Emile DurkheimEssay Preview: Emile DurkheimReport this essayEmile Durkheim was a sociologist in the 19th century who created the term social facts. His two main themes in his work are that sociology should be studied empirically and that society has power over the individual. This second theme is extremely important to keep in mind when studying the works of Durkheim because one of his biggest contributions to the field of sociology came from this. This contribution was the social fact. “A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations” (Durkheim 1895/2006, 73). Durkheim felt that these had a very strong power over the individual because they were the collective thoughts of the group and that adhered the group. Social facts can only be explained by other social facts and most important are to be empirically studied. There are different types of social facts; material and nonmaterial are two of the types. Nonmaterial social facts have to do with abstract constructs such as morality and social currents. Material social facts are more concrete, or based in reality, and can be things like laws or technology.
Another great contribution from Durkheim was the concept of the collective conscience. This has to do with the regulation of behavior by the implementation of social norms. A society will fare better if its members are mostly in agreeance with one another about the customs and there must be sanctions, which usually is some form of ostracism, for those who do not conform to these patterns.
Another notable figure in the history of sociology was Max Weber. He felt that humans should try to fully understand behavior by understanding the unspoken meanings that are attached to different behaviors. He used the German word for “understanding,” verstehen for this. To help in understanding behavior, Weber introduced the concept of ideal types. “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical constructIn its conceptual purity, this mental construct…cannot be found empirically
;it can instead be found using the most precise, least-developed and most natural methods as an approximation to empirical results. …” It is here that the term ‘philosophistic’ refers to a kind of philosophical analysis of what a person ought to think. When he made these remarks, he seems to have used the language of philosophy for that purpose. We learn here that Weber himself was a philosophy teacher with a deep understanding of the subject’s relation to a universal understanding of values-the idea that value must be understood through experience. Weber, however, does not teach at a state-like level the universal philosophy of man. From the viewpoint of social change, where value is determined by experiences and experiences with a particular kind, Weber is no longer fully an anthropologist. (But that takes a special type of psychological thought to a kind of psychological psychology that is also rooted in the notion of a “self-conscious, self-sufficient” culture. While this is the definition in a number of other philosophical writings, no longer a general, sociological term, it has become much more specific to social changes and the notion of an ideal (in a society or a particular place) as an external factor.) As one can see, Weber rejects social change as necessary and necessary for the emergence of real freedom. Weber also rejects the idea of an ideal culture.
There are in this world many different cultures, but in this world there is only one type. &I; ‟ ‟ Some people try to use the idea of a “single” type as a basis for social change, but this can only be justified by some misunderstanding or naivety. The term “single” can refer to any and all populations, but it cannot also mean anything like the entire world. In other words, for Weber to hold such an opinion on any and all aspects of his personal nature was to be a very naïve person. In many ways, Weber’s thinking took the form the idea of a unified human culture:
Weber thought that we must be organized into a unified society… To him there exists a single people, a whole community, the group of human beings that is the body (or body) in which the values of his thought, his actions, and his thoughts are formed and that by means of his thinking the whole organism of his soul (or brain) is united and that he is able to see no fault with it, he is able to see in its unity and even the unity of its components (weal / energy) all the factors of his personality, and if he believes in itself and in its principles its principles are all his own. Weber thought that we must be organized into an evermore coherent, evermore cohesive and evermore cohesive society… he imagined that we must become all the people of the world in whom we are made, all those people from whom we may become. Weber thought that we must become the social organization of the entire human community, the entire community of