Imagine doing geology and geography in a world where the continents move twenty to thirty miles every year (instead of every million years). Maps would continually be out of date. Planning your ski trip would be frustrating when you arrived to find the Alps replaced by a large lake. You wouldn’t want to fly to Hawaii in case changes while the flight was in the air put the airport twenty feet beneath the Pacific Ocean.
Actually, if the world changed this way, people would want to map it carefully and monitor its movements. Only then could they understand where and when such rapid change takes place. Sociology came into being because the social world was changing so rapidly that all the stable landmarks were vanishing. “All that is solid melts into the air,” as Marx put it.1 Sociology is a child of this changing world. The central tradition of sociology deals with the historical transition from agrarian feudalism to modern democratic capitalism.
Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, major founders of sociology, have this change at the center of their interest. Each handles the relationships between individuals and the structures that emerge in the modern world. Many other classic and contemporary thinkers also seek to paint a picture of modernity, with its precursors and its likely future. Sociology offers a diversity of analyses and value judgments about what is happening. These various answers show how difficult it is to decide what the beast is that inhabits sociology’s courtyard. Here’s a sketch of some of the important answers that the creators of modern sociology give.2
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) compared France, the United States, and Britain during their formative years. North Americans know him best for his analysis of democracy in the United States. This French journalist and political scientist said that the world is moving from hierarchy and rank to an equalization of conditions among people. He called this process “democratization.” Everywhere he saw kingdoms and aristocracies melting down into democratic mass societies characterized by social equality.
In his view, ascribed status (that is, the rank one has due to birth) and status based on the social class to which one belongs are dissolving as modernity increases its hold. While wealth and intellectual differences remain, new status concerns preoccupy people. Moderns seek to be recognized as important, but they do so in ways different from those of people in the rigid classes of the past. In the modern scene, individuals are increasingly mobile, autonomous, and diverse. At the same time, they are more dependent on public opinion for ideas, direction, and recognition. In such a world, people cannot easily know how important or powerful others are.
Much modern status is based on money. Yet people are unsure how much of it others have or even how much they themselves must have to merit greater respect than their peers. Thus, visible symbols of status differences take on a new importance. More and more such symbols become matters of personal identity. Ethnicity, race, gender, personal adornment, the mode and expense of one’s transportation all take on increased importance in modern life. In the absence of traditional markers, the conspicuous display of consumer choices becomes a common language used to signal one’s importance.
Centralization of power is another trend that Tocqueville noted. Large bureaucratic structures capable of manipulating public opinion dominate government. The individual becomes lost in such bureaucracies and is weaker than ever before these power structures. For that reason, secondary or intermediate structures (churches, labor unions, political parties, voluntary institutions) increase their prominence in moderating centralized powers. Also, with class no longer as important as it was in the past, ethnicity and gender become consequential indicators of social distinction.
Religion’s importance is another thing that impressed Tocqueville. He saw religion as an ultimate source of people’s conceptions of physical and social reality. It provides a framework that brings intellectual order to the diversity in the world. At its heart is dogma (officially established and prescribed doctrines). However, democratization can hurt religion. It can dissolve dogma as it challenges all traditional authority. Tocqueville’s analysis suggests that the modern individual takes public opinion as a new sacred dogma. Thus, official religion finds it difficult to maintain its traditions.
Yet democracy also has positive relations with religion. Tocqueville noted that political freedom encourages religious institutions and people’s passion for religion. The United States is his key example. Here there are higher levels of participation and identification with religious groups than in countries where politics are totalitarian. In turn, vigorous religious groups foster attitudes about and relations of equality that are essential to freedom. The religious “habits of the heart” provide an essential nurturing climate for the practices of political freedom. Liberal political structures and vigorous religious life go hand in hand.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s fellow Frenchman, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), took intellectual rather than social change as the heart of modernization. What’s crucial in modernization is a new mind-set. His “law of three stages” conceives of modern society as one increasingly governed by positive scientific ideas and worldviews. Religious ways of thinking control less and less of the modern mind. This transition from the theological through the metaphysical to the positive stage of thought is what modernization means.
According to Comte, the present time is a period of crisis and transition. The conflict of diverse beliefs and worldviews in the modern world offers no unity of civilization. That is why this era is warlike and subject to poverty. This period, however, will pass. Someday people will not be divided by differing mindsets, with some thinking like scientists and others like bigoted, close-minded religious fanatics. All human thought and outlook will be scientific. Culture will be unified.
