience it is not generally like this because social structures impose order. In their own self-interest and in return fo1' social protection from others, people come to accept constraints upon their own selfish- ness and aggression. Society therefore becomes crucial for individual happiness, crucial for life· itself. Society regulates rela- tions and disciplines individuals and so makes people "social."

Conservatives saw the violent excesses that characterized the French Revolution as

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an e"Pression of life in the state of nature. People had suddenly been freed from the traditional controls of church and nobility, and the result was chaos and violence. Con- servatives argued that the restoration of order in social life required a renewed emphasis on morality, discipline, and obedi- ence. The primary mechanism had to be teaching children to want to be obedient through a system of programmed learning. Society was possible only when people inter- nalized social discipline from a very young age.

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78).

But there was another view of the French Revolution and of industrialization, one that saw them as liberating forces that would shatter an oppressive feudal order. Advo- cates of such a vlew drew their inspiration from the writings of the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). Rousseau had a more benign view ofthe state of nature than did Hobbes. He snrmised that people were naturally peace loving and were inclined to go about their own business and not bother others provided they were left

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, alone. In Rousseau's philosophy, the com- plicating question was to explain the evi- dence of conflict and aggression between people. Rousseau argued that this did not arise automatically, from the state of nature. It arose because people were aggravated by inegalitarian and repressive social relations. Social harmony could best be sustained, not by subjugating children to programmed learning and discipline, but by giving them freedom to develop their natural talents and inclinations with a minimum of frustrating restrictions.

Radical thinkers adapted Rousseau's philosophy as a basis for a favourable interpretation of the French Revolution. Revolutionaries were no longer seen as rab- ble who needed the discipline of the feudal order, but as oppressed serfs rising up against the nobility who had exploited them and driven them into destitution as landless labourers. From this perspective, the restoration of peace depended upon establishing a new order based on principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

The philosophical assumptions concern- ing human nature and society expressed by Hobbes and Rousseau are still reflected in contemporary sociological theories. Emphasis upon one view rather than the other influences the kinds of questions that sociologists ask, what they tend to focus on, and what they ignore. The Hobbesian view promotes concern with the maintenance of order within society, while those who espouse Rousseau's view are concerned with social conflict and revolt.