Before the turn of the 20^th century, Europe and America were battlegrounds for intellectual development and rapid societal change. The 18^th century saw the violent arrival of democracy in the modern stage, as well as the shrugging off of traditional methods of government and control; the guilds lost their power, the aristocracy was seen as the enemy of the people instead of their proper lords. We see the arrival of exchange value, and the shift from a mechanical society to an organic system and industrialization comes to dominate the economic world. Violence and social disorder are rampant as society is in outright upheaval which perpetuates into the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. With social disorder comes change, and these sociological theorists lived directly in the middle of near social anarchy, their theories would become the basis for the systems which stabilized our society and allowed for order and civilization to ring throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Karl Marx was born in Germany. At a young age, he saw the rampant alienation, dislocation, and poverty being forced on the German people by their government. Germany was being forced to compete with the industrious capitalist states of France and England, and therefore had to enforce capitalism on its mostly feudal society. Because of the rapid enforcement of this new socioeconomic system, poverty was exceedingly more evident. Marx drew on this and studied the rampant suffering his people were enduring. He didn’t believe alienation was a philosophical problem and sought to understand why capitalism seemed to disconnect people from reality and society. He first developed his theories on human nature and species being.

The young Marx believed that there was something fundamental which separated us from animals. He theorized that our labor was what connected us inherently to nature and that our ability to create an object which only previously existed in our imagination was what predominantly separates us from other animals, he termed this state species being. According to Marx, it is this intimate connection that chiefly keeps us away from alienation, and therefore keeps us happy productive members of society. This prepares us for Marx’s views on capitalism.

When Marx grew a little older, he began classifying capitalism and attempting to describe the structure of capitalist society. According to Marx, capitalist society consists of two main classes which are constantly in conflict over the resources of life: the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie. The capitalists are considered the bourgeoisie and are at the top of the food chain, so-to-speak. These capitalists are the ones who own the means of production, as well as the means of mental production and use these means to exploit the working class, also known as the proletariat. Because of the development of industrialization and urbanization, the proletariat are forced to move to more urban areas if they wish to earn a living wage. In the late 1800s, this meant working 12-18 hour work days for next to nothing in wages while living in a single bedroom house with four other families. Marx’s study of capitalism led him to theorize that this was the ultimate goal of the bourgeois class: to keep the proletariat in this state and to control their system of dependency so that they would always be dependent on the upper-class for their wages. In this way, the bourgeois would always be in control and would maintain their system of oppression. Marx believed that by placing a worker in a production line setting, this worker would be alienated from the final product of his labor. This alienation, he postulated, was what ultimately caused unrest and suffering for the working class. Because people were cut off from their species being, they were further unable to express themselves as people and were slowly becoming nothing more than exploited autonomous workers.

Durkheim, however, focused more on the structures of dependence in society. Durkheim sought to divide society into a system of ideals which were simple to empirically study and could be classified and maintained with a common aim to understand their basic functions. He ultimately coined these classifications Social Facts. Social facts are simply aspects of society that are external to the individual, coercive of the individual, and can only be studied through the observation of other social facts. He further classified social facts into two categories: material and nonmaterial. Material social facts are the physical infrastructure of culture; architecture, music, food, etc. Nonmaterial facts are the abstract superstructures which build off of this main structure. For example language, art, philosophy, specific ethics, and the like. Durkheim uses these classifications to describe society through Mechanical and Organic Solidarity. Comte, a theorist which came before Durkheim, believed that industrialization shattered solidarity and that society was no longer held together by an inherent, non-physical bond. Durkheim refutes this theory in The Division of Labor in Society (1893/1969). In what some say is the first classic of sociology, Durkheim describes a shift in solidarity, not the disappearance of such. He explains that society before industrialization was held together by ’mechanical’ bonds, meaning that each person in the society was independent and considered wholly responsible for the success of their families. The wives would be responsible for making food, clothes, and taking care of the children while the husbands would be in charge of growing, butchering, raising, and hunting for food and materials. This template failed, however, with the introduction of the cheaply manufactured moveable goods that industrialization brought with it. And with the shift toward a factory setting, many people became deeply specialized and focused on only one aspect required for the daily life of all. Durkheim describes this specialization as moving from the mechanical system of similar cog-people to a system which played to specialized organ-people. For example, an organism needs each of its organs in order to survive. The lungs breathe, the kidneys filter, and the heart beats; much in contrast to a mechanism of clockwork gears, comprised of only gears and no other parts. The average man who worked in a factory would go to the cobbler to get his shoes fixed, the grocer for foods, and the tailor for clothes. It was this interdependence that, Durkheim believed, held and now holds society together in this new industrial state.

Marx and Durkheim would probably chiefly disagree when it comes to solidarity. Although there is a definitive shift in solidarity during industrialization, Durkheim describes this shift as inherently natural. According to Durkheim’s theories about dynamic density, Ritzer stipulates that “the rise of the division of labor allows people to compliment, rather than conflict with one another”(88). This is clearly in opposition to conflict theory and the Marxist position which Ritzer here portrays, “workers often are forced into outright competition, and sometimes conflict, with one another. To extract maximum productivity and to prevent development of cooperative relationships…”(55). Marx believed that one aspect of capitalist exploitation would be to force the workers into direct competition and shatter this interdependence in order to solidify the system of exploitation and control and maximize profits while preventing a proletarian insurrection.

Weber and Marx would probably agree about societal organization more than any combination of these three theorists. Weber theorized that society follows a linear procession from irrational means to rationalization, and more primitive societies are more irrational. He believed that society, once it takes a step toward bureaucracy, would eventually become so rationalized that it would be irrational. He, also like Marx, divides society into subdivisions, but his divisions are not based solely on economics but on a three-dimensional combination of power, prestige, and property. He believes that industrialized society can be divided into classes, statuses, and parties. Classes are just simply economic orientations and are therefore unorganized and unrelated; for example, two people in the same class don’t necessarily know each other and won’t necessarily act in each other’s best interest. Status is slightly more organized and involves the dimension of prestige; those within the same status may know each other but are definitely always acting in each other’s best interest. Parties are the most organized. They are defined as a group of people working with a similar interest in the pursuit of power.

I believe that Marx and Weber would probably agree on history because Marx was a historical dialectician and would have more-than-likely agreed with Weber and his hermeneutic analysis of sources in combination with his ideologies of verstehen. He would also agree with Weber’s acceptance of the fact that there are no single cause-and-effect relationships but rather “hosts of interactive influences are very often effective causal factors” (118). Meaning that any event in history can be traced to a network of causes and circumstances. Marx belied a similar historical philosophy, and Ritzer stresses that Marx is a “’political possibilist’ rather than a ‘historical inevitabilist’ ”(47). Another way of putting this is that there is simply no one way causal links but rather that “social phenomena are constantly acting and reacting,” and, “the social world defies a simple deterministic model”(47).

Ritzer, George. Sociological Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992. Print.