He also believed that the theological-feudal order is gone forever. The business class is replacing the landed aristocracy; science is supplanting religion; republican political forms are eroding monarchies. A new moral community is being created with the aid of sociologists. A new society, built on new ways of thinking, is being born. It will be a hierarchical society, with ritual and liturgy. There will even be a new “religion” with worship of Society as the supreme being.
Eventually modern society will be as stable as the medieval one was. What will unite and stabilize it is the new “spiritual power”—the power of science. Science will provide the stability of incontrovertible, clear ideas. Sociologists, scientists, and the captains of industry together will create a technical elite of experts who will solve problems as human civilization progresses. Humans are well on their way to achieving this peaceful, prosperous scientific-industrial society, according to Comte. The remaining problems are technical ones, solvable in principle by science as its powers increase. Comte was optimistic about the future, to say the least.
Karl Marx (1818–1883), a seminal thinker in sociology despite what one may think of his politics, makes modernization a matter of the bourgeois revolution. Modernization, he says, is a shift from a feudal society dominated by rural landowning aristocrats to the new, urban, property-owning bourgeoisie. Since a bourg is a town, the bourgeoisie is in fact a class of “city dwellers.”
People in the Western world lived for centuries in a feudal order dominated by aristocratic landowners. This order originated when Rome fell and the power of the empire no longer held people together. Localities became isolated from each other. Local lords offered peasants in their region protection from outside raiders. In exchange, the peasants accepted a relationship that was virtual slavery: they became serfs. These local hierarchies and dependencies turned into a pyramid of stratification and domination.
In the eleventh century the transformation of modernity took its first quiet footsteps with the growth of cities. Seasonal fairs held outside the city walls became year-round activities, crystallizing into permanent marketplaces. The city proper annexed these faubourgs or medieval suburbs, inhabited by merchants. From them came the bourgeoisie, the traders, merchants, and manufacturers, who brought modern capitalism into being. At this point, the capitalist entrepreneurs took the front seat of history.
Modern social problems and conflicts, according to Marx, reflect the struggle over the wealth and property created by this new capitalist, market-dominated society. The democratic revolution (epitomized in the French Revolution) refers to political changes that the bourgeois brought about in order to cement their hold on productive power. Democratic politics are the politics of the bourgeoisie. They also developed science. They use science constantly to help cut the costs of their operations and increase their profit margins. Science also strengthens the means of social control (such as the military) that reinforce the dominance of the bourgeoisie.
Marx argues that one is either part of the problem (on the side of the bourgeoisie) or part of the solution (on the side of the workers, the proletariat). The poverty, suffering, injustice, racism, and sexism seen in today’s world will end, he asserts, only with the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. The central problem is the way in which private property allows the wealthy to control the poor and to take much more than can be considered their fair share of the goods of this world. Sociology helps people see the laws of history as they move toward revolution so that all can cast off the chains of oppression.
Marx claims that religion is an expression of and protest against human alienation. God, says Marx, is nothing more than a symbolic projection of real human powers. The attributes assigned to God are, in fact, the ideal attributes of the human race. Marx asserts that people make God in their own image. The structure and organization of religion reflect nothing more and nothing less than the powers of the ruling class. The elite control the training of clergy, the publishing of books, and the salaries of religious functionaries. So religion in the modern world (as in the ancient world) serves the goals and interests of this class of people. Only when society is rid of the bourgeoisie will alienation be overcome. Someday a perfect society of communism will appear, and then religion will vanish.
From this viewpoint, sociology is a scientific protest against the alienation of the modern world. It reveals that humans are alienated from their true nature in four ways. First, people do not control their physical laboring activity. Someone else sets the hours, the pace of the work, the movements of one’s limbs. In short, a person’s job description is written and enforced to exploit him or her. Second, the products of labor are like aliens to the workers. They do not own these products. Workers make them, but the company that employs the workers controls their disposal. Third, people are alienated from their fellow human beings. They compete for the same jobs and become enemies of one another. They are divided from management and often from people in the next work area.
In the end, human life is in some ways worse than that of animals. Humans are alienated from their “species-being.” As a species, the distinctive human qualities mean that people should be free, intelligent creators through a satisfying work activity. Yet they become pitiful stomachs and muscles who work to live. Work stultifies and stunts people, dulling their minds and destroying their health. The human is no more than a commodity in the modern world. Sociology’s purpose is to understand and free humanity from that world.
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) takes modernization to be the displacement of natural, communal, intimate relations by artificial, impersonal relations based on rational calculation. In modernity, noncommunal connections tie people together in organizations. The mass society in which most people now live is held together by economic arrangements and secured by concentrated political power. Law and politics take commanding places in human lives, reducing the potency of traditional customs and warm networks of cooperative ties. Relationships in the modern urban center exemplify what Tönnies called the Gesellschaft (associational society). Tönnies found the Gesellschaft inferior to its alternative, the Gemeinschaft.
Gemeinschaft (communal society), found in towns and villages, builds on the strong relational ties of kinship, neighborhood, and friendship. This society has much healthier effects on human well-being. The family provides the first experiences of typically Gemeinschaft relational characteristics. Strong personal ties bind the family together, and such human connectedness becomes the model for other social relations in the community.
In contrast, fragile ties of the contract organize Gesellschaft. Here even the strongest relational bonds weaken. One initially experiences strong relational ties in one’s family of origin. Yet in a Gesellschaft a major task of parenting is to teach children how to be independent and autonomous from the family. Because contractual ties overshadow social relationships, the Gesellschaft requires a strong state to enforce the voluntary agreements. Otherwise, people would constantly break their agreements (even within the family) when it was advantageous for them to do so.
Monetary values motivate and dominate city life. People violate social agreements and rules to enhance their income. Contrary to Marx, single social classes are not internally unified. Fellow members of the same class battle with each other, seeking monetary advancement. So classes are not groups unified politically, socially, culturally, or even monetarily. There is conflict within classes as well as between them. The state is essential for restraining such conflicts. The effect is that the state takes increasing amounts of power into its hands in order to preserve peace. The strength that such a state requires to hold society together is dysfunctional for the long-term health of a society. It becomes so strong eventually that it tears the associational society apart, creating the basis for the reorganization of a communal society.
Personally, Tönnies was strongly antireligious and anticlerical. He did little to develop a clear analysis of the place of religion in the modern world. One of his late writings indicates that he longed for a purely secular realization of the social values of the Christianity he so strongly rejected. In an autobiographical work of 1922, he spoke of a “creed of the holy spirit” that preserves what he considered valuable in Christianity. This unpublished, utopian essay, “The New Gospel,” looked forward to the coming of the third age of history described by Joachim Fiore as an “age of the Spirit.”
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) rather liked the modern world (in contrast to Tönnies). For him, modernization represents a shift to moral and social diversity, to a solidarity based on the division of occupational labor. The major shift is from what he called mechanical solidarity (with its moral and social homogeneity) to organic solidarity (characterized by moral and social diversity). Actually, many of his ideas about these two types of solidarity came from Tönnies. A society with mechanical solidarity is similar to the Gemeinschaft, while a society with organic solidarity matches the Gesellschaft. As one might guess from the names he gives to the two, Durkheim feels strongly positive about the Gesellschaft-like organic solidarity. Modernization is a progressive emancipation from traditional restraints of kinship, class, localism, and general social conscience. The heterogeneity and individualism of the organic society is a liberation from the homogeneity of the mechanical society.
Despite its diversity, this new form of society does not lose authority over the individual. According to Durkheim, organic society does not need the powerful state envisioned by Tönnies to enforce contracts on individualists with no moral sensibilities. The essence of any society’s authority appears in the ways it constrains the individual. Some constraints are indirect, found in the society’s collective consciousness as contained in traditions, values, and rules. Other societal controls (such as walls, fences, and police) act directly to restrain individuals. The modern world has both types of constraint, only they differ in form from those of the traditional mechanical society.
Pluralism and heterogeneity constitute modern life. Different kinds of people with different sorts of values have to learn to live together. This diversity is prone to dissolve the authority of society over the individual. It can lead to chaotic communities. Therefore, corporate, intermediate structures are essential for healthy moral life. In intermediate-sized groups, a communal and moral authority is developed that is effective with individuals. Unfortunately, the state increasingly absorbs the old functions of traditional local groups, considering the authority of secondary groups larger than the family a threat to its own power.
For Durkheim, the tendency of the modern state is to undermine the very conditions vital to healthy social and moral life. It is true that the state creates private rights that protect individuals from the abuses of secondary groups and intermediate structures. Yet it also undermines the authority of the intermediate groups that strengthen the moral life of individuals. In this Tönnies is correct: too strong a state is bad for the health of society.
Interestingly, Durkheim almost completely neglects social class in his writings. He simply does not see class groups as important in the modern world. At the end of The Division of Labor in Society (1893), he claims that modern social developments sterilize classes and remove social inequalities. The division of labor will gradually overcome all the tensions and conflicts of the transition to modernity. Individuals are all being tightly woven into an organic society, becoming mutually interdependent. Rather than producing conflicting class groups with different interests, modernization creates a living, organic, cooperative society.
For an ardent secularist, Durkheim held rather dramatic ideas about religion. Religion, he argued, is the origin of human thought as well as its basic framework. It divides the world into clearly distinct realms of the sacred and profane. Clear, distinct ideas originated in religious patterns of thinking. Rituals are the means by which one passes from the profane to the sacred. Rituals mark the boundaries of human lives and solemnize their most significant relationships, even in modern secular life.
The content or substance of religion, however, is not supernatural beings or God. Religion is no more than a symbolic expression of people’s dependence on society. The essence of religion is the sacred community of believers. “God” is a symbolic way of representing the authority and nurturing power of all the social ties that bring humans into being and structure their lives. Periods of communal excitement or effervescence shape the specific content of what people take to be sacred. These may be times of collective mourning and tragedy (such as the Civil War) or of collective triumph and joy (such as the victory of the American Revolution). In Durkheim’s estimation, people in all religions worship society as the supreme being, though they are normally unaware of what they are doing.
The eminent danger of the modern world, according to Durkheim, is the isolation of the individual and resulting anomie. Anomie occurs when people have no sense of guidance, regulation, or restraint set by clear, strong norms. Disorganization threatens modern life, not misorganization (Marx’s diagnosis). The individual is a bundle of powerful desires, willing and wanting. If there are no clear restraints on the individual, then society collapses into a heap of clamoring humans, each seeking to fulfill his or her own infinite desires. The unrestrained individual, nurtured by the disorganization and normlessness of modern society, is an unhappy and troubled creature. Pessimism and anxiety accompany periods of great striving and release. In those periods, individuals do not sense clear boundaries and goals. Suicide rates skyrocket. Crime and punishment multiply.
The solution for modern ills is to find ways of constraining the individual that are appropriate to the nature of the modern world. For Durkheim, there can be no return to traditional cultural forms. Ancient legal means utilizing draconian punishment will not work in modern society. Traditional religion can no longer provide the means to restrain the individual or unify the civilization. Mechanical solidarity (a unity based on the sameness of people) is now impossible. Intermediate institutions and groups where the individual has an identity are Durkheim’s solution. In these groups, communally shared values and rules are created, applied, and made effective. With individuals embedded in intermediate groups, there can be both extraordinary societal diversity and societally effective restraints on heterogeneous individuals.
For Max Weber (1864–1920), modernization meant the penetration of “instrumental rationality” (Zweckrationalität) into all spheres of life. “Instrumental rationality” is a mind-set that invariably raises the question of the best means to achieve the goals of human life. By use of science, observation, and careful reasoning, it seeks the instruments or tools and techniques to achieve practically desired results. If something “works,” then it is instrumentally rational. Its single value is efficiency.
This rationality expresses itself in the rise of formal law and complex bureaucratic organizations. It engenders an “occupational asceticism” in the majority of the population. This means that one approaches one’s work as a “calling.” People work hard and try to do their jobs to the best of their ability. They sacrifice time, family, and leisure in a constant striving to achieve in their vocation. They do this even when they have more than enough money to be comfortable. Inexorably, modernization encloses more and more of life into the master process of rationalization. Once rationalization penetrates key sectors of the modern world, it is powerful enough to force people and organizations to obey its imperative of efficiency.
Reason, not feelings, determines what people do and how they do it under the conditions of modernity. However, the basis of communal relations in a group is the subjective feeling that they are mutually involved in each other’s lives. Such emotional ties come from shared traditions, values, or the mysterious powers of charisma. By contrast, modern associational relations exist when people connect with each other due to rational calculations of interest or consciously taken choices. Ancient cities and communities were communally organized groupings of closed populations (tightly knit kin or ethnic groups) bound together by emotional identifications. In comparison, medieval cities were associations of individuals. Out of them grew the modern city with its paramount ordering principle of rationalization.
Rationalization creates new groups and new dynamics between groups. The way in which wealth, prestige (or respect), and power no longer overlap as they did in the premodern world illustrates how complex the modern world is. In Weber’s view, status groups dominate the traditional world. Such groups as aristocratic nobles or religious castes like the Brahmans of India are status groups. Their claim to respect and honor was based on a cultural style of life. Historically, the distribution of prestige was crucial to human social dynamics, even more important than the distribution of wealth and power. Those who had social prestige also had political power and even wealth. This contrasts with the modern world, where it is possible to have wealth without honor (for instance, in a crime family) or power without great wealth (for instance, President Harry Truman).
For Weber, the group of people called the social class really exists only in the modern world. It is oriented to relative positions in modern markets—that is, a category of people based on the control of wealth, jobs, and productive skills. Furthermore, unlike traditional societies with unified and powerful status groups, classes are internally divided. They are seldom able to crystallize and become powerful cultural actors. They cannot set the agenda for the whole of society as traditional status groups did. As a result, conflict in the modern world is very fragmented, and it cuts across groups.
Rationalization, according to Weber, also means the secularizing of social experience and institutions. What people consider sacred shrinks. Rationalization strips mystery from nature. Yet just when everything appears solidified into rational patterns, the “charismatic personality” strides onto center stage and disrupts everything. The sacred breaks into people’s lives in the form of charisma.
In its pristine state, charisma undermines traditions. The charismatic leader is relatively antiutilitarian and is not concerned with pragmatic success or efficiency. Followers gather about charismatic figures (such as the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran or Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States) and create large social movements. Inevitably, however, charisma fades. When the movement grows too large for a single, dynamic leader to control it, it reorganizes. The bureaucrats take charge. A once-dynamic movement turns gradually into a boring but increasingly efficient organization. In a word, the charisma of the leader is “routinized.” His or her vision is made practical. An effective, day-by-day, instrumentally rational leadership takes over. It translates charisma into utilitarian techniques and efficient systems that ensure the continuance of the movement.
Luther and Calvin were great charismatic figures in the West. Their original ideas and the social groups that carried their ideas generated a grammar of motives that oriented people practically to this world. Their routinized charisma provided powerful forces for social action among entire social strata. The ethos of the Protestant ethic, when spread into a new group, had power to transform an entire economy. The modern world rode into existence on the backs of ascetic Protestants (Calvinists, Puritans, Methodists, Baptists). In time, rationality penetrated religion. It too was made less emotional as the world became gradually disenchanted.
The history of the Methodists is a good example of the routinization of charisma. John and Charles Wesley brought a dynamic, Sect-type movement into being. Methodism expressed rebellion against the dead formalism of the Church of England. It met in plain buildings. Enthusiastic worship and lay leadership characterized the early days. Today the Methodist movement looks very much like a middle-class, comfortable, restrained religious organization, not much different from the Church of England. Stone church buildings, carpeted, well-appointed sanctuaries, formal services led by highly educated, robed ministers are characteristic. The dynamic movement has become a routine large organization.
Rationalization converts all of life into large, impersonal, bureaucratized structures. A monolithic, utilitarian, secular mentality and bureaucracy subordinates all values and relationships. The patriarchal, communal, and enchanted diminish along with the irrational, the personally exploitative, and the superstitious. All that remains is the rationally controllable. The problem of modernity is not disorganization (as Durkheim feared), but over- organization. Rationalization squeezes the life out of people, leveling them before the great idol of efficiency. Organizations run according to administrative meritocracy, and schools seek to generate a universal education where all fit the mold of instrumental rationality.
Weber was pessimistic about the future prospects of the modern world. He saw it as doomed to serve the god of rationality at all costs, becoming increasingly bureaucratic and secular. The supernatural vanishes as more and more of life comes under the aegis of systematic reason. The world is something to manipulate and control, to master and exploit. Such an outlook becomes the passion shaping modern civilization.
If you are not frustrated by now, then you have probably been sleep-reading (a technique highly developed at American universities by second-semester freshmen). These are powerful portraits of the modern world. Their ideas not only differ but many of them conflict in ways that mean they cannot all be true. Yet there is truth in each of them.
When faced with a conflict in interpretations, the tendency is to credit the ideas that reinforce one’s own sociopolitical and religious background. But Christians and sociologists are committed to seeking the truth about social arrangements, regardless of how uncomfortable that truth might be. Seeking the truth involves an arduous and costly process of putting one’s current social conceptions at risk. One needs to test not only one’s own ideas but also those of great social thinkers, using the expanding resources of research and information.
How does one do that? What contribution does a Christian perspective make in figuring out what is the truth about society? What are the critical questions that must be asked and that need at least provisional answers? What criteria can be used to weigh various versions of the modern world and of humans’ place in it?
These are the questions for the next chapter and Part III. There is far more in sociology than a small book like this one can begin to explore. The following chapter looks at just a few of these significant issues. It reviews some questions that are useful for Christians who wish to increase social insight through a conversation between sociology and faith. Part III then plumbs the resources that are available as these critical questions are addressed from Christian perspectives.
1. “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen.” Marx, Die Früschriften, herausgegeben von Siegfried Landshut [Marx, The Early Writings, edited by Siegfried Landshut] (Stuttgart, 1971), p. 529.
2. This is indebted to Robert Nisbet’s insightful work, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966).